Otis Williams (born June 2, 1936, in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States) attended Withrow High School in Cincinnati, and in 1952 joined an existing singing group in the school when one of its members was sick.
[2] The group, which Williams named The Charms, performed "Rags to Riches" in the Withrow Minstrels in May 1954,[3] where they were seen in the opening show by Syd Nathan of King Records.
As a condition of their signing, Nathan required that The Charms pull out of The Minstrels, and so they did not appear in the subsequent five performances of the 1954 production.
The group had further R&B chart success with "Ling, Ting, Tong" and "Two Hearts", and they toured with The Clovers, Big Joe Turner and others.
[1] Another song recorded in 1955, written by Rudy Toombs, was "Gum Drop," a single issued on DeLuxe 6090 and labeled by Otis William and the Charms.
Later pressings of this song, probably late 1955 listed the performance by Otis Williams and his "New Group."
[1] He took a further break, becoming a barber, and later relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, where he met Stop Records producer Pete Drake, who produced some records with his old backing group The Endeavors, then bet him that he could not make a country music album that sells, causing him to record Otis Williams and the Midnight Cowboys in 1971, claiming a fictitious all-black country band that was really some Nashville musicians including Elvis Presley's guitarist Scotty Moore.