It Worked for Peaches and Herb

While looking up something related to Joe's last post over the weekend, I discovered something that I found fascinating: In the singing duo James and Bobby Purify, who delivered the sumptuous 1966 hit "I'm Your Puppet," produced and co-written (with Spooner Oldham) by Dan Penn, there were actually two different Bobby Purifys. Neither of them was actually named Bobby Purify.

James Purify was a real dude, who formed a group with his cousin Robert Lee Dickey in the mid-1960s. Dickey took the stage name Bobby Purify, and in September 1966, the two of them recorded "I'm Your Puppet" and took it to Number Six on the Billboard Charts. Shortly thereafter, though, Dickey began to have health problems, and in 1971 another singer, Ben Moore, took over as the new Bobby Purify.

For reasons unknown to me, the new James and Bobby Purify recorded a new version of "I'm Your Puppet" in the 1970s, and that take went to Number Twelve in the U.K. in 1976. So here you had the rare case of James and Bobby Purify having a hit with "I'm Your Puppet" in two different countries - except that neither the record nor even the James and Bobby Purify were the same.