The Drifters – Save The Last Dance For Me

The man who wrote this song about dancing couldn’t dance — he sat in a wheelchair at his own wedding, watching his bride move across the floor with everyone but him.

The lyric sounds, on its surface, generous and easy: go ahead and dance every dance, laugh and have your fun tonight — just save the last dance for me, and remember whose arms you’re going home in. What almost no one hears in it is the ache underneath, and the reason for that ache. The man who wrote those words, Doc Pomus, could not dance at all. He had been disabled by polio as a child and moved through the world on crutches and, later, in a wheelchair. And the song came directly out of the most bittersweet night of his life: his own wedding.

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In 1957, Pomus — born Jerome Felder, a heavyset, charismatic Brooklyn songwriter — married Willi Burke, a tall, blond Broadway actress and dancer. It was a genuine case of opposites attracting, and Pomus, who could not take the floor himself, insisted his bride dance and enjoy her own wedding. He watched her glide around the reception in the arms of family and friends, present and adoring but immovable in his chair. Some time later, the story goes, he found the wedding invitation while going through a box of keepsakes, and the whole feeling of that night came flooding back. He stayed up writing, and on the back of that invitation he worked out the words to what became “Save the Last Dance for Me.” His writing partner, Mort Shuman, had already given him a soaring Latin-flavored melody; Pomus fitted it with a lyric that turned his own helpless generosity into something universal.

From B-side to No. 1

Recorded by the Drifters with a young Ben E. King on lead vocal, and produced by the great team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the song was very nearly overlooked. It had reportedly been slated as a B-side until Dick Clark, hearing both sides, recognized that this was the stronger record and helped flip it over. Released in August 1960 on Atlantic, it climbed all the way to the top, spending three weeks at No. 1 on the U.S. pop chart and also reaching No. 1 on the R&B chart — the biggest hit the Drifters ever had. In Britain it reached No. 2. It arrived just as Ben E. King was leaving the group for a solo career that would soon produce “Stand By Me,” which gives the record an added poignancy: one of the last great things he sang as a Drifter.

A song about last things

Pomus and Shuman were among the most prolific songwriting teams of their era, responsible for more than five hundred songs between 1958 and 1965, including “This Magic Moment,” Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas” and “Little Sister,” and Dion’s “Teenager in Love.” But “Save the Last Dance for Me” carried a weight the others didn’t, precisely because of what its writer could not do. Doc Pomus was later inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame before his death in 1991. The song has been recorded by dozens of artists across the decades — and it found one final, fitting resting place in 2013, when Leonard Cohen chose it as the very last song he ever performed live, closing the final show of his farewell tour in Auckland, New Zealand. A song about the last dance became, for one of music’s great poets, the last song of all.

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