Doo-Wop at the Hop - Getting Lost in a 1950's Fantasy

It happens every now and then: I put on a collection of songs I have marked as "favorite", simply because I haven't listened to it years, and I end up playing it for days on end on my headphones. Last time this happened I wrote this Grateful Dead post about it. Today I am sinking deep into another similar sized collection of mostly 1950's pop music, I have named Doo-Wop at the Hop. So why not write a post about it?

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The Dream Goes Back to My Childhood

First of all, I have to admit that by the time I was born the 50's had been gone for two decades. Still, there is something in the music of that era that keeps talking to me quite powerfully. At first I could barely define what it was, and to be honest, even today I have a hard time putting my finger on it. It's a dreamy feeling the music has conjured up in me from the first time I heard it. It didn't take long until I could identify with certainty whether an "oldie" played on the radio was from the 50's or not. Granted, they probably played many 50's songs that didn't meet this profile, and vice versa, there was an occasional song that fell into this category that was not from the 50's. But generally speaking I developed an early taste for doo-wop, even though I would only encounter this word much later.

Having such a hard time explaining what it was I was looking for, I would try to find this wonderful music in movies: not from the 50's itself, since film soundtracks from that era had their own peculiar style, but nostalgic movies from the 80's or 90's set in the 1950's. Stand By Me turned out to be ideal for this, and I was amazed at how it seemed to have followed the same dream I was having as a kid. The strangest part was, that unlike the director (as well as probably most of those responsible for the musical score), I could not relate the to the 50's personally. But it was not only films and TV shows that would grab my attention regarding 50's music. It could be something as simple as this commercial (from 1989):

Smooth Chords and Angelic Vocals

But what is it really about the tunes of the 50's that appealed to me so much? After putting together a collection of more than seventy songs, I started analyzing them, trying to find some commonalities that would bring it down to a point, and possibly help me find more songs of the same type. The obvious first thing to notice are the vocals... vocals of all types! Harmonic singing, not unlike a barbershop quartet, where the vocal melodies take the foreground to accompanying beats and instruments. That's how I learned that the term doo-wop is simply an onomatopeic expression of how the vocalization is used to create this kind of music.

Additionally to these purely melodic sound-words they could sing lyrics with actual meanings, or accompany them with instruments. Though the lyrical poetry never went really deep, and even if they had a whole orchestra to back them up, it only served to underline the vocals. In some songs the singers were backed up angel-like choirs, as for example in Paul Anka's Put Your Head on my Shoulder or Frankie Avalon's Venus. This is when I almost felt like melting away at the sound, then evaporating into the ether to dance with the clouds.

Necessarily 1950's?

As I started associating doo-wop music with the 1950's, I came across a couple of surprises. One was The Longest Time by Billy Joel, which I had heard many times before, and I could have sworn was from the fifties. In fact it was recorded in 1984, where the artist managed to replicate the style perfectly, capturing the feel of a 25-year high school reunion, as featured in the music video. Another such revelation of neo-doo-wop, if you want to call it that, was the song Sugar Baby Love by The Rubettes. Seeing the name and hearing the song, there was no doubt in my mind that it came from the same epoch... until I saw the video recording, which made it clear that I could not have been more off: the song is actually from 1974. Wow!

Surprising me on the other end of the temporal spectrum was the song Blue Moon, which I had thought was originally by The Marcels. However, their version was just a cover of many, going back to 1934. Here is one of the first interpretations by Al Bowlly. It's no doo-wop for sure, but it does have that certain something I could see growing into a defining feature of 1950's music. Reading up about this particular song, it mentions the distinct chord sequence which would later be defined as THE 50's progression I–vi–IV–V. Though this is where my knowledge of musical theory ends, so I won't go into further detail about it. What I gathered, was that it's not just the vocals but also the chords that made the 50's music what it is, which happened to catch my attention. For this reason I'd like to add the completely instrumental version by The Ventures:

Doo-wop and 50's Music is Everywhere!

Of course I was not the only one whose ears perked up to 50's tunes. The 80's particularly seemed to be full of 50's revivalism, from Grease to Back to the Future, among so many more or less successful attempts at indulging in the nostalgia of a quarter century before. The reason for this is plain as day: the Baby Boomer generation reliving their childhood and teenage years. Billy Joel was one, as I mentioned before, but also Frank Zappa in his album Cruising with Ruben and the Jets. Since this album came out in 1968 I'd say it's more a parody of doo-wop (though a good one at that) than nostalgia. And there is the audition scene in the 2001 film Mulholland Drive, featuring not one but two very fiftiesque doo-wop songs. Oh David Lynch, why are you so relatable?

And lastly, there are a good number of collections of doo-wop and other 50's pop on the net (and offline), many of which include songs that touch my soul in a similar manner, and others that simply don't. One such song that never made it onto my Doo-Wop at the Hop list is Danny and the Juniors' At The Hop. Not because it doesn't qualify, it just never had the same effect on me. However, there are countless others, and I haven't even gone through all of them yet. So the list is constantly growing. For now I want to leave with one of the songs that has remained very high on top of this list. I think I may have heard it in an episode of The Sopranos, and had to look it up right away: Little Star by The Elegants.