by Ann Powers
What function does nonsense serve in the development of healthy sexuality? Concepts set forth by the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott frame childhood sexuality’s relationship to play: play is an open-ended sense of absorption—in music making, for example—while sexual desire focuses that absorption on a need and pushes the desiring person toward its end. “Sex, to put it as crudely . . . as possible, is what threatens play, what constantly threatens to put a stop to it,” writes modern-day Winnicottian Adam Phillips in his essay “Talking Nonsense, and Knowing When to Stop.” Phillips suggests that incoherence creates the transition between childlike play and adult sexual feeling. “One kind of chaos occurs when absorption, or preoccupation, begins turning into appetite and the hope of satisfaction. The no-nonsense self cannot make that move. Wanting comes out of an incredible muddle.”7
Considering the nonsense sound of doo-wop within this psychoanalytic framework, the music becomes newly coherent. Or rather, it forcefully asserts its incoherence as a means for doo-wop’s creators and fans to remain in that state of play preceding full adult sexuality. Teenagers in the 1950s certainly wanted to experiment with adult behavior, and to learn how to satisfy their freshly born lust. But going too fast also undid them. Doo-wop and other musical styles driven by nonsense offered a way to remain in this disassembled state while still moving through the world with power and confidence.
Nonsense echoed through the streets where young America roamed in the mid-1950s, from New York to Philadelphia, Memphis to New Orleans, Lubbock to Los Angeles. Groups like the Crows tipped away from the “plain talk” of R&B and toward the revelatory babble of an emerging generation. This music was made not by men fronting bluesy bands, but by kids singing on the street and in the bathrooms of their high schools. They were the children of the Great Migration, awash in hormones and hope and a stubborn insistence on liberty, pushing against the bonds of Jim Crow. Doo-wop appealed within African American communities, but via the radio its reach extended: at a time when national attention turned to atrocities like the killing of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, falsely accused of flirting with a white woman, this was the sound of young black men being amorous, openly and innocently. In a way, it was a form of protest. If conventional language had no room for these voices, they’d make up their own.
The same spaces that might be used for a sexual encounter—with a sneaked-in girl, or between boys—became conduits for expressing what went beyond words. “The boys’ bathroom . . . furnished the best echo chamber for singing slow songs with ‘wooo’ in the background,” one singer of the era, Johnny Keyes of the Magnificents, wrote in his 1991 memoir.8 “All of that tile and porcelain were tailor-made for singing.” A teenage Etta James agreed: when the R&B powerhouse auditioned for her future manager Johnny Otis with her vocal group, the Creolettes, she insisted they decamp to a nearby ladies’ room. Almost entirely male and originally African American (later, Italian American kids, also suspect on the era’s city streets, would adopt the form), doo-wop belonged to what the scholar Jeffrey Melnick calls “good-bad” boys, borrowing that term from the girl group song “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las: boys who crossed boundaries, especially linguistic ones, for fun and with no harm intended. These singers reimagined the empowering force of eroticism as not a battle but a game.9
Though many certainly had a fame-seeking sparkle in their eyes, 1950s vocal harmonizers clung to the spirit of play within their performances, which usually began informally and involved all sorts of subtexts: competition, swaggering, flirting. Al Frazier of the Los Angeles group the Lamplighters once reminisced about the small crowd of geniuses that would gather at the home of Gaynel and Alex Hodge, both stars of the scene, in Watts. “We used to sit around the living room and harmonize. Back then I wanted to be a part of the music, a part of the fun at parties. It wasn’t about being a star.” On a given afternoon, Gaynel and Jesse Belvin might compete for the attention of Zola Taylor of the Platters (then at nearby Jordan Junior High), while Etta James, fresh from a singing lesson with local gospel luminary James Earle Hines, tried out a new song with Hollywood Flames singer Bobby Day and his friend Richard Berry, who’d later go on to write the classic nonsense rocker “Louie, Louie.” The creative process of these young experimenters couldn’t be confined within the boundaries of conventional songs. They were trying on whatever move worked in the moment.
Gatherings like this, giving birth to groups that mutated with the speed of a chemistry-class experiment, made doo-wop explode as a nationwide regional phenomenon. Around fifteen thousand vocal groups recorded singles during the 1950s, though many never went beyond that session. The structure of these groups clearly borrowed from gospel quartets as well as from secular vocal ensembles like the Ink Spots and the Mills Brothers; yet the new wave was different, partly because its members were so young. Imagine a whole field of Silas Steeles, most of them under age eighteen. “Diction isn’t always clear, but side is strong and could stir,” Billboard’s reviewer wrote of “On Your Radio,” the debut single by twelve-year-old Richard Lanham and the Tempo-Tones, in 1957.10
The immortal phrase announcing “On Your Radio”—a bass voice singing “doo doot doo doot dat doo doot doo deet whoop whoop”—was fundamental doo-wop talk. “Gee” combined it with the titular exclamation and a fistful of “oh-ho-whoa”s. “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, which broke around the same time as “Gee,” propelled an attempted seduction forward with repeated sputters of its silly title and threw in a “ya da da” or two at the climax. Every doo-wop song relied on nonsense syllables for both percussion and harmonic heft, and by the mid-1950s many were dominated by them, with titles like “Ding Dong,” “Chim-Bam-Bah,” “Ding a Ling,” “Shtiggy Boom,” “Vadunt-Un-Va-Da,” “Zoom Boom Zing,” and so on toward infinity. Most songs weren’t entirely nonsense; instead, the absurdity formed a sort of internal dialogue with the words of romance or frustration being expressed. The voices behind these songs seemed to always be dipping back into baby talk to make their points.
After all, they were practically babies. Lanham was one of many singers who were under the age of consent. From hitmaker Frankie Lymon, who started at thirteen, to “old” men like sixteen-year-old Gaynel Hodge, who cowrote the immortal “Earth Angel” and got his start hanging around Huggy Boy and the other DJs at the Dolphin’s record shop, these boys possessed unstable voices that reflected their unstable identities, employing the high notes of pubescence to make their leaps and runs thrilling to young ears. Though they may have aimed for the precision of their older role models, they inevitably communicated a different kind of bravado—one grounded in inexperience and hormonal flux. And they pushed it. The doo-wop sound was somehow inappropriate, even to the singers themselves. After Lymon’s Harlem-based Teenagers became international sensations with the 1956 single “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” he wrote an article entitled “I’m Too Young for Girls” for the African American women’s magazine Tan. “Singing about love, romance and all that kissing stuff gives the girls the wrong idea,” he wrote, though he added that he did have a sweetheart of his own, who simply wasn’t into “that mushy stuff.”11
Lymon probably “wrote” this article (if he penned it at all) at his publicist’s behest, to tone down his image. In 1954, rhythm and blues DJs had begun organizing to discourage artists working in the new style from recording suggestive songs. They were particularly ruffled by ones like “Such a Night” by the Drifters, which clearly used nonsense as double entendre. “This suggestivity [sic] vanished from the doo-wop genre with the dawning of the classical period in 1955,” doo-wop experts Anthony Gribin and Matthew Schiff assert in their exhaustive history of the form.12 But did it, really? Did Frankie Lymon really mean to not be sexy when he hit those flirty blue notes on the verses of his breakthrough single? Or did someone so young simply experience sexuality differently?
This was a relevant question in the 1950s, when fears about a shortage of men after World War II fed a trend
toward early marriage. Girls often began dating at twelve. Parents sanctioned this by organizing middle-school dances and other “adult” activities for their children.13 At the same time, as Lymon’s declarations indicate, young teens were not supposed to fully explore the feelings such encounters inevitably stimulated. This began a pattern that continues today in American teen social circles still affected by conservative forces like abstinence-only sex education programs. It forced teenagers to struggle regularly with partial arousal, to seek spaces where they could honor their urges in semiprivate (since they were denied real independence), and to find ways to express not simply enjoyment, but anxiety.
Mirroring the indeterminate state of adolescence itself, doo-wop music was both a fugitive form originating in the spaces where young people headed to find momentary privacy and a conduit toward respectability, the dream of full manhood. (Female and mixed-gender doo-wop groups existed, but were few; the feminine moment would come at the start of the 1960s, with the rise of girl groups.) Historians like Brian Ward have noted the connection between young vocal groups in the early 1950s and gangs. “Both were essentially transient, adolescent affiliations: who else had the time to practice the harmonies or fight in the rumbles?” Ward writes. “Both were inherently unstable aggregations: members regularly came and went, their departure often related to the assumption of adult responsibilities, like marriage, parenthood, the draft, or a job.”14
The music vocal groups made allowed their young stars to imagine adulthood, but also to show how their identities and emotions didn’t fit into the simulacrum of it that society was foisting upon them. Similar to the tic-ridden performances of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Vic Morrow in Blackboard Jungle, these heartthrobs seemed to leak excess from their very pores. In doo-wop, this created a tension with harmony’s inherent elegance. Nonsense was the safety valve that also somehow further fed its energy.
Before the 1950s, ungrammatical syllables had meant many things in popular music. Often, they served as obvious double entendres: that “da da strain” which for Ethel Waters signified sexual excitement had many antecedents, from comical numbers like Spike Jones’s version of “Cocktails for Two” to ribald R&B like Dave Bartholomew’s “My Ding-a-Ling.” The gospel quartets had shown how such ways of masking sexual talk could become sublime—a way of invoking an erotic drive that went beyond simple tactile stimulation. At its most emotional, in songs like the Orioles’ “It’s Too Soon to Know,” the Diablos’ “The Wind,” or “The Letter,” the divinely incomprehensible metaphysical poem by sixteen-year-old Vernon Green and his Medallions (which gave us the phrase “the pompatus of love,” whatever that means), doo-wop touched upon this sublimity, infusing romance with a sense of wonder and recasting R&B’s grown-up leer as a winning smile.
Less promisingly, lyrical absurdism also often signified racial difference. African American performers had to contend with the vigorous ghost of minstrelsy surfacing in “jungle” songs like the primate romance “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” written in 1914 but a hit in 1950, when it was featured in the Debbie Reynolds movie Two Weeks with Love. These invocations of an Africa where brown beings babbled were complicated by the occasional presence of actual African music. Early doo-wop groups found themselves on the singles charts alongside “Skokiaan,” an often-recorded Rhodesian big-band dance number that became a US smash in 1954, and “Wimoweh,” the Weavers’ folksy 1952 version of South African Solomon Linda’s improvised 1939 Zulu refrain. In 1961, a white vocal ensemble with the ironic name the Tokens turned Linda’s lovely melody into the perennial family favorite “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
Beyond clear cases where nonsense substituted for language deemed inappropriate (because it was sexual) or impenetrable (because it was African) lay the realm of nonverbal vocal improvising. As we know from the encounter between Adelaide Hall and Duke Ellington in 1927’s “Creole Love Call,” this musical practice was always erotic, too. When singers became instruments, the way Ella Fitzgerald did on her career-launching version of the nursery rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” in 1938, they tested the limits of the body in ways that were openly sensual. Often these acts would also invoke the language of children, allowing listeners to feel a connection to the polymorphous pleasure that preceded the sexual policing they began to encounter as adolescents.
In late 1958, the New York Times reporter Gertrude Samuels ventured out to a show at the Paramount Theatre organized by the founding rock and roll DJ Alan “Moondog” Freed that included performances by the vocal groups Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and the Chantels, alongside solo stars like Jerry Lee Lewis. She asked Roseann Chasen, “a black-haired, starry-eyed beauty of 15,” what drew her to rock and roll. “It’s just instinct, that’s all,” Chasen told her. “I come to hear it because I can sing and scream here. Because it’s not like at home where your parents are watching TV and you can’t.”15 Not like at home, where your parents are watching you. Today we think rock and roll emancipated teenagers in the 1950s, and it did—but only provisionally, and in ways that left their problems and fears intact. Rock and roll created a metaphorical free space in which teenagers could scream their inner chaos as well as their emerging desires.
LOTTA SHAKIN’ GOIN’ ON
As kids singing together carved out temporary free spaces in hallways and on street corners, their goal was to enter a realm where those magic moments of incoherent clarity could be made to last forever: the recording studio. Certain special studios became particularly fertile seedbeds for revelatory teen gibberish. The most famous, then and now, is in Memphis, Tennessee, the same city where so many gospel quartets found their way to deeper truths in harmony. It was a shabby little place called Sun, run by a thirtysomething businessman who’d been robbed of his own teenage freedom when his father died during the Great Depression and he had to go to work to support his family. His name was Sam Phillips, and he became the guru of a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.
Phillips was good at letting kids mess around while making music. He’d started the Memphis Recording Service as a way of making money from the dreams of amateurs, and though his ambition led him to seek out musicians whose singles he could push for a profit, Phillips never let go of that preference for the raw over the cooked. Initially he worked with fairly seasoned African American bluesmen, but he took Sun to another commercial level by turning his attention to barely legal country upstarts trying to avoid lives spent driving trucks or farming. They were interested in becoming regional stars who could play dances throughout the small-town South and find fans via the cheap new records being pressed on vinyl—45 RPM singles. Phillips helped these flashy itinerant workers stay in touch with the parts of themselves that didn’t take so well to upward mobility. When the guitarist Carl Perkins, more meticulous than most, once fumed that a session had been “a big original mistake,” Phillips replied “that’s what Sun Records is.”16
Sam Phillips has been memorialized as a Great Man of 1950s rock and roll. He was great, it’s true, at staying out of the way of the wave of noise moving through his studio. Sam would get himself in the mood to mess up so that his charges would know he was in solidarity with them. “He was just sitting up there having just as good a time as we were,” recalled Billy Lee Riley, a wild man known for the song “Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll,” in a 1999 interview. “And probably just as drunk as we were—or drunker.”17 A nonmusician, Phillips had help from technology—specifically, recording equipment that guaranteed the weirdest warble and loosest guitar line would be salvageable. Phillips realized his own sense of play by inventing studio tricks like slapback echo, in which two takes of a song could be combined to add yet another layer of fruitful incoherence, pushing the voice and the instruments apart just so, making something that might have seemed totally aggressive at the moment its makers laid it down more tentative—decentered, like a thought process unfolding. When he found his perfect improviser in a gospel-loving, vocal groups–obsessed kid named Elvis Presley, Phillips w
as ready to get him real, real gone and get every bit of the process down on tape.
If rock and roll was a virus, Elvis was its irresistible Typhoid Mary. That’s a fact that no amount of revisionism valuing other players in the genre’s birth can overcome. Even before he became a national phenomenon, Elvis was a regional one, touring throughout the South and leaving local versions of himself everywhere in his wake. These callow pretenders played in makeshift clubs set up in community halls, their acts merging the legacies of snake oil salesmen, freak show contortionists, and gospel tent revivalists. Girls flocked to see them. The rockabilly historian Craig Morrison describes these scenes: “There might be Christmas lights strung across the back of the stage, tables and chairs around the perimeter of the room, food available for purchase, and maybe booze . . . Since the sound system is rudimentary and there are no stage monitors on the more rocking tunes, the singer sings louder and closer to the microphone to hear himself, sending the audience a distorted vocal sound. The small guitar amp is also distorting. The drummer has a snare, a big bass drum, a ride cymbal and a high hat and sits low, sitting stiff armed.” These bands seemed like they had been shot out of a cannon. Often, they only had fifteen minutes to play. It was a competition reminiscent of the all-night gospel battles Elvis witnessed as a high schooler, but with leering replacing sanctified shouts.18
Pretty soon, the sound these giddy country boys made had a name: rockabilly. Its creators shared a certain personality—what Phillips’s associate, the producer Jack Clement, called “overt.” Jerry Lee Lewis hurled his blond curls over his forehead and then would comb them back like some kind of snaggletooth tiger. Ronnie Self would start his shows by running from the back of the stage, grabbing the microphone, and flopping down almost into the audience. Janis Martin, one of a handful of female rockabilly stars, shook her hips like a burlesque dancer. At a time when teenagers were being policed for any sign of going out of control, these rockers did it every night, showing their fans how to survive and even profit from behaving exactly as they weren’t supposed to.