Forever Doo-Wop: Race, Nostalgia, and Vocal Harmony

NOTES

Introduction 1. “Doo-wop is so submerged in caricature and deprecation that shadings of Rodney Dangerfield color its very name.” Marvin Gottlieb, “The Durability of DooWop ,” New York Times, 17 January 1993. 2. David Hinckley, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” in booklet to The Doo Wop Box: 101 Vocal Group Gems from the Golden Age of Rock ’N’ Roll (Los Angeles: Rhino Records, 1993), 17. 3. The influence of doo-wop singers such as Nolan Strong of the Diablos and Sherman Garnes and Frankie Lymon of the Teenagers has been acknowledged by Motown singers Smokey Robinson of the Miracles, Melvin Franklin of the Temptations , and Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes. Ibid. 4. Anthony J. Gribin and Matthew M. Schiff, Doo-Wop: The Forgotten Third of Rock ’n’ Roll (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1992), 8. 5. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, eds., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. Jeffrey Melnick, “‘Story Untold’: The Black Men and White Sounds of DooWop ,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 134. 7. Bob Hyde, Compiler’s Notes, in booklet to The Doo Wop Box, 29. 8. Robert Pruter, Doowop: The Chicago Scene (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 250–52. 9. Robert Pruter, “A History of Doo-wop Fanzines,” Popular Music and Society 21, no. 1 (1997): 23. 10. “It is through expressive modes such as music that cultural symbols are maintained and manipulated as a source of power in a social context, within the economic and political constraints of particular historical situations.” Stuart L Goosman, “The Social and Cultural Organization of Black Group Vocal Harmony in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, 1945–60” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1992), 8. 11. Their music was “a source of power that afforded the singers some measure of control in the face of social adversity and the day to day sameness of repression.” Ibid., 3. NOTES 150 notes to pages 6–11 12. The 1950s was an era of “expanding affluence” often perceived now as “orderly ” where, nevertheless, “social ferment” was bubbling beneath the “placid surface.” David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), ix–x. 13. “The Frenzy or “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy.” W. E. B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1995), 215. 14. “The evangelical success of revivalism was not limited by race. Worshipers at Cane Ridge [in Kentucky] commented often on the degree to which black and white southerners participated in the services and were the recipients of God’s grace.” James R. Goff, Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19. 15. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 120. 16. “‘Oh, they were so sharp it hurt,’ recalled Ben E. King, ‘the Cadillacs had the best clothes, the best steps.’ ‘All the quartets sang louder when the Cadillacs cruised Brooke Avenue [in New York City],’ wrote poet David Henderson.” Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 48. 17. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 124. 18. Primitivism is an essential subtext of Modernism and “a return to first principles through the discovery of some elemental and vitalizing energy observable in pre-industrial societies, and particularly in peasant, tribal and folk repertoires. . . . Characteristically, Primitivism tends to connote those tribal or folk expressions which carry the suggestion of the unaffected and the unstudied, the powerful and the essential.” Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 63–64. 19. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 64. 20. Fred Moten goes so far as to claim the “essential blackness of American radicalism.” This quote was taken from a lecture that he gave in his course Black Performance: The Construction of a Research Project, which I attended in the Fall of 1998 at New York University. 21. “Popular music and films seem to resonate with the tensions of the time.” Lipstiz, Time Passages, x. 22. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Penguin, 1988), 27. 23. “The R & B singers’ fate could be servitude or self-sufficiency, depending on whether they knew how to take—and...