In both the UK and the US, My Boy Lollipop was a No 2 hit, kept off the top slot respectively by the Searchers and the Beach Boys. In May 1964, two months after the release of My Boy Lollipop, Millie was given a guest appearance on the ITV special Around the Beatles. Millie’s shrill, joyful vocals, married to a galloping ska rhythm in Olympic Studios in London in an arrangement by the Jamaican master guitarist Ernest Ranglin, were beamed out all that summer from the new pirate radio stations, such as Caroline, that were instrumental in helping promote the record. He had flown the 16-year-old Millie Small from Kingston to London to manage her career. She resides in the U.K.With international sales of 5m copies in 1964, the year of its release, the hit single My Boy Lollipop, sung by Millie, who has died aged 72, “opened the door for Jamaican music to the world,” said the producer Chris Blackwell. Millie Small or Little Millie Small as she was called back then, was born Millicent Dolly May Small on Octoin Clarendon, Jamaica. In August this year, the Governor-General conferred on her the Order of Distinction for her contribution to Jamaican music. Small’s hit was recorded in the bluebeat style, the genre of Jamaican music that predates ska and reggae.Īlthough she continued to tour into the 1970s, Small never had another hit on the order of My Boy Lollipop. It was only recently in an interview with Blackwell at the New York Public Library, that I learned that the song had been released originally in the US by Barbie Gaye.
My Boy Lollipop reached number on the UK and US charts and was the first hit song for the Chris Blackwell’s fledgling label. She went to London in 1963 to record My Boy Lollipop, the song that put both her and Island Record on the map internationally.
Before Millie Small was catapulted to fame in 1964 with the hit song, My Boy Lollipop, she had been part of a duo in Jamaica that had some minor success.
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