Coming to Genre Part Four: Songs in Conversation (the Burkean Jam)

What We Sing About When We Sing About Love

Forgive the long runway for this installment.  We’ll return to the strategies of the earlier parts–the kaleidoscopic, Grammar B-inflected amalgam of biography, cultural history, close reading of lyrics, and glossing of many video clips (with a few personal anecdotes)--after I lay out a number of frames and contexts before the in-flight programming begins.

In earlier installments I put forward a claim that an epideictic purpose drives the pop love song, performing praise (and blame) of prospective, current, and past lovers and also implicitly praising youth’s capacity to feel strong emotions, the full range including love, longing, desire, jealousy, regret, loneliness, or any soul-stirring emotion associated with the trials and tribulations of youth.  I won’t back off that claim.  I will add, though, as many of you might remember me saying in pedagogy sessions, that all rhetoric worthy of analysis incorporates, in a dynamic though often understated balance, all three kinds of rhetoric Aristotle describes, the deliberative pointing to future action, the forensic judging of past action, and the epideictic assigning of praise and blame in the present. The pop song may pulse and dwell in the present, but the past and future poke and prod their way in. 

What, then, do singer-songwriters sing about when they sing about love?  How does the canon of pop love songs function as a kind of mass media scholarly conversation, albeit in non-academic language and familiar and accessible musical idioms?   I call this conversation “scholarly” because most people become experts on love through lived experience (primary sources) and consumption of the cultural conversation about love (secondary sources).

I place singer-songwriters (and those who do one or the other) in the vanguard of maintaining and contributing to this conversation.  They talk to each other as well, sometimes as part of a business (think back to the Brill Building and Motown contexts) and sometimes as part of a creative community (think back to Laurel Canyon, though of course those young artists pursued commercial success through clubs, agents, and music producers as well).  In what follows I will explore a range of these conversations across eras and genres; I will also aim to tease out some parallels between the workings of the popular conversation and the academic research process, extending an earlier parallel I offered about formal schooling and pop culture schooling and apprenticeships.

Field of Enthymemes

“An enthymeme is an argument with a hidden premise. Enthymemes are usually developed from premises that accord with the audience's view of the world and what is taken to be common sense. However, where the general premise of a syllogism is supposed to be true, making the subsequent deduction necessary, the general premise of an enthymeme is merely probable, which leads only to a tentative conclusion.”  From our friends at Wikipedia.

Let’s contemplate the terrain of this conversation about love by considering the driving enthymemes; as noted above, enthymemes include contingent or “merely probable” rather than absolutely true premises—in other words, we can conjure up and take another position—along with unstated “hidden” premises that the enthymeme-maker (enthymemer?) expects the audience to fill in because they already accept them as true.  Many song titles since the 1950’s (and of course before that in Tin Pan Alley and on Broadway stages) include the word “love” and contribute to creating the cultural space of conversation about love, trafficking in “common sense.” That common sense, though, encompasses and invokes disparate views of the world and love’s nature.   You can sing along but still think “but what about this thing that happened to me” or “I heard from my best friend that it’s more like this, really.”

The Beatles sang “She Loves You” (“with a love like that/you know you should be glad”); they also sang “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”  Roxy Music sang “Love Is the Drug,” calling to mind a claim Gorgias made in defending Helen in the “Encomium,” that human beings compelled by love cannot be held responsible for their actions, as love comes from the gods and acts much like a drug or spell.  Elvis Presley sang “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” a take on powerlessness in the face of love.  The Everly Brothers (and later the band Nazareth) sang “Love Hurts.”  Herb Alpert sang Hal David’s words to Burt Bacharach’s melody in “This Guy’s In Love With You” (“Say you’re in love with this guy/Or not I’ll just die,” revised for the Dionne Warwick version to “Say you’re in love and you’ll be my guy/Or not I’ll just die”).  Pat Benatar sang that “Love Is a Battlefield” (“Believe me/Believe me/I can’t tell you why/But I’m trapped by your love/And I’m chained to your side”).  Petula Clark sang of how love transcends nature and natural forces in “My Love” (“My love is warmer than the warmest sunshine,” “my love is deeper than the deepest ocean,” and “there is nothing in this world that can ever change my love”).  Huey Lewis and The News sang “The Power of Love,” a compendium of enthymemes in conversation (“First time you feel it, it might make you sad/Next time you feel it, it might make you mad/But do be glad baby when you've found/ That's the power makes the world go 'round/And it don't take money, don't take fame/Don't need no credit card to ride this train/It's strong and it's sudden, it can be cruel sometimes/But it might just save your life/That’s the power of love”). 

Love has the (limitless, transformative) power, we don’t.  Love determines the quality of life.  Love is a matter of life and death. 

But wait, we have some agency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI844RAJo58 The Supremes and The Temptations together perform “I’m Going to Make You Love Me” around 1968, a song recorded earlier by Dee Dee Warwick (Dionne’s sister—we’ll encounter both later).  I included a link to Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder performing the song in the last installment. 

But wait, our agency has limits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bEdyMvYNNk Bonnie Raitt (daughter of John Raitt, a Broadway musical performer of some repute), introduced by Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, performs “I Can’t Make You Love Me” in 1991.  A pair of Nashville songwriters, Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin, wrote the song, with Reid reporting that the inspiration came from an article he read about a man appearing in court on charges of “getting drunk and shooting at his girlfriend’s car.”  The man told the judge, “I learned, Your Honor, that you can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.”  The man’s experience counts as primary research, Reid’s reading of the article as secondary research, the writing of the song and Raitt’s performance on a popular late night variety show as citation of secondary sources and a contribution to the cultural conversation.

Pedagogy Break: Enthymemes in the Classroom.  PWR lecturers who have joined the community in recent years have heard me talk about the Four R’s in relation to the Big W, specifically Rhetoric, Reading, Research, and Revision in relation to Writing.  In those sessions I’ve contrasted “standard” perspectives on each “R” and “our story” within PWR.  We can think of this contrast as a battle of enthymemes, with the writing teacher valiantly fighting for the premises we believe will support students’ growth as writers while trying to vanquish (or at least expose) premises we believe undermine students’ growth as they reduce the complexity and human potential for exploration, adventure, and joy available through the Four R’s and the Big W.  I count myself a true believer in the enthymemes powering our program curriculum, though I need to remind myself that these cherished, clear-as-day-to-me enthymemes do not stand as absolute truths, however devoutly I commit myself to them.  Committing to our enthymemes requires an act of faith as we strive to “prove” the value of writing as world-building and rhetoric as relationship.

Works Slighted

The Works Cited section of research-based writing just sits there, lumpen and dour.  The alphabetical order and dutiful march of names, titles, and dates flatten out any potential for relationship among the sources.  We might get a glimmer of a life in research evolving if one of the scholars cited has multiple works listed, as we can study the titles and dates of publication to create a story about the scholar’s abiding commitment to an area of study (who has time for that?).  Generally, though, the procession through the alphabet plods along, drumbeat dull.  We can get the same feeling from clumps of sources listed in parenthetical in-text citations, clots of names clogging whatever “flow” the writer’s prose has generated.  (My method in this series offers an alternative to the annotated bibliography, with biographical sketches of many “sources” and many links to their “published works”—I’ll proceed similarly in this final installment.  You can read this entire project as the bibliography for a book I won’t write—maybe in another life.)

What if we develop a pedagogy explicitly encouraging students to approach research as performance?  What would that look like (many of you likely have developed strategies with this goal in mind)?  How could such a model bring life to the conventions of citation and more generally to the integration of sources into research-based writing?  

To begin developing such a model, we might assert a foundational premise that we shall henceforth not simply cite sources—no, we shall “cover” them in a way parallel to how singers cover the songs of others, a creative process that involves selection and then a rhetorical plenitude of choices engaged to craft the performance.  I know little of hip-hop and rap, but I’ve heard the term “sampling” and have a basic sense of what the term means.  What I mean by “research as performance” aims to move beyond sampling, as in a research-based essay a form of sampling likely results from the hunting-and-gathering model of research, with the writer searching for usable bits to include.  

Here I’ll add that my sense of high-quality sampling in hip-hop aims at evoking and enacting a conversation, transcending the rote feel of hunting-and-gathering; in the research context, participation in the conversation requires a fuller engagement with the sources, requiring writers to become as familiar with and fluent in the language of the sources as a singer becomes with the lyrics and phrasing of a song they plan to perform.  This premise could lead to adding to the standard terminology of paraphrasing, quoting, and analyzing sources to put into the foreground the performance element; we harmonize with sources, we sing counterpoint, we engage in call and response, we sing along.  When we quote directly, we can do more than signal the quotation with quotation marks and parenthetical citation; when we gloss, we become part of the choral conversation, sometimes one voice among many, sometimes shining the spotlight on a source warranting a solo, sometimes taking a solo to draw the spotlight to us.

Activity Break—Think about something research-based that you’ve written, whether an article, your dissertation, or an essay for a school assignment.  If you can, go back and read it.  From sentence to sentence, consider how you balance your sense of what the genre “requires” and how you made yourself present or absent in the text, particularly in relation to how you use and engage with sources.  You might consider this as how you balance your commitment to the demands of the academic genre and your commitment to self-expression/adding your voice to the conversation.

Fake It Till You Make It

Wikipedia attributes the origins of “fake books” to one George Goodwin back in 1942.  According to the Wikipedia page on “lead sheets” in a section titled “History,” radio station director Goodwin “released the first Tune-Dex cards. Printing on 3-by-5-inch (7.6 by 12.7 cm) index cards that had the same size as library catalog cards, Goodwin provided lyrics, melody and chord symbols as well as copyright information.”  These cards contained enough essential information to help professional musicians perform passably recognizable versions of hundreds of songs (handy for weddings and other occasions hosting audiences with varied musical tastes, I imagine).  Goodwin’s volumes violated copyright law but became quite popular, giving musicians the essential ingredients for songs from the late 19th century through the late 1950’s.  Flash forward to 1974-75, when musicians at the Berklee School of Music updated the repertory, producing a new fake book that, according to a Berklee faculty member of the time, aimed "to make a book that contained a hipper repertoire, more contemporary repertoire."

We should note another use of fake books in the context of jazz.  More from Wikipedia: while the “lead sheet does not describe the chord voicings, voice leading, bass line, or other aspects of the accompaniment,” which are generated “by an arranger or improvised by the performers,” a “lead sheet is often the only form of written music used by a small jazz ensemble. One or more musicians will play the melody while the rest of the group improvises an appropriate accompaniment based on the chord progression given in the chord symbols, followed by an improvised solo also based on the chord progression. Similarly, a sufficiently skilled harmony player (e.g. a jazz pianist or a jazz guitarist) is able to accompany a singer or perform a song by themselves using only a lead sheet.”  This serves less as fakery and more as scaffolding for invention and exploration.

Thus we see two distinct models, one producing a minimalist facsimile of the song and the other striving for engagement with and interpretation of the song.  Let’s think about the use of sources in research-based writing by way of these two contrasting approaches.  First, we treat every source as a song (a bit of a stretch, I know, but let’s play this out) and proceed from there.

Works Cited as Mixtape and Source-Based Orchestration

Think back to your own coming to consuming pop music.  I’ve shared stories in earlier installments about my childhood memories as well as entering the pop music “conversation” during college and after as a hobbyist singer-songwriter.  You may have dabbled yourself—I can guess with some certainty that you consumed popular music growing up and likely continued to do so through college and into adulthood.  Did you have record collections?  Did you make mixtapes?  When digital technology and streaming services took over, did you adjust how you produced and consumed the soundtrack of your listening life?  I did most of the “research” for this series consulting YouTube, and the soundtrack for my invention activities has been Sirius channels themed to individual artists and genres I’ve written about. 

I’ve acted as curator and commentator throughout the series, compiling a mixtape of sorts, a vast version of my response to the high school assignment I described back in Part One, for which I made a tape of two of my favorite songs at the time including my introductory framing and what then I wouldn’t have known to call a “rhetorical analysis” of the songs’ lyrics, contrasting their renderings of the theme of teenage alienation.  (Thank you again, Mr. Gamache, for the formative experience.)  This mixtape you’re reading/watching/listening to casts a wide net but still puts before you what I deem important enough to include as necessary to telling the story/building the world of my life’s journey of “coming to genre.”

In the context of the RBA, the ten-week journey ideally guides the writer to creating a mixtape of sources, collected in the Works Cited but brought to life (ideally with the interpretive bravado of jazz) in the essay.  In the sprint of the quarter, how often do you feel in the students’ work a recognition of mixtape, of careful selection (curation) and conversational engagement and commentary that turns the “research-based” component of the RBA into an exercise in orchestral improvisation?

Activity Break: Think back again to the arc of your development as a researcher in academic contexts, perhaps to the same text you worked with in the previous activity.  When you read what you wrote, do you hear the mixtape of sources, the strategic purposes that led you to specific choices regarding selection, arrangement, emphasis as you composed?  Instead of horns, strings, woodwinds, and percussion, how did you play and/or conduct each source to provide part of the sound, the music, of the essay?  Did particular background sources serve as the rhythm section, providing the steady beat of historical context?  Did particular argument sources take solo turns, conducted by you to spotlight their necessary contribution to the overall work?  Did particular exhibits or case studies or representative anecdotes have their moments in the spotlight, providing jazz riffs to support the main thematic and argumentative melody?

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony as Oral/Multimodal Presentation of Research

Imagine you attend an academic conference.  The event generating the most buzz, a celebration of legendary contributors to the discipline, has been scheduled for the hotel ballroom to ensure space for all who want to take in the epideictic spectacle (informed by the past and shining a light toward the future).  People sit at tables, the cavernous space humming with anticipation.  The first presenter moves to the podium to speak—this person too warrants hoots and hollers as a prominent voice in the conversation, whether as a peer or acolyte.  The speaker rhapsodizes about the subject of the praise, providing biographical details, personal anecdotes, and encomia about the exemplar’s lasting impact on the profession, introducing a brief video summarizing a laudatory career.  The speaker introduces the subject (or a family member or collaborator if the subject has joined the celestial department of the discipline—if there’s a rhetoric heaven, they must have a hell of a band at the department meeting).  The subject humbly accepts the honor and thanks all who made the career possible.  Then the subject moves to a long table on the stage set up for a panel presentation.  Colleagues have assembled there to read passages from the subject’s work.  The subject reads one of their own contributions that has shaped the field, with colleagues saying amen.

That’s sort of how the rock and roll hall of fame induction ceremony works.  Let’s skip over the exordium and go right to the panel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNdpSl_xSJc “Jolene” as communal conversation, with Dolly Parton (the legendary contributor who wrote the song), Pink, Annie Lennox, Pat Benatar, Rob Halford, Sheryl Crow, and Brandi Carlisle all contributing.  They cross the genre streams to offer tribute to Dolly Parton as exemplar, recognizing through their collaboration and reverence the shared “language” of pop music genres and underlying gratitude for the life they have all chosen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blCEofSxOKI Dolly Parton sings a new original, “Rockin’,” written specifically for her induction ceremony (unusual if not unprecedented), beginning with the observation that she must “earn” her way into the hall.  Let’s consider the bridge made of lyrics she builds between country and rock (note how she defines rock as a form of magic casting a spell, like love, like rhetoric): “I grew up lovin' Elvis and wild man Jerry Lee/Chuck Berry, Little Richard, they all cast a spell on me/Carl Perkins and those blue suede shoes had no place on the farm/But they was better than them brogans I was wearin' around the barn!/With my transistor radio my uncle bought for me/I danced and pranced around the smoky hills of Tennessee/Singing, ‘Don't Be Cruel’‘Great Balls of Fire’ and ‘Be good, Johnny B!’/I was just a child, but I went hog wild for the rhythm and the beat!/I've been rockin', rockin', rockin' since the day I was born/I'll be rockin' 'til the day I'm gone!/I've still got rock and roll down in my country soul/And I'll be rockin' it 'til the cows come home, uh-huh.”  Testimony from the mountaintop about the triumph of youth culture spanning Dolly’s life from Tennessee to Hollywood (and Dollywood), from the roster of rock progenitors transforming her “country soul” via the ubiquitous transistor radio her uncle gave her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PLq0_7k1jk Not the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction (though Roy Orbison is in the hall), but a festschrift in his honor called Black and White Night in 1987.  The backing community for an extended closing version of “Pretty Woman” here: Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, James Burton, Glen D. Hardin, Tom Waits, k.d. lang, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, JD Souther, T Bone Burnett, Steven Soles, and Jennifer Warnes, with Burton and Springsteen putting their guitars in extended conversation and celebration. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jjhWpYs1Rs Also from Black and White Night, Orbison sings “Crying,” with Bonnie Raitt, Jennifer Warnes, and k.d. lang on backing vocals.  When I watch this, I think again about academic conference panels (weird, I know)—generally the source isn’t there with us as we present/perform, but I believe that most of the time we sing back-up to our sources (harmony if we have the confidence) or play in support of the source the way Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen do sitting quietly strumming in the background in this clip, with due humility and respect for what made them possible as artists and performers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Aw3ZnqQrY  One more from Black and White Night, “Only the Lonely,” with Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, and a guy with a beard providing back-up vocals reminiscent of Phil and Don, the Everly Brothers, reenacting a conversation from the early days of the canon. 

Teach (and Learn) Your Culture Well

Okay, let’s take flight, jumping around in time to look at some early Boomers who entered the pop music conversation in the sixties, likely seeing Elvis on television around age 10 or 11 or 12 and hearing folk, early rock, and pop growing up.  Born after the second world war, they also experienced childhood in the shadow of the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, and the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) hearings run by Senator Joseph McCarthy; they experienced the advent of television as a living room fixture displacing radio and the explosion of youth culture parallel to an explosion of advertising, often targeting youth, relentlessly advancing the commodification of youthful desire and the channeling of emotion toward consumption rather than political activism.  They experienced MGM musicals, film noir channeling a deep ambivalence about the seamy underside of polite, middle-class society, and the rebel icons James Dean and Marlon Brando testifying to the emptiness of life in the fifties presided over by former war-hero-general-turned-president Eisenhower.

Cover Girl Singer

Google, aided by AI, offers this about the mid-20th century category of the “girl singer” (lots of passive voice here): “Female singers in big bands were often called ‘girl singers’ regardless of their age. They were considered an essential part of the big band ensemble and were good for business because they provided sex appeal to college boys and GIs. However, they were also given trivializing labels that limited their ability to be taken seriously as musicians.”  Several notable examples from the big band era: Helen Forrest, Kitty Kallen, and Helen Ward. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMaCoxOGXPM Helen Forrest sings “You Made Me Love You” (enthymemes at work) with Harry James and His Music Makers over the opening credits and as the first scene of Private Buckaroo (1942).  The band and Harry James on trumpet get the initial camera time, but we see as the camera moves away that the band provides dance music for a gently swaying swarm of couples.  Helen Forrest sits demurely beside the band before coming to the fore to sing “You made me love you/I didn’t want to do it/I didn’t want to do it.”  Yes, another Helen compelled by love.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk1vz_6CIR0  Sixteen years later Harry James and his band work again with Helen Forrest, introduced as “the girl” by Patti Page on the Big Record Show in 1958.   When James introduces her after the first number, he refers to her as “Miss Helen Forrest.”  Anyhow, television has happened, siphoning content from anywhere it can find it for broadcast to a national viewership.  Instead of dancing couples, we get a chorus line dancing to “Brazilian Sleigh Bells” in the final song of the medley.  The clip looks back to vaudeville and forward to musical variety television shows, a contemporary of the Sullivan show.

As we shift the focus to Linda Ronstadt, keep in mind that she likely watched singers like Helen Forrest while growing up, soaking up different paradigms/role models for her future career.  She notes the formative influence of her childhood listening in these two quotations from interviews: 

“I don't record (any type of genre of music) that I didn't hear in my family's living room by the time I was 10. It just is my rule that I don't break because ... I can't do it authentically ... I really think that you're just hard-wiring (synapses) in your brain up until the age of maybe 12 or 10, and there are certain things you can't learn in an authentic way after that.” 

“If I didn't hear it on the radio, or if my dad wasn't playing it on the piano, or if my brother wasn't playing it on the guitar or singing it in his boys' choir, or my mother and sister weren't practicing a Broadway tune or a Gilbert and Sullivan song, then I can't do it today. It's as simple as that. All of my influences and my authenticity are a direct result of the music played in that Tucson living room.” 

Ronstadt, born in 1946 in Tucson to a prominent Mexican-American Tucson family with German roots, sang locally with siblings as a teenager and moved to LA after one semester at the University of Arizona to pursue a music career, stepping away from formal schooling much like some predecessors we considered in earlier installments.  (When I worked in the writing program at UA, I visited her high school, Catalina, to talk about college writing with the students in English classes taught by Tommy Harper, known as Reverend Harper by his students due to his evangelical fervor about the right ways to read and write about literature; if I’d been more handy, I likely would also have frequented Ronstadt Hardware, the family business in downtown Tucson; if I’d been more criminal, I might have encountered her older brother Peter, who served as chief of police during most of my time in her hometown.) 

Her first hit, recorded with the band the Stone Poneys in 1967, came from Monkee Peter Nesmith, a song called “Different Drum.” Oddly, none of the band members played on the hit recording, with studio musicians doing the work (evidence of how the “factory” model we saw at Motown influenced how producers assembled songs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA5scf8RpCI First, a version by Michael Nesmith from his 1972 album, post-Monkees, though he wrote the song pre-Monkees.  Note the country instrumentation and country vocal style.  Also note the gender dynamics, with a man singing to a woman about his need for freedom from the reins of a relationship: “So, don't get me wrong, it's not that I knock it/It's just that I am not in the market/For a girl who wants to love only me.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9qsDgA1q8Y The Linda Ronstadt/Stone Poneys version (again, without any Ponies playing).  Still a country feel, but fuller orchestration with some strings and keyboards, and a vocal that centers Ronstadt’s already-gymnastic range and register.  She changes a few words to talk about a boy who wants to love only her.  She doesn’t change “I’m not saying you ain’t pretty,” an early indicator that Ronstadt would sometimes push against the gender roles and vocabulary she learned about in the songs she heard growing up in Tucson (and sometimes not push against but play along with).  She sings “So, goodbye, I'll be leavin'/I see no sense in this cryin' and grievin'/We'll both live a lot longer if you live without me.”  Here the woman ends the relationship, leaving behind a crying boy and matter-of-factly if not cavalierly providing a wry take on the life-and-death stakes of young love with the reference to living a lot longer apart than together.  More examples later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGZznJXY1Xc And just for the sake of full documentation, a video version of Ronstadt with the Poneys and a guest jazz harpist, Gloria Tracy.  A very strange clip with instrumentation choices that seem wrong for the song.  But the voice, the voice, rings true.

After leaving the Poneys behind, Ronstadt had Glenn Frey and Don Henley, founding members and main songwriters of the not-yet-formed Eagles, as members of her backing band.  She released a series of highly successful albums and singles through the seventies, most of them covers putting into practice what she states above: she often recorded songs she heard growing up in her Tucson home, listening to the radio, listening to her father play piano, listening to her mother and sister practice show tunes, listening to her brother play the guitar.  In sum, she parlayed her home culture of songs from many genres into lasting fame, fortune, and cultural impact (we can think of her covers of contemporary songs as signs of savvy marketing as well as Ronstadt’s collegial attitude toward singer-songwriters she met as part of the LA scene).  Let’s consider the range of her cover catalog.

1970-72—the Goffin-King 1961 hardy perennial we encountered before, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”; “I Fall to Pieces,” a Cochran-Howard song recorded by Patsy Cline in 1961; Gary White’s “Long, Long Time”; and Jackson Browne’s “Rock Me on the Water,” which he recorded for his debut album the following year.  We see very early a pattern, with Ronstadt’s choice of source material including songs from her formative years listening to the radio at home and songs she “read” in the graduate school of the music business in LA or heard hanging out with friends/peers at venues like The Troubadour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG-8uZg2uV0  Patsy Cline on The Glenn Reeves Show in 1963 singing “I Fall to Pieces.”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIC6cGtPUEM  Linda Ronstadt’s cover on a 1971 album.  Certainly a dramatic counterpoint to the blithe moving-on of “Different Drum”: “You tell me to find someone else to love/Someone who’ll love me too (love me too)/The way you used to do (used to do)/But each time I go out with someone new/You walk by and I fall to pieces.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYU_HqyAW3M Linda Ronstadt on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970 performing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” Can’t tell if she’s singing live, though the music and backing vocals all sound pre-recorded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBq3eFmQJUU A live performance of Gary White’s “Long, Long Time” with Bobby Darin on acoustic guitar and an off-screen orchestra you can glimpse toward the end.  The odd thing about this clip: the surrounding audience doesn’t seem to know what to make of the performance—perhaps the camera makes them uncomfortable, perhaps the director instructed them to act like mannequins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1jkXPrMFvc A Midnight Special clip, again live, of the same song.  The more conventional audience placement makes this less awkward, but note the consistency of Ronstadt’s engagement with the song and her vocal control.  The lyric explores the full lovelorn mode of many Ronstadt covers: “Wait for the day/you'll go away/Knowing that you warned me/Of the price I'd have to pay/And life's full of flaws/Who knows the cause?/Living in the memory of a love that never was/'Cause I've done everything I know/To try and change your mind/And I think I'm gonna miss you/For a long long time."

1973-74—“Love Has No Pride” by Eric Kaz and Libby Titus, also recorded by Bonnie Raitt and Crosby, Stills, and Nash; “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” by Reynolds and Rhodes first recorded by Wanda Jackson in 1956; “You’re No Good” by Clint Ballard Jr. first recorded by Dee Dee Warwick in 1963.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ihe-CQsWM Wanda Jackson’s recording of “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” from 1956.  Think of her as in contemporary conversation with Patsy Cline, though describing a different kind of relationship pain: “You can't buy my love with money/'Cause I ain't never was that kind/Silver threads and golden needles/Cannot mend this heart of mine.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flLoj5qxURw Linda Ronstadt, introduced by Glenn Frey as the band’s “favorite girl singer,” joins the Eagles for a live performance of “Silver Threads.”  Think about the genre moves from country to country folk to country rock as evidenced by instrumentation, vocals, and overall vibe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMi_BCcpWRs Original recording by Dee Dee Warwick of “You’re No Good” from 1963.  Listen for the horns, the percussion, and the backing vocals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMi_BCcpWRs Back to the wonderful Midnight Special archive for this clip of “You’re No Good” from 1973, with Sherlie Matthews and Clydie King singing back-up.  The band includes some essential session musicians from the seventies.

1975-76—“When Will I Be Loved?” by Phil Everly first recorded by the Everly Brothers in 1960; “Heat Wave” by Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland first recorded by Martha and the Vandellas in 1963; “Tracks of My Tears” by Smokey Robinson, Tarplin, and Moore (which we encountered earlier) first recorded by The Miracles in 1965; “That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison first recorded by Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes in 1956 and then by Buddy Holly and the Crickets in 1957.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H0o50WEKH8 Martha and the Vandellas lip-synching to a recording of “Heat Wave,” as was typical in the sixties as we’ve seen in many clips from the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQPpPEmzYEY Linda Ronstadt on Midnight Special in 1975, with the bass player and lead guitarist doing their Vandella thing on the back-up vocals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI0ll5SexV0 Dick Clark introduces the Everly Brothers in 1960 to perform “When Will I Be Loved?”  Remember that Paul Simon said he and Art Garfunkel wanted to emulate Phil and Don.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iD_lqzijUQ Same Midnight Special set, with the bass player and lead guitarist doing their best Phil and Don Everly to back up Linda’s lead vocal on “When Will I Be Loved?”.  The performance moves to a cover of a Lowell George song recorded by him and his band Little Feat, “Willin’.”  Note that Ronstadt changed some words for gender reasons in the first song but doesn’t change any words to adjust for gender in the second, in which she salutes pretty “Dallas Alice” and drives “every kind of rig that’s ever been made.”  I suspect that she loved that the lyric mentions Tucson and some other lesser-known southwest towns: “And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari/Tehachapi to Tonopah/Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made/Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed.”

1977-79—“Blue Bayou” by Roy Orbison and Joe Melson first recorded by Orbison in 1963; “It’s So Easy” by Buddy Holly and Norman Petty first recorded (but not a hit) by Holly and the Crickets in 1958; “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” by Warren Zevon first recorded by Zevon in 1976; “Tumbling Dice” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones first recorded by the Stones in 1972; “Back in the U.S.A.” written and recorded by Chuck Berry in 1959; “Ooh Baby Baby” by Smokey Robinson and Pete Moore recorded by The Miracles in 1965; “Love Me Tender” sung to a 19th century melody by Elvis Presley in 1956; “Just One Look” by Doris Troy and Gregory Carroll first recorded by Doris Troy in 1963: “Allison” by Elvis Costello first recorded by Costello in 1977.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiMl4yX1JiA Roy Orbison performs “Blue Bayou” in 1973 with a full orchestra and some fifties-style background singers.  He delivers verses in a lower register and then soars higher for the choruses, hinting at his legendary multi-octave range.  The original recording features female background singers and a similar shift into the upper register for the chorus.  He doesn’t go ultra-high at the end as Ronstadt’s cover does, perhaps her homage to what Orbison could do vocally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp9G0zkorio  Linda Ronstadt performs “Blue Bayou” in 1977.  Note the similar register climb from verse to chorus.  One back-up singer provides harmony rather than background.  Simpler orchestration overall in the country rock genre.  And, oh, that high note at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23y2Cz40zs4  Dick Clark introduces Chuck Berry to perform “Back in the USA” on the Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show in 1959.  He must be lip-synching to a recorded track, though he seems to strum his guitar (not plugged into anything).  The duck walk is authentic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKI87_GbTgU Linda Ronstadt performs “Back in the USA” on an HBO special in 1980 with a full rock band, quite a distance from the country rock of most of her earlier hits and covers.  We can hear her vocal as homage to Berry, and one of the guitarists gives the duck walk a go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHoDdQqesfY Dick Clark (yes, he was everywhere, and he always looked the same) introduces an early “music video” of Doris Troy performing “Just One Look” in 1963.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsEwBzfdMnk Linda Ronstadt covers “Just One Look” in the HBO special in 1980, with back-up vocals and production reminiscent of Motown hits of the sixties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hkUpvUMmE Live performance of “Tumbling Dice” by the Rolling Stones in 1972.  So young, though they’d already been at it for ten years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I7GkHy5iOA “Girl singer” does her take on “bad boy” Mick: “Now all you women are low-down gamblers/Cheating like I don't know how/Baby I go crazy/There's fever in the funkhouse now/Well this low-down bitching/Got my poor feet a-itching/Can't you see the deuce is still wild/Baby get it straight/You got to roll me/And call me the tumbling dice.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehYvseT27c4 Warren Zevon singing “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” on his album in 1976.  Zevon carved out a niche as a long-suffering victim of gender battles: “Well, I met a girl in West Hollywood/Now I ain't naming names/Well, she really worked me over good/Just like Jesse James/Yes, she really worked me over good/She was a credit to her gender/Put me through some changes, Lord/Sort of like a Waring blender.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EL-lJQ2DHQ Linda Ronstadt performs the song in 1977, just after the original release, likely boosting attention to Zevon’s work.  She switches girls to boys (both versions have Jesse James and the Waring blender) and has one of the boys implore her “please don’t hurt me, Mama,” reversing Zevon imploring a woman he meets not to hurt him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnS_5JY0LAQ Elvis Costello performs “Alison” at the Rock Palast in Germany in 1983, a few years beyond his “angry young man” New Wave phase that kicked off his career when he first recorded the song in 1977 for the album My Aim Is True.  This early ballad reveals he was always a crooner deep inside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAHktlvoZEE Linda Ronstadt covers “Alison” by Elvis Costello, changing some lyrics for gender reasons.  “I only know it isn’t mine” becomes “I only hope he isn’t mine,” recasting Alison as a female rival rather than a former lover.

That’s just the seventies, and that’s not all of Ronstadt’s covers.  I’ve gone on at this length to provide a case study of pop music conversation.  We can think of Ronstadt’s career as her dissertation on pop music, published piecemeal via singles and albums (chapters of various lengths) and via televised and live performances (pop culture conference presentations).  She chooses her sources and joins the conversation, citing, paraphrasing, and quoting directly while also literally adding her own voice.

Nyro Worship

What can I write about the distinctiveness of Laura Nyro as both singer and songwriter?  I’ll give it a try.  Born Laura Nigro in 1947 in the Bronx (her first name inspired by her piano tuner and jazz trumpeter father’s appreciation for the title theme of Otto Preminger’s 1944 noir classic Laura), she taught herself piano and started writing songs at eight, listening to Leontyne Price, Nina Simone, Judy Garland, and Billie Holliday along with classical composers such as Debussy and Ravel.  She wrote an early version of a later hit “Eli’s Coming” in junior high school to prove the value of rock music to a music teacher.  She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan but, arriving at artistic maturity young, did not attend college, instead writing and recording her first album and selling her first songs in her late teens, notably “And When I Die” to Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1966 at the age of 19 (shades of Carole King a half dozen years earlier).  Nyro moved to the west coast to appear at the hungry i in San Francisco, played the Monterey Pop Festival, and signed with David Geffen (subject of Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” ventriloquizing the travails of “stoking the star maker machinery behind the popular song”), making her most popular albums in 1968 and 1969 on the cusp of the emergence of the singer-songwriter as a powerful organizing category in popular music.

Just ahead of the tsunami of singer-songwriters, Nyro in the late sixties had notable success through other artists’ recordings of her songs: The Fifth Dimension had hits with five Nyro compositions, including “Blowing Away,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Sweet Blindness,” and “Save the Country”; Blood, Sweat, & Tears and Peter, Paul, and Mary both recorded “And When I Die”; Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson both recorded “Eli’s Coming,” the song drafted in junior high; Barbra Streisand and Linda Ronstadt, among others, recorded “Stoney End,” though Streisand said in an interview that she wasn’t ever sure what the song was about.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raxswPy0bW4 Video of Nyro at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 singing “Wedding Bell Blues” (partial performance) and “Poverty Train.”  Nyro certainly writes her share of love songs (the narrating persona of “Wedding Bell Blues” comes as close to adhering to genre conventions as any Nyro persona), but she always engaged with social issues, though from a particular perspective often evoking lived experience or portraying convincingly a character’s perspective: “Oh baby, it looks good and dirty, them shiny lights glow/A million night tramps, tricks and tracks will come and go/You're starvin' today/But who cares anyway/Baby, it feels like I'm dyin' now/I swear there's something better than/Getting off on sweet cocaine/It feels so good/It feels so good/Gettin' off the poverty train.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAiNulQnNEw  Bobby Darin (born Walden Robert Cassotto in East Harlem in 1936, he wrote songs as an unknown striver with Don Kirshner in the Brill Building in the mid-fifties, then had major hits with “Splish Splash,” “Mack the Knife,” and “Beyond the Sea” in his twenties) introduces Laura Nyro on the Kraft Music Hall in 1969 in what he states is her first television appearance.  He begins by reading some lyrics from “And When I Die,” quite unusual for the time on a musical variety show and likely mystifying to the viewers.  She first sings “He’s a Runner” with the off-camera orchestra (Lordy, that voice)—note the enthymemes about love in the lyrics: “woman ain't be born/who can make him stay/woman get away while you can” and “Oh why, oh why did you/leave me and run off with tomorrow?/now I 'm in chains till I die.”  She follows with “Save the Country” to her own piano accompaniment.  Note the change in affect when she starts to play piano, which gives her more control over the pacing and mood.  That supple earth-shaker of a voice still pierces; what comes across strongly, to me at least, is her joy.  When singing with the orchestra, she must attend to them, to their tempo—not when she is the orchestra, the choir, the conductor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX5AanHQS1g Album recording of “Eli’s Coming,” providing an example of a full production of a Laura Nyro song, featuring her soaring vocal and rich aural context from the background singers and orchestra.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTNjX7l7-go Laura Nyro’s recording of Goffin-King’s “Up on the Roof.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mg9vkeXCkE Sara Bareilles sings “Stoney End” to honor Laura Nyro posthumously at her induction ceremony at the Rock Hall of Fame in 2012.  No complaints about the version, but I haven’t heard a singer who can match Laura Nyro’s vocal depth and power when she sings her own songs.

When Laura Met Patti

In 1970 new LaBelle manager Vicki Wickham introduced Laura Nyro to Patti LaBelle, by then a veteran performer with hits as a member of The Blue Belles, a singing group made up of members of groups formed in Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey in the fifties.  Wickham probably didn’t expect the introduction to lead to a 1971 album of covers, Gonna Take a Miracle, featuring Nyro, LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash (the other LaBelle members—Cindy Birdsong had left The Blue Belles to join The Supremes, replacing Florence Ballard).  The album finds its inspiration in songs Nyro grew up with; I wonder what led to the collaboration, though I guess, from a distance and not having read any exhaustive Nyro biographies, that Nyro’s meteoric rise as songwriter and singer of her own songs led her to a need for respite and refuge in the songs of her youth, which had likely inspired the work that brought her fame (and fame’s attendant pressures). The full song list of the album: “I Met Him on a Sunday” by The Shirelles; “The Bells” co-written by Marvin Gaye; “Monkey Time/Dancing in the Street” co-written by Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield; “Desiree”; “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” written by Smokey Robinson; “Spanish Harlem” by Lieber and Spector; “Jimmy Mack” by Holland-Dozier-Holland; “The Wind”; “Nowhere to Run” by Holland-Dozier-Holland; and “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0D_qkha5wU The Shirelles recording of “I Met Him on a Monday” from 1958, a few years before their number one hit version of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb0Hz1xwR50 “I Met Him on a Monday” performed by Nyro and LaBelle.  Note the “sitting-on-the-stoop” or “standing-on-the-corner” vibe of most of the performance, with the music coming in toward the end (mostly piano).  I find this general strategy consistent across the album, with Nyro, by turns playful or plangently earnest, doing more than homage—she pushes the original genre boundaries into unexpected musical territory, perhaps the territory the song opened to her when she began writing songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmM1zdepbzo The Originals’ original recording of Marvin Gaye’s (co-writer) “The Bells,” following the Motown ballad form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKAII-6ZRXk Laura Nyro’s solo performance with piano from 1972.  You can listen to the version with LaBelle for a different vocal texture, but this solo version shows again what Nyro (akin to Carole King) can accomplish alone with the piano.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7F2sJjoJP8 Ben E. King and The Drifters perform “Spanish Harlem” in 1960, produced by Phil Spector, generally credited with developing the “wall of sound” production strategy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWVb5-LtgRY Laura Nyro and LaBelle do the cover version.  The “wall of sound” in this case comes from the layered vocals along with the orchestration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Mxtdg752Q The Royalettes lip-synching to “Gonna Take a Miracle” in 1965.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wKyvbmb0lg The album title song from Laura Nyro and LaBelle, heightening the “soul” quotient in the song, with one component the conversation among the singers.

We can think of this cover anthology as a kind of performed bibliography of influences, a kind of engaged scholarship parallel to Ronstadt’s extended cover work through the seventies and beyond.  Both singers directly engage their forebears, working collaboratively with other members of the singing/songwriting community (LaBelle for Nyro, the evolving set of musicians and back-up singers for Ronstadt) to sing their gratitude and praise. 

I expect that we all hear pop songs differently—I can comment on how I hear (and feel) the songs I’ve included in this saga, but we don’t hear the same things.  I venture the same holds for how we engage with scholarly sources in our fields—we may agree that someone warrants attention, but we don’t read that someone in exactly the same way.  More exactly, we create our own version of that someone to fit into our understanding of the discipline—that happens when we’re ready, not before, when we’ve done the prep work required for someone to make sense in the world of words we’ve built.  Perhaps I go too far here, but when we report that a text changed our understanding of the field or the issue, we implicitly share that we’d prepared ourselves, through reading and conversation, to change.

Pop Liturgy

I don’t follow strict chronology in this installment (I’ll watch anything with time travel as a plot element), so we now travel back a few years to some essential singers born pre-Boom, sharing birth years with our NYC/Brill Building friends Carole King, Paul Simon, and Neil Diamond.

Dionne Warwick, born Marie Dionne Warrick in 1940 New Jersey, grew up in an accomplished musical family.  Her mother managed The Drinkard Singers, a family gospel group, which provided young Dionne with early performance experience.  Her maternal aunt Cissy Houston had a long career in soul and gospel (and Cissy’s daughter Whitney Houston, Dionne’s first cousin, became a pop music superstar).  Her sister Dee Dee Warwick we encountered earlier as the original singer of “You’re No Good,” in 1963, later covered by Linda Ronstadt.  So, Dionne had a form of home-schooling from her mother and maternal relatives that included public performance and touring along with church-schooling singing in a Baptist gospel setting.  After high school in East Orange she attended the Hartt College of Music at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, supplementing her home music languages with more formal schooling.  Her experience with The Drinkard Singers and the spinoff groups The Gospelaires and The Sweet Inspirations led to work singing back-up for a range of singers including Ben E. King (earlier we heard him sing “Spanish Harlem”) and Dinah Washington.

Then she met Burt Bacharach at a recording session for his song “Mexican Divorce.”  He immediately noticed both her talent and range as a singer and her formal musical training (akin to his own formal schooling).  He hired her at first to sing demos of his songs; when the president of Scepter Records, Florence Greenberg, heard Warwick sing a demo for a song intended for The Shirelles (think back to Carole King’s demo for the same group), she told Bacharach to forget the song and focus on advancing the singer’s career.  He did.  These hit songs that helped define sixties pop music quickly followed, all written by Bacharach-David and sung by Warwick: “Don’t Make Me Over,” “Make It Easy on Yourself,” “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and “Say a Little Prayer.”

Aretha Franklin, born in Memphis in 1942 but raised in Detroit from the age of five, also grew up with music, singing gospel in her father’s church (her parents divorced when she was a child, and her mother passed away when Aretha was only ten).  She taught herself to play the piano and dropped out of high school as a teenager, already touring with her father’s gospel music caravans from the age of twelve.  She recorded several gospel albums as a teenager and through her father connected to such figures as James Cleveland, the King of Gospel Music, and in the secular realm Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, and Marvin Gaye.  At eighteen she told her father that she wanted to pursue a pop music career, like Sam Cooke.  As her manager, he arranged for her to sign with Columbia Records, considering the Detroit-based Motown label Tamla too small for his daughter’s dreams.  Aretha quickly was dubbed the “Queen of Soul” by Chicago radio personality Pervis Spann—her career took off.  Leaving Columbia for Atlantic Records led to producer Jerry Wexler, who wanted to infuse her recordings with her gospel roots, turning rhythm and blues into a distinctive genre Franklin came to define and embody.

Listen to these two versions of “Say a Little Prayer” from Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin for a sense of the pop music genre as developed by Bacharach-David and performed by Warwick and the soul genre brought to the forefront of pop culture by Franklin.  I hear these as a real-time conversation aired on radio back in the sixties. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kafVkPxjLYg “Say a Little Prayer” sung by Dionne Warwick in 1967.  The montage of photographs offers a sense of the times and of Warwick’s stage presence as well as how she was packaged for the mass market.  I also appreciate the shots of her with Bacharach and the shots of recording sessions that give a feel for the production side of things.  Listen to the musical arrangement, the use of various instruments building an aural structure for the lead vocal, and the relationship between that vocal and the back-up vocals. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ifw8JhDBvs  “Say a Little Prayer” from Aretha Franklin in 1970.  Let’s go to church.  We don’t get to see the background singers in this clip, but for me what galvanizes in this rendition is the call-and-response feel of the lead and backing vocals as well as what I’ll call the rapture of the performance.  “Forever (forever)” lifts the song heavenward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1wFX1TPW6E Another version from Franklin, this one from 1974 on BBC Soul, with background singers visible.  The tempo seems a bit slower, but the rapture remains intact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raEbrKPBoyQ “Say a Little Prayer” from My Best Friend’s Wedding.  Here I begin a subplot for this installment, illustrating what I’ll call “songs in circulation,” which occurs when a song becomes so much a part of popular culture that it erupts in other venues, in this case a pre-wedding meal at a chain restaurant.  Sure, we have to suspend disbelief to enjoy this; the filmmaker expects us to do just that, to accept that everyone at the lunch, starting with Rupert Everett as the gay friend pretending to be Julia Roberts’s fiancé and extending to the entire wedding party, knows the song’s lyrics and melody.  Where the music comes from, Lord only knows.

Whisper a Little Prayer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y335E8mfBAU The 5 Royales perform the 1957 original recording of “Dedicated to the One I Love,” written by their guitarist Lowman Pauling.  Hear the doo-wop influence on the vocal arrangement as well as the guitar licks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGtlxVjZ-fA The Shirelles cover the song a few years later, with less guitar and less doo-wop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUr5_QVPCAI The Mamas and the Papas do their hit cover on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967 (I think the photo montage comes from the person who posted the clip, not the network footage), beginning with Michelle Phillips’s ethereal opening vocal and moving to the four voices and a heavy reliance on piano and percussion rather than guitar.  Contrast the booming “whisper a little prayer for me, my baby” with the earnest, near-plaintive tone of “I say a little prayer for you.”  One a declarative exhortation to future action, the other a delicate promise of everyday devotion.

Sister Whoopi Explains It All to You

Let’s consider more songs in circulation.  The 1992 film Sister Act, starring Whoopi Goldberg as a Las Vegas club singer named Dolores who must assume the identity of Sister Mary Clarence to hide from her mob boss boyfriend, incorporates and sometimes revises pop music hits, turning them toward worship and love of a deity rather than worship of emotion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9Qy9EXaOo0  First, Peggy March performs “I Will Follow Him” in 1963.  The “him” described is an earthly being.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPpd-6X3tEo The nuns have a go at it in the film, beginning the song as a hymn (the Pope watches from the balcony, after all), but then Whoopi/Dolores vaults into pop.  The Pope bops along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1M5eEJeT38 Mary Wells of Motown lip-synchs to “My Guy” on an early sixties episode of Shindig!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=girW7nTNnMQ “My Guy” becomes “My God,” beginning with a short opening dialogue set in Jerusalem.

While we’re on the subject of celestial beings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jwzp7eSfi0 On The Ed Sullivan Show in 1971, The Temptations sing a Whitfield-Strong song, “Just My Imagination,” with these lyrics as the bridge: “Every night on my knees I pray/’Dear Lord, hear my plea/Don’t ever let another take her love from me/Or I will surely die’/(Her love is) heavenly/When her arms enfold me/I hear a tender rhapsody/But in reality/She doesn’t even know me.” Note the life and death stakes when love is involved; in this case, the singer needs heavenly intervention.

Natural Women: Aretha Franklin, Carole King, and Mother Time

If we consider the pop music of the sixties as dominated by two songwriting teams, Bacharach-David and Goffin-King (with all due respect to Holland-Dozier-Holland and Strong-Whitfield as well as independent operators such as Jimmy Webb and Johnny Rivers), we can also posit that the singers wanting to join the pop culture conversation about love by necessity had to engage with those towering “sources.”  Just above we heard the Queen of Soul converse with Bacharach-David.  Below she makes a Goffin-King song her own (as we move through versions of the song from the late sixties to 2015, note how the song becomes a song in cultural circulation, accruing meaning and emotional weight).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOCHEmbCDr8 From the famous BBC performance in 1971, Carole King introduces “Natural Woman” by noting that Aretha Franklin already made the song a hit in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9nSU2hAqK4 Aretha Franklin probably lip-synching “Natural Woman” on one of the many pop music shows of the sixties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfusSj5VnN4 From a VH1 “Divas” special in 1998, we get to hear six (count ‘em, six) divas in conversation: Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Shania Twain, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, and Mariah Carey, representing a range of pop music genres but all fluent in “Natural Woman.”  A fascinating cultural artifact that speaks to the industry of popular music and how all of the women coming together for the communal effort express themselves as artists and get packaged and presented as commodities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEb9Sb6Ge8 In 2015 at the Kennedy Center Honors, Aretha Franklin makes everybody (including President Barack Obama) cry.  Watching this clip I feel the accumulative power of more than a half-century of musical genius, more than fifty years each from Carole King and Aretha Franklin.  Remember that they’re each other’s contemporaries, both born in the early 1940’s.  They’ve been aware of each other since at least the sixties, when Franklin covered the Goffin-King song before King released Tapestry.  They’d performed the song together at least once in 1998, in the clip above with the younger singers.  That’s one dimension—watch the play of emotions from King, from when Franklin appears and sits at the piano (a nod to how King performed as a solo act) to when she leaves the piano to walk toward the audience, shedding her fur coat and letting it drop to the floor, sharing the space with the backing vocalists but clearly the focus of the performance.  Note King singing along with certain phrases. 

Aside from personal and pop music history, we can imagine what runs through President Obama’s mind as he watches from the presidential box where he sits with Michelle Obama.  He likely knows that Franklin as a young woman “toured” with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, singing at events supporting his movement.  He likely knows Franklin sang at Dr. King’s funeral in 1968.  He might think about the decades from those events to his election in 2008 as the first African-American president of the United States—Franklin has witnessed, participated in, and helped shape that history.  Who wouldn’t cry?  One last observation: I think of this song as engaging with a secular theme (romantic love) with a spiritual sensibility.  Love here, in both the Franklin and King versions, transcends everyday life and material conditions, moving us into a realm in which love can “make me feel so alive,” reclaiming the “soul” that “was in the lost and found.”

Dusty Covers

Let’s cross the pond, shall we?  Dusty Springfield, born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien in West Hampstead, London in 1939, recorded songs written by a wide range of familiar sources including Bacharach-David and Goffin-King.  Similar to Linda Ronstadt, she grew up in a family that valued music; her second professional group, the Springfields, included her brother Dion (professional name Tom Springfield).  Also like Ronstadt, she had a hit with “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” early in her career.  A final area of common ground: both Ronstadt and Springfield developed multiple personas through their song choices, in some instances conforming to gender expectations and stereotypes of the time, in others contesting the boundaries.  First Dusty the lovelorn ingenue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGZW7F72hz0 Dusty Springfield lip-synchs to “I Only Want to Be With You” in 1964 on British television.  She starts the song behind the wheel of the prop car, driving the lounging boy around; then we get an odd moment of him leaving the car and in a gesture toward chivalry helping her put on her coat.  A sixties vignette that relies on enthymemes about gender and relationships.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NARXWAleUb4 In a more dramatic mode, Springfield sings “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” in 1966.  The music comes from a 1965 Italian song by Pino Donaggio and Vito Pallavicini titled, when translated from the Italian, “I, Who Can’t Live Without You.” The version in English, with the lyric by producer Vicki Wickham and her friend Simon Napier-Bell, focuses on having lost love and yearning for the love to return, an evocation of the masochism bubbling through so many pop love songs (“Believe me/believe me/I can’t help but love you”).  Wikipedia reports that Springfield, dissatisfied with the acoustics in the studio, sang in a stairwell instead, doing 47 takes before she liked her vocal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUjeR01wnU Lesley Gore (born Lesley Sue Goldstein in New York in 1946) recorded her breakthrough songs in high school, produced by Quincy Jones, then attended Sarah Lawrence and graduated with a degree in English; she appeared on the television series Batman as Pussycat in 1967.  This clip from 1964 features live singing (and a couple of grins that seem in counterpoint to the defiant lyrics); John Madara and David White wrote this anthem, while Gore wrote her own songs later and also collaborated with others.  “It’s My Party” and “Judy’s Turn to Cry” stand in contrast to “You Don’t Own Me” in terms of gender and relationships, with young Lesley pining over Johnny on her birthday and later victorious when Johnny jilts Judy and returns to her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTQfyY48HRs I can’t find a live performance of this cover.  Springfield sings this in her mid-twenties in contrast to the teenage Gore.  A live video might show more clearly how the experience that comes with age could affect how we take in Springfield’s version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDblF-J6qvY From the same time, Dionne Warwick lip-syncs to Bacharach-David’s “Don’t Make Me Over,” thematically quite similar to “You Don’t Own Me” but quite different in rhetorical stance: “Don’t make me over/Now that I’d do anything for you/Don’t make me over/Now that you know how I adore you/Don’t pick on the things I say, the things I do/Just love me with all my faults/The way that I love you/I’m begging you.”  Note the enthymeme at work in both songs: relationships play out in terms of power, specifically power over another’s behavior—the negative potential of love as transformative.  The evil lover, like the evil rhetor, tries to “make the worse appear the better thing.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odzZJ6EvHbo Carole King performs the Goffin-King composition “No Easy Way Down” in 1970 on her album before Tapestry.  Lots of business in the background, both with the vocals and backing vocals, in contrast with the simpler production of the next album that would sell some thirteen million copies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkgsFbdsD6Y Dusty Springfield with her version, with orchestration typical of how she was produced.  To my ear this sounds less busy than King’s version.  The lyrics suggest some recognition of the limitations of youthful hopes for love, similar to the forthright pronouncement “It’s Too Late” in its narrative of the splendor that was that is no more.  In this song: “We all like to climb to the heights of love/Where our fantasy world can be found/But you must know in the end when it's time to descend/That there is no easy way down.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGc7CkYKmXM Audio of a live 1990 performance of the song by Laura Nyro, with just the piano.  Oh, my.  A pristine addition to the conversation.

By now we see a pattern in the pop music conversation (one that we can transpose to the academic context in relation to scholarly conversations): often we become familiar with a particular hit version of a song but know little about the provenance and the subsequent threads of association.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6gptd01mY Erma Franklin (yes, sister of Aretha) sings “Piece of My Heart” in 1967, a song co-written by Bert Berns, with background vocals by Cissy Houston and Dee Dee Warwick (sister of Dionne) among others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2ryrkqDww A version by Dusty Springfield, with the piano featured prominently and horns and a different set of background singers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uG2gYE5KOs A live version of Janis Joplin performing the song in 1968 in Germany, at the height of the sixties, two years before her untimely death in 1970.  She brings people in the audience on stage to dance (and dances with them).  The arrangement relies more on guitar than piano, and we can hear a horn section kick in occasionally.  We don’t hear the background singers of the Franklin and Springfield versions.  I wonder how many members of the audience dancing on the stage knew the other versions and how many thought this was a Joplin original.

Let’s survey how Dusty Springfield engages with Bacharach-David “texts” through the sixties. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v53LYvzuHc Springfield hosted the Motown Special of Ready, Steady, Go in 1965 as her star ascended in the UK.  Here she sings “Wishin’ and Hopin’” with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas (Brill Building meets Motown on a UK television stage).  Thematically, note the contrast between the gender dynamics in this song and “You Don’t Own Me,” with “Wishin’ and Hopin’” a kind of “advice column” song and the other a claim for independence; I read the interaction of Springfield and Reeves, through glances and expressions, as a shared understanding of knowing exactly what they’re doing in a song like this—they may come from different places, but they know many of the same things about gender dynamics both in the songs they sing and the careers they pursue.  Musically, this one is pop while the other has a noir feel in the opening notes setting up a fraught emotional terrain. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbaySb6HXqs “The Look of Love,” a direct address to the loved one invoking the present in the first line, “the look of love is in your eyes,” and proposing an idyllic future with “let’s take a lover’s vow and seal it with a kiss.”  I categorize this as pop leaning into maturity, still rooted in a romantic ideal but inching toward awareness of the complexity of adult relationships.  The horn solo, for me, reinforces that sense of leaving youth behind while bringing love along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17apLhXURzM “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” another direct address, in this case to a former lover.  This song tells a story detailing a betrayal of commitment, with the narrator letting the old lover know that she’s found someone new, in a diner while on the road, “one day away from your arms.”  The pounding drums provide a noir beat of fate encroaching on a promise about to be broken.  The horns and syncopation convey the jumpiness that fate can bring as we experience the buffeting forces of desire and commitment.  I get a kick out of a Londoner of Irish descent singing about Tulsa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOHw5wreA-g Burt Bacharach begins at the piano singing “A House Is Not a Home,” then Dusty (and an invisible orchestra) join in.  This continues in the category of mature pop, with a twinge of melodrama and what we might call an awareness of mortality/time passing that we don’t hear in the eternal present of youth pop. 

And one more before we leave Dusty, from the album Dusty in Memphis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcQQZ5_f18o From The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968, what became one of her signature songs, “Son of a Preacher Man.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS3s25RDazE The Composition Blues Band performs the original suppressed version, “Radical Teacher Man,” at CCCC in 2011.

Genre Adventures Across The Fifth Dimension

Wikipedia describes The Fifth Dimension as a vocal group fluent in “sunshine pop, pop soul, and psychedelic soul” genres.  Okay.  They had twenty Billboard Top 40 hits from 1967-73, with songs by several songwriters we’ve encountered before, notably Laura Nyro, Bacharach-David, and Jimmy Webb.  Let’s start with Jimmy Webb—early Boomer, born in Elk City, Oklahoma in 1946, won first Grammy at age 21, known for three place-based hits performed by Glen Campbell, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” and “Galveston”)—who wrote the first song that won the Grammy Record of the Year for The Fifth Dimension in 1967.  By the way, the original members were Marilyn McCoo, Florence LaRue, Ronald Townson, Lamont McLemore, and Billy Davis Jr., all born between 1933 (Townson, the only original member now deceased) and 1943 (McCoo).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2hI3-KvYZY “Up, Up, and Away” perhaps qualifies as sunshine pop, despite the mention of the moon?  The choreography and gestures bring Motown to mind, though the song itself doesn’t.  Berry Gordy passed on signing The Fifth Dimension earlier in the sixties, so the group ended up signing with Soul City, founded by Johnny Rivers, though later they did record for Motown and other labels.

The group had success with several Laura Nyro songs (more success than she did on the charts, at least).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPA_9p2u-Q Laura Nyro’s “Stoned Soul Picnic.” The arrangement musically and vocally spread velvet over some of the lyrical challenges of the song, starting with the initial interrogatory “Can you surrey, can you picnic?” using words we generally consider nouns as verbs.  Then we get to the lovely flow of “red yellow honey sassafras and moonshine,” pastoral but perhaps what Wikipedia means by “psychedelic pop.”  And what of “And down from the sky come the Lord and the lightning”?  Not your usual Top 40 lyric.  The Fifth Dimension made a song like this less strange, smoothing it out to place it comfortably in the familiar genre of pop for a primetime network audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnl7myr-fIM  Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues” as a sitcom episode.  Marilyn McCoo sings the lead vocal, and her husband of the last fifty years Billy Davis Jr. plays the reluctant Bill. Comforting that their marriage has lasted more than a half century, given that in the skit Billy runs off with Florence and Marilyn ends up with Ronald (with poor Lamont left holding the bouquet).  McCoo and Davis left the group to form a successful duo with hit singles of their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqmS29CXNZ8 The group performs Bacharach and David’s “One Less Bell to Answer” on Soul Train in 1970.  The bare midriffs probably wouldn’t get approved by Eddie (that’s what Topo Gigio called him) for the Sullivan show…  This song also features Marilyn McCoo as the lead vocalist, perhaps an early sign of the breakup to come as McCoo becomes the front woman.  Side note: The Fifth Dimension appeared as a singing group much like The Fifth Dimension in the Robert Wagner television series It Takes a Thief in 1970.  Marilyn (if I recall, the members kept their own first names and had no last names in the episode) had to fake her own death for complicated reasons and hides out in playboy/thief/friend Wagner/Alexander Mundy’s apartment.  I remember watching the episode, which included some kind of séance scene during which the other members, believing she’s dead, try to connect to Marilyn’s spirit.  McCoo and Wagner, in a quiet moment between action scenes, almost kissed (not quite).

The Greatest Pretender

Chrissie Hynde  (born Christine Ellen Hynde in 1951 in Akron, Ohio, thus sharing a hometown with LeBron James) graduated from Firestone High School in Akron before attending Kent State for three years to study art.  Her Kent State years coincided with the infamous killing of four students by the National Guard in 1970.  She moved to London in 1973, moving through a series of jobs including rock music journalist and selling clothes at Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren and designer Vivienne Westwood’s very hip store.  What she really wanted to do: play in a rock and roll band.  She tried to form one or join one for a number of years.  She tried to convince a couple of members of the Sex Pistols to marry her so she could get a work permit.  Didn’t work out.  She lived a life on the fringes of the rock scene until 1978, when Real Records owner Dave Hill became her manager based on a demo and gave her time to put together the band that became The Pretenders (name inspired by Sam Cooke’s cover of The Platters’ 1955 hit “The Great Pretender”).  Their first work together included a cover of The Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8VMjjmSXUY The Kinks’ original recording of the song from 1964, a follow-up to their first hit “You Really Got Me.”  This song has less of a rock edge than some of The Kinks catalog—they aren’t easily pigeon-holed in terms of genre, drawing on British music hall traditions and other pop genres as well as rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J55m5awtEeI A live rehearsal of the original members of The Pretenders performing the song in 1979.  Treasure this clip, as tragically the original lead guitarist and original bass player, James Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug overdoses in 1982 and 1983, leaving Chrissie Hynde as the only original member until drummer Martin Chambers eventually rejoined the group.  Ray Davies of The Kinks wrote the song; in the early eighties Hynde met Davies, and they had a child together, though they didn’t marry.  The ”kid” shows up in a later Hynde song, “Middle of the Road,” in the line “I’ve got a kid, I’m thirty-three.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24rYz9QAvdQ&list=RD24rYz9QAvdQ&start_radio=1 Chip Taylor wrote “Angel of the Morning” in 1967 as a response to The Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” aiming to emulate the emotional texture.  Merrilee Rush recorded the song in Memphis in 1968, resulting in a major hit.  We can think of this song as joining the conversation of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” laying out a different perspective on the decision to stay the night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbQKT_5weEA Chrissie Hynde’s version, with less ornate instrumentation but with a Hynde vocal that makes whatever she sings new.  That “oh, baby” right at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7Qfqle_2Bs “Stephanie Schiffer,” introduced by Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), plays an acoustic version at Central Perk in an episode of Friends.  The spare guitar accompaniment allows us to hear the Hynde vocal in all its splendor, with no bombast, no distractions (aside from the cuts to cast members).  Another example of a song in circulation.

Hynde can do ballads and torch songs (listen to her “2000 Miles”), but she’s ultimately a rocker, joining that conversation.  (We can think of her arc in relation to Linda Ronstadt’s, whose signature songs tended to folk rock ballads though she stretched her range to cover rock songs like “Tumbling Dice,” while Hynde came in the rock door in its punk and New Wave iteration and stretched into ballads—in both cases, they had voices that allowed them to do just about anything.)  Next, Hynde doesn’t cover Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang,” but she writes her own “Back on the Chain Gang” as a kind of response. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBn5aIfZElE Sam Cooke’s recording of “Chain Gang” from 1960.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okvl-9svtS0 A live performance of “Back on the Chain Gang” in London, with original drummer Martin Chambers back in the fold.  The band members providing the background grunts pay homage to the Cooke song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yj-FYOjmSU Six minutes of bliss from the 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony for The Pretenders.  The song is “My City Was Gone,” though I always think of it as “Ohio” because that’s the word serving as the anchor of the chorus.  Recall that Neil Young wrote “Ohio” after Kent State.  Chrissie Hynde, as noted earlier, attended Kent State at that time.  She left Ohio to pursue rock dreams in England, as Neil Young a decade earlier left Canada to pursue rock dreams in the United States.  Here they play together, he in his sixties, she in her fifties.  He wrote about one moment of national crisis, she about another crisis, that of commercialization and unrestrained capitalism overseen by “a government that has no pride.”  She says up front that they didn’t rehearse—why would they need to, as they’ve spent their entire adult lives in this conversation.

Elvis Costello: A Life Steeped in Music

Born Declan Patrick MacManus in West London in 1954 (my kind of Boomer, born six months before me), Elvis Costello grew up in a musical family, with a father, Ross, who played the trumpet and sang professionally (like his own father, making young Declan third generation heir to a family business of sorts).  Never much for school, though he distinguished himself as a writer, he gave up formal schooling at 18, not qualifying for English universities.  He married young, became a father young (like Gerry Goffin), and held down a full-time job while plugging away writing songs and playing in bands around London.  His father’s vocation as a trumpeter and singer meant that the house was full of demo recordings of songs Ross needed to learn to sing as the “boy singer” in the band, encompassing many popular genres.  Elvis said later, “That’s why I know so many songs.”  He idolized The Beatles (noting that he was the perfect age, about nine, to register deeply their arrival on the music scene) and ultimately wrote a dozen songs with Paul McCartney.  Beyond The Beatles, he knew Motown and Bacharach-David songs made popular by Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black in England.  He also knew the work of The Grateful Dead, The Byrds, and The Band (which gave him some familiarity with folk rock and country idioms, although I admit my shock when I first heard an Elvis Costello country song).

As he came to the attention of record producers and agents, punk and new wave’s popularity in London led him and them to package him as a kind of punk Buddy Holly, replacing his frameless glasses (think James Joyce) with his now-iconic thick black frames and likely encouraging his sneering, sardonic punk posture.  Let’s start with clips of early new wave Elvis and The Attractions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTS09Wo1xhI I start with a 1978 performance of “Mystery Dance” to highlight how Costello establishes his distance from the pop love songs of his youth, forgoing any mention of love and instead detailing emotions of confusion, frustration, and teenage exasperation related to sex: “Romeo was restless, he was ready to kill/Dropped out the window cause he couldn’t sit still.”  Later the would-be Romeo sings “She thought that I knew/And I thought that she knew/Both of us we’re willing/But we didn’t know how to do it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvgCIDbj6gQ “I’m Not Angry,” also performed in 1978: “I know what you’re doing/I know where you’ve been/I know where/I don’t care/Cause there’s no such thing as an original sin.”  Elvis was an altar boy due to his Irish Catholic father’s influence.  Imagine that.  Note the delivery and the interaction with the audience, and also the initial stare into the camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Pomrwfu54 From the same 1978 concert, “Lipstick Vogue.”  Note the momentum and colloquial rush of the lyrics: “You say you’re sorry for the things that you’ve done/You say you’re sorry but you know you don’t mean it/I wouldn’t worry I had so much fun/Sometimes I almost feel just like a human being.”  Direct second person address, which we’ve heard before in pop love songs—different idiom here, though, with unsparing judgment: “You say I’ve got no feelings/This is a good way to kill them.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oCXNfS3WFw Sorry for the 45 degree slant of the clip here.  The clip provides the historical documentation of the Saturday Night Live appearance in 1977 that led to Elvis's banishment (for a dozen years) from the SNL stage.  The clip begins with “Less than Zero,” a song written after Elvis watched British fascist leader Oswald Mosely interviewed on British television.  He stops the band, saying “there’s no reason to play this song” for a US audience that wouldn’t know anything about Oswald Mosely, and prompts the band to play “Radio, Radio,” an indictment of mainstream media: “I was tuning in the shine on my late night dial/Doing anything my radio advised/With every one of those late night stations/Playing songs bringing tears to my eyes.”  This next verse later in the song has run through my mind for more than forty years, more often than usual in recent years: “Some of my friends sit around every evening/And they worry about the times ahead/But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference/And the promise of an early bed/It’s either shut up or get cut up/They don’t want to hear about it/It’s only inches on the reel to reel/And the radio is in hands of such a lot of fools/Trying to anesthetize the way that you feel.”  Sure, the technology has changed, but the anxiety still comes through clarion clear.  With the advent of talk radio and hyper-partisan media, we might change “anesthetize” to “weaponize” in the last line of the excerpt.

Elvis didn’t write only angry love songs.  His anger extended to political and social issues from the start.  Listen to “Oliver’s Army,” for another example.  Elvis was his father’s son, though.  How else to account for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DL0M9P1TXk  Elvis Costello covering “My Funny Valentine,” a ballad from the 1937 Rodgers and Hart show Babes in Arms.   I suspect Ross MacManus learned to sing this, and son Declan heard it as a youth.  The rhymes evoke what Costello would do with language in his own songs whatever the genre: there’s “laughable” and “unphotographable” early on and then this triplet, “Is your figure less than Greek/Is your mouth a little weak/When you open to speak/Are you smart?”  That concluding “are you smart” is a long-deferred rhyme with the earlier “you’re my favorite work of art.”  Note the combination of artifice and playfulness, and an adventurous attitude toward what a lyricist can get away with in a popular song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5vVtg9pT1A Elvis covering The Beatles’ “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”  He often paired this cover with his own “New Amsterdam” in concert performances, putting his song into conversation with his childhood influences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y30bmNONXMY Elvis’s mother and father both lived well into the 21st century.  I don’t know what the parent-child relationships were like, but if they followed Declan’s career they knew about his turn to the music they shared with him as he grew.  Here Elvis sings a sixties Bacharach-David confection, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”  Imagine young Declan hearing the rhyme of “you get pneumonia” and “never phone ya” and storing it away for reference when he becomes Elvis Costello—the rhyme lodges in his brain and prods him to his own adventures in rhyme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiKCKQhsZbg Two clips from Late Night with David Letterman from the late nineties, with Elvis in full crooner mode—he’s become his father Ross, minus the trumpet.  Bacharach and Costello recorded an album together.  No more angry young man, just a crooner in mid-life. 

From a Tribal Love Rock Musical

Let’s consider another song in circulation.  Hair: The American Tribal Love Rock Musical with book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado and music by Galt McDermott premiered in 1967, causing quite a stir with its portrayal of counterculture youth complete with nudity, sex, and drugs.  What to do, what to do?  Like the Borg, assimilate and absorb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCXSA_biSw4 From The Ed Sullivan Show, the Broadway cast of Hair in 1969.  Note the cast foray into the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and their festooning of Sullivan, once again subject to the demands of the mass audience as he brings youth culture into his theater.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjxSCAalsBE The Fifth Dimension, also in 1969, on an island in space, fully clothed at a safe distance from the audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdsCGm4bP3E The concluding scene and credits from The 40-Year-Old Virgin with the whole cast (lots of familiar faces from Judd Apatow films), 2005.  Many of these actors might have seen the previous performances as children. 

A Gilmore Girls Fantasia Biographical and Biblical—Where You Lead

Gilmore Girls (2000-2007, with a four-episode sequel some ten years later) focuses on mothers and daughters (a precursor to Pamela Adlon’s sitcom Better Things, also concerned centrally with three generations of women).  Lorelai Gilmore gave birth to daughter Lorelai (called Rory) at the age of sixteen, leaving both the comfortable home in which she grew up and Rory’s father Christopher, scion of a wealthy family, to raise Rory on her own in the small community of Stars Hollow, home to a colorful array of characters, all of whom adopt Lorelai and Rory as their own.  The series begins with Lorelei age 32, Rory age 16 with dreams of attending Harvard.  Her mother’s first challenge: find money to enroll Rory in the Chilton Academy, an elite private school that will prepare Rory for admittance to Harvard.  Lorelei goes to her parents, Richard and Emily, to ask for the money.  Richard wants to say yes right away, but Emily negotiates the terms: they will give Lorelei the money in return for Lorelei and Rory both coming to Friday night dinner every week with Richard and Emily at their house.  From that initial maneuvering we see a hint of Emily’s desperate longing to mend her relationship with her only child, though they disappoint and have at each other for the next seven years (nice biblical number).  The series begins and ends with scenes set in Luke’s Diner in Stars Hollow, with Lorelei and Rory at a table served by Luke Danes, the owner and proprietor of the diner (formerly his father’s hardware store); in the first episode, after they order mass quantities of what Luke considers unhealthy food, he warns Rory not to become like her mother.  Rory answers “Too late.”

The opening credits include a montage of shots of mother and daughter interacting (and glimpses of the other significant characters), with a soundtrack consisting of a short version of Carole King’s “Where You Lead.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OX8JtJffWo “Where You Lead” theme song.  This version leads me to think about the biblical Book of Ruth and Ruth’s words to her mother-in-law Naomi: "Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you" (Ruth 1:16–17 NJPS).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCM082Gjte0 Carole King appears as Sophie Bloom, proprietor of the new music store in Stars Hollow.  Lane Kim (Keiko Agena), Rory’s best friend since they met in grade school, comes into the store and falls in love with the drum set Sophie shows her; Sophie ultimately agrees to let Lane practice on the drum set after the store closes on Wednesdays and Fridays, as Lane’s mother (known always in the show as “Mrs. Kim”) would not allow a drum set in the house she and Lane share—and she goes to bible study on Wednesday and Friday.  Thus Sophie becomes a surrogate mother to Lane, providing her both the drum set and the practice space.  When Lane joins a rock band later, Mrs. Kim unexpectedly becomes a savvy manager of sorts, arranging the band’s first tour (playing at churches, but it’s a start) and revealing a canny sense of what makes a song a hit when Lane’s boyfriend Zach tries to write original material.  Note Carole King’s comic timing in the scene and her New York diction and syntax—she channels Carol Klein (the name on her birth certificate) to bring Sophie Bloom to life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswbOOJKZtk  Here we learn Sophie’s backstory—she used to be a singer in the days of vinyl records before coming to Stars Hollow (a nice touch—you can hear a Goffin-King song, “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” a hit for The Monkees, playing in the background during the scene).  Lane asks for mentorship from her surrogate mother.  The second part of the clip relies on a sitcom-style misunderstanding, with Zach secretly playing banjo in Sophie’s store, fearing that Lane will think less of him for liking bluegrass.  Note Sophie’s succinct maternal command to Zach and Lane, “Talk!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7ly9v1w_1g Carole King and her daughter Louise Goffin perform “Where You Lead” in Hyde Park in London in 2016, with lyrics revised to fit the mother-daughter relationship.  Baby Louise had already arrived when her parents wrote “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” as homework for Don Kirshner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hucE7kPY24 1988 performance of a medley of King-Goffin songs by mother Carole and daughter Louise joined by another daughter Sherry Goffin (introduced by Mom as “another Goffin-King production”).   Note the inclusion of “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” a hit for The Monkees.  Note also that mother Carole credits daughter Louise with encouraging her to play the guitar.  The medley showcases the scope of the Goffin-King songbook and reminds us that Brill Building songs show up everywhere, not always known as Brill Building songs or associated with specific songwriters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-XVxNgSjhs “I Will Always Love You” performed by Lorelai Gilmore at karaoke night in Stars Hollow.  The performance works at two levels for the audience in the room (and the television audience), the community that has known and nurtured Lorelei and daughter Rory for nearly two decades (they know Lorelei will always love Rory) and also observed and at times intruded on Lorelei’s relationship with Luke, who comes into the room just as Lorelei begins (they know Lorelei will always love Luke and vice versa).  Thus she sings both to her daughter and to her former fiancé (who will remain in her life after Rory leaves to start her journalism career covering Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign).  Dolly Parton wrote the song, and Lorelai says she aimed to evoke Dolly (not Whitney Houston, who recorded a monster hit version).

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist—We Got the Music In Us

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist lasted two seasons on NBC, from January 2020 to June 2021, totaling 25 episodes before a two-hour holiday film screened on Roku in December 2021.  The show’s premise stems from an earthquake hitting San Francisco while Zoey Clarke (series lead Jane Levy) nervously waits out the tremor in an MRI machine.  To calm her anxiety before the procedure starts (and before the tremor hits), the MRI technician asks her what music streaming service she would prefer to listen to during the scan, assuring her he has “everything” available.  When the tremor hits, in a parallel to Chuck Bartowski downloading all intelligence data into his brain from Bryce Larkin’s email attachment in the first episode of Chuck, Zoey apparently has all music downloaded into her brain, along with a bonus superpower (somewhat different from Chuck flashing on intelligence data).

On the street afterwards she realizes that she has a new ability, a kind of emotional super-intelligence, the power to hear other people’s “heart songs,” songs they experience internally that reflect their hidden feelings.  The first song Zoey hears from a flock of people walking the streets of the city: “Help” by the Beatles, which becomes a full-fledged production number (reminiscent of the opening sequence of the first Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night).  When the song ends, people carry on as before, with only Zoey having heard (and seen) the singing and dancing that dramatizes the emotional turmoil and need of everyone on the streets of San Francisco.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-L-LmuKa_o  Opening scene from A Hard Day’s Night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7WJsC73740 “Help” from the first episode, before Zoey develops a theory for what’s happened to her.  A couple of points: her first reaction is to flee from strangers’ sudden manifestation of their emotional state; and second, the show creators make an implicit claim about how pop culture supplies the language to express emotional states.  Sure, the premise offers a hook to sell the show and an opportunity to get actors singing and dancing; underneath rests a claim about a shared cultural language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83B3P-l_JYo “True Colors” performed by Peter Gallagher as Zoey’s father Mitch Clarke, who has a serious degenerative neurological condition that renders him unable to speak or interact with his family.  Zoey, her mother Maggie (Mary Steenburgen), and her brother (Andrew Leeds) devote much of the first season to thinking about whether Dad is still with them, registering their presence and their love for him.  This song from him lets Zoey tell the rest of the family that he is still there and does feel their presence.  As a result, they take him on a boat excursion because they know he can still find pleasure in feeling the sun and the wind.  Side note: while actors trained as singers and dancers play many roles in the series, actors like Gallagher and Steenburgen, not known as singers or dancers, nevertheless sing and dance, lending the show a musical verite feel.  Mandy Moore’s choreography also leans into the everyday settings (no jazz hands), with the exception of some production numbers at Zoey’s workplace in San Francisco.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PibDzdCPZX8 “Mad World” performed by John Clarence Stewart as new co-worker Simon, on whom Zoey develops a crush before learning he’s engaged.  This song lets her know he’s not the carefree type he seems on the surface (nobody in this show is).  He’s looking at a picture of his recently-departed father.  Incidentally, Zoey works at a tech start-up called SPRQ Point, first as a coder and then a team leader for a cadre of coders.  Her boss: Lauren Graham/Lorelei Gilmore as Joan, in this show playing a kind of evil mother, though ultimately she bonds with Zoey, promoting her to team leader and recommending her for Joan’s position when Joan leaves for Singapore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-pr9viPsTU At the end of the second and last season, for unknown reasons Zoey’s power transfers to co-worker, best friend, and eventual love interest Max (Skyler Astin).  You can see his surprised reaction to hearing Zoey profess her love for him in a song, “Melt With You,” with a backing chorus of dancers.

We Are Lady Parts—Living the Punk Life in Contemporary London

This British musical sitcom created by Nida Manzoor also has two seasons (of only six episodes each), the first released in 2021, the second in 2024.  Lady Parts, the eponymous punk band, consists of four Muslim women at different stages in their lives: Amina (Anjana Vasan), a doctoral student in microbiology who initially plays acoustic guitar but finds her inner punk rocker when recruited by the band to play lead; Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), the band founder and rhythm guitarist with a punk ethos and sensibility, aiming to achieve genre purity; Ayesha (Juliette Motamed), the drummer with stunning eye make-up who shares Saira’s commitment to genre: and Bisma (Faith Omole), the bassist, long-married and mom to a daughter beginning to act out teenage rebellion.  Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse) serves as the band manager, with the major plotline of the second season focused on whether the band will switch managers to get a record company deal.  Each band member brings their current life experience to the creative process of writing songs, with several episodes in the series moving from the “real life” inspiration to the translation into lyrics and the presentation to the rest of the band.  While punk offers the motivating genre of the band’s repertoire, the women seem to know all of pop music and skip from genre to genre driven by the kairotic moment. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_rM72UY7pM “Voldemort Under My Headscarf,” a song representative of Lady Parts in punk mode (though even here other musical genres weave in and out), blending the Harry Potter references with personal experience and cultural critique: “Voldemort’s alive and he’s under my headscarf.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReG-4bQXg_w  Lady Parts develop and perform “Villain Era,” Amina’s “girl power anthem.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3TclipIlm0 Lady Parts develop and perform “Malala Made Me Do It,” Bisma’s song about a contretemps with her daughter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAc5e0EiNNs Lady Parts, pressed into a wedding gig to raise money to pay for studio time to record their first album, perform “Oops I Did It Again” by Britney Spears–not a song they wanted to circulate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR993YOkqgI Lady Parts, brought together in the street outside Hassan’s apartment building to help Amina follow her mother’s advice to make a grand romantic gesture, perform a cover of “The Reason” by Hoobastank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51WKwBlwv38 Bisma sings Eric Burdon and The Animals’ “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”  No clip, but in the episode Bisma is at wit’s end about family issues related to her husband and daughter.  Out of exasperation, in a moment of “magical realism,” she has used the television remote control to freeze them in mid-argument.  Then she walks out into the street (where I think everybody is frozen in place as well) to sing this song from the 1960’s (if Zoey were there, she’d be able to hear the “heart song”).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AanBlgu21co “Glass Ceiling Feeling” provides a step on the way to catharsis toward the end of the second season, when the band members realize they can’t sell their punk souls to the record company and need to be true to themselves (and former manager Momtaz).  The lyrics explore their doubts about their talent, whether the record company sees them only as safe novelty tokens for public relations purposes, and whether they’re complicit by playing in “the master’s house” using “the master’s tools.”  They decide to release their album to fans for free online (escaping corporate clutches) and happily return to Momtaz and her community-based music performance space.

The Burkean Jam: Rhet/Comp, Revision and Blues, and the Universal Chorus

The title of this concluding section comes from an article I wrote some twenty years ago about the Composition Blues Band that appeared in the WPA Journal.  I began with this epigraph:

“Imagine you enter a jam session. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated jam, a jam too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the jam had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the songs that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the set; then you put in your oar. Someone answers with a verse; you answer with a verse of your own; another riffs off of your chorus; another takes a solo off the bridge, to either the delight or dismay of the room, depending upon the quality of the player’s chops. However, the jam is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart.  And you do depart, with the jam still vigorously in progress.”

I ascribed the passage to Kenneth Burke and his grandson, singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, best known for “Cat’s in the Cradle” and “Taxi.”  I continued thus:

“The Universal Requirement.  We’ve all had to make our way through it, and the ‘all’ includes every singer, songwriter, and band of the twentieth century.  The experience of first-year composition has been endlessly explored and analyzed, but what hasn’t been documented is the trauma (and occasional joys), the deep psychic wound (and occasional levitation of the spirit) left by the experience.  Such trauma leaves the individual and the community no choice but to repress the memory, to erase it if possible, to cover it over with less painful narratives of lost love, teenage anomie, and struggles with the Man.

“The work of the Composition Blues Band is to return the repressed to consciousness, to bring the trauma of composition to light in the hopes that all of us can find peace with our lot and let the healing begin.  This is arduous archival work, as the original lyrics of the rhet/comp canon are buried in dusty notebooks, on scribbled drafts, on restroom walls from Asbury Park Community College to the University of Texas-Lubbock.  One might venture that the entire massive apparatus of pop music, the rock biz, the star-making machinery of the popular song, exists to keep the story of FYC well-hidden.  The CBB will not allow this to continue.  We will seek out the lost original lyrics of the rhet/comp canon wherever the search takes us, and we will continue to bring the lyrics to the rhet/comp community, as we have in presentations at CCCC, WPA, and other venues.

“It’s a commonplace that great art comes from great pain, and what’s more painful than a life in composition?  That’s why so many songwriters first found their voice in FYC, as students.  What’s more surprising, and shamefully unknown, is how many of these artists followed their tsuris, extending their relationship with rhet/comp as writing teachers, scholars, and even as WPAs.  We offer an overview of our archival work below.”

Stepping outside the myth for a moment, I understand the CBB as a conversation between two of the great enthymeme systems in my life, those of popular music and writing pedagogy.  I’m not me without both of them, so why not bring them together?  

What do the guiding questions “What do we sing about when we sing about love?” and “What do we talk about when we talk about writing?” (or “What do we teach about when we teach writing?”) have in common?  I wrote earlier in this installment that we all become “experts” on love and thus part of the “scholarly” popular conversation about love through life experience and participation in consumer culture.  A parallel with writing: we all become “experts” on writing and thus part of the scholarly academic conversation about writing through academic life experience and participation in school culture.  How do we teach writerly practice when everyone can claim “expert” status through all the writing they’ve done and all the enthymemes they’ve come to accept as true?  No easy answers in the battle of enthymemes.  As many of us do, we can begin by exploring the enthymemes circulating through student culture (and the wider public culture), putting them in conversation with the enthymemes that provide the foundation for our teaching.  In the current moment, the advent of generative AI offers an opportunity for intensive exploration of writing as a fundamentally human activity, especially as a new set of enthymemes about the “just like a human” or “better than human because look, no grammatical errors” writing of chatbots gains momentum.  Again, not easy to dismiss the fresh class of enthymemes, as enthymemes don’t have to be true to take hold in people’s minds.

What to do?  We bring our pedagogical premises to life, vividly, in every class meeting, every conference, every comment, demonstrating the personal, academic, and public benefits of our enthymemes to student writers.  While we can’t claim absolute truth for our methods, we can make them compelling and persuasive.  To paraphrase a Bill Maher bit, we can’t claim our premises are facts, but we know they’re true.

Postscript re Coming Attractions: Those readers who know me might ask about the third great enthymeme system in my life.  Good question.  My answer will come in installments over the next four quarters as I embark on Coming to Comedy Genres, spanning roughly the same time period as this year’s now-concluded series, the 1950’s to the present day, with some reference to earlier comic traditions.