Inspired by the pizzicato strings of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Les Baxter’s “Quiet Village”, first recorded in 1951, is the pattern from which many future exotic records would be cut. But six years would pass by before Martin Denny’s jazz combo made the song a hit, and by then Baxter had already sold his stake in the composition to the Granson Music publishing company. While the Granson publishing company had nothing to do with Martin Denny’s discovery and subsequent million-selling cover of the song, Jose Granson certainly reaped the rewards -- in 1959 “Quiet Village” was the second best-selling piece of sheet music in the United States. More than a hundred versions of the song exist, from The Astronauts’ surf-ed up adaptation to The Ritchie Family’s disco vamp.

Born Jose Nieto in 1911, Granson spent his formative years in Spain and Mexico, emigrating to the States at the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1921. He spent his twenties as a movie extra but failed to land a single speaking role. In the late ‘30s he married singer/actress Carolyn Marsh, and became her manager under the name Joe Nieto. Their 1943 Broadway production The Hit Paraders gathered popular songwriters Herman Hupfeld, Kay Twomey, Walter Kent, and Ruth Lowe on stage to run through their songbooks, with Marsh headlining as “America’s Foremost Blues Singer.” The couple divorced after the war, and Nieto changed his name again, to Jose Granson. He set up Granson Music in the 1940s with the notion of buying up dormant copyrights on the cheap. After acquiring hits “Number Ten Lullaby Lane” and “Key Largo,” Granson set his sights on Les Baxter.

The first half of Granson’s 1950s were consumed collecting dead songs and plugging them to a bevy of L.A. indies from his suite at 1608 Argyle Street in Hollywood. His pursuit of Baxter was hardly labored -- they both had something the other desired -- Granson with cash, Baxter with a seemingly endless supply of orchestral jazz numbers. The first Baxter composition to bear the Granson mark was 1953’s “Brazilian Baion,” performed by Betty Reilly with backing by the Les Baxter Orchestra. Granson set up Forecast Records in 1955 to issue singles by Weirnaut Brothers, Bonnie Deauville, and Bernice Gorden, and Acama Records that same year for crooner Fred Darien’s “Magic Voodoo Moon,” but a chance encounter with an ex-child star would push his fledgling operation into overdrive.

By 1955, former Little Rascal Darla Hood was nearly 15 years removed from her final Our Gang performance. She’d spent the ensuing years struggling against the tide of her youthful persona. As a student at Fairfax High, Hood joined the short-lived vocal group The Enchanters and reinvented herself as a singer. After graduation the quintet sang their way into Ken Murray’s Blackouts, a long running stage show that took them as far east as New York. When Murray earned his own variety hour on CBS, he brought Hood and the Enchanters with him for a three season run for The Ken Murray Show. With the show’s cancellation in 1952 Hood found herself in a somewhat more desperate state, working for a stretch as a ventriloquist’s assistant. Jose Granson found Darla Hood amidst the slow realization that her parents had blown all of her Our Gang proceeds and a bitter divorce. With enough baggage to weigh down a DC-7, the two married in 1956.

The first record to bear Darla Hood’s name was January 1957’s “No Secret Now” b/w “Jody” for the Encino label, also operating out of 1608 Argyle. Another would follow in 1958. Both carried the Grayson Music publishing credit. When “Quiet Village” broke wide in 1959, Granson suddenly had more money than he knew what to do with, adding Bob Russell, Bob Warren, Ronnie Buck, and Griz Green to his songwriter stable, and agreeing to back Ray Whitaker’s Ray Note label. Hoping to capitalize on overwhelming demand for “Quiet Village,” Granson challenged his writers to produce a tune to follow in its wake. Written by Ronnie Buck and Hood, “Silent Island” appeared on Ray Note in August 1959 with Darla Hood backed by the Ray Whitaker Orchestra.

Over three years and ten singles Hood bounced between Ray Note and a reanimated Acama. “My Quiet Village”—a vocal version of the Baxter classic—was issued in 1961 as the final 45 on Ray Note. “Silent Island” didn’t blow up the way Granson had hoped, but that didn’t stop him from having Modesto Duran cover it for Acama in 1960.

Darla Hood never returned to the studio. After the 1962 birth of their second child Darla Jo, they relocated to find a quieter existence in New Jersey. Hood appeared once on the Jack Benny Show and voiced commercials for Campbell’s Soup and Chicken of the Sea, but her time on screen was largely over. “I felt I had let [my fans] down by not remaining a child,” Darla said in an interview near the end. “They’d be dying to meet me and yet I could see their faces fall when I walked into the room. What do you say to someone whose fantasy has just been disturbed?” Hood’s final year was spent caregiving for Granson following a stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Hood passed from congestive heart failure in 1979, when she was just 47. Granson finally succumbed in 1995, at the age of 83.