Brenton Wood, ‘Oogum Boogum Song’ crooner who captivated Latino listeners, dies at 83
He was not on the list.
In 1967, Brenton Wood looked as if he was on the cusp of
mainstream success.
The Compton crooner’s single “The Oogum Boogum Song” became
a hit and ranked 34th and 19th on the Billboard’s Hot 100 and Top Selling
R&B Singles charts, respectively. A few months later, Wood debuted his
second hit, “Gimme Little Sign,” which peaked at No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot 100.
Wood, who was born Alfred Jesse Smith, died Friday of
natural causes at his home in Moreno Valley, his manager and assistant Manny
Gallegos confirmed to Variety. He was 83.
Wood’s slinky and upbeat tunes are infectious. His seductive
and affable manner of describing the essence of a budding romance in layman’s
terms is inviting. Whether solo or with a partner, it’s easy to groove to the
beat.
Wood continued releasing tracks but none ever garnered
similar success. Frustrated with the music industry, he quit for a couple of
years, then inched back onto the club circuit. There, he found an audience that
would sustain him for decades: Latinos.
He would play major California cities, then travel through
Mexico and into Arizona before returning home. As his audience aged, Wood began
to perform on themed cruises and at festivals with Chicano musical luminaries
including Los Lobos, Thee Midniters and Ozomatli. Wood’s romantic oldies
resonated with a new generation of lovebirds, becoming a soundtrack of Southern
California life — literally, as Wood found a third career as a performer at
weddings, quinceañeras and anniversary parties.
Bob Merlis, a former executive for Warner Bros. Records and
co-author of “Heart & Soul: A Celebration of Black Music Style in America
1930-1975,” described the artist as a “local hero” to L.A. — a “standard bearer
for the Southern California pop soul scene.”
“Nothing else sounded like them,” said Merlis, who now runs
a public relations and consulting firm. “It was so different and that
instrumentation is very unusual.”
“They’ve kind of picked me out of the whole batch, and they
keep me going,” Wood told The Times in 1992. “I appreciate it, because if I was
waiting for the big boys to call, I’d have died a long time ago.”
Wood’s lyrics captured the cat-and-mouse chase of a first
love, the kind of infatuation that makes people act a fool. He encapsulated
that all-too-familiar yearning to whisk away a lover to bask in their honeymoon
paradise. But he also wrote about heartache — and the triumphant moment when
the pain wears off.
“Latinos like to dedicate songs, and his songs are good for
that,” radio veteran Art Laboe told The Times in 1992. “It’s not the big hits
they like. It’s songs like ‘Take a Chance,’ ‘I Think You’ve Got Your Fools
Mixed Up’ — if a girl’s having trouble with her boyfriend, she’ll dedicate that
to him.”
The songwriter was born July 26, 1941, in Shreveport, La.,
and moved west to San Pedro when he was 3. He moved throughout L.A.’s inner
cities, selling papers and fish and shining shoes until he created a career in
the music industry.
Wood was 7 when a pianist mesmerized him. Without a
television set at home, he spent hours at the park, watching and mimicking the
performer, using two fingers to tap on imaginary keys until he got his own
piano. At 10, Brenton Wood wrote his first song about a man who wanted to be a
bird. It was cheerful and rhymed but lacked oomph.
He found his groove when he met his first girlfriend. Then,
the words flowed out.
The Compton High School graduate enrolled at East Los Angeles
College and sang in local R&B groups such as Little Freddie and the Rockets
and the Quotations in the 1950s before he went solo. He took on his stage name,
Brenton Wood, from the wealthy L.A. enclave of Brentwood, where a manager
lived.
Wood’s “The Oogum Boogum Song” came entirely by accident. He
was working the graveyard shift at Harvey Aluminum in Torrance when the melody
came to him.
“It took me about six weeks, because I had to switch the
verses around about a hundred times,” he told the San Diego Union-Tribune in
2000. “That was a song about fashion changes in the ’60s with bell-bottom
hip-huggers and high-heeled boots and all the different styles of clothes the
girls were wearing — hot pants and all that stuff.”
The bouncy track was later featured in Cameron Crowe’s
“Almost Famous” and Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling.”
“It was one of the best feelings you could have,” Wood told
Cal State Fullerton’s Titan TV in 2014.
By 1970, he founded Mr. Wood Records and produced other
artists’ singles. Latino listeners were already embracing him as one of their
own.
Chicano music historian Gene Aguilera recalls being “glued
up” to his little transistor radio as a teen, listening to Wood’s “Gimmie
Little Sign” mixed in with the Beatles and the Supremes on KRLA-AM 1110 all
within an hour. Walking his neighborhood, he would hear Wood’s voice along with
Thee Midniters wafting in the background, emanating from nearby parties or from
lowriders cruising down Whittier Boulevard, bumping his tunes.
“Even though he wasn’t born here, he’s just forever going to
be etched in our consciousness,” said Aguilera, who last saw the artist perform
at a local park in Baldwin Park before the pandemic.
“His music was really accepted by East L.A. because of
the slow groove he’s got, very soulful, that people from East L.A. just love.”
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