What musical genre are you if you schedule an inaugural Hall of Fame concert for Good Friday the 13th? Try doo-wop. During its glory days, in the ’50s and early ’60s, doo-wop singing groups suffered endless emotional agonies on the cross of unrequited love, and they had to be the unluckiest devils on the face on the earth: despite their undying devotion, it seemed they never got the girl or guy. So it was fitting that last Friday, Harvey Robbins’s Doo-Wopp Hall of Fame of America™ held its inaugural induction ceremony and concert, at Symphony Hall no less, honoring six groups — the Cadillacs, Dion and the Belmonts, the Platters, the Flamingos, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and Bill Pinkney and the Original Drifters — in a marathon event that went on well past midnight.

Unlike the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland or the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, the Doo-Wopp Hall of Fame of America appears to be a concept rather than an installation. And in a way that too is appropriate for the most ephemeral of all music genres. Doo-wop songs made their mark on ’50s AM radio but didn’t always rattle the sales charts; doo-wop performers, most of them black, tended to be names rather than faces. And the group line-ups weren’t exactly stable, even by today’s standards. When in June of 1958 the original Drifters (who’d already gone through a passel of changes) appeared on the stage of the famed Apollo Theatre, their opening act was a young Harlem group called the Crowns, and the Crowns impressed Drifters manager George Treadwell so much that he hired them to be the Drifters (which he could, since he owned the name), then went backstage and sacked their predecessors.

You could even argue that a true doo-wop hall of fame ought to be devoted to the songs — particularly since so many of the performers were one-hit wonders. The Elegants, an Italian quintet from Staten Island, achieved the rare doo-wop feat of a #1 Billboard single with their 1958 hit “Little Star” (“Twinkle twinkle” nursery-rhyme lyrics; melody courtesy of W.A. Mozart), but that’s their only charting appearance. A doo-wop hall of fame without “Little Star” is unthinkable, but how to include the Elegants? Same goes for the Five Satins (“In the Still of the Night”), the Silhouettes (“Get a Job”), the Monotones (“Book of Love”), the Danleers (“One Summer Night”), the Videos (“Trickle Trickle”), the Teddy Bears (“To Know Him Is To Love Him”), the Crests (“Sixteen Candles”), the Safaris (“Image of a Girl”), the Capris (“There’s a Moon Out Tonight”), the Marcels (“Blue Moon”), Jay & the Americans (“She Cried”), and countless others.

Still, if you’re going to start up a doo-wop hall of fame, you probably want to have a doo-wop hall-of-fame concert, and that means inducting groups who, 40 or more years after their heyday, can perform more than one song in some semblance of their original incarnation. By that standard, the Doo-Wopp Hall of Fame of America’s inaugural event was a reasonable effort. The pre-concert VIP reception offered diehard fans (and there were plenty, the vast majority white) a chance to take pictures of and get their $15 souvenir programs autographed by the likes of Hank Ballard, the Cadillacs’ Earl “Speedo” Carroll, and the original Belmonts. Symphony Hall itself was packed with the kind of casually dressed devotees (many well-known to one another from the doo-wop circuit) that you don’t see at BSO or Celebrity Series concerts.

But the hall-of-fame concept meant that instead of getting one or two numbers from a lot of bands, as was the case with the Doo-Wop 50 concerts that PBS televised from Pittsburgh in 1999, we were confined to the Doo-Wopp Hall of Fame of America choices. Sort of. Opening were the Harptones, not inducted though Robbins’s starry-eyed ring-announcer intro had to leave you wondering why. Original lead singer Willie Winfield anchored a quartet that included one of the few women on stage all night, Vickie Burgess; they did “The Shrine of Saint Cecilia” and “My Memories of You” and then, with original bass baritone Bill “Dicey” Galloway, “Life Is But a Dream.” The “Flamingos” followed — over the past couple of years, founding members Jacob and Ezekiel Carey have both passed on, but Jacob’s son J.C. put together a quartet who did a credible job with the Flamingos’ 1956 hit “I’ll Be Home.” So then they went on to “I Only Have Eyes for You”? No, they left the stage; Robbins played a taped telegram from Tommy Hunt, who had joined in 1957 (he thanked Dion and the Belmonts “for proving to us that white boys can sing”), then brought out Terry Johnson for a mannered karaoke performance of the group’s biggest hit, and then Johnny Carter (who went on to the Dells), who announced that he and Tommy Hunt would be getting together.

More mystification followed with the arrival of Shirley Reeves with a back-up pair of young ladies. As a member of the Shirelles, Reeves would seem a Hall of Fame candidate, but she appeared instead as a “special guest,” performing “Mama Said,” “Baby It’s You,” “Tonight’s the Night,” “Since I Fell in Love with You,” a sing-along “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and “Soldier Boy,” then accepting the Platters’ induction plaque for Zola Taylor, who we were told is ill in California. Then the Drifters, who of course didn’t perform any of the hits you’re most familiar with (“There Goes My Baby,” “Save the Last Dance for Me”), since those belong to the post–Apollo massacre version of the group. No matter: Bobby Hendricks, who came on as lead singer in ’57, was there, and Pinkney, at 76, was still in good voice for “Money Honey,” “Drip Drop,” “Honey Love,” and a “White Christmas” that put Bing Crosby to shame.

Intermission: a chance to rest one’s ears and meditate on the meaning of doo-wop. I grew up on groups who sang a cappella or with some discreet backing combination of guitar, sax, piano, and percussion. This being the 21st century, I was not surprised to see a pair of electric guitars plus sax, keyboards, and a full drum kit on stage, but I didn’t expect to be blasted out of my seat. Even the voices were overamped, losing their individual personalities and becoming a harsh blur. As big as Symphony Hall is, a modest-sized pianist playing an unamplified Steinway can fill it with no trouble, so there was no reason for the Doo-Wopp people to turn up the volume. The more so as Symphony has a cushy acoustic as opposed to the drier sound picture of, say, Carnegie Hall or Cleveland’s Severance Hall.

The Belmonts (the only white performers to grace the stage all night) had enough vocal and visual variety to manage: Carlo Mastrangelo still machine-guns the opening bass “dun-dun-dun di-dun-dun-di-dun” of “I Wonder Why” as if he were restaging the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Angelo D’Aleo provides tenor contrast, and Freddie Milano bounces around like a teenager. What they didn’t have was Dion, whose absence went unexplained. His hands going all over the place, Danny Elliott looked like Paul Lynde doing Bobby Darin, but he made a passable substitute lead. “Where or When” was sung a cappella; I missed the sax breaks from the original recording, and there was no falsetto from Angelo at the end, but at least they proved that voices alone can fill the joint. “A Teenager in Love” got turned into audience karaoke; given that this was the first reunion of the three original Belmonts since 1972, it would have been nice to hear them sing their biggest hit.

The Cadillacs — which is to say Earl “Speedo” Carroll and two younger, non-original singers — verged, as always, on self-parody, but “Gloria” (the prototype doo-wop ballad) and “Speedo” (“Well they call me Speedo but my real name is Mr. Earl”) are so good they can take it. “Gloria” turned into a Victor Borge number, Speedo repeatedly breaking off before the closing “But she’s not in love with me”; “Speedo” stretched its one-note band riff into eternity. They did just three numbers — the problem is that their two big hits are way more popular than anything else in their repertoire.

On to Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, who prompted further thoughts about the nature of the genre. Back-up or no, the core of doo-wop is vocal harmony, and though a doo-wop classic can be a ballad (the Statues’ “Blue Velvet”) or an upbeat number (the Jarmels’ “A Little Bit of Soap”) or even part of a dance craze (Dick Clark’s American Bandstand kids did the stroll to Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow”), it doesn’t rock. Hank Ballard rocks, and at Symphony Hall the vocal harmonies took a back seat to the very big band sound. Ballard was an R&B/funk pioneer whose “Work with Me Annie” was too suggestive for American Bandstand (but Dick played Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” — am I missing something here?); he wrote “The Twist,” and though Chubby Checker got the credit and the exposure, Hank got the songwriting royalties. It’s not that he and the Midnighters don’t deserve a chance to play Symphony Hall, but their extended set was a rock show whose sonic assault was painful to listen to. At 11:35, a half-hour into their set, with no end in sight and no earplugs in my pocket, I did what I have never done in 20 years of reviewing: I bailed out. A steady stream of other defectors filed past the sympathetic (they too understand the acoustic) Symphony Hall ushers. The evening was expected to go on well past midnight, with, I imagine, a group finale; let’s give Harvey and company the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a rousing success while also hoping that by next year’s Hall of Fame concert (scheduled for March 29, again Good Friday) they get those amps under control. I went out into the night, casting a wistful look at the empty intersection of Mass Ave and Huntington; concerts like this one are a boon for the performers, but the real doo-wop hall of fame is where it always was: on the street corners.