The Robins Artistfacts

1949-1961
Bobby Nunn1949-1955
Terrell "Ty" Leonard1949-1961
Billy Richard1949-1961
Roy Richard1949-1961
Carl Gardner1954-1955
The Robins started out as a doo-wop quartet called the A-Sharp Trio, founded by brothers Bill and Roy Richard in the mid-1940s before they added bass singer Bobby Nunn and rebranded as the Four Bluebirds, and finally the Robins in 1949.
The group's earliest brush with chart success came as a backing group, not under their own name; they sang behind 14-year-old Little Esther on "Double Crossing Blues," a Johnny Otis production that shot to #1 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1950.

That same session made Little Esther the youngest female singer ever to top the R&B chart, and the Robins' harmonies were a big part of what made the record click, even though the label credit went to Johnny Otis and Little Esther.
In 1954, The Robins became one of the first acts signed to Spark Records, a fledgling label started by songwriters and producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote and produced much of the group's most memorable material.
Leiber and Stoller wrote "Riot In Cell Block #9" and "Framed" for The Robins as comic "story songs" built around a spoken, deep-voiced narrative style, a format the duo reused as a template for many later hits with both The Robins and The Coasters, drawing loosely on the talking-blues tradition of Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters' "Hoochie Coochie Man."
In 1955, The Robins fractured over a business dispute: whether to stay independent on the West Coast or sign with Atlantic Records and relocate east. Leiber and Stoller took Bobby Nunn and Carl Gardner from the Robins, added new singers Leon Hughes and Billy Guy, and formed The Coasters, who went on to become one of the era's biggest vocal groups. The remaining founders - the Richards brothers and Ty Terrell - kept the Robins name going until 1961.
Ironically, The Robins' recording of "Smokey Joe's Cafe" was climbing the R&B charts right around the time the split happened, meaning the group that wrote and performed the song's original version never got to fully cash in on its momentum.
The Robins never scored a major national pop hit under their own name, but their influence on vocal group harmony and comic storytelling in R&B directly shaped the sound Leiber and Stoller would perfect with the Coasters.

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