Girls, Boys, and Women

But to begin, it is useful to differentiate the social experience and function of ‘girl’ from those of both ‘youth’ and from ‘woman’, even while we acknowledge that girls constitute a market category that overlaps with both youth and women. In many contexts, girls constitute a particularised subset of youth, which is nominally gender-neutral but actually usually designates boys: storytelling about youth invariably centres on male experience, and female readers are expected to identify with male protagonists in ways that male readers are not encouraged to do with stories about female characters. Books about boyhood ranging from Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876), and The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling, 1894) to The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger, 1951) and the Harry Potter series (J. K. Rowling, 1997–2007) are held to be classics that will resonate with all readers, while Emma (Jane Austen, 1815), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte, 1847), Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868), Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery, 1908), and The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath, 1963) are characterised as women’s literature and not directed at male readers (many of whom read them anyway, of course!). In the cinematic world, films from 1946’s The Yearling and 1967’s The Graduate to 1986’s Stand by Me and 2014’s Boyhood present coming of age through the lens of white, American masculinity, but have nevertheless been embraced by audiences of all genders and nationalities.

In short; girls’ stories are for girls, but boys’ stories are for everyone. Because this assumption pervades so much of the media created for children, girls learn from an early age to perform a cross-gender identification in order to see themselves reflected in the stories presented to them, while boys are rarely encouraged to identify with anyone not like themselves. Furthermore, as John Berger told us in Ways of Seeing, ‘from earliest childhood [a girl] has been taught to and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity.’⁵ This is not unlike W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, articulated in his monumental Souls of Black Folk as the ‘peculiar sensation [of an African American], this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.’⁶ This kind of learned doubleness also shapes the listening habits of all girls, as they learn to recognise themselves as the subject of men’s songs but also seek to empathise with and model themselves after male narrators and creators. Non-white girls exist at the intersection of both forms of marginalisation, as girls of colour are the least-depicted group in media made for children.⁷ Small wonder, then, that Valerie Walkerdine considers that ‘girls’ fantasies are shaped entirely by the available representations: there are no fantasies that originate with girls, only those projected onto them’.⁸

Similarly, studies of childhood, youth, and adolescence have overwhelmingly presented masculinity as the norm, leading Angela McRobbie to predict in 1980 that ‘questions about girls, sexual relations and femininity will continue to be defused or marginalised in the ghetto of Women’s Studies’.⁹ McRobbie was an important pioneer of studying girlhood within the broader landscape of popular culture studies, which was shaped by masculinist priorities in its early days as a scholarly field. Her lament points also to the often-uneasy position of girls in relation to women; because the term ‘girl’ has often been used to infantilise and trivialise adult women, many feminists and progressive folk prefer to avoid it. In white supremacist economies like the Southern United States at mid-century, for example, ‘girl’ was an acceptable way to refer to those black women who worked in the homes of white women – who expected to be called ‘ladies’ – and age was irrelevant to this distinction. First- and second-wave feminists seeking the dignity of equality with (white) men did not, unsurprisingly, want to align themselves with girls.

And yet, girls – and here I mean quite specifically adolescent and pre-adolescent females – were courageous activists and symbols of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Long before she created hit recordings like ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’, and even before her fellow Atlantan Martin Luther King, Jr. took his first stand for justice, Gladys Knight earned the honour of a lifetime membership in the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) while still a child; aged eight in 1952, she won a national prize singing in the popular radio series Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, in spite of racist contempt for her participation.¹⁰ Five years later, black civil rights activists in Little Rock, Arkansas, carefully chose six teenage girls (and three boys) to desegregate the city’s Central High School. These community leaders reasoned that the necessary discipline of forbearance was already more familiar for girls than boys, as evidenced in the stunning composure of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford in photos of her attempts to enter the school, alone, in the face of a seething mob.¹¹ The four girls killed by murderous violence in the 1963 racist attack on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama became potent symbols of loss.

Girls and Girls’ Voices

So, when I write about girl singers in this chapter, I choose my terms deliberately and advisedly, and with the utmost respect for girls and girlhood. Most singers in girl groups of the 1960s were audibly pubescent and even pre-pubescent, and their songs were explicitly about the experiences and concerns of female adolescence. Girl group music was a popular music phenomenon involving pre-teen and teen girls, especially prevalent in the United States during the early to mid-1960s, but with a significant echo in the 1990s with groups such as Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls. Girl groups are distinct from bands that involve girls as instrumentalists, and most groups comprised three to five members who generally dressed alike and performed simple choreography while they sang about themes of importance to girl culture. For the most part, songwriting credits on girl group records are attributed to professional songwriters, instruments are played by professional session players, and the songs treat such topics as crushes on boys, wedding fantasies, the strictness of parents, and the travails of adolescent romance, through songs like ‘Beechwood 4-5789’ (The Marvelettes, 1962), ‘Chapel of Love’ (The Dixie Cups, 1964), ‘Party Lights’ (Claudine Clark, 1962), and ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ (The Crystals, 1963), amongst many more. Some of the best-known groups include the Shirelles, Ronettes, Chiffons, Little Eva, and Lesley Gore (the latter two associated with the genre although nominally solo artists). The Supremes and Shangri-Las are generally considered girl groups, although their chief popularity came after the main girl group phenomenon had ended, and it must be noted that from the very beginning of their success, the Supremes presented a sophisticated, aspirational version of femininity that aligned more with adulthood than adolescence. Between 1960 and 1964, girl group music dominated Top 40 radio in North America, an unprecedented and unrepeated instance of teenage girls taking centre stage of mainstream popular culture.

The first girl group songs began to circulate in the late 1950s in New York; these recordings all had distinctly different styles, and their popularity was generally limited to African American communities in north-eastern cities of the United States, so that they were not understood as representing a cohesive new style. Rather, these early records drew on musical styles such as doo-wop, jump blues, barbershop, and choral singing, and Tin-Pan-Alley-styled songs. These influences led to such diverse songs as the Chantels’ ‘Maybe’, the Bobbettes ‘Mr. Lee’ (both 1957) and the Shirelles’ ‘I Met Him on a Sunday’ (1958), all successful on the R&B charts. Sonically, these three songs have little in common beyond the use of young female voices; ‘Maybe’ uses a doo-wop harmonic progression, a 6/8 time signature, and a choral sound for backing vocalists to support seventeen-year-old Arlene Smith’s ringing soprano, while ‘Mr. Lee’ is a rollicking twelve-bar blues with honking saxophone solo, walking bass, and precociously growling vocals from twelve-year-old Reather Dixon; and ‘I Met Him on a Sunday’, with its foregrounded handclapping and finger-snaps, simple, sing-song melody expressed by each girl in turn, and refrain of doo-wop syllables punctuating the story of a week-long romance, bears a strong resemblance to the handclapping and jump-rope songs so central to girls’ play at mid-century.¹²

In the soundscape of the late 1950s, these three songs were embraced as part of the North American doo-wop style that was popular amongst urban youth, featuring teenage boys who developed their sound singing a cappella and filling in instrumental lines with nonsense syllables. While groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers could roam their neighbourhoods and experiment with close-harmony singing in alleys and stairwells, however, the members of the Chantels, Shirelles, and Bobbettes had less freedom to wander the streets unchaperoned. Confined as they were by the restrictions of respectability and by their vulnerability to dangerous men, these girls gathered at supervised choir rehearsals, basketball practice, and glee club meetings to create songs that were at first derivative, but would eventually coalesce into a distinct, and distinctly girl-centred, new genre.

The Girl Group Era

In 1960, the Shirelles recorded Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s composition ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’, depicting a girl on the brink of her first sexual encounter, coincidentally in the same year that the US Federal Drug Authority approved the clinical use of the birth control pill for women. This record, which rose to the top position on the Billboard pop charts early the following year, is arguably the true start of the girl group phenomenon. The voices heard were audibly those of teenage girls, and the musical language and vocal style suggested that they were nicely brought up and respectable, as distinct from the womanly, raunchy blues queens who were more familiar discussants of female sexual desire. The Shirelles made it possible for ‘nice’ girls to talk about sex without disrupting society’s preferred view of them as demure.

Songwriters King (b.1942) and Goffin (b.1939) were themselves teenagers, on the brink of a marriage triggered by an unplanned pregnancy, as they both worked tirelessly and enthusiastically to find their places in a newly professionalising rock ’n’ roll music business.¹³ As a songwriting duo, King and Goffin would become important architects of rock ’n’ roll and youth culture in the early 1960s; as with other young songwriters such as Ellie Greenwich (b.1940), Jeff Barry (b.1938), Cynthia Weil (b.1940), Barry Mann (b.1939), Mort Shuman (b.1938), and Neil Sedaka (b.1939), Goffin and King were part of the Brill Building community of songwriters creating the soundtrack to adolescence just as baby boomers came of age. (You can read more about Carole King’s career as a songwriter in Chapter 10, ‘“(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”: Women in Songwriting’.) ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ provided a template for teens to talk about sex and love, and helped girls ask difficult questions of their boyfriends.

The record’s style also set the standard for the girl group sound: a young, untrained voice, with backing vocals suggesting friends in dialogue with the lead singer, against a backing of pop instrumentation (i.e. piano or strings, not guitar) and rock ’n’ roll rhythms and grooves. Over the next few years, the Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr. Postman’ (1961), Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’ (1962), and the Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ (1963) adhered fairly closely to the style, presenting more examples of ‘good’ girls discussing their feelings and fantasies in candid, yet polite, ways. Often, the backing vocalists respond to the lead singer’s statements with encouraging remarks such as ‘go ahead, girl!’ and songs like the Marvelettes’ ‘Too Many Fish in the Sea’ (1964) address themselves explicitly to young women, with spoken phrases such as ‘look here, girls, and take this advice’. This direct, spoken interpellation of girl listeners would be echoed in more explicitly feminist songs such as Laura Lee’s 1971 ‘Women’s Love Rights’ and Madonna’s 1989 ‘Express Yourself.’

Different musical versions of girl identity began to appear as the girl group phenomenon became more established. In 1963, a trio from New York’s Spanish Harlem had spectacular success with ‘Be My Baby’, written for them by Brill Building songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. This song seemed to articulate all of the dramatic intensity and heightened emotional state of adolescence, and the singers provided new models of girlhood for girl listeners to experiment with. The Ronettes, whose meteoric success in 1963–64 included five Top 40 hits and a UK tour with the Rolling Stones as their opening act, were a mixed-race group of two sisters and a cousin; as girls growing up under the watchful eye of their grandmother, they experimented with singing, dance, and fashion to create a striking look. Their distinct group style, provocative though it may have been, provided a measure of safety as they began to explore New York’s club scene as teenagers, in that all three were marked as belonging together. It also helped them garner a following and the confidence to seek performing opportunities; in this way they ultimately came to the attention of producer Phil Spector, who developed his famous ‘wall of sound’ production style around Ronnie Bennett’s (later Ronnie Spector’s) passionate vibrato.¹⁴ Singer and producer went on to marry, and Ronnie discloses the abuse she suffered at his hands, and her difficulties leaving the marriage, in her autobiography Be My Baby.

Legacy of the Girl Groups

The Crystals and the Blossoms, in New York and Los Angeles respectively, were also acts produced by Spector, who recorded such girl group classics as ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Then He Kissed Me’ (both 1963 hits for the Crystals) and ‘He’s a Rebel’, infamously recorded by the Blossoms in Los Angeles but then released as a single by the Crystals in 1962. Spector owned the names of both groups and decided that the Crystals needed a hit, while the Blossoms were more useful to him as a malleable group of session singers who could be paid studio session rates to provide backing vocals for an extraordinary range of artists, from Frank Sinatra to Betty Everett. The Blossoms’ lead singer, Darlene Love, would eventually record ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ with Spector, under her own name, and the Blossoms as a group earned overdue recognition in the 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. By this time, the brilliant, tyrannical Phil Spector was midway through a prison sentence for the murder of Lana Clarkson, a reversal of fortunes that must have provided some sense of closure for the girl groups he produced after his exploitative and controlling treatment during their teen years in the 1960s.

Beginning in 1964, a tough, streetwise version of white girlhood issued from the Shangri-Las, whose songs, such as ‘Leader of the Pack’ (1964), were operatic in scope, narrating anguished tales of teenage death and tragedy. Listening to these records in the privacy and safety of her bedroom, a sheltered suburban girl could experiment with the tough, streetwise stance and seductive manner of the singers she heard, and she could give herself over to the powerful emotions enacted in the music. The navigation of dramatic conflicts between love and repressive social mores in Shangri-Las songs like ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’, ‘Out in the Streets’, and ‘Past, Present and Future’ (all 1965) ensured that these recordings were formative listening for teens such as Debbie Harry, who fronted a semi-ironic girl group called the Stilettos before co-founding the band Blondie in 1974 and, by extension, the New York punk rock scene. In her own career, Harry’s performance of pretty blonde femininity was complex and subversive; by adopting some (but not all) of the conventions of attractiveness for the male gaze, she was able to poke apart easy assumptions about girls and women. Her blonde hair with deliberately visible dark roots foregrounded the artifice of beauty, and in her singing she similarly destabilised the tropes of girlhood, deploying textures ranging from breathy wistfulness in ‘Sunday Girl’ to predatory snarling in ‘One Way or Another’ (both from the 1978 album Parallel Lines).

Harry’s ability to mimic the qualities of a girl’s voice, well into her thirties, indicates both her canny understanding of girlhood as a costume and also her deep familiarity with the girl group records of her teen years.¹⁵ The musical language created by girl groups in the 1960s had created an architecture of girlhood that would also shape the experiences of future generations of girls, as when the 1987 teen film Adventures in Babysitting introduced its central character, an archetype of 1980s suburban, white, American girlhood, via a bedroom lip-synch performance of the twenty-two-year-old song ‘Then He Kissed Me’. In the twenty-first century, the brilliant singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse drew significantly from girl group sound and style, modelling the song structures and even production approaches to her recordings on the work of groups like the Shangri-Las, and encouraging thirteen-year-old Dionne Bromfield to make her recording debut, on Winehouse’s label Lioness, with the Shirelles’ ‘Mama Said’ in 2009.

Girl Singers and Boy Listeners

Male adolescent listeners have been equally enthralled and inspired by girl groups; Brian Wilson was moved to write a song for the Ronettes after hearing ‘Be My Baby’. When Wilson took ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ to his idol Spector, the more seasoned producer rejected it, so Wilson recorded the song in 1964 with his own group. The Beach Boys also recorded a cover version of a girl group song, transforming the Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’ into ‘Then I Kissed Her’ in 1965. While Wilson and his bandmates switched gender pronouns in order to preserve ‘proper’ courtship patterns of active male and passive female, the possibility of adopting a girl’s point of view through a song’s persona did allow some boys and men to experiment with gender fluidity. This was particularly appealing during a time when expectations for boys and men were highly rigid, and writing songs for girls to sing allowed male songwriters to explore vulnerability and tenderness. Motown songwriter Eddie Holland observed that:

As part of the legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team that wrote hits for Motown acts such as the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers, and Marvin Gaye, as well as the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas, Eddie Holland had ample opportunity to explore and express complex emotions through creating songs for male artists to sing: it is significant that he would value writing for girl singers.

Other male groups in the early 1960s found that singing girl group songs was the key to appealing to a female audience and earning massive popularity. Indeed, many of the British Invasion beat bands had their first North American hits with girl group songs; I have already noted that the Beatles recorded and performed numerous examples. What is more, the Fab Four’s famously appealing androgyny derived in no small part from their ability to sing from the subject position of girls, demonstrated in many of their original songs (i.e. ‘It Won’t be Long’ or ‘You’re Gonna Lose that Girl’). Herman’s Hermits achieved international success in 1964 with their cover version of ‘Something Good’, a song that Carole King and Gerry Goffin had originally written as a solo effort for Earl-Jean McCrea of the Cookies earlier that year, and Manfred Mann recorded versions of the Exciters’ ‘Do-Wah-Diddy’, Maxine Brown’s ‘Oh No, Not my Baby’, and the Shirelles’ ‘Sha La La’ in their contribution to the British Invasion of the mid-’60s. The appeal of girl group songs to young men continued, with male punk bands in the 1970s turning to songs like the Shangri-Las’s ‘Give Him a Great Big Kiss’ (Johnny Thunders, 1978) and the Ronettes’ ‘Baby I Love You’ (the Ramones, 1980), and Johnny Marr and Morrissey made their recording debut as the Smiths in 1982 with a rendition of the Cookies’ ‘I Want a Boy for my Birthday’.¹⁷

Conclusion

But the significance of girl groups to boys’ music is not the only, nor even the most important, reason to celebrate them; girl groups gave voice to teenage girls at a crucial juncture in North American history, and their music provided models of racial integration. During the most active and revolutionary years of the Southern civil rights movement, girl group songs, created by teams of songwriters, musicians, producers, and singers from diverse ethnic backgrounds, were heard on Top 40 radio around the United States. Although the Marvelettes’ 1960 ‘Please Mr. Postman’ was issued with a drawing of an empty mailbox on the record cover for fear that a photograph of the black group would make it unmarketable to white listeners, by mid-decade the Supremes were icons of style and amongst the most visible African Americans in the world. Girl groups and their songs were emblematic of girl culture at the very moment when notions of youth identity, race identity, and female identity were in upheaval, and they played a central role in defining girlhood for decades to come.

In 2017, National Public Radio published a superb list of the 150 best albums by women, aptly named ‘Turning the Tables’ as it explicitly sought to overturn the hierarchies of taste that have excluded women’s music making from canonical status. The Turning the Tables essays celebrated music from a wide range of genres and styles, honouring albums by girl groups like the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes, as well as work by Pauline Oliveros, Nina Simone, and Joni Mitchell; this approach allowed the list’s curators to make room for joyful, exuberant pop songs alongside serious, introspective music. Listening to this broader soundscape and honouring the value of girls’ music ensured that the list makers documented a history of girls and women in music that is both restorative and inspiring. In celebrating girls and their musical creations, we can help to build a world where girls and women raise their voices with confidence that they will be heard.