Carl Gardner, the spunky tenor who was the lead singer of the original Coasters, whose mixture of rhythm-and-blues, doo-wop and sitcom humor created 1950s hits like “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown” and “Searchin,’ ” died on Sunday in Port. St. Lucie, Fla. He was 83.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Veta, said. She said he also had Alzheimer’s disease.

The Coasters, one of the early black groups of the rock ’n’ roll era, specialized in witty story songs about characters who often exemplified the problems of teenagers. Formed at the suggestion of the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote much of the group’s material, they made their debut recording, “Down in Mexico,” in 1956. A bluesy number with a Latin tinge, it featured Mr. Gardner’s clear-voiced, plaintive and faintly licentious narration of an episode involving a seductive dancer in a south-of-the-border honky-tonk.

The song was an echo of a previous Leiber and Stoller hit, another semi-humorous, semi-sexy bar tale, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” which Mr. Gardner had recorded with his previous group, the Robins. The Coasters’ first big hits, “Searchin’ ” and “Young Blood,” released in 1957, had the same yearning sexuality.

As the Coasters went on, however, their work took a turn for the light and youthful. In songs like “Yakety Yak,” a parental warning to a teenager to behave — “Don’t talk back!” — and do chores; “Charlie Brown,” a portrait of a class clown (“Who calls the English teacher Daddy-o?”); “Poison Ivy,” about the kind of girl who will make a young man itchy with desire (“You’re going to need an ocean/Of calamine lotion”), the Coasters spoke to teenagers in winking, clean-cut little melodramas — playlets, as Mr. Leiber called them...
Obit