There's a terrible misconception that the Twin Cities had little to offer rock and roll before 1964, when The Trashmen enjoyed national success with "Surfin' Bird" and encouraged a decade of similarly raucous garage band music from Minnesota. Of course, this ignores the fact that rockabilly pioneer Eddie Cochran hailed from Albert Lea. It likewise ignores the dozens of '50s-era rock and roll bands and close-harmony R&B groups who languished in obscurity due to never having recorded, or because they recorded with small studios that produced a few hundred platters at most and could offer only the vaguest gesture at distribution. In fact, in the fifties, the Twin Cities produced one of the best rock and roll songs ever, but nobody knows this fact, because the song and its performer are unjustly forgotten.

The song is "Do I Do Right," and it's credited to Lou & Ginny. The latter was almost certainly one Ginny Charland, a local nightclub performer who was still appearing with the Twin Cities Show Chorus up until her death in 2003, and who is credited as the song's author. As to who Lou is, well, we just don't know. The album was recorded sometime in the 1950s by a St. Paul company calling itself Hep Records. And that's it. There, in a nutshell, is everything we know about the song. "Do I Do Right" will occasionally pop up on collections of obscure rockabilly, and, to their credit, the Minnesota Historical Society includes the song on a jukebox as part of their marvelous Twin Cities rock music exhibit. But otherwise the song is unjustly obscure, because it's fantastic. In fact, it's beyond fantastic—it's transcendent.

Over pounding toms and violently strummed guitar, in a mournful, panicked minor key, Ginny pleads with her deceased father for advice. She has fallen in love with a rock and roller and fears eternal damnation as a result. "Does the Lord up in heaven approve of rock and roll?" Ginny begs. "Please tell me daddy, for I want to save my soul." Her father must know the answer, after all, as Ginny wails in the chorus, he's "closer to the Lord in Heaven."

Written at a time when American clergymen where genuinely arguing that rock and roll was one step on a path to eternal torment, "Do I Do Right" finds a perfect tone, somewhere between fascination and terror. The song doesn't answer its own question; the singer is left with her questions unresolved, but the expressive melody and Ginny's powerhouse vocals provide their own answer. She might, in fact, be damned for rock and roll. But it might be worth it.