was broadcast only in the daytime, recording sessions were at night when the station was off the air. One of the first artists he recorded was the young Johnny Maddox, who packed records for him at his store, and whose honky tonk piano style graced Dot Records for almost twenty years. Wood's roster of R&B artists included Ivory Joe Hunter, Joe Liggins, the Four Dots, the Big Three Trio, Brownie McGhee, Shorty Long, the Counts, and the Griffin Brothers, who had a top-10 R&B hit with "Darling Dear" in 1954. His country artists included Mac Wiseman, who had hits with "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy", and, more famously, Jimmy "C." Newman, who scored many hits on the label (the biggest being "Cry, Cry, Darling") before leaving for MGM Records in 1958. Wood also recorded such gospel artists as the Fairfield 4, the Gateway Quartet, the Golden Voice Trio, Rosa Shaw, Joe Warren, the Singing Stars, and the Brewsteraires. Dot's first major pop act was The Hilltoppers, whose hits included "P.S. I Love You" and "Trying"; when lead singer Billy Vaughn hit #2 with a revival of Wayne King's "Melody of Love", he left the group to become the label's main musical director. Wood, seeing the demand for rhythm and blues recordings among white audiences, in 1955, hired a number of vocalists to do pop-oriented covers of tunes popular in the genre. The most notable artist who performed that function for Dot was Pat Boone, who outsold the original recordings of the Charms' "Two Hearts", Fats Domino's "Ain't It a Shame" (which was changed to the slightly more grammatically correct "Ain't That a Shame"), the Five Keys' "Gee Whittakers!", Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" and "Long Tall Sally", the El Dorados' "At My Front Door", and Ivory Joe Hunter's "I Almost Lost My Mind". Boone in the late spring of 1956 opted to switch to original material in the Bing Crosby/Frank Sinatra tradition. Other notable artists who did R&B covers for Dot included the Fontane Sisters (who covered the Jewels' "Hearts of Stone", the Teen Queens' "Eddie My Love", the Drifters' "Adorable", the Marigolds' "Rollin' Stone", and Fats Domino's "Please Don't Leave Me"), Snooky Lanson (with covers of the Jacks' "Why Don't You Write Me" and the Dream Weavers' "It's Almost Tomorrow"), and actress Gale Storm (with covers of Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall in Love"