Lucky Ladybug by Billy And Lillie - toddlers at library 2006

This video was taken December 12, 2006 during Storytime on Tuesday night at the Milpitas, California library. All the children were working on singing this song for a couple of months, and we sang this song all the time between stories during Storytime. The children in this video are all between 2 and 8 years old. This song is complete with handclapping (which the kids are really taken with). Lucky Ladybug was a song sang by the duo Billy and Lillie in fall 1958. Billy and Lillie also had another song called "La Dee Dah" in 1958 that reached # 9. When it (La Dee Dah)
became a big hit, DJ Dick Clark (of American Bandstand fame) told the writers to think up something similar. So they came up with Lucky Ladybug, which is sort of a calypso song. Lucky Ladybug reached # 14 on Billboard top 100 in January 1959. Billy Ford (the male part of the duo) died in 1984 at age 59. Lillie Bryant Howard (the female vocalist in the duo) is still alive and well, and is currently 67 years old and lives in the lower Hudson Valley in New York and still sings.

Lucky Ladybug was released on Swan Records # 4020 in 1959. It happened that Bernie Lowe and also Kal Mann who wrote "Butterfly" which was sung by Charlie Gracie and also Andy Williams as well as "Wild One" sung by Bobby Rydell, owned Swan Records. Swan records had among other artists, Mr. Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon (who sang "Tallahassee Lassie" as well as "Palisades Park"), and also the Beatles (the record label released the first Beatles song in America), "She Loves You" in 1963. Yeah, yeah, and yeah!!

Both La Dee Dah and Lucky Ladybug were written by Bob Crewe and Frank C. Slay.
Bob Crewe would later produce the Four Seasons, many of their songs in fact, including "Big Girls Don't Cry", "Sherry", and "Rag Doll". Frank C. Slay would later produce, among other things, the song "Incense and Peppermints" by the Strawberry Alarm Clock which was a BIG hit in 1967, with the hippies and flower power generation. Since no one has posted anything regarding Billy and Lillie except for one cassette recording of "La Dee Dah", I felt that this would be a great post. Thanks and enjoy the song!! ----

NOTE: in the video, me and my friend Lauren
(who is a children's librarian) are in front.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Lucky
• Ladybug
• Billy
• And
• Lillie
• 1959
• Four
• Seasons
• toddlers
• children
• Milpitas
• Calif
• December
• 2006

[barnabysquirrel]

Delightful. Thanks for the background on the singers and songwriters.

[mcfrdmn]

Nice video

[violetflower]

XD I love this song i listened to it on the way to Nevada!^__^ (Im still here just gothere XD) 5/5

[thetruth415]

Milpitas, California?!!! This looks like it was filmed in China.