And Yet Again, When Doo-Wop Be-Bopped The 1950s Night- “The Coed Records Story”- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Crests performing Sixteen Candles.
CD Review

The Coed Records Story, various artists, Ace Records, 2000

Sometimes looking back at the genesis of the 1950s rock explosion that produced some of the classic music that defined my generation, the generation of “68, it was individual performers like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, who drove the music, other times it was the lyrics, the Tin Pan Alley-etched lyrics, and, as here, sometimes it was the sound, the sound associated with a particular label. One thinks of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records with the early rockabilly and blues explosion. Or Verve, Or Decca, or later the Motown sound. One place where the doo-wop, or doo-wop oriented sub-genre got a full workout was with Coed Records who story is told here in informative booklet form, and more importantly, by something like a greatest hits CD of the best work from that label’s heyday.

Now, like every musical genre, some of this material is strictly of the moment, that doo-wop moment, and some of it was performed by one-hit Johnnies and Janies, but a few, and that is all that one can expect, are classics. Here those classics include 16 Candles and Step By Step (songs you prayed, prayed out loud that they would play, and play at the end of the school dance night), The Crests; You Belong To Me (ditto), The Duprees; and, The Last Dance (ditto again) , The Harptones.