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.
I've been into every doo-wop there is. I think I went to the university of doo-wop-ology.
When I got involved with The Five Crowns who later became The Drifters, and we got this hit record, I still was looking at this as kind of a fun thing.
I came up in Brooklyn singing doo-wop music from the time I was 13 to the time I was 20. That music served a purpose of keeping a lot of people out of trouble, and also it was a passport from one neighborhood to another.
My grandfather was actually a doo-wop singer in Panama. They were called The Dominos. He was the high soprano voice.
I even done a doo-wop version of the Mickey Mouse march.
In my vocal, I think you can hear something of my earlier times when I'd sing in subway halls for the echo and perform doo-wop on street corners. But I had a lot of influences, too - singers like Sam Cooke, Brook Benton and Roy Hamilton.
I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It's not super-poetic, it's just from the heart.
I did have my beginnings in doo-wop music; I had a group called the Tokens in Brooklyn. They went on, of course, to do 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' and a lot of other great things. I went on as a soloist. But I still love doo-wop music.
Who put the bomp in the bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp-bomp, who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong?
I'd had it as a member of a group. I sang with the Moonglows for two years, and that was enough.
It's kind of hard to believe that 'Sherry,' 'Walk Like a Man,' 'Big Girls Don't Cry' - the big three - belong to the same group that does 'Oh, What a Night' and 'Who Loves You.'
When I tend to belt, it kind of reminds me of like a more '60s girl doo-wop kind of belting.
My dad grew up in Pittsburgh in the '50s, and he used to sing Four Seasons songs on the stoop. He made me listen to Cousin Brucie - the guy who broke the Four Seasons on the radio. So I knew all of their songs, but I didn't know they were all by the same group.
I never left doo wop.
My brother Art was a doo-wopper. He had a group that sat out on a park bench in New Orleans and sang harmonies at night, and they'd go around and win all the talent shows and get all the girls, you know.
The groups, though, were my inspiration way back then. I liked Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers.
I love the story of how my parents met because it seems very 1950s Brooklyn. They met on a brownstone stoop as my father was singing a little doo-wop.
