Endless Sleep, which peaked at No. 5 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart in 1958, opened the door for a string of similarly tragic pop hits including Mark Dinning's “Teen Angel," Ray Peterson's “Tell Laura I Love Her," Johnny Preston's “Running Bear," the Everly Brothers' “Ebony Eyes," Dickey Lee's “Patches" and the Shangri-Las' “Leader of the Pack."
Ralph Joseph Reynolds was born in Denver on Dec. 3, 1932, according to an interview with Reynolds posted at the Rockabilly Hall of Fames website, although many pop music sources list the year 1938. He was inducted into the hall of fame in 1999.
His family moved to Oklahoma when he was a child, and he grew up listening to country music and Western swing acts such as Bob Wills, Hank Thompson and Eddy Arnold. He started playing guitar in his early teens and formed a band, the Storms, in the early '50s after he moved to Arizona. When radio stations started playing the raw, energetic music of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and other rising rockabilly acts, Reynolds liked what he heard and started emulating them.
Reynolds told the Phoenix New Times in 2001 that he wrote “Endless Sleep" in 1956, right after listening to Elvis Presley's “Heartbreak Hotel" five times in a row on a jukebox. He loved the desolate quality of the story and Presley's vocal, and came up with an even darker tale, about a boy in search of his girlfriend after they had a fight.
Looked for my baby, she's nowhere around
Traced her footsteps down to the shore
'fraid she's gone forever more
The ballad unfurled with scooping electric guitar chords and Reynolds' voice double-tracked and soaked with echo, all contributing to the foreboding atmosphere. His voice fell somewhere between Presley's sad- sexy drawl and Ricky Nelson's boy-next-door conversational style.
