The “Golden Hits Of The 60s”
Main MenuConcept Refinement The Author..Wayne JancikGolden Age Of The 50sGolden Age Of The 60s1970s and There After
MARK DINNING
“TEEN ANGLE“
(Jean Surrey, Red Surrey)
MGM 12845
No. I February 8, 1960
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“I was born on August 17, 1933 on a farm near Drury, Oklahoma,” Mark Dinning told Record
E!lchanger’s Bob Kinder. “Patti Page was once a babysitter for my sisters. She got her name
from the Page Milk Company there. My singing sisters were once known as the McDerring
Sisters, because of the McCormick-Derring Tractor Company. It’s odd how some of these
people got their show business names.” Mark was born the last in a line of nine–five girls,
four boys.
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His dad and his uncles were either ministers or evangelist singers. In the early ’40s, three of
his sisters were taken by brother Wade to the “Barn Dance Show” on radio KFH in Chicago,
Ginger, Jean, and Louise soon dropped their tractor moniker in favor of their surname. As
“The Dinning Sisters,” they became quite popular with such disks as “My Adobe Hacienda”
(#9, 1947), “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” (#12, 1947), and the Oscar-winning “Buttons
And Bows” (#5, 1948).
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Meanwhile, little Mark milked cows and won first prize with his turkeys at a local 4-H show.
His father had given him an electric guitar when he was 17, but this last of the Dinnings was
determined to stay with what he knew best, farming. All that changed, however, once
Mark and his guitar were assigned to an isolated military outpost in the Mojave Desert. “I was
in the USO Club in Barstow, California, when I heard my first rock and roll record, ‘Rock
Around The Cloc’ Bill Haley & The Comets. I was 21 at the time, and when I got my discharge
at 23, I decided to make music my career.”
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His successful sisters introduced Mark to star-makers like publisher Wesley Rose and Columbia
Records’ Mitch Miller; the latter had just that day signed Johnny Mathis and thereby preoccupied.
By 1957, however, Mark was a recording artist with MGM–but, for three years, an unsuccessful
one. His sister Jean, and her hubby, Red Surrey, had worked up a song they were sure was just
right for the kid. The idea for “Teen Angel” had come to Jean via a 19 59 magazine article by a
DJ who argued that not a II teens were dirty delinquents According to Dinning, the article read:
“I hear all the people putting down the teenagers of today: how rough and tumble they are,
undisciplined, and how they’re all a bunch of little devils. From my own experience, I happen to
know quite a few teen angels.” That last phrase stuck with Jean, who awoke one night from a
nightmare to scribble down the lines to this classic death dirge.
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“I didn’t even think it was going to be a hit,” Mark recalled. “They banned it in England because
they considered it ‘too bloody awful.’ It was kind of a silly song, really; a girl going back for the
ring and all that. It was a far-out, left-field teenage folk song that sold 3,500,000 copies.”
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Follow-ups were another story The next few releases did receive airplay and charted–“A Star Is
Born (A Love Has Died)” (#68,1960), “The Lovin’ Touch” (#84, 1960), and “Top 40, News,
Weather And Sports” (#81,1961)–but eventually the records stopped, and the dust settled
on Mark Dinning’s career.
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From 1962 through’l970, Mark moved through the South playing lounges as a solo act, or in the
company of his brother Ace. He began drinking heavily in the late ’60s. “The Beatles really
took us out. It was a blow to my ego and my wallet … Groups were in and singles were out.”
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After appearing in a club in Jefferson City, Missouri on March 21,1986, Mark returned home,
where he died of a heart attack.