The song that made Ray Hildebrand’s name, Hey Paula, was written to help out Russell Berry, a teammate on his university basketball squad. Berry wanted to impress his girlfriend of that name, and it worked – she married him. But if Hildebrand, who has died aged 82, had simply handed it over and carried on with his education, he would have missed out on an era-defining single and a career lasting nearly 60 years.
Luckily, both for him and a generation of smooching teenagers, he decided to record the song with his college friend Jill Jackson. The track alternated between creamy harmonies and sunny individual vocals. It was a melodic shot of pure adolescent desire – “I’ve waited so long for school to be through / Paula, I can’t wait no more for you” – that spoke to seemingly every moonstruck young lover in the US.
The producer of the song, Major Bill Smith, put it out on his own local label, Le Cam, under the name Jill & Ray.
Jackson had a 15-minute Sunday radio show on KEAN in Brownwood, Texas, and played the track, after which larger stations picked it up, and listeners began to phone in to request it.
A Philips Records scout made a deal with Smith, changing the duo’s name to Paul & Paula and releasing the song on the Philips label at the end of 1962. By February 1963 it was No 1 in the US and stayed there for three weeks. Equally popular in the rest of the world, it sold 3m copies in total.
Hildebrand attributed its success to its singularity. At that point, there were few young boy/girl duos professing their love to each other in song; older musical couples such as Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé were too slick for teens, who were waiting for “teenage pizza and peanut-butter songs”, as Hildebrand characterised it, from artists of their own generation. (A few years later, Sonny & Cher were viewed as hippy descendants of Paul & Paula.)
Compared to the musical developments that were right around the corner, Hey Paula was 1950s in outlook – the protagonists wanted nothing so much as to get married – but its appeal was enormous. It did not hurt that the pair, who were never a romantic item despite having met on a college blind date, looked good together – he was tall and reddish-blond, she dark-haired and petite at only 5ft 1in. They were so in demand that on a visit to London in 1963, the BBC radio show Pop Inn dropped the original headliner and Paul & Paula were asked to close the show. Making the best of it, the Beatles waited around to get their autographs.
There was another hit that year, Young Lovers – co-written with Jackson – and three more Top 100 singles, but by then Hildebrand had tired of fame. The record label wanted to turn Paul & Paula into a nightclub act, and there was endless touring. Grinding through the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars roadshow in late 1963, Hildebrand walked out halfway through and went to Oregon, helping a friend to haul hay. Clark took his place on stage with an angry Jackson.
Hildebrand and Jackson reconciled briefly and put out more records, though they never again approached the top of the charts. During that period, Hildebrand also returned to university and finished his English degree, in 1964, the same year that he married his longterm girlfriend, Judy Hendricks. He and Jackson finally went their separate ways in 1965.
The second act of his career brought Hildebrand far more satisfaction. Disenchanted with the pop world, he began to read the Bible for the first time in many years, and was moved to write music again. He became one of the pioneers of the genre that came to be known as contemporary Christian music – a diversion from traditional gospel that included pop and country elements.
He wrote 500 songs and released many albums, starting in 1967 with He’s Everything to Me. In 1983, he teamed up with a fellow musician, Paul Land, and, as Land & Hildebrand, made several “harmonizing and humorizing” records such as Phrogs, Pharaohs and Phorgiveness (1986). Alongside this, he worked with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, writing and performing pop songs at their events.
Born in Joshua, Texas, to Alma (nee Wood), a teacher, and Walter Hildebrand, a headteacher, Ray was the youngest of their four children. He sang in church from a young age, but his passion was basketball, which he parlayed into a basketball scholarship at Navarro junior college in Corsicana, Texas. In 1960, he went on to further education at Howard Payne College (now Howard Payne University) in Brownwood, also on a basketball scholarship. When he met Jackson on a campus blind date, he was singing with a college group called the Prisoners, but she persuaded him to become her duet partner. After dissolving their partnership in 1965, they remained friends, reuniting several times for concerts, including in later years.
Judy died in 1999. Hildebrand is survived by their children, Heidi and Mike, seven grandchildren, and a brother, Steve.
• Raymond Glenn Hildebrand, musician, born 21 November 1940; died 18 August 2023
