Warwick — Girl Groups, Girl Culture

Author: Jacqueline Warwick
Title: Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s
Year: 2007
Type: Academic book (Routledge)

Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s is a study by the musicologist Jacqueline Warwick, published by Routledge in 2007. It argues that the girl group music of the 1960s deserves serious study as evidence of how teenage girls worked out who they were, and it examines the singers and their listeners alongside the producers and songwriters. Its evidence is the records, analyzed closely, in chapters on the voice, dance, record producers, the songwriters Carole King and Ellie Greenwich, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, and crossover at Motown. Yvette Staelens’s review in the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews was favorable, and the notices its publisher quotes praise it.

Routledge published the book in 2007.¹ Its page describes Warwick as an associate professor in the Department of Music at Dalhousie University in Canada.¹ She writes that girl group music “has been one of the most underresearched repertories in popular music history,” a culture “too often dismissed as vapid and reactionary,” and that she considers “ways in which girls can and do negotiate their gender and generational identities.”²

Warwick defines the repertory by five features. Its lyrics put an “emphasis on the concerns and interests of teenage girls,” and its songs were “prepared for the most part by professional songwriters.” Its records were made in the studio with hired session players, its arrangements often call on orchestral instruments, and, “above all,” it is heard in “the audibly adolescent voices of girls interacting in dialogues between lead and backing vocalists.”² The book has five parts and fourteen chapters. The first, “Girl Talk,” takes up the sound and “The Voice of the Girl”; the second, “A Brand New Dance Now,” turns to dance and the body, beginning with “Embodying Girlness.” The third covers production, in “Record Producers and the Politics of Production,” “Carole King and Ellie Greenwich” and “Up Against the Wall of Sound,” on Spector’s records. The fourth turns to respectability, crossover and the family, in “Respectability Versus Rock’n’Roll,” “Motown and the Politics of Crossover Success” and “Mothers and Daughters.” The fifth, “Out in the Streets,” covers group identity, rebellion, public space and the groups’ lives on the road.^{1, 2} Among the records the book discusses is the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, which Spector, Greenwich and Jeff Barry wrote for them.² Routledge’s description calls Warwick “the first writer to address ’60s girl group music from the perspective of its most significant audience—teenage girls.”¹

Staelens, writing in the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews in October 2008, wrote that Warwick shows girl groups to be “more than just disposable pop” and turns attention from instrumentalists and composers to singers and listeners. She called it “a wonderful read, a great reference source, and an essential volume,” though she thought it a pity that its photographs were few, and felt its musical analysis might lose some general readers.³ Among the quotations Routledge selected, Harp magazine wrote that the book “flies in the face of the notion that producers are musical gods,” and CHOICE rated it “Highly Recommended.”¹ It was also reviewed in the Journal of Popular Music Studies in 2007, and in the Journal of the Society for American Music and the University of Toronto Quarterly in 2009.⁴

Key contributions

• Girl group music studied as evidence of how teenage girls negotiated their identities.
• Singers and listeners studied alongside the professional songwriters and producers.
• A five-part definition of the girl group repertory: its themes, its professional songwriting, its making in the studio, its orchestral sound and, above all, the voices of adolescent girls.

See also

• Brill Building — the New York songwriting trade that supplied many girl group records
• Pop as craft — the debate over pop as a craft
• The songwriter-performer divide — the division between writing songs and performing them
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music