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The reason these groups have this longevity is because the songs were great. These songs will live forever. The Marshak groups are a case in point. None of those groups have original members and people don’t care. That’s what interests me most about that era. The sentiment of doo-wop really penetrates a lot of people. There’s something genuine about those songs and performances . It was before MTV, it was about the performance. A lot of the records were performances captured on record as opposed to today which are so produced. The doo-wop songs had a feeling to them. It’s just about the song and the performance. It’s more down to earth and real.1 T hese opinions expressed by oldies circuit band member Carl Vreeland explain well the continuing appeal of doowop . Recording music straight to the hard drive of a computer where it can be digitally edited has become common practice. In a time when popular music is increasingly the product of such a process, there is an appreciation of the more “down to earth and real,” the more human quality of the doo-wop records. One hears the flaws in the performance and production, the flat notes, the distortion , the badly balanced ensemble recording. But these are aspects that remind us that music, in the words of the ethnomusicologist John Blacking, is “humanly organized sound”—or disorganized, as the case may be.2 Music making, especially singing, is an activity in which most of us, regardless of socioeconomic status or musical background, can partake. Doowop fans identify with the human, flawed, and real nature of their favorite records because they can indulge in the fantasy that, with maybe just a little practice and courage, they could also be doo-wop singers. Vreeland’s words also illustrate the tension between the “lives” of the doo-wop songs and the lives of the singers who initially made those songs famous. The advent of relatively inexpensive technology of CD burners and MP3 players and accessibility of the vast cultural reservoir of the Internet have made it possible for the classic doo-wop recordings to find new audiences well beyond the doo-wop community. Ironically, however , this wider digital availability has coincided with the disappearance AFTERWORD THE PERSISTENCE OF HARMONY 142 afterword of the genre from the airwaves. Mainstream radio, presided over primarily by two corporate behemoths, Clear Channel and Infinity, has systematically phased out the music of the 1950s and early 1960s, pre-Beatles era, from the programming of their stations. Songs from the latter part of the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s now dominate the playlists of “oldies” radio. The doo-wop songs linger on, but the doo-wop singers cannot. The aging original members of doo-wop groups are less able to endure the rigors of performing. They also must compete with the succeeding waves of oldies performers from the subsequent decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The rock-era nostalgia circuit has become a very crowded field indeed . Many of the acts from these later decades are being hired by the same promoters, such as Richard Nader’s organization, that have been booking the doo-wop groups for so many years. In the 1970s, these promoters laid the foundation for an oldies circuit that catered to nostalgia for the 1950s, and now they and new generations of promoters and performers are doing the same with more recent musical styles. The eternal return of popular culture in this postmodern age of seemingly infinite cultural availability provides a perpetual resource for the revival circuit, where everything oldies is, eventually, news again. Most doo-wop singers accept that there are only so many performing venues, only so much radio airtime, and that, eventually, older entertainers must make room for the young. But the music business can be merciless when the time comes for a change. In New York, the initial warning sign came in August 2002, when WCBS-FM DJ Don K. Reed’s long-running Sunday night show The Doo-Wop Shop was suddenly canceled. Soon after , a large crowd of the show’s supporters rallied in front of the Viacom building, home of WCBS-FM’s parent company, but their protests fell on deaf ears. Then the final blow came. A June 4, 2005, New York Daily News article told the tale. Oldies radio is dead in New York City. After more than three decades as the top...

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