For the first dance at our wedding, my wife and I chose The Danleers' one and only hit, One Summer Night. It's not a very famous song, and although we had listened to it a lot together - along with many other classics from this magical moment in American pop - it didn't hold a particularly special meaning for us. The lyric is on point for a July wedding, sure, not to mention reminiscent of the heady days of late May and early June a couple of years earlier, when we had first dated as the heat started to rise off the London pavement and the city went happy-mad under an opening sky. But that's not why we picked it either.
We picked One Summer Night because it's doo-wop, and there is no more romantic sound on earth. If you want to make someone feel an almost painful nostalgic yearning; if you want to transport them to a world of elegant courtship and sublimated sexual heat; if you want their hearts to soar and break, and you want to do it all in under two-and-a-half minutes, then you can't do better than doo-wop.
Here's your potted wiki: doo-wop is a genre of rhythm and blues and a close cousin of rock'n'roll that was popular through the 50s and early 60s. It's defined by harmony singing, often contrasting a high tenor voice with a deep, deep bass, and was usually performed by penguin-suited vocal groups with names that instantly conjure a world of neon-lit diners and chrome-edged tailfins: The Drifters, The Skyliners, The Five Satins. Its roots go back to southern gospel but also to New York's pop production lines of the early 20th century, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, and it has strong precedents in 30s and 40s vocal groups like The Ink Spots. Like hip-hop later, doo-wop was originated as an a capella street music by black teenagers who couldn't afford musical instruments, though it was quickly seized upon by Italian-Americans as well. The name doo-wop refers to the nonsense sounds often sung by the backing singers as a rhythmic bed for the lead's soaring melody.
from Eurogamer.net
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