“After eight years of bringing doo-wop music to Centre County and across the state, RamaLama has decided to hang up their rock-and-roll shoes,” said Tom Wilson, a band member and former mayor of Bellefonte.
The six members of RamaLama will delight audiences with their a capella harmonies one more time at their final concert on Thursday, Sept. 28, on the Brother’s Pizza outdoor stage in Stormstown. The concert will begin at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free. Concertgoers should bring chairs.
Wilson said that in the past, Brother’s Pizza moved the concert indoors when it rained.
“We decided it was time to retire RamaLama,” Wilson said. “Everybody has very busy lives these days. We never expected it to last eight years.”
“It’s bittersweet,” said band member Jeff Brown, who does the morning shows on 99.5 The Bus radio and teaches radio full-time at Penn State. “A lot of people were regulars and came to all our shows. We loved entertaining them and they loved to be entertained.
“We got the fans we did because no one else was singing the songs from the ’50s and ’60s,” Brown said. “Twenty to thirty performances a year. It was fabulous. We had so much fun doing it.” He said the decision to end the group was very amicable. “It was a huge disappointment to everyone. We love performing, love singing and have gotten close to each other.”
Wilson traced the history of RamaLama back to the 1980s, when he attended a Penn State Free University class on how to do doo-wop, taught by Frank Fox, a member of the popular East Coast doo-wop band Vito and the Salutations. Out of that class, Wilson and four others formed Doo-Wop Inc. and performed for four years in the mid-1980s.
In 2014 and 2015, Wilson thought it would be nice to have another doo-wop group and recruited Brown, a former coworker at 3WZ radio, for the bass singer, and John Zimmerman, a retired Bellefonte Area School District music teacher, for baritone. The tenor, Luke Lorenz, was originally from Texas and only knew about doo-wop from his kids’ Disney movies. Wilson sang tenor and baritone.
RamaLama performed as a quartet the first year, Wilson said. Then they added Lisa Lenze so they could perform songs for women from that time period. She left the group after a year because she was too busy to continue performing.
Eric and Amelia McGinness, a married couple, joined RamaLama, and the group became a sextet. She sings soprano and they both sing tenor.
Wilson said, “We’re the only doo-wop band in probably a 200-mile radius. We developed a pretty large following over the eight years and a lot of people were not happy to see us go. It may reappear sometime. Maybe a new doo-wop group will keep the genre alive.
He said doo-wop was born from the urban street singers of the ’40s and ‘50s doing a capella (unaccompanied) singing, or with a guitar, sax and/or drum. The music came to the mainstream in the ’50s and early to mid-’60s and laid the foundation for early rock and roll.
Wilson said people get barbershop and doo-wop confused. Barbershop is clean, tight and precise. “Make your mouth this shape.”
Doo-wop is street corner music originally sung by Black, white and Italian people of the inner city, he said. It has the roughness of the streets, with a down and dirty rock and roll base to it.
Wilson said RamaLama has played for many venues in Pennsylvania, including the Wheels of Time Car Show in Allentown, the Bloomsburg Fair, Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, Centre County Grange Fair, The State Theatre, First Night State College, Bellefonte Summer Sounds and the Bellefonte Arts and Crafts Fair. Doo-wop lovers from New Jersey traveled to their concert at the Shamokin Knights of Columbus.
RamaLama held strolling fundraisers at American Alehouse to benefit local charities, Wilson said. “People would look at a menu of songs we normally do. They’d pick out a song or two and throw money in the jar.” All the donations went to the local charity featured that night.
Brown said they went to a retirement home and went around to all the floors, singing. “Then we went to the dementia area, and there was a man in a wheelchair with his wife standing behind him. He was staring straight ahead until we sang ‘In the Still of the Night.’ He reached up and grabbed her hand and mouthed the words, or maybe he sang them, then went back to staring after the song. That was probably the highlight of my career with RamaLama.”
“We got to go out and sing and have fun and raise money for a great cause,” Brown said. “Who knew that people loved doo-wop so much?”
Brown said RamaLama talked about doing occasional popup concerts in the future. He suggested checking their social media for updates.
“It was fun. Such a cool experience. It was nice, innocent — love, heartache and cars. The key to it was that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. We were dedicated to entertaining people and giving back every chance we have. It’s all in the joy and the love of playing.”
The Original Brother’s Pizza and Italian Restaurant’s outdoor stage is located at 1950 Halfmoon Valley Road (Rt. 550) in Stormstown. For more information about RamaLama, visit their Facebook page.
IF YOU GO
What: RamaLama’s final concert
Where: Brother’s Pizza Stormstown, 1950 Halfmoon Valley Road, Port Matilda
When: 6:30 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 28
Admisssion: Free
