The Kingtones and Marie -- Let's Dance Baby

Back in 2016, I wrote about one of Tatsuro Yamashita's（山下達郎）1970s classics "Let's Dance Baby", his very first single as a solo artist in January 1979. One of the things that I remarked there was that it had originally been a song offered to and performed by the doo-wop group The Kingtones and Marie several months earlier.

Perhaps at the time, the YouTube video of that Kingtones recording didn't exist, but it does now, so I'm featuring it now. Yamashita came up with the mellow melody while Osamu Yoshioka（吉岡治）provided the lyrics. The Kingtones' original version of "Let's Dance Baby" first popped up on their 3rd album "Resurrect ~ Ginga kara no Kikan"（レゼレクト 銀河からの帰還...Return from the Galaxy） which was released in October 1978.

This was a revelation to me since I had only known The Kingtones for that one doo-wop tune, "Good Night, Baby" which always seems to be the one to be performed by the quartet whenever they show up on television. However, they do just as well with "Let's Dance Baby" under a similar arrangement to Yamashita's self-cover. There is that extra layer of soft disco and a bit of spaciness, though, which underlies everything like a good large piece of shag carpeting. Doo-wop does well by "Let's Dance Baby".