Dylan and Doo-wop

What else are the Traveling Wilburys if not a vocal group? Their song “7 Deadly Sins” is pure Doo-wop. I can picture the conversation of how the song was written.

Bob: “Remember that song by The Moonglows? What was that called?”

George: “‘Sincerely’? ‘Most of All’?”

Bob: “Nah, the other one.”

George: Oh, ‘Ten Commandments of Love’.”

Bob: “Yeah, that’s it. We should do something like that but invert it.”

Even if “Acne” is a parody, Bob is simply too committed to the performance for there not to be some genuine affection for the style of music.

The same could be said of “Silhouettes” on The Basement Tapes. I was blessed to grow up listening to stacks of my dad’s 45s, including this song by The Rays. I nearly lost it when I heard Bob and The Band slow the tempo while speeding up the vocal phrasing of “I was sore” and “down your door”. Even in this ramshackle performance, Bob is brilliant. This music may have been thought of as square, but it is still part of the soundscape of his youth. It is mixed up with the rest of the medicine down in the basement of Big Pink. As he wrote in “Tarantula”, “You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past.”

Bob has sung “Never Let Me Go” and “It’s All in the Game” live with two of my favorite singing partners of his, Joan Baez and Clydie King. I think these songs can be safely classified as Doo-wop, among other quaint genres. All the best songs occupy multiple spaces. Of the latter, he writes in The Philosophy of Modern Song, “The arrangement is key. You will not hear arrangements like this these days. It is way thought out, with a real live echo chamber on the vocalist, and layered with counterpoint parts of the strings, and communal voices filling in the gaps. But nothing gets in the way.” This song was a favorite of my mom’s mom. Perhaps Bob’s mom Beatty liked it too.

In The Philosophy of Modern Song chapter on “My Prayer”, Bob writes, “The guy in the Platters, Tony Williams, is one of the greatest singers ever… there’s nobody that beats this guy.” I have often thought this, so this was one of the things I was most delighted to read in his book. He goes on, “The Platters don’t need back-alley blues full of flatted notes and double entendres, they carry their soul with a cooler-than-thou looseness, offhand and urbane.” The Platters for me have always been the link between the American songbook of the 1940’s and the rock and rhythm of the 1960’s. In the 1950’s they are simultaneously having hits with the likes of Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and also “The Great Pretender”, which they perform in the rock ‘n’ roll movie, “Rock Around the Clock”.

One of my favorite groups during the last gasp of Doo-wop in the early 1960’s is The Duprees, formed by Italian American guys in Jersey. Trying to capitalize on The Platters’ formula of updating standards, they had a top ten hit with “You Belong to Me”. I like their version of “These Foolish Things” even better. Bob has sung both of these songs.

Dion DiMucci, who started in the group The Belmonts, went on to sing pop, rock, folk, Christian music, you name it. He was the first to record “Abraham, Martin, and John”, which Bob so beautifully covered live with Clydie King. Bob wrote the liner notes for Dion’s 2020 album, “Blues with Friends”, which features the likes of Paul Simon, Van Morrison, and Bruce Springsteen. He wrote, “With a Vaudevillian Father and the Doo-wop street corners of the Bronx as teachers, Dion learned early on that they way to be heard and reach hearts was to sing in his own rhythmic voice… Dion knows how to sing and he knows just the right way to craft these songs.” The liner notes sound an awful lot like a chapter from The Philosophy of Modern Song. The last chapter of that book is Dion’s version of yet another standard being updated, “Where or When”. Bob writes, “When Dion’s voice bursts through for a solo moment in the bridge, it captures that moment of shimmering persistence of memory in a way the printed word can only hint at. But so it is with music, it is of a time but also timeless… music transcends time by living within it.”