Your Promise to be Mine - the Drifters
Bubba Thrasher's finest hour!
The Drifters again, this time just two years later in 1956. Gerhart "Bubba" Thrasher started with the group in 1953 as baritone but soon graduated to second tenor, a role he played until 1958, when the line-up was cleared out to make way for Ben E King and crew. With the likes of Clyde McPhatter ahead of him, he didn't have many opportunities but here he got a rare chance to show what he could do, and didn't he make the most of it.
The song too is an essay in long-serving, self-sacrifice:
"I'll miss you, everyone knows,
that's the way life goes
still I won't hold you to your promise
your promise to be mine."
Wonderful, smoky, low-ceilinged back-barroom kind of track, wonderful sax, and scorching, passionate vocal by Bubba, simmering, coming to the boil, simmering again, then boiling over and putting the gas out.