“Save the Last Dance for Me”

The Drifters, “Save the Last Dance for Me” (Great Moments in Pop Music History)

 The chances are good that you’ve not heard of a teenage blues shouter named Jerome Felder, at least by that moniker.

Strapped into steel and leather braces, borne by crutches, the victim of polio in the late 1930s, Jerome was chased out of more than one Greenwich Village nightclub, not just for being underage but also for being—well, improbable. His early career was, to put it gently, not promising, not even the makings for a one-hit wonder. Fortunately, though, one day, along about 1941, a bar owner listened as Felder opened his mouth and sang, and then things were different.

Things would become more different still when Jerome Felder began calling himself Doc Pomus and writing his unforgettable songs. One, perhaps his best known, commemorates his marriage to a lithe woman who loved to dance, something that, for obvious reasons, he had difficulty doing. Doc had written the lyrics to a swaying Latin tune that he had recently heard. According to biographer Alex Halberstadt, the author of Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life & Times of Doc Pomus, he had wanted his words to sound as if they had been translated from the Spanish, as if from a poem by Pablo Neruda. Thus its onrushing heartbreak: “You can dance every dance with the guy who gave you the eye, let him hold you tight…” “If he asks if you’re all alone, can he take you home, you must tell him no…”

Sung by the brilliant Ben E. King, “Save the Last Dance for Me” is an early soul masterpiece. It came perilously close to being shelved, though, for the normally astute record producer Ahmet Ertegun didn’t quite get it, and he stuck it on the B-side of a much more pedestrian song called “Nobody But Me.” Dick Clark, host of American Bandstand, spun it on his show, King melted hearts, and “Save the Last Dance for Me” hit number 1 on the Billboard charts on October 17, 1960, occupying the spot for three weeks—half a lifetime in the fickle world of pop music.

Here’s King, at the head of The Drifters, singing the song. It’s followed by a version by New Orleans soulster Aaron Neville, who captures both its Latin feel and its unbearable sorrow. Bruce Springsteen then belts it out, while Ike and Tina Turner well, let them show us how it’s done.