Songfacts®:

• "Twilight Time" is a song with lyrics by songwriter Buck Ram (the seminal force behind The Platters, who were originally named "The Buck Ram Platters") and music by The Three Suns (Morty Nevins, Al Nevins, and Artie Dunn). The Three Suns also originally recorded the song, which hit for them in 1944 at #8. Al Nevins would later go on to become a music producer together with Don Kirshner, forming Aldon music.
• This song was mainly a hit the first time for its timing; in the thick of World War II, it became an anthem for soldiers returning home and starting the American Baby Boom. The Platters' version pushed on to even greater fame.
• Your word for the day is "alliteration," which is when the first letter or syllable of the words in a phrase rhyme: "tea time," "Baby Boomer," "hip hop." "Twilight Time," besides having an alliterative title, also has several alliterative phrases in the lyrics: "colored curtains," "beneath the blue," "surrender the setting sun," among others.
• Besides being The Platters' third #1 chart on the Billboard Hot 100, "Twilight Time" also hit #1 Best Seller, #1 Jockey, and #1 R&B for three weeks steady.
• In Rich Podolsky's book Don Kirshner: The Man with the Golden Ear, we learn that this is the song that really opened the doors for Al Nevins and Don Kirshner. Kirshner would introduce Nevins as "my partner, he wrote 'Twilight Time' for The Platters." Suddenly their calls were magically getting returned.
• Horror author Stephen King wrote a short story titled Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling, a reference to this song's opening line. It appears as the final story in his short story collection Hearts in Atlantis, which was also the basis for a later film. King often weaves songs from this era into his fiction and seems to be a confirmed Brill Building/Doo-Wop/Rockabilly diehard. Music fans would love to be turned onto You Know They Got A Hell Of A Band, a short story from his collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, in which a hapless couple stumble upon a town called "Rock and Roll Heaven" populated and managed by dead rock stars.