In 1953, when the nineteen-year-old Jackie Wilson approached Billy Ward, the leader of the Dominoes, at the Fox Theater, in Wilson’s home town of Detroit, and suggested that he’d make the ideal replacement for the recently departed Clyde McPhatter, boasting that he was actually a better singer…well, Ward and the band were undoubtedly skeptical.

Then Wilson sang for them – and found himself fronting the group for the next three years, playing before the audience that McPhatter had built and winning them over with similarly abandoned blood-sweat-and-tears performances. He even put the Dominoes back on the charts once more with “St. Therese of the Roses.”