Relearning old songs

Sometimes you hear something about the creative process that completely changes your relationship to, and understanding of, a piece of art.

Doc. Pomus wrote an amazing number of songs. You know some of them, even if you don’t know he wrote them. He got into music after polio took both his legs as a child. He became a blues singer, and then started writing songs when record labels saw no future in blues for a white, Jewish man in crunches.

At his wedding, he told his wife that she shroud go dance with people, after all, it was her wedding. He went on to joke that she was coming home with him anyway, so who she danced with didn’t really matter.

Years later, he co-wrote “Save the Last Dance for Me” on the back of one of his old wedding invitations.