The Lovin' Touch

The Lovin' Touch: Mark Dinning Between Tragedy and Tenderness

By the summer of 1960, Mark Dinning had already experienced something that few pop singers of his generation could claim: a genuine number-one hit with a song so dark and so strange that radio programmers had initially hesitated to play it. Teen Angel, with its portrait of a teenage girl killed on railroad tracks, had defied conventional wisdom and reached the top of the Billboard chart in early 1960. What came next, for a singer in that position, was the question every sudden star had to answer: who are you when the novelty has passed?

A Singer in Search of a Second Identity

Dinning came from a musical family (his sisters formed a successful vocal group in the previous decade), and he had the kind of warm, approachable baritone that suited him to a range of material. After Teen Angel established his name, MGM Records looked for follow-up material that could sustain his commercial momentum without simply replicating the morbid teen tragedy formula. The Lovin' Touch represented a different approach: a gentler, more conventionally romantic record aimed at demonstrating range rather than capitalizing on formula.

Six Weeks on the Chart

The Lovin' Touch debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 22, 1960, entering at number 100, and climbed gradually through the late summer weeks. It reached its peak at number 84 during the week of September 26, 1960, completing a 6-week chart run. Measured against the extraordinary success of Teen Angel, those numbers represented a commercial step back, but they also reflected a record that was genuinely trying to expand Dinning's appeal rather than coasting on a proven formula.

The Sound of 1960's Pop Mainstream

MGM's pop productions of this period had a characteristic glossiness, arrangements that placed a singer's voice within a carefully constructed frame of strings and light rhythm section. The sonic world of The Lovin' Touch was recognizably the world of the early Brill Building era, where professional songwriters crafted pieces specifically designed for a given artist's strengths and the taste of radio programmers. The production aimed for warmth and accessibility, qualities that served the romantic subject matter well even if they could not generate the same shock of attention that a teenage tragedy had provided.

The Problem of the Follow-Up

Pop music in 1960 was already developing its own folklore about the difficulty of the follow-up hit, and Dinning's chart trajectory after Teen Angel illustrated the problem clearly. The record that makes a career often does so by exploiting something unique about a particular cultural moment: a specific anxiety, a specific taste, a specific gap in the market. Replicating that alchemy is genuinely difficult, and most artists who tried to follow a breakout novelty hit with more conventional material found the chart response muted. The Lovin' Touch performed respectably rather than spectacularly, which in 1960 was its own kind of achievement.

What This Record Tells You

There is something appealing about listening to The Lovin' Touch precisely because it shows Dinning at work without the scaffolding of a sensational gimmick. The voice is genuine, the performance sincere, and the song itself is a straightforward declaration of romantic feeling with none of the melodrama that made his biggest hit famous. That plainness, in context, has its own kind of charm. Press play and hear a singer trying, with complete earnestness, to show you something new about himself.

“The Lovin' Touch” — Mark Dinning's singular moment on the 1960s charts.