Little Eva
Eva Narcissus Boyd, known by her stage name Little Eva, was an American singer best known for her 1962 hit "The Loco-Motion".
Biography
Boyd was born in Belhaven, North Carolina in 1943 and had twelve siblings. At the age of fifteen, she moved to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, New York. As a teenager, Boyd worked as a maid and earned extra money as a babysitter for songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin.It is often claimed that Goffin and King were amused by Boyd's particular dancing style, so they wrote "The Loco-Motion" for her and had her record it as a demo. However, as King said in an interview with NPR and in her "One to One" concert video, they knew she could sing when they met her, and it would be just a matter of time before they would have her record songs they wrote, the most successful being "The Loco-Motion". Music producer Don Kirshner of Dimension Records was impressed by the song and Boyd's voice and had it released. The song reached No. 1 in the United States in 1962. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.
After the success of "The Loco-Motion", Boyd was stereotyped as a dance-craze singer and was given limited material.
The same year, Goffin and King wrote "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" after discovering that Boyd was being regularly beaten by her boyfriend. When they inquired why she tolerated such treatment, Boyd replied without batting an eyelid that he hit her because he loved her.
Boyd's other single recordings were "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby", "Let's Turkey Trot", and a remake of the Bing Crosby standard "Swinging on a Star", recorded with Big Dee Irwin. Boyd also recorded the song "Makin' With the Magilla" for an episode of the 1964 Hanna-Barbera cartoon series The Magilla Gorilla Show.
In 1963, American Bandstand signed Boyd with Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars national U.S. tour and she was set to perform for the tour's 15th show, scheduled for the night of November 22, 1963 at the Memorial Auditorium in Dallas, Texas when suddenly the Friday evening event was cancelled, moments after U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while touring Dallas in an open car caravan.
Boyd continued to tour and record throughout the sixties, but her commercial appeal plummeted after 1964. She retired from the music industry in 1971. Boyd never owned the rights to her recordings. Although the prevailing rumor in the 1970s was that she had received only $50 for "The Loco-Motion", it seems $50 was actually her weekly salary at the time she made her records. Penniless, Boyd returned with her three young children to North Carolina, where they lived in obscurity.
Interviewed in 1988 after the success of the Kylie Minogue recording of "The Loco-Motion", Boyd stated that she did not like the new version; however, its then-current popularity allowed her to make a comeback in show business.