In the Still of the Nite, Five Satins (1956, 1960, 1961)

Maybe I've seen one too many PBS fundraising specials focusing on the great a cappella singers lately and I'm lamenting my lost youth. But in front of my house, which was built in 1930, is one of those old-timey lampposts - which works - and sometimes I fantasize starting my own doo-wop group to sing under it.

One of the tunes my group and I would sing is In the Still of the Nite by the Five Satins. I was too young to be aware of it when it was first released in 1956, however in 1960-61 it gained a new and enduring life when it was re-released and at some point I would have heard it on Washington, D.C. soul stations in the early 60s.

Ranked at #90 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the song was written by lead singer Fred Parris, who is still performing, and was originally recorded in a church basement in New Haven, Connecticut.

In Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere To Run, Ben E. King, who was once a Drifter, describes the influence of songs such as this one: "We'd learn from the records, like everybody did ... If you could sing Moonglows, you could kill the neighborhood. They had great harmonies, the Moonglows. Or the Satins or the Clovers. We tried to pattern ourselves after the tight-harmonied groups."

What is the enduring appeal? King goes on: "You could dance to the stuff, kiss your girl to it. And, my God, more than a lot of this electronic stuff you have going on now, you could feel it. It was a human voice you picked up on. I guess I'd say you could get involved on a real emotional level."

And if you could kill the neighborhood in the bargain, so much the better!

When A Man Loves A Woman, Percy Sledge (1966)

I just got back from a business trip to Alabama, so wouldn't this be a good time to mention one of the most sublime songs ever to have been incubated there, Percy Sledge's unforgettable When A Man Loves A Woman?

The backstory may very well explain why it feels like one of the most authentic soul ballads ever recorded. Not a song that was handed to him by other composers as was so often the case, Sledge spontaneously belted it out one night when he was being paid to sing songs written by others in a nightclub in Sheffield, Alabama.

According to Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere to Run, one of the definitive histories of American soul music, Sledge's regular singing gig - he worked as a hospital orderly by day - was suffering mightily because a broken heart had put him off his game. One night he asked the bass player and organist accompanying him to give him any key. (He later gave them writing credits on the song.) Howling "a bunch of stray thoughts on the blindness and paralysis of love," according to Hirshey, the anguish streamed out of him in the form of When A Man Loves A Woman. I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like to be in that audience!

Later, he was signed to Atlantic Records following a local record shop audition, having further refined the fruits of that spontaneous combustion into the song we know today. Session musicians from Alabama's legendary Fame studios in Muscle Shoals backed him up on organ and horns, with the result being the perfect expression of a man hopelessly in love and being played for a fool.

I was a mere 13 years old when this was released - as I've written previously, so many of the soul songs of this period were way beyond my maturity level in their focus, yet they left an indelible impression upon me of what life was going to be like down the long and winding road.