Sometimes destiny decides that you don’t get to score the hit.

In the 1950s and 60s, a genre known as “beach music” (aka “Carolina beach music”) established itself as the de rigueur party music along the southeastern coast of the US. Beach music was a mix of rock, pop, and R&B originally designed for dancing the Carolina shag, and groups up and down the coast formed to play this music at house parties, high school dances, and college gatherings. The Sensational Epics started in South Carolina in 1963 in order to help spread the music and make the people dance.

The band began with five teens, but after a couple of years added a horn section and became a full-size show band with choreography, matching outfits, and crowd-pleasing routines. They recorded a couple of failed singles, but their live popularity brought them to the attention of Warner Bros., who signed The Sensational Epics and gave them another chance.

Unfortunately, that chance was given to a song released in early 1968 called “You Warp My Mind, Girl,” a perfectly cromulent track with no particularly strong hooks which sounded like hundreds of other generic 60s songs which failed to stand out in a very crowded and competitive market. The flip side, however, contained a song given to The Sensational Epics by their producer, Ray Whitley, who had co-written it with J.R. Cobb (who we met back here when he co-wrote “Spooky” around the same time).

“Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy” was a fun, exuberant pop song which would have fit in perfectly on AM radio in 1968. But someone had the bright idea to bury it on the B-side. Of course, there are plenty of examples of DJs flipping over the record only to discover a hidden gem, and subsequently turning that gem into a hit, but that scenario was far more likely to occur with established artists. DJs only had a limited amount of time and could only turn over a limited number of records — they weren’t going to do that with most no-name bands.

The single sank.

A few months later, The Tams, an established R&B group who had worked with producer Ray Whitley for years, released their own version of “Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy” and scored a moderate R&B hit. Wisely, they had chosen to make it the A-side. Two years after that The Tams version was reissued and became a hit in the UK, where it’s long been a favorite of the Northern Soul scene.

But here’s the original by The Sensational Epics, a bunch of kids who sound young, foolish, and happy, singing a song destined to belong to somebody else.

And here’s The Tams with their more well known version.