Forever Doo-Wop: Race, Nostalgia, and Vocal Group Harmony
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FOREVER DOO-WOP A volume in the series american pop u lar music Edited by Jeff rey Melnick and Rachel Rubin FOREVER Race, Nostalgia, and Vocal Harmony john michael runowicz University of Massachusetts Press Amherst and Boston Copyright © 2010 by John Michael Runowicz All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America lc 2010027200 isbn 978- 1- 55849- 824- 2 (paper); 823- 5 (library cloth) Designed by Richard Hendel Set in Scala and Gill Sans by Westchester Book Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Hersey, John Michael, 1962– Forever doo-wop : race, nostalgia, and vocal harmony / John Michael Runowicz. p. cm.—(American popular music) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55849-824-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-1-55849-823-5 (library cloth : alk. paper) 1. Doo-wop (Music)—History and criticism. I. Title. ML3527.H47 2010 782.42166—dc22 2010027200 British Library Cata loguing in Publication data are available. Like a bouquet of wildfl owers I present this to my wife, Barbara CONTENTS Preface ix Ac know ledg ments xvii Introduction 1 1 the roots of vocal harmony 23 2 the birth of doo- wop 40 3 shortcut to nostalgia 63 4 the doo- wop community 85 5 the oldies circuit 109 Afterword: The Per sis tence of Harmony 141 Notes 149 Index 175 Illustrations follow page 84. PREFACE e have a special connection to the music of our youth. The words, melodies, and rhythms that fi ll our relatively uncluttered and still developing teenage brains leave imprints that last throughout W our lives. The makers of this music also leave last- ing impressions. They are avatars of the optimism and innocence, unbri- dled energy and impulsive rage, unalloyed joy and intense sadness of our youth, emotions that seem so much more easily contacted through the pop- u lar culture of our early years than by other means. The impact of this ex- perience is made all the more poignant by how quickly it seemed to pass. As we, and the music makers, grow older, the music that we shared accu- mulates ever more layers of meaning and aff ective power. Music does this for us both individually and collectively. This book is about a genre of music called doo- wop and the par tic u lar meanings and aff ective power it has come to hold for people today. There have been other books about doo- wop that have focused primarily on its origins and fi rst fl owering in the 1950s and early 1960s, but the period of doo- wop’s adulthood, from the mid- 1960s to today, is when the story gets most interesting for me. What I off er here is a larger and more compre- hensive historical and cultural perspective on this music. Doo- wop pro- vides a rich ground to explore American society and culture. Primary is the opportunity to see how black and white Americans interact, to see the truths of the racial complexity of one node of American pop u lar culture. There is, too, the par tic u lar phenomenon of doo- wop: a style of music whose heyday lasted only a blink of an eye and whose infl uence on later music is still vastly underrated, which nevertheless spawned a long- standing, devoted, and now eco nom ical ly infl uential subculture. To dis- miss this simply as nostalgic consumption is to miss the opportunity to examine the intricacies of the role music plays throughout our lives. Doo- wop’s longevity and place in the national “psyche” makes such a study possible. But this par tic u lar study is also possible because of my fortuitous proximity to this music. I have spent the last twenty- three years working increasingly closely with one of the legendary doo- wop groups, Speedo and the Cadillacs, on what is known as the oldies circuit. A social network, what I call the doo- wop community, has supported the perform- ing careers of the members of this group for more than forty years. The doo- wop community coalesced in the late 1960s around American pop- u lar music of the 1950s. It comprises the singers, band musicians, pro- moters, and fans, who all have an often complex stake in its continued existence. Their story is also my story. It has been and remains at times diffi cult to know where I end and the community begins. So this is an experimental work in many ways. The up- close and personal nature of my social position has yielded opportunities for insight that would not have otherwise been available. But this same close proximity has also made it more diffi cult for me to maintain the safe observational distance from which the usual “re- searcher objectivity” can be claimed. There is always the question, can the storyteller ever be completely removed from the story? Without equivoca- tion, I answer a resounding no. I have become part of what I continue to study— a personal journey that began over two de cades ago. I fi rst met Earl “Speedo” Carroll, the lead singer of the black vocal group the Cadillacs, in the summer of 1987. Peter Millrose, a college friend who was the keyboard player in the Cadillacs’ band and who, like me, is white and a generation younger than Carroll, introduced us. I auditioned to be their guitarist not knowing who the Cadillacs were, although Peter had informed me that they were a fairly well- known New York– area “doo- wop” group who had had a handful of hits in the 1950s. (Playing with the Cadil- lacs was a “good gig,” as Paul Schafer, David Letterman’s bandleader, once told Peter.) My background as a guitarist was in the white rock music of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, a musical life with an infancy in the British Invasion (the Beatles and Rolling Stones), an adolescence in album- oriented rock (Led Zeppelin and Yes), and an early adulthood in new wave and punk (Elvis Costello and the Clash). In my time with the Cadillacs, I would learn, among many other things, about the African American origin of much of the white rock of my youth. I did not realize it at the time, but I had just enrolled in the school of rhythm and blues. I was taught my fi rst lesson during the audition. Following the chord chart, I played along with Peter on keyboard and Carroll singing. During the song “Zoom,” an up- tempo, jump- blues number (my fi rst encounter with this term), Carroll stopped the music and good- naturedly instructed me to play the chords not on every beat of the four- bar mea sure but just on x preface beats two and four. He also asked that I voice or pitch the chords a little higher, and play them more sharply or staccato. It was a subtle but essen- tial aspect of rhythm and blues guitar playing, and it helped me to recon- ceptualize what it meant to be in a band. In the music of my youth, the guitar dominated the sound. Big, resounding chords and riff s defi ned the texture of most of the music. In the Cadillacs’ band I soon learned that the guitar was just one part of a sonic whole; keyboards, drums, bass, saxophone, and vocals all have an important role to play in the ensemble. Learning to play the guitar diff erently was only the beginning of my od- yssey with Speedo and the Cadillacs. As time went on and I got to know the singers and my fellow band members, a rich, musically infused social network began to reveal itself. I soon discovered that the Cadillacs are one of many vocal groups with roots in the 1950s and early 1960s that perform on the oldies circuit. Everyone had been in show business for de cades, and they had comic, tragic, and inspiring stories to tell. All the stories I was told or overheard had a quality that made them unique to the oldies circuit— the result of a decades- old social milieu in which race, nostalgia, and vocal harmony were common interrelated themes. At a show somewhere in Staten Island, after about four or fi ve years of steady gigging with the Cadillacs, I momentarily stepped out of my role as guitarist and noticed that something special was going on. The concert featured an equal number of white and black acts for a predominantly white middle- aged audience. The show was billed as a “trip down memory lane,” and a picture of a vocal group of indeterminate race was displayed on the program. My “aha!” moment came when I realized that what was being said backstage diff ered from what I overheard in the audience: the per- formers and the concertgoers were not necessarily taking the same nos- talgic journey. My defi nition of nostalgia then was “an overly sentimental look at the past through rose- colored glasses.” But it did not describe what I was witnessing. African American middle- aged singers were sharing the bill with white middle- aged singers, singing in musical harmony, though not necessarily in the same groups. They seemed to be modeling a kind of social harmony that may or may not actually exist, at least not in the straightforward, simple way that the audience may have perceived it. About this time I began pursuing a graduate degree in music, and during my fi rst semester I realized that the musical culture of doo- wop, the oldies circuit, and the Cadillacs were a perfect subject for ethnomusi- cological research.