The “Golden Hits Of The 60s”
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O’KAYSIONS
“GIRL WATCHER”
(Buck Trail, Wayne Pittman)
ABC 11094
No. 5 October 5, 1968
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In 1954, at the tender age of eight, Donny Weaver (lead vocal, bass) started singing around the house. A
decade later, a neighborhood guitar man named Jimmy Hennant (b. 1947) joined Donny in making joyful
noise. Over the next few years, other O’Kaysions-to-be would join the duo to sing praises of the Lord:
Bruce Joyner (drums), Wayne Pittman (guitar), Jim Spidel (sax), and Ronnie Turner (trumpet).
Beginning in 1960 as the Kays, they played gospel and, later, country music in the coastal areas of their
home state, North Carolina.
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By the spring of 1968, they were the secular-singing O’Kaysions, and they had recorded a leering lyric
about ogling babes for the peewee Northstate label. Local DJs, appreciating that bird-watching was a
popular pastime for their listeners, rode the number as if it had a satin saddle. Sales of the single
outpaced the little label’s ability to produce the merchandise fast enough, so ABC picked up distribution
and gave the O’Kaysions their lone Top 40 moment.
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Success was a wearout, said the tune’s co-writer Wayne Pittman to the Washington Post. “It all went so
fast; and it’s hard to describe it other than saying it was hard work. Day to day, it was a lot of hard work,
because we had to do a lot of promotion of the record. Driving all over the country, flying all over the
country. A lot of one-nighters.”
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Despite the promotion and a few further releases, featuring Donny Weaver’s raspy voice, only the
immediate follow-up to “Girl Watcher”–“Love Machine” (#76, 1968)–managed to chart. An album was
casually tossed together;as Pittman admitted to the Washington Times, it was this careless attitude,
plus the group’s lack of direction, that brought an end to the O’Kaysions. “You had the hippie
generation and acid rock, and music was going in crazy different ways. There was no one voice [within
the band] saying ‘this is the way we should go.” The O’Kaysions broke up in 1968.
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Wayne–in the late ’90s–was fronting a new version of the O’Kaysions. They were working the highways,
byways, and backwater bars of the Carolinas, where even now, worn-out copies of “Girl Watcher” can be
located on the dwindling number of jukeboxes.