Wishful Thinking

Wishful Thinking — Little Anthony and the Imperials' Early Longing

A Group at the Starting Line

March 1959 was still early days for Little Anthony and the Imperials. The group from Brooklyn had scored their breakthrough with Tears on My Pillow the previous year, a doo-wop ballad whose blend of youthful heartbreak and falsetto yearning had introduced Anthony Gourdine's remarkable voice to a national audience. That record's success created real momentum; the question of what came next was pressing and not entirely answered. Wishful Thinking was one of the recordings made in the window between that breakthrough and the establishment of the group's full mature sound, a song that captured the Imperials in the act of finding their range. Early-career recordings from acts that later became important often carry a rawness and immediacy that the more polished later work trades away; Wishful Thinking has both qualities in healthy measure.

Anthony Gourdine's Voice as the Central Instrument

Even at this early stage, what made Little Anthony and the Imperials distinctive was the lead voice. Anthony Gourdine had a tenor of unusual purity and reach, capable of climbing into registers that most singers of the period would not have attempted in a recording studio. The falsetto passages in the group's ballads were not ornamentation but structure; they carried emotional weight that a chest-voice delivery could not have matched. Wishful Thinking deployed that voice in service of a lyric about longing and hope, which was precisely the emotional territory where it operated most convincingly. The close harmonies around him gave his lead lines a cushion of support that intensified rather than diluted the feeling; the Imperials were a group in the truest sense.

Two Weeks on the Chart

The single entered the Hot 100 on March 23, 1959, debuting and peaking at number 79. The following week it slipped to 94, and the chart run was over. Two weeks on the Hot 100 was a modest performance, but it placed the record in the national conversation at a moment when the group was building the audience that would carry them through the decade. The chart position was not a capstone but a waypoint; the group's most significant commercial moments were still ahead. Many of the best careers in pop music look, in retrospect, like a series of small steps before the leap that defines them.

Brooklyn Doo-Wop at a Transitional Moment

The late 1950s New York doo-wop scene was extraordinarily fertile. Corner-group singing had been a feature of New York street culture for years, but by 1958 and 1959 the recording industry had found ways to translate that community practice into commercial product with a consistency that produced dozens of charting groups in a single season. The Imperials occupied a specific niche within this world: they were more polished than the rawest street-corner recordings, more emotionally raw than the pop-vocal groups who covered similar material. Wishful Thinking sat in that productive middle ground, a record with one foot in the street-corner tradition and one foot in the polished studio pop that was beginning to dominate the charts.

The Prelude to a Classic Career

Looking at Wishful Thinking with knowledge of what followed makes the song interesting as a document of potential. The group would go on to record some of the finest soul ballads of the 1960s, and Anthony Gourdine would be recognized as one of the era's great vocalists. Songs like I'm On The Outside (Looking In) and Goin' Out of My Head would arrive a few years later and cement their legacy definitively. Three million YouTube views on a recording from March 1959 suggests that the audience for early Imperials material extends beyond dedicated fans of the period. Press play and hear a great voice in its first spring.

"Wishful Thinking" — Little Anthony and the Imperials' singular moment on the 1950s charts.