Among the seemingly endless parade of American singers with exotic names and distinctive voices who populated the early years of rock’n’roll, from Fats Domino with his bluesy croon on Blue Monday to Buddy Holly and his ardent hiccupping on Peggy Sue, few were more easily identifiable than Clarence “Frogman” Henry, whose nickname referred to a vocal trick he had developed in his schooldays in New Orleans. Henry, who has died aged 87, had only three big hits, but they were not easily forgotten.
The first, Ain’t Got No Home, was released in 1957 and immediately established his claim to uniqueness. Having sung the first two verses in his normal genial tenor register, he switched to a squeaky falsetto, impersonating a girl, before giving his impression of a croaking bullfrog singing the same tune. It was gimmicky, but gimmicks went a long way in the era of Purple People Eater and Monster Mash, and the song made it into the US Top 20.
It was four years before he reached the charts again, this time with (I Don’t Know Why) But I Do, a plaintive ballad propelled into the Top Five on a gently shuffling New Orleans rhythm. Later, in 1961, You Always Hurt the One You Love made it to No 12.
Those successes, and his performances in the UK in 1962 on a package tour with Bobby Vee, Tony Orlando and the Springfields, brought him an invitation to tour the US and Canada with the Beatles in 1964, making him an astonished witness to the first wave of Beatlemania in North America.
He was born to Ernestine Henry and her husband, Clarence Sr, a railroad porter and amateur musician, in New Orleans’s 7th Ward before the family moved to the Algiers neighborhood, across the river from the French Quarter. Clarence Jr took piano lessons from the age of eight and was soon, in the local tradition, playing the trombone in his high school band. His piano heroes were Domino and Professor Longhair (Roy Byrd), the local keyboard giants, and soon he was playing in local bands. After he had formed his own trio, his destiny was shaped by an encounter with Paul Gayten, a bandleader who had become the local talent scout for Chicago’s Chess label, the home of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
While sharing the bill with Gayten’s band at the Joy Lounge, Henry performed a song he had begun working on, as he later remembered, while trying to persuade patrons to leave a club at six o’clock in the morning. “Ain’t got no home,” he sang, in three successive voices, changing the words to match: “I’m a lonely boy/girl/frog.” The frog sound, which he had developed while teasing girls in the schoolyard, came from breathing in and singing at the same time.
He recorded the song under Gayten’s supervision, but it first appeared as the B-side to a song called Troubles, Troubles. When Clarence Hayman, a New Orleans disc jockey known as Poppa Stoppa, took a liking to the B-side and began playing it on the radio, the response from listeners calling in to request “the song by the frog man” persuaded the record company to begin promoting Ain’t Got No Home around the country. As it climbed the charts, Henry happily adopted his new sobriquet.
After a fallow couple of years, But I Do came along to revive his fortunes. Written by the Louisiana songwriter Bobby Charles in collaboration with Gayten, it was followed into the charts by Henry’s version of You Always Hurt the One You Love, an old Mills Brothers song. The absence of further frog impersonations did nothing to hinder their chart success.
Returning from the Beatles tour, Henry settled into a routine of playing with his band at clubs along Bourbon Street. He became a fixture at the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival, latterly singing from a wheelchair, and had been booked to appear again in the month of his death.
Although he continued to record for other labels, including an album made during a stay in the UK in 1983, there would be no more hits. But his income received a boost when Ain’t Got No Home appeared on the soundtracks of several films, including Forrest Gump and Casino. And when the rightwing radio personality Rush Limbaugh used it to mock homeless people, he was not going to decline the extra royalties.
“We do a variety of music,” he told John Broven, the author of Walking to New Orleans (1974), a decade after his heyday. “We don’t cater to one style of songs. We do Dixieland, pop, the classics, you know. We don’t do opera, though. The only thing we do is soap opera.”
Each of his seven marriages (two of them to the same wife) ended in divorce. He is survived by 10 children and 19 grandchildren.
• Clarence Henry II, singer and pianist, born 19 March 1937; died 7 April 2024
