Till the Night Is Gone: Tribute to Doc Pomus

Born Jerome Felder in Brooklyn in 1925, Doc Pomus was stricken with polio at age nine and spent most of his life on crutches or in a wheelchair. That didn't stop him from imitating his hero Big Joe Turner in Manhattan clubs with musicians like Milt Jackson, Horace Silver, King Curtis, and Buddy Tate. He soon found he had a gift for writing witty lyrics to standard blues changes, and in 1955, a 17-year-old kid named Mort Shuman started hanging around Pomus's apartment as a sort of apprentice songwriter. Shuman wrote catchy pop/R&B tunes for Pomus's lyrics, and by '59 they had hits with Dion's "Teenager in Love" and the Mystics' "Hushabye." Before they broke up in '65, they had written 20 songs for Elvis Presley and at least half that many for the Drifters. After a 10-year retirement, Pomus started writing again with Mac Rebennack for albums by B.B. King, Jimmy Witherspoon, and Johnny Adams. Till the Night Is Gone: A Tribute to Doc Pomus reinforces the obvious point that Pomus's tunes should be considered American pop standards as much as Irving Berlin or Harold Arlen's compositions, and should be recorded again and again. The three greatest American songwriters of the '60s--Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Lou Reed--are all on hand to pay their respects. Dylan turns in the disc's most surprising performance, a slinky, funky, country-swing version of "Boogie Woogie Country Girl." Reed injects a modern irony into "This Magic Moment" by contrasting a straightforward, optimistic vocal against grinding, apocalyptic guitars. Los Lobos and John Hiatt & the Guilty Dogs turn in invigorating, garage-rock demolitions of "Lonely Avenue" and "Mess O' Blues" respectively. In fact, the only misstep on the whole album is Shawn Colvin's ponderous, portentous take on "Viva Las Vegas." --Geoffrey Himes

View More In Tributes.

Or Browse Our Catalog.

R. Kelly is a multiple Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. Hes one of the biggest-selling male artists of the '90s and one of the most successful male artists of all time. R. Kelly to date has released...

Named after a key line in Arthur Lee's "The Red Telephone" (itself a steal from the then-fashionable play Marat/Sade, also parodied by the Bonzo Dog Band in their freakout classic "We Are Normal"), the extremely uneven Love tribute We're All Normal a...

Twilight fades and we're ready for a little cherub rock. Smashing Pumpkins will always be known for shimmering pop and crunchy rock. The lyrics reflect a mind awash in it's own dreams. Tonight, tonight it's time for a dream, Siamese or otherwise. Thi...

The live collection Past Lives, originally released in 2002 but long out-of-print, will also be reissued as 2-CD and 2-LP sets on the same date. It features performances recorded between 1970 and 1975 when the band was at the height of its dark power...

The thundering power of high energy rock fuelled fusion, the subtly woven sounds of Latin American music and folk in particular the music of his Argentinian friend and inspiration Astor Piazzolla, the breathtaking interchange between acoustic and ele...

2009 two CD live tribute to the trailblazing Texas singer/songwriter. On Undone, more than a dozen young Texas-based acts, who've been influenced by Keen's unique artistry, were brought together by the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State Un...

Green Day goes Blue Grass? Hell, yes! These acoustic covers of the Bay Area boys’ precocious hits are a perfect blend of punk and pickin’. If you haven’t walked the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" to the soundtrack of banjo, fiddle and mandolin, y...