Poor Little Fool

When looking for a song that was released on a 78, I believed it would be easy. I thought that I would be able to just search through all of my grandfathers records, pick one out, and Bam I would have it figured out!

But this turned out to not be the case, in fact even though all of his records were old, none seemed to be quite old enough to reach the 78 requirement. Thus cue the slight panic, having been so sure that I would have found what I needed, I realized that I don’t really have any background knowledge about older songs.

So the first thing I did to solve this problem was ask some friends if they knew any songs, and when they too came up empty handed, I knew I had to pull out the ultimate search tool. I googled ‘Popular songs before 1950.’ And even though my search was specific, Poor Little Fool by Ricky Nelson still popped up. I had to look into it to make sure it was produced on a 78, so although it just barely makes the cutoff, I am glad that it does.

Ricky Nelson released this song on June 23, 1958. When looking into the genre of this song, I was surprised that it was listed as ‘Rock and Roll.’ While although when listening to this song you may disagree, this genre has evolved drastically since the time that this song was created.

And although this song is interesting enough on its own, the reason it first attracted me to it was because of who actually wrote it. According to Rolling Stone, this song has been considered “Possibly the ultimate teen idol anthem. “Poor Little Fool” was written by Sharon Seeley when she was just 15 about her brief fling with one star, Don Everly, and she pitched the song to another pop idol, Ricky Nelson. She became the youngest woman to write a Number One hit in America.”