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Twenty classic songs from the world famous The Drifters. Tracks 1-14 are original hits. Tracks 15-20 are live in concert.

...The Drifters can also claim a unique place in popular music history, as a major R&B group founded at the instigation of a record-label chief.

Their story began in early 1953, when Clyde McPhatter, the soaring high-tenor lead singer in the Dominoes, a vocal quintet formed by Billy Ward three years earlier, quit that group. The Dominoes were playing a scheduled gig at the New York club Birdland, one of their first performances without McPhatter, when one of the audience members present asked after the singer backstage. That fan was Ahmet Ertegun, a one-time record collector who had started Atlantic Records in the late '40s; as soon as he learned of McPhatter's having left the Dominoes, he contacted the singer and signed him to Atlantic.

It was Ertegun who gave McPhatter the impetus, as part of his contract, to start a group of his own, which came to be called the Drifters. The origins of the name and credit for thinking of it are obscure, although no one at Atlantic liked ''the Drifters'' at first, thinking it sounded too country & western -- the explanation sometimes offered by those present was that the members simply drifted in from other groups...

from Artist Biography by Bruce Eder

AllMusic Guide