He later left Gone Records to sign with Frank Sinatra's Reprise Records (a surprising opportunity, given that Sinatra had founded the label specifically to release his kind of music, which didn't include rock & roll). Donner enjoyed another pair of hits, "Please Don't Go" and "She's Everything," over the next year, but by the spring of 1962, hit days in the Top 40 were behind him. This coverage in the fan magazines, though hardly serious by today's standards, was enough to keep Donner in the public spotlight while Goldner and Gone Records searched for a follow-up single, which they got in the summer of 1961 with "You Don't Know What You've Got (Until You Lose It)," which peaked at number four. Suddenly, Ral Donner had a national Top 20 hit, and he sounded so much like Presley that some members of the public, utterly unfamiliar with Donner, wanted to know if he actually was Elvis Presley. With a new band called the Starfires backing him up, "The Girl of My Best Friend" was re-recorded and licensed to Gone Records, the New York-based label founded by George Goldner. The Presley side had been issued successfully as a single by RCA in England, but in America it was only available on the album. Donner was doing little better than treading water professionally, however, until a pair of Chicago producers heard his demo of "The Girl of My Best Friend," a song that Elvis Presley sang on his LP Elvis Is Back. That same year, he cut a demo with his new group, the Gents, got a pair of sides out on a small label, and got to tour with the legendary South Carolina rockabilly band the Sparkletones. At 17, he broke through to Alan Freed's Big Beat show and, in 1959, appeared at the Apollo Theatre in New York. His work with the Rockin' Five in his high school days was good enough to get them on television in Chicago, even earning a spot alongside Sammy Davis Jr. He organized his two groups - the Rockin' Five and then the Gents - while still in his teens. Born in Chicago in 1943, he started singing in church choirs as a boy, and by his early teens was a regular competitor in local talent contests. Donner was part of American rock & roll's third wave, young enough to have been a fan of Elvis Presley when the latter first emerged nationally. He was never able to transcend those beginnings, however. In a period during which Elvis Presley was the quintessential rock & roll star, Donner was the most successful of all the Elvis sound-alikes, getting a career, a year's worth of charting singles, and years of steady work out of the fact that his singing bore an uncanny resemblance to the King of Rock & Roll's ballad style. Titelschreibweise auf der Single: „My Heart Sings“.Ral Donner is the classic example of a musician who was doomed to a marginal career by the very attribute that got him public notice in the first place. Noch einfacher per Mausklick auf die Links in den Datenfeldern! Diese Übersicht ist ein Quellenwerk und verwendet: Diverse Hitparaden, Deezer (53 Millionen Titel), mehr als 600.000 Seiten gedruckte Discographien, Labellisten (ca. © by Henry König Hier geht es zur Datenbanksuche von mehr als 1,73 Millionen Musiktitel. © by Henry König Singles (Vinyl-, EP-Aufnahmen) des Jahres 1965. Singles (Vinyl-, EP-Aufnahmen) des Jahres 1965 mit Datenbanksuche.