Don McLean built his reputation on songs he wrote himself — “American Pie”, “Vincent”, “And I Love You So” — but some of his most durable hit singles came from other people’s catalogues. In the spring of 1981, a decade after “American Pie” made him a star, McLean returned to the American Top 40 with a song older than rock and roll’s first decade: “Since I Don’t Have You”, the soaring doo-wop ballad the Skyliners had taken up the charts in 1959. His version was no novelty revival. Sung plainly over a Nashville production, it climbed to number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100, number six on the Adult Contemporary chart and number two on Canada’s adult contemporary survey — coming closer to the original’s chart peak than any of the dozens of covers recorded in between. The story of the song is really three stories: a Pittsburgh street-corner group with an orchestra behind it, a songwriter who kept faith with the music of his youth, and a melody that has been rediscovered by every generation since.
A Song Built by a Whole Street Corner
Most doo-wop records were made quickly and cheaply. “Since I Don’t Have You” was unusual from the start, beginning with its credits: the song is officially the work of seven people — the five members of the Skyliners, their manager Joseph Rock, and arranger Lennie Martin. The group itself had been assembled in Pittsburgh by Rock, a 22-year-old who worked for a local record distributor and drew the singers from three separate high-school vocal groups around Carrick High School. The line-up he settled on was extraordinary for its range: lead singer Jimmy Beaumont, soprano Janet Vogel, tenor Wally Lester, baritone Joe Verscharen, and Jackie Taylor, who sang bass and played guitar.
Rock had built the group like a man assembling an orchestra. Wally Lester had sung with the Crescents, Beaumont — whose heroes ranged from rhythm-and-blues groups like the Cadillacs and the Moonglows to the jazz-polished Four Freshmen — fronted the Montereys, and Vogel and Verscharen were recruited from a third outfit, the El Rios. All five were teenagers. Songwriting in the camp was communal: the group’s early hits were credited to the singers and Rock together, all six sharing the royalties, which is how a street-corner ballad came to carry seven names once Martin’s contribution was added.
What set the record apart, though, was Martin’s arrangement. Where rival groups sang over a piano and saxophone, the Skyliners’ debut floated on a full, sweeping orchestral backing, with Vogel’s soprano obbligato spiralling above Beaumont’s desperate lead. The lyric is a catalogue of absences — no plans and schemes, no hopes and dreams, no love to share, no one who cares — and the grandeur of the arrangement turns that emptiness into something almost operatic. It was doo-wop dressed for the concert hall, and it sounded like nothing else on the radio in the winter of 1958.
The Skyliners’ Breakthrough
Released on the small Calico label in December 1958 and taken from the group’s self-titled album, “Since I Don’t Have You” climbed steadily through the early months of 1959. It reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, number seven on the Cash Box Top 100 and number three on Billboard’s R&B chart — a remarkable crossover showing for a white vocal group from Pittsburgh, and one that took the Skyliners to the Apollo Theater and onto Alan Freed’s New York rock and roll shows and Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars. It finished 1959 among the year’s top hundred singles, and it made the group a permanent fixture of the era: the Skyliners were inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2002, and Beaumont was still singing the song with later line-ups until his death in 2017. The follow-up hits had been real but smaller — “This I Swear” and “Pennies from Heaven” both reached the Top 40 — and although the original group dissolved in 1963, Beaumont reunited a Skyliners line-up in 1974 and kept the name, and this song, on the road for the remaining four decades of his life.
The record also began a second career almost immediately, as other singers kept testing themselves against it. Chuck Jackson took it to number 47 in 1964; the Four Seasons and Manfred Mann both recorded it in 1965; Jay and the Americans slipped it onto the B-side of their top-ten single “This Magic Moment”; the Vogues reached number eight on the Easy Listening chart with it in 1970; and Art Garfunkel carried it to number 53 on the Hot 100 and number five on the Adult Contemporary chart in 1979. Every version treated the song as a standard — which, by the time Don McLean got to it, is exactly what it had become.
Don McLean Finds It
McLean had been a folk singer in the 1960s, a protégé of Pete Seeger, and his tastes were formed long before “American Pie”. At the end of the 1970s he went to Nashville and cut an album of largely borrowed material with producer Larry Butler — Chain Lightning (1978) — leaning into the country and early-rock songs he loved. From those sessions came his hit revival of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, and the follow-up single, released by Millennium Records in April 1981, was “Since I Don’t Have You”.
The single did not arrive cold. McLean’s “Crying” had just completed one of the great revival runs of the era — number one in Britain in 1980, then a top-five American hit in 1981 — and Millennium followed it with the same formula: a beloved old ballad, sung straight, from the Chain Lightning sessions. “Since I Don’t Have You” was the natural sequel, another song from the pre-Beatles world that McLean treated not as kitsch but as scripture. Nostalgia was a proven commercial force by then — the Grease phenomenon had shown how hungry audiences were for the sounds of the fifties — but McLean’s revivals were notable for refusing to wink. There is no irony anywhere in them.
McLean’s reading is a study in restraint. Where Beaumont’s original soars and pleads, McLean sings the lyric almost conversationally, letting the melody do the pleading for him, and the production keeps one foot in country music — tellingly, the single’s B-side was Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, and the record even grazed Billboard’s country chart at number 68. Pop audiences responded anyway: the single peaked at number 23 on the Hot 100 and number 28 on the Cash Box chart, while adult contemporary programmers made it a staple, sending it to number six in the United States and number two in Canada. Of all the remakes, McLean’s came nearest to matching the Skyliners’ own chart run in America. It was also, fittingly, one of the last major hits of his career — a folk singer in his mid-thirties, singing a song from his own adolescence back onto the charts.
The Song That Would Not Retire
The covers kept coming. Ronnie Milsap took “Since I Don’t Have You” to number six on Billboard’s country chart in 1991, proving the song’s Nashville passport was genuine. Three years later it survived its most unlikely transformation, when Guns N’ Roses recorded it for their covers album “The Spaghetti Incident?” and released it as a single in February 1994. Their version reached number 69 on the Hot 100 and the top ten in Britain, and its video — in which Gary Oldman appears as a grinning demon taunting Axl Rose — was the last the band filmed with Slash, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum and Gilby Clarke still in the line-up. The Brian Setzer Orchestra swung it in 1998, and Ron Sexsmith recorded it in 2012.
Along the way the original recording itself became a piece of shared cultural furniture. The Skyliners’ version was anthologised on the American Graffiti hits collection that carried the sound of 1959 to a new generation, and the song’s roll of interpreters grew to include everyone from the Four Seasons and the cast of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai to the Brian Setzer Orchestra — each act reaching for the same arrangement, the same lift into Vogel’s soprano line, the same sweet ache. Few doo-wop ballads survived the genre’s commercial death in the mid-1960s with their prestige intact; this one never really left the repertoire at all.
That a single song can hold Pittsburgh teenagers in 1958, a Nashville studio band in 1978, a country star in 1991 and a stadium-rock band in 1994 says something about what the Skyliners and Lennie Martin built. “Since I Don’t Have You” is not really a lyric so much as a frame: a singer steps into the emptiness it describes and fills it with whatever his voice does best — Beaumont with yearning, McLean with quiet resignation, Rose with melodrama. McLean’s version endures because he understood the song’s secret. Underneath the strings and the soprano obbligato, it is a folk song about having nothing, and nobody has ever sung about having nothing quite as plainly, or as believably, as Don McLean.