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[statics]
[jukebox operating]
Everything has to begin somewhere, everything.
No matter where you went in 1956, no matter what neighborhood, what project,
there was a group doo-wopping, they were singing, making harmony.
You heard harmony every place you went.
[music playing]
What is doo-wop? I wish I knew.
If you talk to ten people in this music business,
they'll give you ten different answers.
Doo-wop means great music.
Harmony, harmony, harmony. No band, no nothing.
I don't know who came up with that term.
I looked it up, doo-wop in the Webster's dictionary...
Street corner.
Homegrown music.
Acapellas, street corner harmony.
It's a feeling.
I would call it really rhythm and blues.
Doo-wop. Do-bee-do-bee-do-wop. Do-bee-do-bee-do-wop.
They would doo-wop, we were R&B singers.
Four or five guys standing on the corner singing that wonderful music.
And we said, "Well if they can do that, we could do that."
One lady said that she had conceived four children on that song.
I don't know if I should take credit for it or apologize.
We paved the way for Rihanna, Beyoncé, Destiny's Child.
When I first heard Boyz II Men, New Edition, Backstreet Boys, all that's doo-wop.
They should acknowledge us because if it wasn't for us, they wouldn't be here.
There would be nobody out there doing anything if they didn't reach back
into what we put down as that foundation.
You know as long as there's teenage girls out there,
I think vocal harmony groups will be around.
It was good music then, it's good now,
it's gonna be good in the future when the next generation recreates it.
That period of time, some of the greatest music,
greatest singers, greatest groups in history.
That was the beginning of a revolution that has never ended.
[music playing]
When I was in gospel, we learned how to hum before we learned to ever sing.
You know, my mother used to go-- [hums]
I said, "Whoa!"
[music playing]
The do-wop as you call them, I call them street corner harmony groups,
came from gospel.
If you did have some talent, it was-- usually it came out in the church.
We imitated a lot of the groups that were by the church groups
that's where it basically comes from. Soul Stirrers--
whatever they were, the patterns they would use,
we would use that into rock and roll and rhythm and blues.
My mom was a gospel singer.
and through that is where I met Sam Cooke
and he sang with a group called the Soul Stirrers.
So, I got to meet a lot of wonderful gospel singers
and my mom used to take me around to all of the churches and places she would sing
in the tri-state area. So, I would sit there and listen to her
and listen to them sing and-- and I got very inspired.
I would listen to the High Lows which weren't really a doo-wop group necessarily,
but they were male vocal group. the Swan Silvertones and-- and groups like that
that were gospel in nature. So, you had call and response happening
or where you'd have a lead vocalist and then the other three vocalists
echoing what he was singing. That was doo-wop.
It was kind of like standing under the streetlight on the street corner
and just starting parts and just-- just singing.
So, it was always a part of our heritage.
Pretty soon when I got-- so I'd say, "I'm tired of going to church singing.
I gotta make some money."
The evolution of doo-wop music or harmonizing of music
came from these guys like the Mills Brothers, the Ink Spots.
["If I didn't care" by Ink Spots playing]
[Anthony] Let's take the Ink Spots.
Now that's the early 40s, during World War II.
The Ink Spots were singing pop music. "If I Wouldn't Care."
[hums] And we would hear that stuff and go, "God, dad what was that?"
They used to rap, the Ink Spots. ♪ Oh, honey child, baby♪
In the middle-- eighth of the song.
♪ Honey child More than words can say♪
[Anthony] Spiritual music gave birth to blues,
blues gave birth to rhythm and blues,
rhythm and blues gave birth to rock and roll,
rock and roll gave birth to hip hop.
No doo-wop. I don't know where that is. It doesn't fit in the category.
It was the Ink Spots, it was the Ravens, but there was the Orioles.
["Does She Loves Me" by The Orioles playing]
[Sammy] When they first heard "Does She Loves Me"
that earthy sound from the Orioles with Sonny Til
and by the time "Crying in the Chapel" came out,
you could see that the music had changed
and it gave it a more sophisticated sound.
Oh, that was beautiful.
They hung out on Pennsylvania Avenue which many of us believe
was the birthplace of rhythm and blues vocal harmony
and it was rhythm and blues vocal harmony, which would later develop into doo-wop.
The Orioles were fantastic, but they weren't doo-woppers.
The groups from then, don't like that term
because that's not what they were. They were rhythm and blues singers.
Groups started springing up all over the country trying to imitate the Orioles
and I dare say, I don't know of a group that formed between 1948 and 1952
that was not influenced strongly by the Orioles.
It was just soul. It was the soul of Baltimore.
The Orioles hooked up with a manager named Deborah Chessler.
Deborah Chessler was a twenty-five-year-old songwriter from Baltimore.
She was Jewish and she happened to stumble on the Orioles
and decided she wanted to manage them and use them
as an outlet for her songs, which she did.
Deborah Chessler was the first white woman to manage a black group.
She went to a pool in Baltimore and there was a sign, "No blacks, no Jews."
She swam and she was coming out and she saw the sign
and she went up to the girl at the thing and said,
"I just want to tell you something. Uh, I'm Jewish,
and I just swam in your pool."
She understood discrimination.
She identified, I think, with African Americans.
She was happy that-- that her songs fit their styles.
My wife, she was in love with Sonny Til in the Orioles, you know.
I guess that's what made me sing the way I sang.
They called him "The Voice." They called him Sonny-- Sonny Voice.
His real name was-- was Earlington Tilghman.
His voice was so smooth.
Sonny would go get on stage, when he started singing, he had women falling out.
[music playing]
That song was recorded by every major artist.
It was a new song not written by a major composer,
but by an unknown girl and it was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald,
Dinah Washington, Irma Thomas and Sonny Til which had the hit.
What does a thirteen-year-old boy know about love?
Well, Mr. Laine, I've been falling in love since I was only five.
-Five? -[audience laughing]
But I've been a fool about it since I was eleven.
[audience laughing]
[Mr. Laine] I think we've had enough of this little chitchat.
-Are you ready to rock and roll? -[Frankie] That's right.
I was watching television, of course, black and white
and I hear this ruckus. I'm watching the Frankie Laine Show.
And I see these five guys jump over this brick wall
and they had on these white sweaters with tees on them
and they start singing "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"
Well, when I tell you this turned my whole life around.
["Why do fools fall in love" by Frankie Lymon and The Teenager playing]
I believe that Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers were put together
to become Jackie Robinson of doo-wop.
[music playing]
There wasn't the internet then, you didn't have home recorders.
So. in order to be in the record industry,
if you have a group and wanted to be a singer,
you had to go find an agent, or start knocking on doors
and hopefully they would open their door and listen you sing.
Richie Barrett moved into the neighborhood. We were so excited.
He's a recording artist, he's a star, he has a group,
he's getting ready to perform at the Apollo Theater.
Richard Barrett became a big star as a singer singing with the Valentine's,
but then he also became big on the other end of the microphone
just managing groups, producing records, writing songs.
Richard Barrett-- [puffs] the king of all this stuff.
[Charlie H.] Richard Barrett was living in an apartment in Washington Heights
and he kept hearing these kids singing beneath his window.
And they were trying to get attention. They knew he was a big star.
He sees us singing and he says, "You know what?
I'm gonna take you guys downtown and get an audition."
And we were thrilled. We had Richie Barrett of the Valentines
who had a song out called "Lily Maebelle"
who's going to take us downtown and make us stars.
[music playing]
The first week in September, Richard Barrett of the Valentines
takes us down to George Goldner and there we do a live audition.
[Jerry] Let me tell you about George Goldner.
He was one of the unsung heroes of doo-wop street corner, trust me.
So, we're auditioning in front of George-- "You know, you guys sound great.
You guys sound-- Richie, Richie, do they-- do they do any original music?"
I said, "Well, there's a song that we've been working on.
It's called Why Do Fools Fall in Love." And on December 3rd 1955,
we went into the studio and we recorded "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"
And we were about sixteen, and Frankie was thirteen. Thirteen-years-old.
I don't know what I can say about this next act.
What can you say? But sensational.
All over the world, Frankie Lymon, a 13-year-old youngster
with a great way with the song and The Teenagers.
That was the beginning of a revolution that has never ended.
That was a big bang we were looking for.
There had never been no teenage group before.
I'm 16 years old. Frankie Lymon is younger than me.
[music playing]
And the people that related to The Teenagers were not just black,
they were white.
[Ron] The lyrics were something that we got,
you know, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love"
because when you're 14-years-old, 15-years-old
you're falling in love constantly and hoping for the best.
[Anthony] And they would get to the Brooklyn Paramount
with Alan Freed, and I lived down the street.
And me and a couple of other kids, we knew that place like the back of our hand.
We didn't let a little thing about the theater and not having any money--
we'd sneak in the theatre. You know what I'm saying?
And I remember seeing him, and he was singing with The Teenagers
and Herman Santiago and Sherman Garnes and all the guys.
I said, "Oh, shoot!" I just so-- was so overwhelmed
not knowing that I was gonna meet him someday.
Frankie could-- he was a natural.
I always felt that way and he could sing too.
You know, I'm talking about a kid about that tall.
[music playing]
I tried to sing his song, but I wasn't able to hit the notes that he could hit.
He was fabulous. He was fabulous.
He was a great singer and he had a great stage personality.
He was a genius.
Frankie Lymon, of course, I mean that's-- he was the best.
I know Joey Fatone, that's his favorite too.
Some star, he was a star, he was a star.
It was written all over him, man. "I'm good."
-He had his swag on early. -He had swag.
[laughing]
[music playing]
The first time we met he said, "Oh, yeah. You're that cat, man.
We call you little Anthony, man. You're that cat." I said, "Yes, sir."
Then he tells me, "Hey, man you want to go to this here, restaurant?"
And-- and he took me to Japanese restaurant that specializes in soul food.
Figure that one out, man. So, Frankie took me there and it became--
we'd go there all the time.
We figured together, man, we had the power.
I'm Little Anthony, he's Frankie Lymon,
literally women they would just come from everywhere.
For the next eighteen months,
Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers were on top of the world.
Can you imagine in eighteen months, they had six top 10 records
and they even made a tour of England where they played the London Palladium.
[Jimmy] And remember we on the road with men. They were like sailors.
You know, these guys in the clothes and The Coasters
and The Drifters, they had women in every town.
And we started copying them, you know.
And we got rebuked out of the hotel because Park West Hotel
wasn't gonna have it, you know. [laughs]
Crazy!
During the tour, Frankie Lymon was--
was no longer being managed by Richard Barrett.
They picked up some new managers and they said,
"Why are we dealing with five kids when we only need to deal with one?
We're gonna split Frankie Lymon away from the group."
They split the group up and Frankie Lymon after that never had another hit record.
And The Teenagers on their own with different leads
never had another hit record after that.
I watched him in happy times and I saw him when he had become self-destructive
and there was nothing we can do. And-- and I mean, I remember,
he was getting worse, and worse, and worse. He was taking heroin.
And-- and then we started. So did the-- you know,
that's something I couldn't-- I didn't want to deal with.
I saw my brother get caught up in that thing and I said,
"You know, I-- that's not-- that's not where I want to go."
But I just-- I just wanted-- I didn't know how to help him.
But he was still my friend.
Eventually, I got to meet Frankie Lymon.
I was working at the Apollo and it was sad
that he would hang around backstage,
you know, and he was on drugs, and he didn't look good at all.
And he would, you know, try to borrow some money, or ask for money
and stuff like that. I mean, he was-- I looked up to him
and when I'm-- here I am appearing at the Apollo,
and I see the guy that I look up to
in this bad state, you know, so--
[Anthony] I get a call from my wife. She says,
"He's not with us anymore."
I said, "What?"
"He's not with us anymore," she said.
I was told by street people that he took almost pure heroin
and he shot it up.
He was in the bathroom and he slumped over and died.
It just-- it was ended.
It was over.
When Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers jumped over that wall,
I think the next day teenage groups popped up from coast to coast.
All of a sudden, we realized that as a teenager,
we can actually, you know, maybe make a record.
Frankie Lymon was about the same age I was,
so I said, "Well, if he can do it, I can do it."
They caused the epidemic. There were the groups in every schoolyard.
They were all over and no matter where you went
in 1956, during the summer,
no matter what neighborhood, what project,
you heard harmony every place you went.
[music playing]
[Diz] We used to sing on street corners.
If you were a singer, then you know what I'm talking about.
Most the time we was-- we'd get together and sing.
Come on, I'll meet you at the corner, and I see you walking up,
they gotta me, all good stop and start singing on the corner together.
[Charlie T.] You know, a long time before I got
with the Drifters I was with The Crowns-- The Five Crowns,
and we used to sing on the street corner of 8th Avenue.
It used to be the Cadillacs on one corner,
it used to be The Five Crowns on one corner, The Harptones on another corner.
You know, you know you light the fire in the garbage can
and you take a little nip of something and then you hit a little doo-wop song.
[music playing]
And this is where this whole thing called doo-wop developed in the inner city
and that to me is what doo-wop really is. It's a homegrown music.
There was a lot of poverty, you know, there was no one who was rich,
everybody was struggling.
Everybody was trying to get out
and you'd rely on whatever skill,
talent, ability you had to do that.
That was a way of releasing tension and to form brotherhood.
Brooklyn was not a high-end community.
There really wasn't any money for-- for instruments.
Nobody could afford to buy instruments, so you had to--
you wanted to make some money, you had to imitate the instruments.
Well not only could we not afford them, we couldn't play them.
We didn't know how to play them.
Started sundown, as soon as the streetlights came on,
uh, you would find various groups taking positions.
It seems like there was a group under every streetlight.
["My true story" by The Jive Five playing]
It was just street-corner singing,
getting that harmony to ring, usually standing under the streetlight.
It would be like a concert and it was just an amazing,
amazing evening until of course, about nine o'clock, everything shut down about 9:00.
We would have a lot of parents saying, "Stop that noise and get out of my back door."
And that was the good days.
[music playing]
[Barbara] Well, the schoolyards they would assemble.
Various groups would show up, and they'd find a spot.
Yeah everybody's going in like a prizefighter. You're going in,
one group is standing in the corner and standing in another corner,
in another corner, you know. And it's-- when it's your turn-- when it's your turn to sing,
you go up and you do the best song.
About what we gonna do? We gonna burn them and all that kind of stuff
that's-- that was the term back then. We gonna burn. We gonna burn them tonight.
-That's right. That's right. -[laughing]
And it was really trial and error. We were imitating all the other groups.
So basically, we were doing their songs,
but then we were here, "Well, wait a minute.
If we just singing it in the streets, it didn't sound the same
as it was-- as they sound on the records."
Well, somehow, we stumbled up in the hallways
of Brooklyn and in Fort Greene projects
and other projects where other groups came from and it had echo.
There was natural echo. We said, "Oh! That's what we're hearing
on the record. We could do this in the hallway."
You must be in
a stairwell
or a bathroom for harmony. I mean, it was like--
it was amazing to scramble around the fire,
"Where are we gonna sing today? Oh, shucks! They're in the bathroom."
[Anthony] Then we found out
that when we're down in the subway, it was even better
and that's how we learned. We learned by trial and error.
This is how we talked. It wasn't you're the tenor, you're the baritone,
you're the second tenor-- no, nobody--
it's like, "You do the high part,
man and you-- you do the low part."
When you're singing those-- those sweet love songs like that on--
on the street corners where there were girls always around.
-All right. -And that was-- that was it.
-That's what you all gonna do? -I would put my baseball glove down, my bat down--
-this is what I wanted to do. -And everything, right?
Yes, yes indeed.
["In the still of the night" by The Five Satins playing]
But the main thing it was all the girls used to come to the best group
and we were the best group. Over The Harptones and The Moonglows and all.
We were the best group. They used to come and crowd and load up our corner,
you know, and that was them-- that's the most marvelous--
excuse me wife, this is my younger days.
We wanted attention, you know,
and that was the easiest way to get attention.
Well, it was because of the girls.
Hell, all the fellas wanted the girls, so.
That was the coolest thing in the world that you didn't need a band.
You didn't need anything. That you and your friends could go on a street corner
and-- and sing-- and-- and girls would like that.
That's a big deal. That's a really big deal.
[music playing]
So that was the beginning that evolution. It went from the street corner,
to the subways, in the hallways of Brooklyn.
And you remember, as we keep doing this, we're getting better and better
and better at our craft.
It wasn't thought that we would eventually
go on to be professional.
-It was just the fact that we were enjoying ourselves. -Yeah.
As long as they had a streetlight,
or a bunch of guys together staying on the corner,
on the stoop, it didn't matter. For me, it was the inner-city urban sound.
For me, it was camaraderie, it was achievement,
it was a coming together of a bunch of guys
singing their hearts out, making harmony together.
[music playing]
["Maybe" by The Chantels playing]
Before the 50s, no one was writing songs for kids.
They didn't have money,
but in the 50s, Eisenhower was President and things were good,
and the kids literally had a buck to spend on a record.
In the late 50s, young people started writing songs for kids.
It was kids writing songs for kids now.
[Ron] Growing up in New York area was luckiest thing in the world
because you could take a ferryboat to Manhattan
from Staten Island and go up to the Brill Building,
which was the mecca of all music at the time.
The Brill Building. Oh, man! How sweet!
The building wasn't a concept, there was a building
and it was just-- it was no more than that.
That's where they were making a star, right in the Brill Building.
It really wasn't magical then, it's magical now.
[Sammy] This is the building where all the record companies,
Scepter Records and Gone Records and a host of others.
It was like fourteen, fifteen floors of music publishers,
managers, record companies, and even a recording studio.
So, everything was linked to this-- this one area.
[Jeff] It was just a cool place with brass front doors,
and a long hall leading to the elevators,
black and white marble floors, and a restaurant on either side
you could access from the street, or from the interior hallway.
The whole building was filled with music.
There were people in the elevators singing.
You know, they were actually elevator operators who would tell you--
that's when they didn't have automatic elevators,
they would tell you which publishing companies are looking for people.
We were rabid Heartbeat fans,
so we followed the address on that label.
We started knocking on the doors, on every door
in that building until somebody said okay.
I once met Paul Simon and he was just starting out and he said to me,
"You don't have to start on the first floor, second floor."
He said, "Go to the top and walk down each flight
and stop at the publisher's offices and the manager's office
because it's easier coming down than going up."
One of the places we stopped at was a record label called Whole Records
and the woman and her husband that owned the label said,
"You don't have to go no further than this. We're very interested."
They gave us a contract to take home to our parents
because we were all minors at the time
and that's what we did.
We signed, we were in the studio,
and we recorded "Little Star."
["Little Star" by The Elegants playing]
We were all seventeen-years-old when we had our first hit record "Son in Law."
When I was sixteen-years-old, I recorded my first hit record,
a group called The Chips, the record was called "Rubber Biscuit."
I think we started when I was about fourteen-fifteen years old.
I was thirteen coming up, thirteen, twelve, you know.
I was nineteen-years-old when we recorded, "I only have eyes for you."
When I wrote Little Star and recorded it, I was sixteen-years-old.
I was coming out of summer school for the last time I thought
and I saw Jimmy Moschello who was still singing with me today,
one of the original members, and I'm coming down the walkway, and he's beeping the horn
and he's yelling, "It's number one. It's reached number one."
And we knocked out Perry Como and I didn't want to tell my grandmother that.
She would kill me. I took my books and I saw a big garbage pail
and I threw my books in the garbage pail and I jumped into his car
and we took off and I said, "That's it. I'm-- I'm a singer now.
I don't-- I don't need a diploma."
[music playing]
It's all in the writing baby. It's all in the writing. The real stars are the songwriters.
It really was an occupation that we would get up and-- and go in and write.
And we would get to work every day. Some guys would get there ten in the morning.
We had four or five, six, maybe eight piano rooms and you'd close the door
and then you'd start to write your song.
["Yakety Yak" by The Coasters playing]
See, we were with a couple of guys named Leiber and Stoller.
These are white Jewish guys that went to church
and they loved the black sound in the churches.
Leiber and Stoller were the man.
They were the ones, Jerry and Mike. They was the man.
We were the first white act they ever touched other than Elvis
and they wrote for him and produced some of the stuff,
but they produced all of The Drifters and The Coasters
and all this great music that had complicated arrangements.
They were too me-- they were the best.
They could just out of clear blue sky-- just give you some words.
They were the hippest guys out there on the streets.
Their lyrics were always cool--
-[Marty] Right on. -Right on.
Jerry said, "Billy, you talk too much, man."
And Billy said, "No, I don't talk too much." "Yes, you do it."
Said, "Yeah you just yak, yak, yak all the time."
And when we came back the next day, Jerry had put some words to "Yakety Yak.
They had a million hits and they were with the best people.
Oh, Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, Along came Jones,
Down in Mexico, One kiss led to another, Searchin',
on and on.
It was happening. We were inventing. I called it Kitty Hawk,
you know, that's where the Wright Brothers threw their--
pushed their first plane off the hill and went, "Hey, it flies," you know.
And that's what we were doing.
People have said,
"You made history. Did you know it?"
We didn't know we were making history. We were making records.
[music playing]
See back then, especially in Philadelphia and New York City too,
most radio stations were playing the popular music of the day;
Rosemary Clooney, The Four Lads, but all the--
at the other end of the dial, you had the little black stations.
[Jocko] You ready for the big ride from outer space, huh?
Passengers fasten your seat belts. Three, two, one, take it off.
[music playing]
I was listening to a disc jockey from North New Jersey
where you could hardly hear it on the radio, there was such static,
but you could hear the doo-wop sound coming through.
["Stay" by Maurice William And The Zodiacs playing]
I was fooling around with the dial and I hit black radio
down the right end of the dial and I found it much more interesting.
They played records that I never heard,
that never got over to the white stations.
It was much more interesting.
There was a disk jockey called Jocko
who had a rap-- who had a persona.
He will come out the Apollo Theater in a rocket ship
and in a spaceman's suit and he was the persona.
[Jocko] --through Jocko and the engineer the big rocket ship sure thing.
Greeting salutations.
Jocko knew the ghetto, the street corner,
the music in the black neighborhoods
and was playing music because he had an ear.
[music playing]
So, all the black cats Lord Fauntleroy,
Sir John Bandy, all the black cats had a persona.
So, what happened when rock and roll happened,
the white cats, all had to get a handle.
I became the Geator.
Jocko, if he would have been white,
he would have been bigger than Alan Freed.
-[radio presenter] The Moondog Show. -Hi, everybody. Hi y'all.
This is yours truly, Alan Freed welcoming you
to the Big Beat once again on radio.
Alan Freed, my main man.
Alan Freed was the king of the DJs.
Anyone who was anyone had to go through my main man.
[Fred] Alan Freed was a disc jockey from Cleveland,
who was one of the first white deejays to play black music.
["That's what you're doing to me" by The Dominoes playing]
People didn't like that too much really.
He was not initially into this.
He knew enough to visit record stores and see what kids were buying
and when he saw white and black kids buying black music
like this he said, "Well, maybe I can start
playing some of this on the radio."
He realized that this was a new form of music.
[Charlie H.] He moved to New York basically on the fame
that he had developed in-- in Cleveland
and of course now, he had an even bigger audience
and he could push hard.
But what he really did was mix R&B music with-- with the white pop
that was out there and play it all.
So, you would hear Elvis Presley and then you'd hear The Platters,
then you would hear The Moonglows, then you would hear The Elegants.
You would hear different groups on your radio and that opened it up.
They just couldn't hardly separate it.
It was very difficult to separate it after Alan Freed started playing it.
They had hit the major markets, you know, like Jocko was on a limited station.
Tommy Smalls, Dr. Jive was on a limited station.
You couldn't get him, let's say, in the five boroughs
just like you could get Alan Freed.
[Diz] You ever heard of a Clyde McPhatter? Alan Freed, you know who Alan Freed was.
They had a song that said "That's what you're doing to me."
That they were playing over the air
and here's where this expression came from.
"I want to rock. I want to roll.
I want to feel it deep down in my soul.
Oh, can't you see. That's what you're doing to me."
[music playing]
Alan Freed would play that every day on the air
and when Alan would come back on the air
and say, "Everybody, it's time to rock n roll"
because he got it from the record.
So, he was playing this music
and at-- at an alarming rate and it was growing so fast
and so many people were digging it, kids.
It just grew like wildfire.
All of a sudden black music became the number one music in the world.
Once Alan Freed pulled the covers off of that music
and had the audacity to make movies integrated with this music
that was shown from coast to coast,
I think that's one of the reasons why they got rid of him
and really tried to hurt him.
They tried to blackball him.
They tried to threaten him that he couldn't do this.
He couldn't do that. And he just went against the odds.
To me, he was the king of rock and roll. I'm sorry he's gone.
[Jerry] This is the Geator, the big boss with the big cat sauce, the man with the planet.
Let's go back to the year 1959. Dion and the Belmonts, ladies and gentlemen,
out of the Bronx. The name of the song is called "I Wonder Why?" My man.
["I wonder why" by Dion and the Belmonts playing]
The black groups really were the R&B soul singers.
They were really the earthy singers, but there were other groups
and there were white groups. They could not sing the way we did.
They couldn't get that soul. So, they created their own style.
We often look at the late 50s
as a time when a lot of white doo-wop groups started singing
and, in the beginning, of course, they were singing black music.
We were all kids and they-- they heard the same thing that we heard.
Now, I would-- I wouldn't even buy a record that was recorded
by a white artist at that time.
You know I was like, you know, it was like going against
everything that I-- that I believed in musically.
My first exposure to doo-wop music came from my cellar
because there was a local group, The Elegants and they would rehearse in my cellar.
So, I would hear these great harmonies coming out of the cellar
and my dad would say, "But they're never gonna make it.
How are they gonna get a record made?" And about three months later,
they had the number one record in the country and they sold a million records.
It has been stated that the first two groups to create and open the door
for this whole Italian-American doo-wop movement
was ourselves The Elegants and Dion and the Belmonts.
[music playing]
The Italian-American groups were basing their singing on their own culture.
They grew up listening to Frankie Laine and Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra.
And there's a little bit of that in their style of singing.
Some of it is spiritual, some guys sang bluesy, but it was all in a city feeling.
It had no color cause Dion and the Belmonts was doo-wop group,
Frankie Valli the Four Seasons was a doo-wop group.
White groups and black groups do sound slightly different
even when doing the same song in similar style.
This was pretty much brought on by the fact that in many cities
the Italian-American neighborhoods
were right next to the African-American neighborhoods
and there was some interaction between groups.
All the groups, all the white groups and the black groups
there was no difference after a while.
["The angels listended in" by The Crests playing]
This music is for whoever wants to do it.
It's basically a black form of music,
but the fact that we had two Puerto Ricans in our group
lets the world know that Puerto Ricans love the music as well.
You know, I like to think that music is the great uniter.
It was especially noticeable in doo-wop music,
I think, because here were cases where all of a sudden
you started having racially integrated groups singing.
There were several of them that were very big The Romancers out on the west coast,
The Del Vikings were another. Johnny Maestro in The Crests.
I came from a place called South Beach in Staten Island New York.
Johnny Maestro's family lived not too far from us
and he also wanted to doo-wop, to sing with his own group
at that time when he had The Crests.
Johnny Maestro and The Crests. The first integrated group.
Spanish, black, white.
Johnny Maestro greatest voice of them all.
[music playing]
It was black and white kids singing together, emulating that harmony.
Music has no color. This is about love. It's for the love of the music.
[music playing]
Before I actually played the Apollo,
I often wondered what they did when the show was over,
they went to another-- and-- and-- and I would hear them talk about--
"Well, we're going on a big tour. We're gonna go to the Howard Theatre.
We're gonna play this out there tomorrow." Oh, man,
that's like running away and going to the circus.
["A thousand miles away" by The Heartbeats playing]
Touring and so forth, shows this was all new to us, to all of us.
We went to almost every state with Dick Clark.
We went from Canada to Texas, New York to California.
We did ninety one-nighters in ninety days and we did three of them in one year.
Get on a bus, you get off a bus. You do your show, you get back on the bus.
You go to the hotel, you-- you didn't have time to even hang out.
It's time to go to sleep, get up, get on the bus.
Well the buses were fine. Actually, there was always somebody,
a group of somebody's playing cards in the back.
There was a great sense of camaraderie on it.
We just had each other and the jamming and the kidding around and the joking.
It was a big-- big family. I was working with some of the biggest acts at the time.
We didn't think of anyone as being a legend,
but here I am, you know, thirty days and sixty days, you know, eating and drinking,
and laughing and joking with Buddy Holly, and Dion, and Frankie Avalon,
and Bobby Darin, and The Coasters, The Drifters.
We were all just having a good time.
I made lifelong friends on those tours.
There was a lot of fun. It was all brand new to us.
The South was different.
[chuckles] The South was a lot different. It was-- it wasn't as much fun.
[music playing]
I'll never forget Birmingham, Alabama. It was scary.
It was a scary time in my life.
During 1959, we did
a six-week tour of one-nighters in the south
and that was a mind-boggling
and eye-opening situation for all of us.
We would see people outside with sticks, guns,
"better not get off that bus boy," you know, it was a heck of a time man.
[Lois] You know, we knew what we were reading on-- in the papers.
We heard it on the news. We saw things on TV
about what was happening in the south, but we really didn't have a clue.
To play the South was like, it was hard for me as a teenager, as a young teenager.
I don't know about the other girls because they were eighteen
and maybe they were more mature than I was.
I wasn't as mature to understand racism and I was angry.
[sighs] Rough, man. Some of them was rough, you know.
We had to go to the back room. When we would go into the south,
we had to go to the back room to eat. We couldn't sit down and rest around.
Mmm-hm, they wouldn't-- they wouldn't serve you.
They wouldn't serve you back then.
[music playing]
We're kids. We go, we sit at the counter
and we go to order and somebody said, "You can't order sitting here."
"What do you mean we can't order?"
You know and then, you know, we went and did the, "We're from New York."
And a guy, a black guy came and tapped us, and he said, "Come here."
And he said, "You're gonna get us killed. You cannot order at a counter.
You can only order over there and you can't eat here."
White artists, they were allowed to sleep in the Sheraton Hotels
when we were not allowed to sleep at Sheraton Hotels.
We had to sleep on some floors of hotels.
We had to stay in these, you know, backstreet motels
that no kid should have been in because of the things that we heard.
We couldn't see because we were pretty much locked in our rooms for our own protection.
Cops would have to escort us in. They'd be looking at us, "Don't look,
don't you look at no white girl. Don't look at a white girl."
I mean, yep--
you have to keep your eyes like this, guns all around you,
I mean, you know, it's frightening.
[music playing]
[Charlie T.] We did a show in Georgia with James Brown and they say--
the producers say, "You're not allowed to sing to black or white"
and they put our microphones to the wall. We had to sing to the wall.
First time I went to venue where the orchestra's to my back,
I'm singing to the wall,
there's white on this side,
black on that side and they all screaming for the music.
We're not looking to either side, we're looking to the wall.
I mean, it was hard to--
hard to believe that I'm being hated on one side
and getting so these kids are loving us. It was strange.
By me being thirteen and, you know, a thirteen-year-old got a little fire in her.
When the white kids would come and they would say to us,
you know, with the southern accent, "Could I have your autograph?"
And I would say no.
Why do I have to give my autograph? You know that was my way
of rebelling and that was my way of being heard.
We went down to Charleston, South Carolina
and the bus driver was a white guy. His name was Little Willie, you know.
So, him and I went down to [mumbles].
A water faucet for the black and water faucet for the white.
You know, so Willie said, "I'm gonna get me a drink of water," you know.
I said-- he said, "Come on, go with me Charlie."
So, I went with him. He was up to this, you know,
and so he went to the white faucet. He said, "Come here, Charlie."
Said, "You drink out that one, I'm gonna drink out of this one."
Like then we took a quick sip
and went back. He said, "How do you feel?"
"I feel like I drunk water." He said, "I do too."
He said, "Now you can see how the water tastes on the white side.
And I can see how the water tastes on the black side." I said, "Okay."
In my mind as a kid, I'm performing for you.
I'm doing everything I can and I hear all this applause and you like me.
And I'm happy that you like me, you know.
I'm good enough to perform when I'm on stage and I'm good enough
for them too like me as a performer,
but I'm not good enough for them to like me as a person.
But then as I got older, I realized that, uh,
color doesn't matter, you know.
And I know that I had to develop from inside
and not outside. I had to learn that it didn't matter.
[music playing]
Obscenity and vulgarity of the rock and roll music
is obviously a means by which the white man
and his children can be driven to the level with a nigger.
Rock and roll has got to go. And go it does at KWK.
This was a time when there were movements
within the country to ban rock and roll from radio and everywhere else
because first of all they considered it the devil's music
and the people that did not consider it the devil's music,
considered this Negro music.
Most of the great songs were coming from the R&B singers
and all those songs were copied by at least four or five or six white artists.
As soon as the black artists had a great hit, they jumped right on it.
And so you can see when The Chords came out with "Sh-boom"
which is very black sounding rhythm and blues song,
then The Crew Cuts out of Canada started doing it
as a white group and they toned it way down and made it more commercial.
["Sh-boom" by The Crew Cuts playing]
["Sh-boom" by The Chords playing]
When I heard their version, I was livid. I was so angry
because first of all it wasn't-- it didn't have the same rhythm
that you really wanted to dance-- at least we didn't.
And I just thought it was-- it was so awful
that they gave this such airplay and the guys--
The Chords never got a chance.
["Sh-boom" by The Chords playing]
Pat Boone was doing Little Richard, which to me was, you know, it was unheard of.
Pat Boone covered Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti,"
you know, and tamed it down some and then that was played
on the white stations that would not play black music.
[Terry] Pat was covering everybody's songs
and he was really making this and it was a disheartening thing
to hear something that was recorded by these guys
and watch a white guy take over and reap the rewards,
and the financial and the success. It was a drag.
[Wally] They didn't put black people on th cover of their records.
Fats Domino just sold twenty-five million records
and you don't put his picture on the cover?
At that particular time, they didn't.
"I Only Have Eyes for You" was on our album "Flamingo Serenade."
["I only have eyes for you" by The Flamingos playing]
We wanted our picture on it.
I'm sitting on a stool with my guitar Tommy Hunt's there.
Nate's at the table with the champagne, and what a great picture,
but George had to stop doing that. He said,
"We can't use-- we can't use the photographs anymore."
We said, "Why?" He said, "Because down South they--
down South is not gonna play it."
They're not gonna play it because they see us black guys, we can't do that.
So Flamingo Favorites,
they had a whole field of green grass
and then they had all these pink flamingo birds.
They could accept our music and, you know, our singing, but not--
wrong color, man. Wrong color.
[music playing]
When rock and roll and doo-wop started,
there was no script. There was no rhyme or reason. There was no how-to book.
In 1955-56, uhm, you know, black artists,
and especially, young; their parents didn't know anything about copyright.
They didn't know about music law.
They didn't know about royalties.
Our parents believed everything that our manager told them.
We didn't know any better. We were all young and dumb
and because the record companies knew that so they took advantage of it.
Our manager was George Goldner. He said, "Hey, this is for the board. Sign this."
Okay, they signed, but they didn't know that they were signing away our rights.
My lyrics have been taken.
I've gotten-- not one royalty in my life
and I wrote practically everything that we-- we recorded.
This is one of the-- the parts of the music industry
that people need to know about. Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers
also represents the great American Royalty Rip-off.
"Why Do Fools Fall in Love" is played in elevators.
I heard it on American Idol. Numerous people have recorded it;
Diana Ross, The Beach Boys.
Frankie's wife is getting royalties,
but he didn't get no money while he was alive and we don't.
[Eddie] I'm working on it now, I'm trying to get-- to get my royalties.
They're selling my records, they're still playing
them and they're still out there doing it.
They ain't changed, you know.
They're still doing it.
Look at the body of work. We sold seventy--
seventy-some million records
over the years. We didn't even know it.
Somebody got the money and it sure wasn't me.
[music playing]
Every time I saw a girl group on television I always wondered,
"Oh, I bet they're having so much fun and look at their clothes,
and their singing, and their vocals and their harmonies."
When I moved to New York City from Philadelphia
and I saw and heard various groups,
I mean, even more so than in Philadelphia, on the street corners
and that tight harmony just gave me chills.
I knew that I wanted to be a part of that.
The guys on the block used to stand on the corners and sing.
Then we said, "Well, if they can do that, we can do that."
We used to get on, like I said, on the porch and just sing
with one another in schools after school,
that's what you did for fun in the summertime. That was what we did.
-We loved to sing. -A-ha.
I don't know how we became professional.
It just happened
as my becoming a Clickette just happened.
["Lover's Prayer" by The Clickettes playing]
You know and we were classy. We came from good families, good parents,
you know, we may have not had money,
but we had morals. That's what The Crystals were about.
We knew how to dress, we knew how not to be sleazy,
we knew that when we'd go on the road, we'd have to protect ourselves.
We just went out and did what we had to do and then went back to the dressing room
and weren't allowed to socialize.
For a woman in the industry,
especially once she decides to get married and have kids,
she's juggling now. You know, she-- she-- her attention is divided,
she can't be very as focused on her music,
or you know, on the music side of her life because she's torn.
And I experienced this-- as a mom, you know, and a wife.
[Fanita] You know, when they called us and told us they wanted us to go on tour,
and to be gone for maybe two months, oh.
I was devastated. I mean, I had one small boy.
It was just the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
As young girls, it wasn't easy. The pay was horrible.
We still struggled, no matter if the people were dancing to it,
enjoying our music, we as artists, we were struggling.
Let's forget about the intro for now, let's just come right in. One, two, three.
[music playing]
[La La] When we did work with Phil, we knew that we were gonna have a hit.
With all the music that was around us in the studio,
you knew, that there was something special
that's gonna come out of this studio.
[Fanita] He was a genius.
He was different. He was a different producer.
He knew exactly what he wanted
and we did exactly, you know, what he told us to do.
He would go into the studio and create a wall of sound.
["Then he kissed me" by The Crystals playing]
And then when he heard "Then He Kissed Me," it was like--
they thought it was like as if it was an opera. I know--
all they're saying about "Then He Kissed Me" is like, "Huh?"
I'm just putting down the track.
I didn't even have a boyfriend at the time
to even know what the lyrics meant.
That's what Phil picked up on, innocence.
And when you're innocent and pure, and you're putting down the track
that's what came in. I think, if I had been dating,
even though I was fifteen, maybe I was like dating a little bit,
I may have had a little attitude.
[Fanita] Well, the experience that we got from working with Phil Spector
was endurance because we had to have patience with him.
And he'd work you to death. I mean, I remember going to the studio
and working with Phil, Sonny Bono picking me up at the Knickerbocker Hotel,
would share, and he would pick me up at 12 o'clock.
And I wouldn't leave the studio until five o'clock in the morning.
He would call us sometimes at four o'clock in the morning,
to come and do the background.
And my husband wasn't very happy about that at the time,
but we got up and, you know, we-- we went and did what we had to do.
His sound was so big that they call it the Wall of Sound.
He taught me how to produce records. How to produce guitars,
and pianos, combine them together,
drums and bass. I learned a lot from him.
[Jerry] Phil was a genius,
but as all geniuses sometimes, you get a little nuts.
[Fanita] You know, when we were at Fremont High School
walking down the halls, singing a cappella,
I had no idea
that I would have a career like this,
being able to see the world,
just had no idea this-- you know,
that it would happen to a little girl like me.
[Lois] What I'm most proud of for The Chantels is that through all of--
what we went through, we maintained our integrity,
our sense of who we were, and we never lost that.
[music playing]
The white folk did not listen any longer and silenced.
They were bold about the fact that they liked doo-wop, they liked black music.
["Tears on my pillow" by Little Anthony & The Imperials playing]
With the kids, there was no problem.
It was a grown-ups-- they were the ones that didn't like it,
but the kids, they were getting into it.
-That music was restricted in your white families. -Yeah.
-It was called jungle music-- -Yeah.
Or jigaboo music, whatever, but see, the white kids loved the music.
So, I mean, it was coming.
All of a sudden, these black artists are breaking out everywhere and crossing over,
but we crossed over in such a remarkable way,
we bridged it.
[music playing]
I went to Dallas and right down the center they-- they had a rope
right down the center of the place and they had the black on this side,
and the white on this side.
And as we were singing,
these on this side was shaking hand with this hand they were dancing like--
like, you know, like you have to dance with a girl and you grab my hand.
The white and the black were doing this across the rope.
And then after that we stopped.
We stopped the band and stopped everything and asked the promoter there--
asked can we take the rope aloof.
We said, "Look how those kids are dancing. Look how they're doing together."
And when he took the rope aloof from the front-- at the front of it,
they went together, man, they started dancing with each other
and it just flipped.
So, from then on, we had mixed crowds and we loved it.
Things were turning around. Things were changing.
That was the very beginning of this integration thing.
As things progressed,
it was not uncommon for audiences in some of the big concerts
to be mixed, black and white.
And it was in a sense of, people who then would grow up into the 60s
that realized that this was just one aspect of black culture.
This was creating a sea change in America.
Our music kind of like melted the races together.
If there's one legacy that doo-wop music has is
that it did help usher in an era of civil rights.
Music has always had a way of being the great common denominator
that brought people together.
This music moved the country to a place
where in the 60s the civil rights movement was ready to happen.
Doo-wop music really peaked in the late 1950s,
uh, and of course, you could see even then it was starting to change.
When you got into the 1960s there were different styles of music coming through.
[music playing]
As you moved into the 1960s, things got a little bit slicker in the music.
Doo-wop music had at this point branched off into a number of styles.
The white groups that are out there singing
with sort of an Italian-American influence to them
were the groups that would evolve into the white groups
of the 1960s like the Beach Boys.
["Surfin'" by The Beach Boys playing]
Doo-wop kind of became rock and roll.
Those kinds of harmonies were to lay the foundation for us
to create, you know, music about more contemporary things, like surfing.
Like, "Surfing is the only life, the only way for me. Surf with me.
Bop, bop doop-de-doop-de-doo. Bop, bop."
So, you had a little more of an evolved doo-wop sound
as the origins of the Beach Boys incarnation.
Well, the four freshmen taught me a harmony,
and-- and falsetto. Well, it was four-part harmony.
It spoke to me in a very spiritual way.
Brian's voice I thought was beautiful, I mean,
he honestly captured that Frankie Lymon quality to me.
Real, real pure even and Brian had that.
Boy did we get lucky with the voices and composition and roots
to work from, you know, the basic roots. Very fortunate.
[Brian] When I heard "Surfin'"--
my family and I were listening to the radio and they played "Surfin'."
And we couldn't believe it. We said, "Oh, my God! Surfin's on the radio."
I was proud as hell, you know. Proud as hell.
[music playing]
Now, Motown started out in the late 1950s
and Berry Gordy was writing songs for Jackie Wilson.
Jackie Wilson, of course, had a strong doo-wop background.
He started with The Dominoes and then went out on his own.
Berry Gordy, in my opinion, did
probably as much as Martin Luther King
did to bring the races together. He did it through music.
["It's the same old song" by The Four Tops playing]
[Charlie H.] Berry Gordy was looking for talent and he stumbled upon
none other than Smokey Robinson and The Miracles.
Smokey Robinson and The Miracles,
you listen to his early recordings then you can hear the influence
of the other Detroit doo-wop group that was so big,
Nolan Strong and the Diablos.
Berry Gordy came along.
He said, "I'm gonna make music for young America.
I'm gonna have song writers to write hits for just this particular act."
Berry had a stable of young writers,
you know, kids out of Detroit.
Holland-Dozier-Holland, everybody's writing,
Smokey's writing, they're all in house,
and they're coming out with this whole new sound.
The sound of doo-wop and Motown
were distant cousins in a sense.
The doo-wop era in the 50s were basically just a way to get started.
Get your opinion, your feeling, into that genre of R&B music.
Motown is a little more sophisticated.
They have more lyrics, more melodies, more chord progressions.
[music playing]
The stuff is still around and the people are still--
when they throw parties, the first thing they want to hear
is a bunch of Motown songs when they're having a party, you know.
You're not partying, unless you got Motown on Jukebox.
Oh, my gosh! You can listen to that stuff now and it stills sounds fresh.
I think doo-wop had its time. I mean, it was sort--
it was here and then it was gone, but--
in one way but in another way,
it was always there in like an undercurrent.
The instrumentation sort of changed it
and it gave it a more sophisticated sound,
but the root of all of it is still doo-wop.
[TV presenter] There are rumors around that this is Britain's revenge
for the Boston Tea Party. Three thousand screaming teenagers
are at New York's Kennedy Airport to greet,
you guessed it, The Beatles.
Beatles!
The musical Shack that was heard around the world.
[Tony] Well, this jet pulls in, 707 and one by one,
a mop top came down on the steps.
The Beatles, the phenomena, it's just nothing ever happened like it before.
They just took over.
They had the song. They had the writers, you know.
They had the writers singing the song.
They taught the world. I respect them highly, always have.
[TV presenter] Their first meeting with the American press
brings forth an interview laced with quips and humor.
You'd laugh too with a gross of 17 million dollars last year.
The only thing is when they came here, they
killed our music. Yeah, our music stopped dead in its tracks.
We had that-- that feeling against the Beatles and English music
and what-- how could you do this to us?
Just as music was at it's highlight,
-the black music, you know, they came in with a rush. -Yeah.
And that really knocked us to our knees.
[Jon] The British Invasion had put an effective end
to the record sales of the 50s, early 60s style.
And they came, even doing some of our music.
The world had changed so rapidly, uhm, in the 60s.
The most turbulent decade of any of our lives,
who have lived that long, uhm. Turbulent in every possible way,
you know. Turbulent politically, turbulent geopolitically,
you know, war in Vietnam was going on.
The innocence by the end of the 60s was kaput, if-- there was no innocence.
End of an era.
Doo-wop groups have never gone away. They just-- they evolved.
It comes back, you know. It's always you know reinventing itself
and that's what we're seeing always, you know.
That-- those groups will never go away.
They just reinvent themselves.
Billy Joel had a great line, "Everything old is new again."
Nothing that's good really dies.
[music playing]
Remember Sha Na Na. Watching Sha Na Na on Saturday night,
♪ Do-do-do-do-do Do-do-do-do-do♪
♪ Tonight sweetheart--♪ It was like--
if-- if I could do that.
When Sha Na Na started doing this
in the very late 60s, early 70s,
it's very hard to describe if you weren't there, but it seemed
like it was a thousand years ago
that this music had happened. It was a reclamation
of what seemed like our youthful innocence.
- Let's give a big Sha Na Na welcome to The Coasters. -[cheering and aplause]
Miss Ronnie Spector and The Ronettes.
-Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Hey! -[cheering and aplause]
Prepare to meet Little Anthony.
-Hey, it is Ben E. King. -[cheering and aplause]
Because we really had grown up awfully fast.
Goodnight and "Grease for Peace."
Then "Grease" opens, the musical.
American Graffiti came along.
[TV presenter] Grab that special one and jump into your candy colored custom,
or your screaming machine, cruise down town and catch American Graffiti.
Finally, ultimately in the mid-70s
this nostalgia craze peaked with "Happy Days" and "Laverne and Shirley."
We really did raise a whole generation of little kids
on doo-wop and early rock and and roll.
My dad being from New York and being in, you know,
that was able to be in that scene as a teenager--
to be able to-- and he comes home and finds me listening to these records, he's like,
"Why are you listening to those records?" I was like, "Because they're awesome."
He's like, "But you're seven." I was like, "I don't care."
They're so awesome. They're still awesome to this day.
Vocal harmony groups have been around for a very long time now
and they're not gonna go away. You see genres and music come and go, and come and go,
but that vocal harmony group, it's-- it's always been around with guys and girls.
[music playing]
The core of NSYNC is the harmonies. It's the singing.
It always has been and it always will be.
We were always aware of-- of what came before us,
you know, from the 30s to, you know, now.
We always respected those vocal harmony groups
because we really loved mixing that R&B with that doo-wop.
There's not that big a difference between the Ink Spots
and The Platters and Earth, Wind, and Fire
and the Doobie Brothers, or any of these groups.
It's all the same stuff.
[Anthony] Hip hop ain't no different. It's still urban,
it's still music in the streets,
still kids writings songs for kids.
You know, many young girls grew up, uhm, and were so influenced
that they, uhm, became recording artists like us.
We had a dream and that music gave us faith
to know that we could grow up and do the same thing.
And then to in turn, to pass that hope on to--
-the next generation. -Right.
That is the root. When you get a bunch of guys
standing around together, harmonizing.
So, I think that it's going to continue to live.
This music will be with us forever.
[music playing]
We still carry on the flavor,
trust me. You'll still find out tonight.
[presenter] And I bring to you Mr. Diz Russell.
♪ Baby please don't go Baby please don't go♪
♪ Now, baby please Don't go back to New Orleans♪
♪ Because I love you so Don't go, don't go♪
♪ You got me way down here You got me way down here♪
Music is something that if you love it--
I haven't been here over fifty or sixty years.
--once you get attached to it, you don't give it up.
You just don't give it up.
People don't forget good music. So, we're keeping it alive.
We love this music. It will never die.
It's just a great thing that The Orioles continue to keep the doo-wop alive.
[people cheering]
[Diz] Yeah! Thank you!
Still singing after all these years.
-You got it, man. -You reckon?
Oh, yeah.
So, this music was never supposed to mean anything
all these years later, but it has.
I had a saying, even at this time when we were young kids
singing on-- on the Avenue,
I saw ourselves being stars without a stage,
-right at that time. -Mmm-hm.
-Wherever you sang. -That's right.
-That was the stage. -All right.
We had touched on something that had never been done before
and all of a sudden, we were on the ground floor of this.
That was a-- that was a tremendous feeling.
I can't-- they can't take it away from us no matter what happens.
But the legacy, I'm there.
If you google, you see Barbra Jean English did a lot of stuff.
I stand on the shoulder of giants
who came before me.
And it's heck of a life.
I owe a debt of gratitude to--
Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers
and every time I see Jimmy Merchant,
I put my arms around him and kiss him on the cheek
because they saved my life. Excuse me for getting choked up.
I just hope that whatever contribution we've made, uh,
leaves a lasting impression.
And I'm just suddenly very cognizant of--
time.
I paid the dues and I paid the cause to be a Drifter.
And I'm so proud that we left a legacy behind.
I would like people to remember me as being
a member of one of the greatest girl groups
and that we influenced other girl singers.
What I'm really proud of is
I came a long ways and I met that lady over there.
I'm proud.
I never thought of quitting.
I figured I was gonna be here till a hundred,
so I might as well to keep on moving.
And that's what I've been doing ever since.
I've been so blessed to be able to sing this wonderful music.
It's hard to believe that I got to really spend my whole life making up songs
and going into studio and having that great fun producing records
and working with great talent. I really got away with it.
Oh, we was in love with what we was doing and we had a lot of love for each other.
I see in that short period of time accomplishment.
[Billy] If I had to do it all over again, I would.
I wouldn't change a thing. I just would like to go back
and-- and do what we did.
If you're lucky enough to last this long-- can you believe it?
To last this long and live this long and still be able to sing
and have a band that can play the music which it's--
it's all pretty extraordinary when I think about it.
It was an opportunity of a lifetime that a lot of people will never know.
I felt really blessed to have been a part of that.
-[interviewer] You were there. -I was there, man.
You talk about camaraderie, we-- we had the time of our lives.
We were brothers and sisters of the same large.
When I say I had the time of my life, I truly had the time of my life.
[La La] When we were growing up in Brooklyn, you sang on the stoops.
That's where we started from singing on the stoops.
The first song I recorded with The Crystals was "Uptown." I was a kid.
-Is that a working mic there? -It does work.
I started working with Charlie when I was like thirteen or fourteen years old on tours.
We did the amateur show. That's how I first came in touch,
really-- really up with the stage at Apollo.
Me, Ben E. King, Al Berof, Doc Green, and lover palace
and we tore the audience up.
That's why I started from singing on the street corner.
Yeah, we started singing on the stoop and we battle each other, right?
You give me a pint of wine I will sing anything with you.
-You know I love you, right? -Yeah, we're good.
Thank you, baby. This guy has known me since I was fourteen.
I used to take his money. I used to hold his-- I used to hold his money for him.
He used to gamble on the bus. He used to always win,
but sometimes after a while he started losing.
Losing a lot of money.
So, he said to me, "What I want you to do is take this money
and whatever I ask you for it, do not give it to me.
In a few hours of gambling,
he came back, "Could you give me some money?" I said, "No."
I didn't give it to him for about a day or so.
He was mad at me. He was pissed with me.
My money.
You know, when you get backstage and there were six or seven groups out there working,
you get time to spend amongst each other
and there's nothing better than that. This is a family.
-Oh, my God, it's VD. -Ow, VD!
-Oh, my God! -We gotta say goodbye
He nicknamed me VD, you know. And when Hurricane Sandy hit,
first phone call I got was from Charlie.
He said, "VD, you all right? I see Staten Island, they got hit hard, you know."
I don't know how many friends I've got. Hundreds, thousands. I don't know,
but that was the first call I got. I'll never forget it.
-Hello everybody. -[all] Hello.
-Hi. -How are you doing?
-We're Straight No Chaser, man. -All right, beautiful.
-How you doing guys? -Pleasure.
They're beautiful, they're beautiful, man.
We're were just a bunch of guys that went to Indiana University together.
Well that's sort of the beauty of our story.
We didn't anticipate that this was going to go any further than college.
-[man] Nice to meet you. -[La La] Same here.
So many guys. You guys could all be models. My God!
Of course, I listened to doo-wop growing up, but I never thought
that I would come into college, join a group
that I would be still doing twenty years later.
[La La] These guys here got the real deal and which is good they're young.
They got good harmony, you-- you know.
-Very good harmony. Very good. -They got beautiful harmony and they've been there
into the rhythm and blues feel too
just like we are. And they love just a song. So, I'm happy about that.
One, two, three, and--
Doing Ben E. King's song today and his music,
it's like, I wish that I would have said more things to him, you know.
-I feel Ben E. King in every word. -Oh, my god!
In every word that was my friend. I feel Ben E. King in every-- every word.
-Wishing he was here. -Mmm-hm.
Just wishing he was here.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be able to sing with some of the Greats.
This is your moment. This is your moment.
And to hear their stories and to be able to sing along with them.
This is so fun. I'm just like a kid-- a kid in the candy store right now.
I'm in FAO Schwarz.
And I hope they'll, you know, enjoy singing with us as well.
So it's gonna be fun. We're excited, fingers crossed.
-[Charlie] I love you Laila. -I love you too.
♪ So, darling, darling Stand by me♪
It's perfect. Let's record it.
"Stand by me", Ben E. King.
♪ When the night has come♪
♪ And the land is dark♪
♪ And the moon Is the only light we'll see♪
♪ No, I won't be afraid♪
♪ Just as long as you stand Stand by me♪
♪ So, darling, darling Stand by me♪
♪ Oh, stand by me♪
♪ If the sky That we look upon♪
♪ Oh, should tumble and fall♪
♪ Or the mountain Should crumble to the sea♪
♪ Lord, have mercy♪
♪ I won't cry, I won't cry♪
♪ No, I won't shed a tear♪
♪ Just as long as you stand You stand by me♪
♪ And darling, darling Stand by me♪
♪ Oh, stand by me♪
♪ Stand by me Stand by me, baby♪
♪ Stand by me♪
♪ So, darling, darling Stand by me♪
♪ Oh, stand by me♪
♪ Oh, I want you to stand Come on and stand♪
♪ Stand by me♪
♪ Whenever you're in trouble Won't you stand by me♪
♪ I want you to stand Stant by me♪
♪ Come on and stand Stand by me, baby♪
♪ Stand by me♪
♪ Oh, oh, stand by me♪
♪ Oh, I want you to stand Stand by me♪
♪ Come on, come on Come on and stand♪
♪ Stand by me baby♪
♪ Stand by me♪
♪ One more time Let's sing it♪
♪ Stand by me Come on, come on♪
♪ Come on and stand♪
♪ Stand by--♪
♪ Ah, girl♪
♪ Won't you stand by me♪
♪ Me♪
-[singer] Yeah. Yes, that's the take right there. -[Charlie] Beautiful.
-[La La] You guys sound so good. -[Charlie] Thanks gentlemen. Thanks so much.
-[man] I hear that. -[Charlie] Thank you. God bless you
and I hope it turn out to be something.
[Jerry] So, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen,
Streetlight Harmonies,
the story of the music,
the love, the devotion, and the memories
from all of these wonderful artists
who made our lives a little more enjoyable.
As all good things must come to an end so must this show,
but remember as the Geator says "You got to keep on rocking
cause you really only do, rock once."