Save the last dance for me

Last Sunday’s New York Times carried Alan Light’s review of the new biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt. Doc was one of the true characters of the Brill Building era of pop songwriting. In the immediate aftermath of his death in 1991, the late New Orleans soul singer Johnny Adams produced a stirring tribute to him in “Johnny Adams Sings Doc Pomus: The Real Me.”
Until reading Light’s review, I don’t think I knew that the divorce attorney Raoul Felder was the brother of Doc Pomus. I did know that Doc had been crippled by polio as a kid, but I had never put that together with the lyrics of “Save the Last Dance For Me.” Light explains:

[His] crowning achievement was the Drifters

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