nature boy

Dion & The Belmonts - ‘Lovers Who Wander’ (1962)

Despite my strange love-hate relationship with doo-wop (I’ll post about this sometime later), I do like the lead singer Dion DiMucci’s voice here. It seems versatile and perfect for that musical magma that was the late 1950’s and early sixties music where the swinging white-bread pop of the 50’s, rock and roll and rhythm and blues all kind of mated left and right. His voice has a bit of a gravel in there at times which is kind of unusual, usually you associate butter smooth voices with doo-wop, and that kind of gravel for me at least reminds me more of early rock and roll, which we’d call rockabilly sound I guess, and even later classic rock, they really liked those gravelly voices. Trait of some remote blues upbringing? I guess so.

There is a second song from them that I REALLY want to post too that I love with epic hand clapping, but I had to do a coin flip since I loved this song too.

I also wish I could sing like this. I grew up being able to sing and I’m hoping one of these days to take some sort of singing lessons to get back into it. My grandfather was a singer (I guess Broadway style) and it’s kind of embarrassing that one of his four grandchildren who could actually sing or at least actively would sing in front of the family (my brother I think could too, but he never does) didn’t really do anything with it. 

*shrugs*

I just like the image of standing in front of a microphone in a sharp suit.