A heartbreak song from another era
Long before it launched one of the great careers in soul music, I Sold My Heart to the Junkman was a piece of 1940s rhythm and blues melancholy. Written by Leon René — the West Coast bandleader, songwriter and label owner who published it under the pseudonym Jimmie Thomas — the song was first recorded in 1946 by the Basin Street Boys featuring Ormonde Wilson, and released on René’s own Exclusive Records label. René was no journeyman: he had co-written When It’s Sleepy Time Down South, a standard so durable that Louis Armstrong adopted it as a signature, and his Exclusive label was one of the foundational independent companies in postwar Black music. His Junkman song carried the craftsmanship of that world. Its central image was bleak and unforgettable: a lover so carelessly discarded that the only buyer left for her heart was the junkman, the rag-and-bone dealer who hauls away broken things. Etta Jones covered it a year later with J. C. Heard and his Orchestra for RCA Victor, and jazz saxophonist Gene Ammons cut an instrumental version on his 1961 album Up Tight! It was, by any measure, a standard in waiting — a good song in search of the performance that would make it famous. What nobody could have predicted was that the famous performance would arrive wrapped in one of the strangest credit disputes of the girl-group era, and that the group whose name appeared on the label would spend months promoting a record it had not made.
The Ordettes: four schoolgirls and an audition
The teenagers who would lend their name to the record had their own story, and it began, in the classic Philadelphia fashion, at school. Patricia Holte won a talent competition at John Bartram High School at sixteen, and in 1960 formed her first group, the Ordettes, with schoolmates Jean Brown, Yvonne Hogen and Johnnie Dawson. The original quartet frayed the way teenage groups do — two members left to marry, a third was pulled out by a religious father — and by 1962 the Ordettes had been rebuilt around Holte with three new voices: Cindy Birdsong, and Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx, recruited from another local group that had folded. It was this lineup that auditioned for Harold Robinson. The detail that seals the story’s strangeness is what won him over: Robinson agreed to work with the group, by the standard accounts, after hearing young Patricia Holte sing I Sold My Heart to the Junkman. She could sing the song — demonstrably, she had sung it for the very man who owned the label. He simply chose, for reasons of contractual convenience, to have a different group record it, and to let hers take the credit and the consequences.
The Starlets walk into the wrong studio
The record that conquered the charts in 1962 was cut by the Starlets, a girl group from Chicago who were enjoying a genuine moment of their own. Their single Better Tell Him No had reached the top forty, and the group — Jane Hall, Maxine Edwards, Mickey McKinney and Jeanette Miles — was out on tour when the road brought them to Philadelphia in December 1961. There they crossed paths with Harold Robinson, president of Newtown Records, who persuaded the touring singers to step into a recording studio and cut two songs for him. One of them was I Sold My Heart to the Junkman. It was a routine piece of road opportunism, the kind of quick session that happened constantly in the independent record business of the day, and the Starlets thought little more about it.
Robinson, however, had a problem. The Starlets were under contract to Pam Records, and releasing their performance under their own name invited legal trouble. His solution was brazen even by the standards of the era: he released the single on Newtown credited not to the Starlets but to a Philadelphia group he was working with — the Ordettes, a quartet of local teenagers fronted by a seventeen-year-old named Patricia Holte. The Ordettes had recently renamed themselves the Blue Belles, taking the name from a Newtown subsidiary, Bluebelle Records. When another label owner threatened action over that name, it was adjusted once more, and the record went out under a billing that would echo for decades: Patti LaBelle and Her Blue Belles. Robinson had also given Patricia Holte her stage surname — LaBelle, French for “the beautiful” — despite having initially dismissed the young singer, in her own later recollection, as “too dark and too plain.”
Lip-syncing somebody else’s hit
The deception might have collapsed quietly if the record had flopped. Instead it took off. In April 1962 the Blue Belles made their first television appearance on American Bandstand, Dick Clark’s Philadelphia institution, and lip-synced to a vocal performance that was not theirs. The exposure pushed I Sold My Heart to the Junkman up the charts: it peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 13 on the R&B chart, reached No. 16 on the Cash Box Top 100 and No. 6 on the Cash Box R&B listing, and climbed as high as No. 4 on Record World‘s R&B chart. Boosted by Newtown’s promotion and the Blue Belles’ relentless personal appearances, it became a million-selling record.
Success, though, made the secret impossible to keep. The Starlets’ manager sued Robinson over ownership of the recording, and the case ended with each of the Starlets receiving $5,000. The Blue Belles, meanwhile, were in the uncomfortable position of having to perform “their” hit on the road, night after night. Curiously, when the group later recorded its own version of the song, the two performances turned out to be strikingly similar — close enough that, to this day, it remains genuinely unclear exactly what is on the hit record. Historians still debate whether Robinson erased the Starlets’ lead vocal and overdubbed LaBelle’s, kept the Starlets’ track intact with session singers, or some combination of the two. The paperwork survived; the whole truth did not.
Two groups, two fates
The aftermath divided cruelly along the fault line of the credit. The Starlets, the women who actually sang the first hit version, never recovered their momentum. A move to Okeh Records produced one more single in 1962, released under the name Dynetta and the Starlets, and by 1963 the group had disbanded — their signature achievement permanently filed under somebody else’s name. It stands as one of the era’s clearest cautionary tales about who owned what in the independent record business, and about how easily young Black women singers, in particular, could be separated from the value of their own voices. Justice, when it finally came for the Starlets, arrived in the collectors’ market rather than the courtroom: girl-group historians and reissue compilers have spent decades restoring their name to the record, and their own genuine hit, Better Tell Him No, now circulates alongside the Junkman story as evidence of a group that deserved a longer life. The $5,000 settlements bought out their claim. The scholarship, at least, gave them back the credit.
The Blue Belles’ story ran the other way. The group LaBelle fronted — by then settled as LaBelle, Cindy Birdsong, Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx — went out on the road behind the hit and became favourites of the chitlin’ circuit, earning the nickname “Apollo Sweethearts” at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. Crucially, they proved the hit had not been a fluke of somebody else’s tape. In late 1963 they entered the top forty on their own account with the wedding ballad Down the Aisle, distributed by King Records, and followed it with gospel-styled renditions of You’ll Never Walk Alone and Danny Boy for Cameo-Parkway. LaBelle herself has never hidden from the strange beginnings: she devoted a substantial chapter of her 1996 memoir, Don’t Block the Blessings, to the Junkman affair, telling the story on pages 96 to 115 with the mixture of humour and hard-headedness that became her trademark.
The song that would not stay buried
Even the song’s later life carried the echo of its odd birth. In 1962, British singer Lyn Cornell released her own cover, produced by Jack Good; it won airplay on the BBC Light Programme without troubling the charts. The 1962 hit version, meanwhile, has been anthologised for sixty years as a girl-group essential, and every reissue reopens the same irresistible question of whose voices are actually on it.
For Patti LaBelle, the episode set the terms of a career. She began at the very top of the charts with a record built on other singers’ work, credited under a name a label owner had invented for her, in a business that assumed girls like her were interchangeable. Everything that followed — the reinvention with Labelle, the solo stardom, the six decades of show-stopping performances — can be read as a long, deliberate answer to that beginning: a singer making certain that no one would ever mistake whose voice it was again. The junkman, in the end, got nothing. She kept the heart, and the name above the title too.