If someone ever attempts to put together a definitive compilation album covering all aspects of the teenage experience throughout the history of popular music, they have to make sure that there is a place on the tracklisting for Don French's 1959 recording of Lonely Saturday Night. It’s a stripped down recording, which is fully designed to bring audiences to their feet either in recognition at its sentiments or sympathy for French’s little-boy-lost performance as a man spending Saturday night dateless and isolated.
Listening to the song with 2023 ears, it comes across like a bit of an incel lullaby, but they didn’t know the word back in 1959 (lucky buggers), and its themes remain universal and timeless. If homework is one thing nobody misses as they grow beyond school/college age, then that dreadful, false feeling that you’re missing out on a great time if you’re spending Saturday night on your own is one thing I don’t miss about late teens/twenties.
The song was covered in a 2007 blogpost on Locust St. in which the author received a bit of a dressing down in the comments from a Margo French (a relation of Don’s perhaps?) for describing his singing as almost comically deep and describing the track as being as ominous as it is ridiculous but I think the performance rings full value out of the sentiments of the song. For Peel, the vocal was what made the track. He called it…a classic of that kind of tortured Conway Twitty vocal…it really ought to be far better known than it is.
Video courtesy of Wesley B.
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