Thomas Hardy goes doo wop

The Kool Gents featuring Dee Clark. Pic from Unca Marvy's highly recommended site - view page about the Kool Gents here. Superb, painstakingly assembled accounts of the tangled histories of many doo wop groups.

And you know how people always go on about how, ooh, if Charles Dickens was around today he'd be writing Eastenders - what, so Emmerdale or Corrie aren't good enough for him, then? As Don, or possibly Baby Boy Phil (and I don't mean Mitchell) would say:

You know the sort - always putting on ... airs.

Anyway, don't mind me. What I intended to say was please click below if you wish to hear a song which sounds, to these ears, anyway, like something Thomas Hardy would have written had he been born in rather different circumstances - always provided his first marriage had followed roughly the same trajectory, of course. If the youtube clip is not visible, click below.

Canal ... plus

Before drifting away to other matters I'd like to talk about another of Ralph McTell's songs, Barges, which must have featured on that lost cassette of the Apollo concert (see previous post) as I hear it in my head as voice and guitar, unadorned.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 19

clarkedavis
(M/Dover, New Jersey)

Tony,

The verse from Thomas Hardy is perfect. I think the doo wop mentality and the sense of spirituality has been around a long, long, time. But it was never articulated so profoundly for the common man ... I can imagine the communication between privileged concert-goers in Vienna seeing Mozart perform. Lead East, Europe in the "real" old days.

Seriously, the feeling two lovers must have felt when sitting next to each other, perhaps holding hands, listening to romantic strains of a concert orchestra, must have been akin to what doo wop evoked for us. It's the quality of communication, and the sharing of something special that creates the bond.

There are those still among us, who lived through the highly romantic forties. Songs like Where or When, Again, A Tree in the Meadow were versions of songs made popular a decade or more earlier. The forties produced a heightened sense of romance coupled with the danger of annihilation (World War II) which forged premature relationships to blossom, due to time constraints of soldiers.

Romance and sophistication went hand in hand in the elegant forties, and some of that spilled over into the doo wop era. The sensibilities that allowed the awkward and the raw, to emerge as acceptable, if true of heart, successful commercial entities was truly what the fifties allowed. So we have the Moonglows Secret Love next to Rosie and the Originals Angel Baby on the jukebox. Sublime to almost ridiculous, with both garnering respect, because of where the music was coming from, in both cases, the heart and soul.

I am very pleased we were able to have this communication, begging the indulgence of others who might think this a bit off base for a board of this nature.

Doo Wop Dialog[ue]: 17

pismotality
(42/M/London, England)

Clarke,

In response to your main posting the words of Thomas Hardy seem right (hey, I'm an English teacher, people - these things are forced upon me!):

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam -
But we were looking away!

(...or as Ral Donner, following in Hardy's footsteps, put it, You don't know what you got...)

Your description of the dances and afterwards is amazing - really powerfully evocative. I went to a Jesuit-run school in Glasgow and at the dance, c.1975, get this: the hired deejay was told not to play any slow tracks - smooching or "snogging" not allowed – there was even suspicion (and I’m not talking Terry Stafford) if you were in a darkened corner.

Maybe this explains my love of ballads: a past I never had but wanted to have. How lucky you are to be able to link the music and experience so intimately - the brasher sounds of early 70s disco was often the backdrop to my teenage romance, though I do recall Eddie Holman’s Hey There Lonely Girl the night, thrust into each other's arms by friends who had seen our timidity at a party, this school dance girl and I first kissed. (OK, not doowop but the sensibility is the same. And now, 25 years later, I'm compiling a doowop tape for the same girl, having recently got back in touch ...) But doowop for me has often been a solitary pleasure and that's why I really value the opportunity to share thoughts in this forum.

Tony


Eddie Holman's website, including a video of his singing Lonely Girl in front of a hugely appreciative audience. He has a new gospel album entitled Love Story, and judging from the samples his remarkable voice is as good as ever. The photo, taken from that site, is captioned: "Eddie at Virtue Recording Studios, Philadelphia, PA. where This Can't Be True, Hey There Lonely Girl and many more of his legendary songs were recorded."

There are lots of links to Thomas Hardy poems on the net; here's one which provides quite a wide selection including The Self-Unseeing. Along with Tennessee Williams' plays, discovering Hardy's poetry was my major thrill at university. You could even argue that he was a kind of doo wop lyricist before his time, as an idealised, unattainable woman often features in his verse, as elusive as the being celebrated in The Wind by the Diablos or - a record I've been listening to a lot lately - the Kool Gents' When I Call On You.

And just as both of those great records (I think) hint at the spectral nature of the woman, the object of Hardy's best poetry is, indeed, unattainable by virtue of being dead; to cut a long story short, the death of his first wife, whom he had neglected, sparked a remorse-fuelled run of poems about her (Poems of 1912-1913), widely regarded as being among his very best. I'd recommend them all, but try The Voice.

I never finished that doo wop tape. It may never even have progressed beyond a few songs scribbled on a piece of paper.