One of the most distinctive hits of the early rock and roll era, Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs was, at 1 minute and 36 seconds, the shortest record ever to make it to No 1 in the US pop charts. Into that abbreviated span it crammed so much incident – including a falsetto-led chorus, a slinky Latin-inflected rhythm, and Williams’s exultant shout of “Whoops! La-di-dah … ” on the fadeout – that it made an indelible impression on a generation of listeners hearing it for the first time in 1960.
A Black record rooted in the doo-wop tradition, it was soon being covered by white musicians. For the Hollies, from Manchester, it became their first Top 10 hit, released in 1963. The Four Seasons, from New Jersey, enjoyed a US Top 20 hit with the song in the same year. It was a cherished golden oldie by the time Jackson Browne, the Californian singer-songwriter, revived it in 1978 and took it back into the US and UK Top 20 before singing it as a duet with Bruce Springsteen in two No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden in 1979.
In 1987 it reached another audience via the hit film Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. The soundtrack album sold 32m copies around the world.
Maurice Williams, who has died aged 86, was in his mid-teens when he wrote the song, inspired by his attempts to persuade his high-school sweetheart, one Mary Shropshire, to ignore the restrictions of a parentally imposed curfew. Growing up in Lancaster, South Carolina, he had sung in church with his family from childhood and was given piano lessons by his sister. With a friend at Barr Street high school, Earl Gainey, he was soon forming a gospel group, the Junior Harmonizers.
Influenced by the successful early doo-wop outfits of the time, such as the Orioles, the Moonglows and the Spaniels, Williams and Gainey turned their attention to secular music. Joined by William Massey, Willie Jones and Norman Wade, they twice renamed their group, first as the Royal Charms – winning their school’s talent show – and then, in 1956, as the Gladiolas.
The latter change came at the behest of Ernie Young, the boss of Excello Records, to whose Nashville studio they had travelled in order to make their first recordings. A catchy up-tempo song called Little Darlin’, written by Williams and also inspired by his feelings for Mary, was released in 1957, making No 11 in the R&B charts and No 41 in the pop charts. As was the way of things in that era, a swift and softer-edged cover by a white group, the Diamonds, took the song to greater success: the Canadian quartet’s recording reached No 2 and was later heard in the 1973 movie American Graffiti.
In 1959, discovering that Young had retained the rights to their name, the Gladiolas again rechristened themselves, this time as Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, after glimpsing a British-built Ford Zodiac car while waiting for their own broken-down station wagon to be repaired between engagements in West Virginia. Now a sextet, with Williams and the falsetto specialist Henry “Shane” Gaston (who had replaced Gainey) joined by Wilie Bennett, Charles Thomas, Willie Morrow and Albert Hill, they recorded a series of demos in a TV studio in Columbia, South Carolina.
When they took the demo tape to New York, Stay was the song that caught the ear of Al Silver, the head of Herald/Ember Records. Silver put them into a studio to make a master recording but, according to Williams, urged them not to make it too perfect. “He said we were singing it too good,” Williams told Rolling Stone in 1986. “We’d cut this thing I don’t know how many times, trying to get it right for him. When he said, ‘Sing it flat,’ that just pissed everyone off.”
Silver’s instincts were proved right when the final version hit the airwaves in 1960, giving him his label’s biggest hit. The group’s follow-ups, I Remember, Come Along and May I, were less successful, barely making the Top 100. Their hit-making career was over by 1961.
For Williams, however, there would be a long and fruitful second chapter. As the decades passed, replacing departed band members whenever necessary, he kept up a schedule of 200 shows a year from his base in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he ran his own record label and played the piano in the New Emanuel Church of Christ. By the 80s he had become a hero of the region’s thriving Beach Music scene, based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the movement’s adherents still dance the Carolina shag – a cooler version of jitterbugging and jiving – to the R&B and soul classics of the 50s and 60s.
He is survived by his wife, Emily.
• Maurice Williams, singer and songwriter, born 26 April 1938; died 5 August 2024
• This article was amended on 16 August 2024. Bruce Springsteen gave two, rather than one, No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden, in 1979 rather than 1980.
