TBT: The Dovells, "You Can't Sit Down"

Sometime in 1963 I was with the Robinson High School debate team at a tournament held on the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee. The evening after we arrived, my teammates and I were in a student cafe, having burgers and cokes. The cafe had a juke box and a small dance floor. A couple looking much like those in the photo, except that the woman was wearing a tartan skirt and black-on-white saddle Oxfords with white bobby socks, got up; the man put a coin in the juke box, and a very lively tune began. The couple did a frenetic jitterbug with lots of twirling and, if I recall correctly, the man lifting the woman by the waist and swinging her around.


.The song was "You Can't Sit Down," a '63 hit for the Dovells, a Philadelphia group whose biggest hit was "The Bristol Stomp" and who recorded on Cameo Records, part of the Cameo-Parkway group that was central to the Philly rock and R&B scene in the late 1950s through the '60s.