Kathy Young was born in Santa Ana, California, on October 21, 1945. When she was fifteen years old, she and her mother happened to be attending The Wink Martindale Show, a daily dance program in Los Angeles. As luck would have it, a local trio called The Innocents was performing their current hit, "Honest I Do," on the show. Afterward, when Kathy approached the group to congratulate them, she mentioned that she was a singer. Jim Lee, the Innocents' manager, as well as the owner of their record label, took one look at the photogenic teenager and invited her to come to his studio the following week for an audition.
When Kathy showed up with her mother at Lee's Indigo Records office at 3330 Barham Boulevard in Hollywood (near Burbank), she sang one of her favorite songs, "A Thousand Stars," which had originally been written and recorded six years earlier by The Rivileers, a black vocal group from Queens, New York. Kathy gave a rousing performance, but Jim Lee thought something was missing. She needed a background group to fill out her sound. And he had one: The Innocents.
The Innocents, who would eventually sing under their own name or behind someone else on almost a third of the 50 Indigo singles that Jim Lee released from 1960 to late 1962, were Al Candelaria, guitarist Darron Stankey and Jim West, three young guys from the San Fernando Valley. They had an unusual blend of three voices harmonizing slightly off-key, backed by a reverb-heavy guitar. They had begun as a quartet, The Echoes, for the Andex label, but after the company folded in 1960, one of the members quit and the remaining trio renamed themselves after their car club, The Innocents. They recorded "Honest I Do" for producers Gary Paxton and Kim Fowley, who then sold the masters to Jim Lee at Indigo.
"Honest I Do" and its follow-up, "Gee Whiz," became national sellers (both creeping into the Top 40), but these singles were mere blips compared to the huge success of "A Thousand Stars," with Kathy Young. The song rocketed to #3, followed by two more chart records, "Happy Birthday Blues" and "Magic Is The Night.".But the demands of heavy record sales had a way of sinking tiny, undercapitalized labels, and by 1962 Indigo folded. Kathy eventually went to Monogram Records, where her voice was overdubbed onto a Chris Montez tape from three years earlier. It turned out to be a minor hit, "All You Had To Do (Was Tell Me)." She later married John Maus of the singing Walker Brothers ("Make It Easy on Yourself") and left show business. The Innocents continued to record, first with Warner Bros./Reprise and then with Decca, but they disbanded in 1964.
Following a Kathy Young & The Innocents' reunion thirty-seven years later, in October 2001, for PBS-TV's nationally televised Rock, Rhythm & Doo-Wop concert, they headlined, both together and separately, at DWS Show #39 on March 23, 2002.
