Shane Sheppard, later famous as Shep of Shep and the Limelites, had his first hit on Hull Records in 1957 with "A Thousand Miles Away," purportedly written when his girlfriend moved to Texas. His group was the Heartbeats, formed in the late 1950s in Jamaica, Queens, New York. Their numerous songs, besides Jamie’s “One Million Years” b/w “I Want to Get Married,” included "Crazy For You," "I Won't Be the Fool Anymore," "500 Miles to Go," "After New Year's Eve," "Down on My Knees," "Your Way" and "People Are Talking." “One Million Years” was recorded at Regent Sound on 56th Street in Manhattan on January 1959 and came out ten days later on January 15. Shep and the Limelights had a gigantic hit with “Daddy’s Home,” something of another distance song that completes the cycle of absence and return.
Within a year, the Heartbeats broke up and in 1960 Shep formed Shep and the Limelites with Clarence Bassett from The Five Sharps and Charles Baskerville from The Videos. Back at Hull Records, they recorded their biggest record,
"Daddy's Home," in February 1961, just two years after “One Million Years.” It got to No. 2 in Billboard in May 1961.
Bassett later joined the Flamingos and Baskerville ended up with the Drifters after a stint with the Players Shep died on January 24, 1970 inside his car on the Long Island Expressway, the victim of a robbery in public view but rumored in the music business to have crossed the wrong people. , Baskerville died in New York on January 18, 1995 and Bassett died in Richmond, Virginia, on January 25, 2005.
