SHIRLEY & LEE

January 23, 1956

poss. Cosimo Recording Studio
523 Governor Nicholls Street
New Orleans, Louisiana
USA

Shirley Goodman - duet vocal
Leonard Lee - duet vocal
with poss. Justin Adams - guitar
Frank Fields - bass
Charles "Hungry" Williams - drums
Edward Frank - piano
Lee Allen - tenor sax
Alvin "Red" Tyler - tenor sax

from the liner notes of the SHIRLEY & LEE box "THE SWEETHEARTS OF THE BLUES" (BEAR FAMILY 15 960 DI):

.....In February Aladdin releases A Little Word. On February 5, 1956, after the last performance of the tour, in Washington, D.C., an old friend from New Orleans, Lloyd Price, by then a resident of the Capital, comes backstage. He hears A Little Word, Shirley's favorite of the duo's many recordings.
With new words, the song will become Price's comeback record, Just Because, a year later. The same basic melody apparently  has a more surprising origin: the Caro Nome aria from Verdi's "Rigoletto". The tunes are based on the same simple descending chromatic scale.

Shirley: "I loved ['A Little Word'], I don't know why. I always liked that song. I would not go on stage without singing it. I'd sing it every night. Every night, it had to be in.
"Well, Lloyd came in and heard it, and he says, 'I wrote some more words for this song.' And he just went and record it. We gave it to him. Never got a cent off it. They had an agreement, Lee said, 'Okay,' so I didn't say anything. In those days it was different in the business, you didn't care, you tried to help one another."