Entry · catalog no. 2405
doo-wop
/ /ˈduː wɑp/ /DOO-wop
noun · Harlem and the Bronx, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, and other Northern cities · 1950s
✓ Verified
1.
A style of vocal harmony built by Black singers in Northern cities from the late 1940s through the early 1960s: a lead voice out front, three to five voices behind it carrying the chords on wordless syllables, a bass singer holding the bottom and often speaking a bridge, and thin or absent instrumental backing. The name comes from those background syllables, and it was fastened onto the music years after the music itself had come and gone.
“They worked out the whole doo-wop arrangement standing under the subway steps, because the tile threw the harmony back at them.”
2.
Used loosely of any later song or passage that borrows the four- and five-part background chording, the walking bass syllables, and the chord progression associated with the style.
“The bridge goes full doo-wop for eight bars and then drops back into the groove.”
Origin & Attribution
The music was made by Black teenagers in the tenement-dense neighborhoods of the urban North — Harlem and the Bronx, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, Detroit, Chicago — who rehearsed unaccompanied on stoops, in hallways, in school gyms and subway entrances where the tile carried the sound. Its sources were Black: the gospel quartet tradition, Black barbershop harmony, and the pop vocal groups of the 1930s and 1940s, the Mills Brothers and above all the Ink Spots, whose tenor lead and spoken bass became the template. The Orioles' It's Too Soon to Know, issued in 1948, is the record usually marked as the point where the style comes into focus. The word doo-wop is not what the singers called it. Through the whole life of the music it had no name of its own, and the label came later, from record shops and radio sorting the back catalogue. The syllables themselves are on record earlier than the label: the Turbans' When You Dance carries an audible doo-wop chant in 1955, and the Five Satins' In the Still of the Nite has doo wop, doo wah in the bridge in 1956. The coinage is routinely handed to the New York disc jockey Gus Gossert, who played the music on New York radio around 1970, but Gossert himself refused the credit and said the term was already circulating in California before he used it. That refusal is the correction. Doo-wop is a retroactive label applied to Black music by the people cataloguing it, not a name its makers gave it.
1948
The Orioles record It's Too Soon to Know, the first vocal-group hit of the style
1955
The Turbans' When You Dance puts the syllables doo-wop into a refrain on record
1956
The Five Satins' In the Still of the Nite carries doo wop, doo wah in the bridge
c. 1970
DJ Gus Gossert popularizes the term on New York radio and publicly refuses credit for coining it
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and the Bronx, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, and other Northern cities · 1950s
Spoken by
Black vocal groups and their audiences made the music; the word itself was first used by disc jockeys, record dealers and collectors sorting the catalogue after the fact
$DOOWOPThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady65 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
58/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1961
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
The Orioles, It's Too Soon to Know, It's a Natural Records / Jubilee Records, 1948
record
■
The Turbans, When You Dance, Herald Records H-458, 1955
record
■
The Five Satins, In the Still of the Nite, Standord/Ember, 1956
record
■
Doo-wop, Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry on the genre
glossary
■
+ Cite a sourceThe Doo-Wop Society of Southern California, Origin of Doo-Wop, documenting Gus Gossert's disavowal of the coinage
glossary
See also