Top Five Doo Wop Songs

I recently joined a music forum which asked its readers to name their five favourite doo wop records - an impossible task, but fun to try. I reminded myself of the five titles I had nominated many years ago on the messageboard of the long-gone Yahoo group Steve's Kewl Doo Wop Shop and substituted a few others - although frankly I'd be equally happy with the original list, and my selection could change again tomorrow.


With that in mind here, presented in reverse order, are my current "Fave Five" [copyright], along with a few notes. Fuller pieces about almost of these can be found elsewhere on this blog - see the "longer read" links below the youtube clips.



5. Chimes - the Pelicans (1954)

When Frank Zappa referred to "cretinous love songs of greasy simplicity" he could have had this particular record in mind, although to what extent the performance is naive or calculating must be left to others. Beyond the impassioned lead vocal it's hard to find individual elements to praise although the whole is, to my ears, some kinda wonderful. There isn't much complexity in the vocal backing, which lacks even the surprise sometimes found in the more customary nonsense syllables: we only hear the words "ding dong" endlessly repeated, echoing the sound of church bells rung for a wedding. It sounds as though there is only a piano and double bass by way of instrumentation, and the lyrics of the song don't add up to much on paper, though that lead makes up for everything, his stylings something like:

Remember what you said on that moh-oh-oonless night,
Darling, I was wrong and you-ou-ou were right
Do you - remember - the things you told me, Darling
I'll a-a-always love you, no matter what you do
So meet me in the chapel and we'll listen to the chiming of the bwelllls ...

This song also has a kind of personal association for me, but after the fact: it wasn't playing in the background at a certain restaurant in Bridgnorth in the late 1980s, but now that all memory of the conversation that evening has quite disappeared from my memory banks, and my dining companion is now elsewhere (in the bad Thomas Hardy sense of the word), it's this song, naive and hopeful, which immediately puts me right back into the experience.



The longer read: Aurelian Chimes - not




4. Sweet Dreams of Contentment - the Dells (1955)

A member of the Dells cited this record as the one most vividly evocative of their early years. The plaintive lead is Johnny Funches, who would only remain with the group until 1958; after a car crash put a temporary halt to their activities he chose not to return, which meant that Johnny Carter, deemed surplus to requirements in the Flamingos at the time, found a new, and happily permanent, home.

The power of this pre-Carter Dells recording, however, lies in more than the voices: it is superbly engineered, or produced, by Bill Putnam, whose touch informs numerous doo wop recordings on Vee Jay and other labels; Golden Teardrops, featuring Carter's falsetto wailing as a kind of commentary on Sollie McElroy's lead, was one of his.

I recall having a discussion on the Kewl Steve board with Clarke Davis and others, trying to identify that strange word intoned by Funches at the end of Dreams of Contentment. Despite straining every sinew we couldn't arrive at a universally agreed conclusion. I didn't print out our exchanges so they are probably forever lost in the ether - though as no definitive answer emerged perhaps it doesn't much matter.

What has been preserved, thanks to the mastery of Putnam, is a beautiful sound, at once clear and muffled, as befits a dream; no wonder it brought back those early times. And when, in an ecstacy of longing, Johnny Funches finally soars into the stratosphere at the end, it's surely one of the great doo wop moments - whatever he's saying.





3. You Have Two (I Have None) - the Orchids (1955)

You Have Two (I Have None) was recorded by the Orchids, prized by afficionados for the disjointed, haunting Newly Wed, beloved by the aforementioned Frank Zappa.  You Have Two ... did not see the light of day until the early 1990s, but in my opinion it's at least the equal of that more famous number.

The lyrics of Newly Wed are puzzling - what exactly happened on the honeymoon? - but perhaps You Have Two (I Have None) offers a solution. I don't mean that it's an answer record - besides, it would have to be a prequel, if anything, as it's a lovesick swain's declaration of affection -  but it suggests to me that songwriting may not be where the group's main interests lies.

As explained in rather more detail here, You Have Two ... borrows or pinches the words of a folk song of sorts, an indication - to me, anyway - that the group aren't too concerned about what they sing: it's the singing itself, the harmonising, which really matters, and words can be scooped up from anywhere - or perhaps even improvised without too much concern for sense.

So I reckon Newly Wed is best understood as a dummy lyric, such as Eno might have smilingly allowed through on his Here Come the Warm Jets album (you call it avant garde, I call it early draft): the performance is the thing.

Technically the shape of the song is odd, whether through intentional complexity or carelessness. You get a little verse at the beginning ("I love you baby...") followed by several choruses strung together (from "Don't you know God above ...") then the briefest of bridges ("Tell me you love me ...") before turning back to the chorus ("Yes, I had a heart ..."). But the sense of longing and resignation in Gilbert Warren's lead, and the harmonising of the group, especially in the climactic moments, make it no wonder that Pruter, author of the indispensible Doo Wop: The Chicago Scene, calls this "a minor masterpiece [which] represents the highest level of doo wop creativity."

Although they "sang their *sses off" at gigs, according to Pruter's book, the Orchids were short-lived, and seem to have been treated badly by Al Benson, the owner of Chicago-based Parrot Records, who "cheated them out of quite a bit of change." None of the group seems to have stayed in the business, even though the handful of ballads they recorded for Parrot are uniformly superb and will live on for lovers of doowop.

And whatever politics or neglect led to You Have Two ... lying in the vaults unheard for so long, thank goodness it's out there now.



The longer read:  More info about You Have Two (I Have None)



2. In the Still of the Nite - the 5 Satins (1956)

What can be said, or need be said, about the Five Satins' In the Still of the Nite? An alternate take indicates that perfection was not instantly arrived at, but all the elements are in perfect accord on the master. I once took part in a discussion about the relatively basic recording quality of this classic, taped in the basement of a church in Connecticut. The conclusion we came to was that it didn't matter - and indeed the fact it sounds, when you play the record, as though what you are hearing is coming out of an AM radio seems entirely fitting: a signal put out into the air, to be gratefully received by those with the capability. I associate it with long walks at night, a note of hope, of possibility: I seemed to feel it in the skies.

The song has been covered many times but nothing comes close to the original recording and those gnarly backing voices, producing a sound which is not pretty, perhaps, but seems direct and open. Clarke Davis summed it up:

A magic moment, reflected perfectly by an awkward sax break, simple, unpolished lyrics, and an almost amateurish performance. Teenage Love in a teenage world.

The song seems accessible, within reach, and is one of the few I have dared to sing out loud, heedless of possible judgement (though usually I was far from the madding crowd on one of those walks). When it was the subject of discussion on the Doo Wop Shop board many people joined in alongside myself and Clarke, their comments often reflecting this observation by another member:

... there is more to it than just the words. There is something amazing, something that you can't define, in the combination of the music, the voices, the atmosphere ... Somehow it all melts together to produce something that becomes more than a song. It becomes an actual experience to the listener.

And I think that's because there is, in the master take, nothing extraneous, no musical curlicues: Fred Parris's falsetto during the fade is not a display of prowess but the conclusion of a heartfelt prayer: as I read the lyrics, "Before the light, / Hold me again ..." is an act of imagination, an earnest wish for the impossible: for that lost time to be returned.



 The longer read: Now We Are Nine



1. Golden Teardrops - the Flamingos (1953)

Golden Teardrops, the Flamingos' masterpiece, was painstakingly assembled, "put ... together like a puzzle" over several months' rehearsal in the apartment of the lead singer Sollie McElroy's mother, as he recalled in an interview:

We were almost ready to give it up. We couldn't get it like we wanted to. And Johnny [Carter] started bringing in that tenor and it started fitting in.

Whenever I play it to people who are not big doo wop fans the intro gets them. Bradford Cox describes it as:

Just so ... reverberous ... so timelessly lovelorn ... the DNA of all the doowop or girl group stuff that came after it ...

That is in part down to Bill Putnam, and also the restraint of the musicians, whose accompaniment on this occasion is more felt than heard. The track isn't acapella but the harmonies are the main deal, reflecting the fact most of the group were part of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, otherwise known as Black Jews. Nate Nelson, McElroy's successor, was not a member of the church but told an interviewer:

Our harmonies were different because we dealt with a lot of minor chords which is how Jewish music is written.

I recall a bit of resistance when I first heard Golden Teardrops. But at some point the elements made sense - tremulous falsetto, out-of-tune-sounding yet absolutely right lead, and above all a feeling of being ushered into a holy place, cavernous and echoing as a great cathedral, then drawn together in a moment of stillness  before Sollie McElroy stands up to testify - or confess:

Swear to God I'll stray no more ...

Doo wop lyrics don't always matter that much: a peg for emotions transmitted through the singing itself. But on this occasion they seem to give the group a clarity of focus which inspires them to a height they never quite attained on any other song: Golden Teardrops is, quite simply, the loveliest and the saddest of all doo wop records.



The longer read: Flamingos # 3: Golden Teardrops & Carried Away



Out of competition: The Letter - the Medallions (1954)

I didn't include The Letter, the song penned by Vernon Green for the Medallions which gives this blog its name, in my top five; it felt wrong to have such a piece in competition, as it were. But here, in this online equivalent of a late night screening at Cannes, are a few thoughts on this classic recitatif.

The Letter is at once heartfelt and ridiculous: the true voice of adolescence. Green was fourteen years old when he wrote it, and apparently in the habit of honing his chatup technique by talking to the speaking clock.

Whatever agonies he is supposedly going through in the song he seems, to my ears, either to be sending himself up a little in that spoken section or at least taking a selfconscious pleasure in his delivery, never losing an awareness of being in the public arena - a record which people are going hear - while supposedly suffering the torments of love:

What is there worse on this earth
Than to be unable to stop loving you,
Knowing well that I should?

The language doesn't exactly sound torn from the heart, although that doesn't mean that the performance isn't touching: he is, after all, letting something out - some need, talking all out of his head even if intoxicated with nothing more than a sense of theatre. And if this is supposedly the missive which might sway things, who dast blame this manchild for a few verbal flourishes to secure the loved object's attention?

All too soon the song trickles to a halt, suggesting either that Green has exhausted himself with the effort of framing this confessional or that he has been floored by the epiphany that she "just won't be true", for all his made-up words - for our hero has travelled lunar distances beyond language as we understand it during the course of his narrative, giving unto the world "sweet words of pismotality" and "the puppeteuse [sic] of love".

From its context I take "pismotality" to refer to language which can only be understood via the indulgence extended by a lover, just as Wordsworth - the Vernon Green of his day - was wont to confess his "strange fits of passion ... in the lover's ear alone".

For those who don't know, I filched "pismotality" for my username on the Kewl Steve board, later using it as the title for this blog, in the hope of a) alerting the right kind of reader to the nature of the blog's contents and b) engendering, by a natural associative process, a similar spirit of indulgence in such obviously malleable visitors.  

And "puppeteuse"? Green said in an interview that he was referring to "a secret paper doll fantasy figure" ... which seems a good point at which to bring all explorations in that area to a juddering halt.






There has been no consensus about the top five doo wop songs on the forum to which I recently added my nominations, although certain numbers have cropped up again and again, especially the Flamingos' I Only Have Eyes For You. Dave Marsh has pointed out in his The Heart of Rock and Soul that the sophistication of its production puts the recording at a considerable remove from most doo wop ... but that is an argument for another day.

I still prefer Golden Teardrops, the product of what might be termed the Mark I Flamingos, when Johnny Carter was responsible for the group's musical direction. The group subsequently underwent two major changes: Sollie McElroy was replaced as lead by the smoother Nate Nelson, and Terry Johnson, from a more pop-oriented background than Johnny Carter, joined the group while Carter was doing his military service, in effect taking over the musical driving seat when the group moved  to End Records, where I Only Have Eyes ... was recorded.

Looking over my choices (and that "bonus" nomination) is there anything they have in common? "Gutbucket" would be the wrong term for the Flamingos' 1953 recording of Golden Teardrops - or any Flamingos recording, come to that  - but there does seem to be a directness about most of these performances as well as in the songs themselves: we're not talking polished, Platters-style examples of the genre.

The words of most songs aren't particularly complex or important - and even when you can't make them out (Dreams of Contentment) or understand them (The Letter) it doesn't seem to matter. Several songs seem to be about recapturing, or  desperately clinging to, a lost happiness, and it's not clear whether those times are likely to come back (In the Still of the Nite, Chimes) ... but perhaps there's not much point in further categorising of this sort when lyrics are often a means to an end.

All I can say, really, is that I have loved these recordings for many years, and they have not become dulled by familiarity in the way that some better-known examples of the genre have. I still don't feel that I fully understand them, but I am always happy to surrender to them, to be taken into their world of exposed nerve endings.