The Stroll
2025
A few beats on the snare drum and we’re off.
We hold hands. It’s six years before the Beatles want to hold hands with us and somehow, inexplicably, we’re lured into a blues tune disguised as an innocent dance record.
We aren’t sure what’s going on. Too much happens at once. This strange song ripens from so many unattached origins we have no idea how it can possibly fit together.
We pay attention to the lyrics but at first we don’t detect their poetic blues structure.
Feel so good
Take me by my hand
I feel so good
Take me by my hand
And let’s go strolling
In wonderland.
There they are, hidden in plain sight, written by Clyde Lovern Otis, from Prentiss Mississippi.
The blues, snuck into the late nineteen fifties innocence of a dance record like a flask of whiskey snuck into a high school dance.
Four young men from Toronto sing. Dave Somerville handles lead vocals for the Diamonds. His rich doo wop lilts and whirls. Mournful backup vocals swell up and down, lifted from the miseries of a deep south plantation, a terrible chant.
The saxophone cries and the piano moans. And yet you…
Feel so good.
We don’t know where this record comes from, either a Mercury Records studio in Chicago or New York.
The tune appears on the next to last day of 1957. Week after week, through the uncertain winter of 1958, “The Stroll” transforms dances in church halls and high school gyms into its promised wonderland.
You’re no Nureyev so to stroll back and forth across the dance floor works out just fine.
What you hear for two and a half minutes is haunting. There’s not a hint of exuberance, no jitterbug joy. Only an irresistible promise of a journey to wonderland, an invitation to escape to a world infinitely more fulfilling.
You don’t know how things will turn out. There’s no advantage of hindsight. It is a world you commit to explore more passionately when you sneak out the door of the dance hall with your girl, gliding past the chaperones, down a hallway and off into the night.
Let’s go strolling
In wonderland.
Wonderland turns out to be fervid and shadowed, illicit and perhaps even sinister. But none of this matters because you and your girl feel so good.
You’ve been invited here by these four young men from Toronto. You and your girl can hold hands, or more, and nobody can do a thing about it.
Take me by my hand
And let’s go strolling.
The Diamonds hit record liberates thousands of otherwise mundane halls in churches and high schools. “The Stroll” spins on countless star crossed turntables connected to amplifiers aglow with warm tubes.
Crepe paper streamers stretch from wall to wall. The lights are never turned down low enough. Stern chaperones dutifully stand guard. You watch them and you understand something of the time you live in, even if you can’t put it in context.
It is the uneasy winter of 1958 and you and your girl take a stroll.
You are outdoors in wonderland. On this cold and brittle American night, far above in the uncertain darkness of our republic’s vast sky, the Russian satellite Sputnik I passes overhead.
