Song of the Day 2/24: Dion, “Runaround Sue”

He was just Dion, sans the Belmonts and without his surname DiMucci, in 1961 when he assembled an impromptu doo-wop chorus at a party and started ad-libbing lyrics about a girl who wouldn’t be true. When he brought it to songwriter Ernie Maresca they came up with a No. 1 hit.

Guys have been writing songs about one Sue or another ever since Stephen Foster told Susanna not to cry for him back in 1848, launching his career as America’s first professional songwriter. After that, she’s gone by a lot of different names. She was Little Susie when the Everly Brothers told her to wake up, Suzanne when she took Leonard Cohen to her place by the river, Susan to the Buckinghams, Suzie Q to CCR. No wonder Dion wanted to put people wise.

DiMucci married a girl named Sue, and though he once told Oprah the song was about her, he usually admitted it wasn’t. His Sue has been a lot more constant than the one he wrote about – they’ve been married for 63 years.

The tune and its follow-up, “The Wanderer,” were such big hits that Hollywood put the songs and Dion in a 1961 movie, “Twist Around the Clock.” As I suppose is obvious, that band of old geezers behind him had nothing to do with the actual recording of the track. The real backing musicians were black session players and the vocalists a white doo-wop outfit called the Del-Satins. As DiMucci explained years later, producers thought theater owners in the South wouldn’t book a film that featured a mixed-race band.