By Barbara Groark
However, if you do want to hear the pop music of our own grade school and high school years, sung by the original performers, you need go no further than the your local food store. At least that’s what’s been happening in my neighborhood starting a few months ago. The company that puts out Muzak is no longer using the much-disparaged easy-listening versions of older popular songs – in recent years it’s been Laura Nyro, Billy Joel, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane given the Muzak treatment if I remember correctly, however vaguely. The company now serves up original recordings for shoppers and elevator riders, and the era of current choice is the late fifties and first half of the sixties. I don’t know if the stores are making a mistake.
The other day I was minding my own business picking out some bread or cereal or lettuce or milk, and I almost started doing the Slop as “Carol” by Chuck Berry came on (not “Oh Carol” by Neil Sedaka). I controlled myself, but it was a bit distracting. Then it was the Beatles “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which is not a great sing-along for me, and is kind of noisy if you’re trying to read Nutrition Facts. But then “Just One Look” came on with that opening piano, and I almost (almost) compulsively got into girl-group stance to start singing along. This song is really good for singing along. I tried to remember who the artist was – it kind of sounds like Tina Turner, or at least the Ikettes, but I really couldn’t remember. I wrote down the song name on my shopping list.
Well, thank heavens for YouTube. It turns out that I never knew the woman’s name in the first place, only every word to the song. She was an obscure one-hit wonder of a singer named Doris Troy, and here she is, or was. (Warning: Don’t play this link until you are in a place of relative privacy, with enough dance room for a cha-cha.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvpLeRa4phk
Before YouTube, what did we do to find out important historical information such as this? Well, we had arguments in bars and at family reunions, and when nothing came of that went to the people who are the archivists and historians of our age, such as Jerry Blavat (who currently has a one-hour educational oldies radio show on WXPN-FM in Philly on Saturday evenings at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time if you’re interested [ http://xpn.org/xpn-programs/geator and I think you can listen on the Internet if you are from way out of town.]).
Or go to Dave Marsh’s book The Heart of Rock and Soul: 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: DaCapo Press, 1999). I resorted to this valuable book at one point after hearing a band in a bar playing a pretty nice version of “Some Kind of Wonderful” (not the Drifters song), and my cousin-in-law reminisced about the song as recorded by Grand Funk Railroad. Not blaming him a bit for being a few years younger than I, I pointed out that I thought the original was by another group, a black R&B group whose name wouldn’t come to me. We put the issue aside (no money involved). But I got to the reference section of a bookstore later on and found the above-mentioned song-critique encyclopedia and looked up the title in the index (“Kind of”, not “Kinda”).
Item 594, the Soul Brothers Six. Atlantic, 1967. As it says on page 390, “As for the Soul Brothers Six, who knows what became of them? They seem to have been from Philadelphia; judging from what I can hear, they may have been that town’s answer to Dyke and the Blazers.” [“Bugaloo Down Broadway”]
I was glad to be vindicated, and I sent my cousin-in-law a memo (no email at the time). And I went back to the store and actually bought the book, which has proved valuable since then. And who knew that Dyke and the Blazers even needed an answer?
If you’d like to refresh your memory, here is a version by neither GFR nor SB6, and I think it sounds better than both of them, being by a men’s a cappella group:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHRLrYWPVwo&feature=related
Have you been to any grade school or high school choir concerts lately? It seems that the music teachers and choir directors have been digging into the girl and boy doo-wop and R&B repertoire for the past few years and getting the kids to learn some of our era songs, like those guys in that video. Since one of my nieces is a singer, I’ve heard concert versions of “My Girl” by Mary Wells, “The Lollipop Song” (I forget by whom), as well as “Over the Rainbow,” which by the way has been again recorded by one of today’s singers, and the kids like it all over again. Sounds like they are trying to have fun with the older music, and please some of the parents and grandparents in the audience (and possibly annoy others).
It seem like adult choirs and barbershop quartets are also making a comeback among the really rebellious, and the barbershop guys are incorporating doo-wop and R&B sounds among their older standards. I can vouch for this, since I saw a barbershop singing competition a few years ago, rebelliously, at the Wildwood Convention Center (Wildwood, now advertised as the Doo-Wop Capital of the World). That was fun to hear.
And if we recall our history even more, class, we can see why, for example, communism never really took hold in this country. We already had a voice of the people on the radio every day. While other people had Hitler or Mussolini haranguing them, the Allies had Bing Crosby and Duke Ellington. While other people had Khruschev, we had Elvis. Are music and dancing the opiate of the masses? Or did they help us win wars? Or are they just excellent anger management tools? (All of the above?)
Anyway, there was a time in the 1970s, following the political assassinations, when that old American music was disparaged and apparently voluntarily suppressed. Even the blacks stopped dancing. Something was obviously wrong. Only the gays, like the monks of medieval Europe, seemed to be keeping the knowledge alive till the Renaissance came. Are we seeing that time now?
Here’s another obscure hit that’s made a return; two versions. I give them both because I don’t think Alicia gets the better of Brenda, though she does a good job. And the sound, not great, on the Brenda version is unrestored to digital. [Ibid., page 599, Item 946, Tamla 1964: “…more reminiscent of the pop-soul set pieces Burt Bacharach and Hal David were constructing for Dionne Warwick in those years. Which also marks Holloway as the first really adult Motown artist….”] Again, I would be in a non-public area before opening the links:
Here’s Brenda Holloway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SzeReQR-kw
Here’s Alicia Keys: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfycwdZoseM&feature=related
In other news, from some time in the nineties, one of my sisters and her husband, whose son was touring with the Philadelphia Boys Choir, traveled to South Africa in the period after apartheid ended. Her report when she got back included the kinds of music the South Africans were playing on the radio: old Elvis music and other old American rock and roll and R&B. Who would have guessed this would be their choice? They apparently found the songs to be appropriate accompaniment to the big social upheavals that were, and still are, happening in that country.
OK I have work to do. I can’t be browsing around YouTube all day and night!
But another interesting thing that is happening with this music is that it is really big, and I mean really really big all over again in England nowadays, as confirmed by my hairdresser, whose husband is British and goes back home a few time a year. There are some radio guys there who call themselves Northern Soul who are promoting the old R&B music and creating dances that look like a combination line dance, break dance, and just a mushy shuffle, but anyhow it’s not mosh pit metal. These are the guys dancing in back of Duffy on this song, which has a sound a little like “Sally Go Round the Roses” and a little like “Nowhere to Run Nowhere to Hide.” I give it about a 95. It has a good beat that makes you want to dance, or at least join the background girls in the “yeah, yeahs.” See if you agree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ
And finally, something completely ridiculous. This is the Northern Soul guys again, from England, apparently YouTube-savvy, combining an old Motown song with an unrelated dance clip by the Nicholas Brothers, the old vaudeville-type dance team whose heyday was the 1930s and -40s.
I sense a great disturbance in the Force.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_UudmXWuMg&feature=related
And I still haven’t finished my food shopping.
And Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and grandfathers out there.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
A Defense of June Cleaver
By Barbara Groark
Our early childhoods and grade school years were spent during the 1950s, a time much maligned as white-bread, vanilla, flavorless, and naïve, a time personified by the Leave It to Beaver television show, featuring the Cleaver family (Ward, June, Wally, and Theodore [the Beaver] – why do we remember these things?). The later feminists and student protesters had a field day excoriating the lies, yes all lies, promoted in family shows like Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet.
OK, maybe they could have shown some variety in family life. There seemed to be only one race of people. There was a sameness to the ‘problems’ to be solved by the end of the show. These were the some of the shows that babysat us while our mothers were making dinner or doing laundry. The shows and their themes were considered safe for children.
The ‘bland’ reputation of the fifties has been passed on by people our age to the next generation of high school and college kids. I suppose if you do not delve too deeply you could stay with that opinion. But if we look back as adults at the political and cultural events, let alone TV shows, of that time, the fifties look pretty noisy and lively. Come on - they had Tennessee Williams on Broadway (A Streetcar Named Desire and others), Brown vs. the Board of Education in Arkansas and Rosa Parks in Alabama, the struggles of the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee and the Cold War, Nazi-hunters, crazy artists like Jackson Pollock, movies like Picnic, and rock-and-roll and Elvis. What kind of blandness is that? But when you are seven or eight, you don’t know these things.
Baby boomers of course had to grow up and distance themselves from their own childhoods, as is normal for everyone. I guess there were so many of us and we were so noisy that we were like bulldozers over everything we didn’t like at the same time. Childhood was just not cool, and it was so damned sheltered. Annoying.
However, now we have Nickelodeon and TV Land cable channels, and they give us the opportunity, boys and girls, to reexamine some old opinions. Some time in the last 10 years or so I came across an old Leave it to Beaver show, and I watched the whole thing instead of continuing to ‘surf.’ I came away with an astonishing discovery, now that I had studied literary criticism and read a lot of books of lots of different kinds.
Leave It to Beaver was one of the most sophisticated, subtle portrayals of childhood ever. It was all done from the point of view of the seven-year-old in the family, and when you are seven years old, your Mom is beautiful and wise (most often seen in a shirtwaist dress with pearls and high heels, hair perfect – if she’s doing some work around the house, she is wearing a ruffled apron), your Dad is kind and wise (changing when he gets home from his suit jacket to his cardigan sweater and fixing his pipe) and someone you can talk to anytime and anyplace, and your older brother is just amazing in general. Some of the subtlest interaction is wordless among the adults or older kids, which we can interpret better now that we are adults instead of the same age as the character Beaver.
In one scene of the episode I saw, the Beav was walking to school with one of the boys from his block past the white picket fences (the same environment as our first and second grade readers). From their conversation, it was clear that this boy’s family was not as happy as the Cleavers. From what was said and not said, and from the childlike interpretation by the kids, you could tell that there was maybe alcoholism and maybe beating of wife and kids going on, or at least a lot of yelling. But the sunny disposition and logic of the kids kept all that in the background of the story. Only an adult viewer would guess what may have been really going on. The writing is worthy of Mark Twain possibly.
So I’d like to defend the much-maligned June Cleaver and her family. They are probably not really the dimwitted, small-town ‘fifties’ nonentities as remembered by embarrassed former fans in later decades. They are the idealized products of a sunny seven-year-old’s mind, not complete maybe, but not completely unrealistic as they are.
If you think you need a refresher, here is an article from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Cleaver
Our early childhoods and grade school years were spent during the 1950s, a time much maligned as white-bread, vanilla, flavorless, and naïve, a time personified by the Leave It to Beaver television show, featuring the Cleaver family (Ward, June, Wally, and Theodore [the Beaver] – why do we remember these things?). The later feminists and student protesters had a field day excoriating the lies, yes all lies, promoted in family shows like Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet.
OK, maybe they could have shown some variety in family life. There seemed to be only one race of people. There was a sameness to the ‘problems’ to be solved by the end of the show. These were the some of the shows that babysat us while our mothers were making dinner or doing laundry. The shows and their themes were considered safe for children.
The ‘bland’ reputation of the fifties has been passed on by people our age to the next generation of high school and college kids. I suppose if you do not delve too deeply you could stay with that opinion. But if we look back as adults at the political and cultural events, let alone TV shows, of that time, the fifties look pretty noisy and lively. Come on - they had Tennessee Williams on Broadway (A Streetcar Named Desire and others), Brown vs. the Board of Education in Arkansas and Rosa Parks in Alabama, the struggles of the McCarthy House Un-American Activities Committee and the Cold War, Nazi-hunters, crazy artists like Jackson Pollock, movies like Picnic, and rock-and-roll and Elvis. What kind of blandness is that? But when you are seven or eight, you don’t know these things.
Baby boomers of course had to grow up and distance themselves from their own childhoods, as is normal for everyone. I guess there were so many of us and we were so noisy that we were like bulldozers over everything we didn’t like at the same time. Childhood was just not cool, and it was so damned sheltered. Annoying.
However, now we have Nickelodeon and TV Land cable channels, and they give us the opportunity, boys and girls, to reexamine some old opinions. Some time in the last 10 years or so I came across an old Leave it to Beaver show, and I watched the whole thing instead of continuing to ‘surf.’ I came away with an astonishing discovery, now that I had studied literary criticism and read a lot of books of lots of different kinds.
Leave It to Beaver was one of the most sophisticated, subtle portrayals of childhood ever. It was all done from the point of view of the seven-year-old in the family, and when you are seven years old, your Mom is beautiful and wise (most often seen in a shirtwaist dress with pearls and high heels, hair perfect – if she’s doing some work around the house, she is wearing a ruffled apron), your Dad is kind and wise (changing when he gets home from his suit jacket to his cardigan sweater and fixing his pipe) and someone you can talk to anytime and anyplace, and your older brother is just amazing in general. Some of the subtlest interaction is wordless among the adults or older kids, which we can interpret better now that we are adults instead of the same age as the character Beaver.
In one scene of the episode I saw, the Beav was walking to school with one of the boys from his block past the white picket fences (the same environment as our first and second grade readers). From their conversation, it was clear that this boy’s family was not as happy as the Cleavers. From what was said and not said, and from the childlike interpretation by the kids, you could tell that there was maybe alcoholism and maybe beating of wife and kids going on, or at least a lot of yelling. But the sunny disposition and logic of the kids kept all that in the background of the story. Only an adult viewer would guess what may have been really going on. The writing is worthy of Mark Twain possibly.
So I’d like to defend the much-maligned June Cleaver and her family. They are probably not really the dimwitted, small-town ‘fifties’ nonentities as remembered by embarrassed former fans in later decades. They are the idealized products of a sunny seven-year-old’s mind, not complete maybe, but not completely unrealistic as they are.
If you think you need a refresher, here is an article from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Cleaver
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