Doo-Wop

Doo-wop is a popular style of R&B with a heavy emphasis on male four-part harmonies and light instrumentation that peaked in popularity in the 1950s. Because instrumentation is not critical to the form, A cappella performances of doo-wop songs have been popular among amateur groups and street performers from the genre's 1940s origins to the present. The onomatopoeic name, referring to the often silly lyrics, was bestowed on the genre retrospectively in the early 1960s. The Mills Brothers and The Ink Spots, two of the most popular male Vocal Group artists of the 1930s and 1940s, influenced doo-wop with their approach to harmonies, but the doo-wop groups that emerged from cities in the northeastern United States and California in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s had a much more up-to-date style with the same sort of appeal to teenagers that helped to birth Rock & Roll. One of the early doo-wop hits, "Sixty-Minute Man" by Billy Ward and The Dominoes, was notably risqué for the time.