Doo Wop Quotes

I grew up listening to a lot of soul music, and a lot of folk music.

I grew up on R&B and soul, so that backbone is always there.

I was at the Apollo Theater all the time, skipping school, and I worked in a barbershop. That's how I started with doo-wop. Now I've come full circle. I did all kinds of music. I used to work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.

Early on I was more interested in gypsy jazz music until rock and roll came around and I listened to a lot of Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and skiffle singer Lonnie Donegan.

When I talk about rock n' roll, to me, that goes back to the beginning of the 1950s. Blue suede shoes and sideburns, man. Pink and black coloured clothes. Turn your collar up, comb your hair in ducktails. And the music was cool. It was a whole culture then - a different world.

I'm so old, I can remember before rock 'n' roll come along.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you'll see you had to be sharp onstage.

I remember having a lot of Josh White albums. Johnny Cash. Elvis. I loved the Coasters.

I'm a fan of all music, and probably my first - well, not the very first music I listened to, but back in the late fifties, when I first started hearing rock & roll, it was definitely tinged with doo wop and also Elvis and all those great songs.

My pop culture ended somewhere north of Elvis but not too far.

I'm coming from a Ginuwine and Usher background: slow and smooth songs. And that's why I really connected to Sam Cooke, because he was just very smooth. It's not like the James Brown types, which is all great stuff, but he was totally set apart from those guys.

The Righteous Brothers were purely rhythm and blues, black music.

The '50s was the golden age of music all over the world for some crazy, 'X-File'-like reason I can't quite understand.

When I was a kid in the late '60s and early '70s, my parents and their friends would play the records of Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como, music with string arrangements and men singing songs that sounded sad whether they were or not.

My dad was a soul fan and a singer himself, and he loved vocal harmony, stuff like the Beach Boys and Motown like the Four Tops, which was a big influence on me.

I think the music of the Fifties is really good. I suspect it's much better musically than much of what's available now. Not in terms of production, but in terms of content.

The original Beach Boys are Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, Mike Love, and Alan Jardine.

I grew up listening to oldies, like Motown. That's from my mom.

I didn't grow up with Broadway music. My mother played Perry Como, while I listened to Andy Williams records. Later on it was Cream, Grand Funk Railroad and lots of R&B like the Isley Bros. and Parliament.

I'm into the old school. I listen to rock, soft rock, jazz, old school R&B.

Randy Newman seemed like an even worse singer than me. I liked Ray Charles, Levi Stubbs, Jack Jones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett.

I'm very obsessed with pop culture of the mid-century and it goes hand-in-hand with the music that I studied in school.

Rock and roll and swing never quite mixed. Rock and roll came in and just blew everything out of the water. Big bands were dead.

I came in after the Smokey Robinsons, Temptations, Clovers, and Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters. I came along at that level, when there was harmonizing.

I love old R&B records.