Save the Last Dance for Me: The Drifters and Doc Pomus

The Story Behind the Song · The Drifters, 1960

The Drifters pictured in a 1961 Murray the K Holiday Revue programme, months after the record gave them their first No. 1

The Drifters pictured in a 1961 Murray the K Holiday Revue programme, months after the record gave them their first No. 1 · Murray the K Holiday Revue programme, 1961, copyright not renewed, public domain

Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman and the Drifters

Doc Pomus was born Jerome Solon Felder in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in June 1925, and polio took the use of his legs when he was a child. He sang the blues in New York clubs under a name he invented so his parents would not find out, and then he became one of the great songwriters of the era, mostly in partnership with Mort Shuman. In 1960 the two of them handed the Drifters a song about watching the person you love dance with somebody else.

The record went to No. 1. In the Billboard issue dated October 17, 1960 it jumped from No. 4 to the top of the Hot 100 — Atlantic 2071, the first No. 1 the Drifters ever had. The lead voice belongs to Ben E. King, who would leave the group within months over a contract dispute and turn up on his own the following year with a song of his own that the Drifters had turned down.

There is a story attached to this record that you will find in every account of it: that Pomus wrote the lyric remembering his own wedding, sitting at the edge of the floor while his bride danced with the guests, telling her to dance with whoever she liked as long as she came home with him. It is a story worth telling — but it should be told as a story. We could not find it in any contemporary source. It appears in the biography of Pomus and in the documentary about him, both of them made decades later, and the song itself was written years after the wedding. His paralysis is documented; the scene at the reception is testimony, not record.

What is certain is that a man who could not dance wrote the most generous dance song in American popular music, and that he did it as a straightforward professional assignment, one of hundreds of songs he turned out in the Brill Building years. The distance between those two facts is where the record lives.

On the record

  • Released 1960 on Atlantic 2071; written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman.
  • No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, issue dated October 17, 1960, rising from No. 4 — the Drifters' first No. 1.
  • Doc Pomus, born Jerome Solon Felder in Brooklyn on June 27, 1925, was paralysed by polio as a child.
  • The wedding-reception origin story comes from later biography and documentary, not from any contemporary account.

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Music on this channel is composed and produced with AI tools; the songs, stories, and artwork are original works created for lovesong1950s.

Sources: The Billboard, October 17, 1960 — Hot 100 (issue scan) · Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Doc Pomus · Doc Pomus official site · Library of Congress, National Recording Registry essay on "Stand by Me". Chart positions are cited to the specific Billboard chart and issue date, because the magazine ran several separate charts in these years and a record could sit at No. 1 on one and No. 8 on another.

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