Faye Adams

Music career Tuell started performing the age of five with her sisters singing spirituals, regularly performing on Newark radio shows. She entered an Apollo Theatre singing contest and won first prize in 1939. In 1942 she married her first husband, Tommy Scruggs, who became her business manager. Under her married name, Faye Scruggs, she became a regular performer in New York nightclubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

While performing in Atlanta, Georgia, she was discovered by the singer Ruth Brown, who won her an audition with the bandleader Joe Morris of Atlantic Records. Morris recruited her as a singer in 1952, and signed her to Herald Records, under new management by her former vocal coach Phil Moore. After he changed her name to Faye Adams, she released her second recording and first release at Herald with Morris's song "Shake a Hand". The recording topped the US Billboard R&B chart for ten weeks in 1953 and reached number 22 on the US pop chart.

According to the Acoustic Music organization, the "first clear evidence of soul music shows up with The "5" Royales, an ex-gospel group that turned to R&B and in Faye Adams, whose "Shake A Hand" becomes an R&B standard".

In 1954, Adams had two more R&B chart toppers with "I'll Be True" (later covered by Bill Haley in 1954 and by a young Jackie DeShannon in 1957) and "It Hurts Me to My Heart". During this period, she left the Morris band and was billed as "Atomic Adams". She appeared in the 1955 film Rhythm & Blues Revue. In 1957 she moved to Imperial Records, but her commercial success diminished. By the late 1950s she was seen as an older recording artist whose time had come and gone, although she continued to record for various small labels until the early 1960s and 70s. DJ Alan Freed called Adams the "little gal with the big voice" and she toured in the Rhythm and Blues Show Tours, which also featured The Drifters, The Counts and The Spaniels. returned to her gospel roots and family life in New Jersey.

Discography Singles

Award year Association Award Results 1998 Rhythm and Blues Foundation Pioneer Award