Few songwriters shaped 20th century popular music like Doc Pomus. From “Save The Last Dance For Me” to “Viva Las Vegas” to “This Magic Moment,” his words have been sung by Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, the Drifters, Dion, Lou Reed, the Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, and countless others. Now, to mark what would have been his 100th birthday, the vault has been opened for You Can’t Hip A Square: The Doc Pomus Songwriting Demos, a career-spanning 6-CD, 160-track set with over 120 songs never before heard and many making their CD or digital debut.

Drawn from demo acetates Pomus kept throughout his life, most sung by his legendary writing partner Mort Shuman and lovingly preserved by his daughter, Sharyn Felder, this is a time capsule of hits in the making and brilliant “what ifs” that never reached the airwaves. “If you talk to any songwriter who’s had a bunch of hits,” Felder says, “they’ll tell you about the 50 other songs they wrote that were just as good, or even better, that nothing ever happened with.”

The collection captures not only the songs that climbed the charts, but the lost gems that might have topped them had they reached the right artist at the right time. Meticulously restored and mastered by Grammy-winning engineer Michael Graves with Jordan McLeod, the set comes housed in a 48-page hardbound book loaded with essays by Geoffrey Himes, Sharyn Felder, Peter Guralnick, Eddie Gorodetsky, Will Bratton, and producer Cheryl Pawelski, plus track-by-track notes, photos, acetates, sheet music, and other artifacts from the Pomus estate.

You Can’t Hip A Square is a front-row seat to the songwriter’s workshop of one of music’s most enduring lyricists, offering a rare look at how timeless songs are born and how many more are still waiting to be discovered.