The 1950s File Feature
Try The Impossible
Try the Impossible — Lee Andrews and the Hearts Reach for the SkyIn the summer of 1958, Philadelphia was one of the most important cities in American popular…
01 The Story
Try the Impossible — Lee Andrews and the Hearts Reach for the Sky
In the summer of 1958, Philadelphia was one of the most important cities in American popular music, a place where doo-wop had developed its own distinctive regional flavor and where the local record industry was beginning to generate national hits with some regularity. The city's contribution to the vocal group tradition was substantial, and Lee Andrews and the Hearts were among its most artistically accomplished representatives. They brought to the form a polish and an emotional seriousness that set their best recordings apart from the genre's more formulaic output.
The Hearts' Philadelphia Sound
Lee Andrews and the Hearts had been recording since the mid-1950s, working their way through the local label ecosystem before finding an audience that extended beyond their home region. Their approach to doo-wop was notably refined: the harmonies were precise and layered, and Andrews himself had a lead voice that combined warmth with a kind of dignified restraint. He was not a screamer or a showboater; he was a singer whose technique was in service of emotional communication, and that quality gave the group's recordings a timelessness that more flamboyant performers sometimes lacked.
An Aspiration Set to Music
Try the Impossible is built around one of the most fundamental of human impulses: the refusal to accept that what seems out of reach is necessarily beyond you. As a title and as a premise, it was perfectly calibrated for the late-1950s moment. America in 1958 was a culture simultaneously consumed by possibility (the Space Age had arrived, the economy was booming in certain sectors) and constrained by real social limits (segregation, Cold War fear, the rigid hierarchies of class and race). A doo-wop love song about attempting the impossible carried that cultural freight lightly but genuinely.
Two Weeks, Two Positions, Genuine History
The record debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 4, 1958, at number 83, and climbed to its peak of number 70 on August 11, spending two weeks on the chart. A brief chart run, certainly, but two weeks on the national pop chart in 1958 was evidence of genuine commercial reach; the Hot 100 was fiercely contested, and any presence on it confirmed real radio traction. For a Philadelphia vocal group operating on a small label, that national chart placement was a meaningful achievement.
A Sound Worth Preserving
What you hear in this record is doo-wop at the height of its sophistication, a genre that had evolved rapidly from its mid-decade origins into something capable of genuine musical complexity. Lee Andrews knew how to build a performance that sounded simple from the outside while containing considerable craft within. The result is a record that rewards attention rather than just background listening; put on headphones, give it your full focus, and you will hear why Philadelphia doo-wop deserves to be remembered as one of the great chapters in American vocal music.
“Try the Impossible” — Lee Andrews and the Hearts' singular moment on the 1950s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Try the Impossible — Love as an Act of Defiance
There is a category of love song that is also, at its core, a song about will. Try the Impossible belongs to that tradition: it frames romantic devotion not as a passive state of feeling but as an active choice to reach beyond what seems achievable. In the doo-wop context of 1958, that framing carried meanings that extended well beyond the immediate romantic situation the song described.
The Impossible as Romantic Ideal
Love songs have always borrowed the language of extremity; lovers routinely describe their feelings in terms that exceed rational measurement, and the beloved is perpetually described as someone whose value surpasses ordinary human experience. Try the Impossible takes this tendency seriously, making the attempt itself, rather than its outcome, the subject of the song. The act of reaching for what seems unattainable is presented as the right response to genuine feeling, regardless of whether the attempt succeeds. This is a more sophisticated emotional position than simple romantic optimism.
Aspiration in the Context of Constraint
For African-American audiences in 1958, a song about attempting the impossible carried a specific resonance that white listeners might have experienced differently. The social and political constraints on Black life in America at that moment were very real and very immediate. A doo-wop song about refusing to accept that something is beyond your reach was, in that context, more than a love song; it was a small, musical articulation of a posture toward the world that had genuine stakes. The romantic framework did not exhaust the song's meaning.
The Vocal Group as Collective Aspiration
Doo-wop's characteristic use of multiple voices served the theme of impossible aspiration in a specific way. When Lee Andrews sang the lead and the Hearts provided their harmonic support, they were enacting communal effort: the impossible was being attempted by a group, not an individual. That collective quality was central to what made the vocal group tradition emotionally meaningful to its audiences. You were not alone in your reaching; others were reaching with you, their voices braided with yours into something more substantial than any single voice could produce.
Hope as Musical Structure
The melodic and harmonic choices in this kind of material were not innocent of meaning. Ascending melodic lines, open harmonies that suggest unresolved yearning, a tempo that leans forward rather than settling back; all of these structural choices participate in the emotional argument the song is making. In Try the Impossible, the music itself enacts the aspiration the lyrics describe, reaching upward with the same determination the words call for.
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