(The Quotations - in the land of one-hit wonders)

I'm threatening to do an entire week of Doo-Wop next week. It's an almost extinct form of popular music that some people still swear by and maybe it's time to get those of you not familiar with it at least introduced. Like I always say, ignorance of your culture is considered uncool.

Rather than start at the beginning point (the early 1950's), I thought I would jump ahead and do something from the tail end of the Doo-Wop era, the 1960s. The Quotations were (as you can tell by the photo up there) from Brooklyn and were one of the only such signings to an almost exclusively Jazz label, Verve in 1961.

They delivered their one and only hit, Imagination, a standard written in the 1930s by the team of Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen. That was what a lot of Doo-Wop was about; taking standards and giving them a twist that, not only made publishers happy but exposed a whole new generation to some tried-and-true song material.

Some of it was pretty corny and some of it was absolutely great.

So with this track, you get to decide.