UC Santa Cruz

My dissertation examines the role that urban Black female youth culture played in the formation of the sixties girl group phenomenon, a style of music popular in the United States from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, which focused on the voices and emotional concerns of teenage girls. Through oral histories, interviews, and correspondence with over a dozen girl group vocalists, my dissertation locates the roots of girl groups and girl group music within urban Black neighborhoods and communities of the post-war era. In these environments, cooperation, harmony, and collectivity were central strategies young Black women and girls developed in response to the changing social and economic realities of urban renewal, suburbanization, and Cold War politics. My research shows how girl groups and girl group music emerged from the new technology, youth-oriented consumer culture, and shifting gender and sexual roles of the post-war era. As members of the first generation of African American youth, for whom the majority were raised in urban centers outside of the South, girl group vocalists and their male counterparts, doo-wop vocalists, grew up in a period of relative economic opportunity before the full effects of automation, decentralization, and relocation devastated urban neighborhoods and communities. Urban vocal group culture emerged as a source of identity for the sons and daughters of Southern migrants and Caribbean immigrants who were navigating the changing racial and ethnic composition of America’s cities and negotiating intimate relationships within a Cold War context that privileged a racially homogenous white middle-class family model. I contend that vocal groups functioned as an important form of community building among post-war urban youth, especially young Black women and girls. The collective identities Black girls crafted in their groups were an important form of self-representation and expression. Trying on different vocal personas and collectively addressing particular teenage female problems through song allowed Black women and girls to not only insert themselves into public conversations about being a teenager and female, these practices allowed them to expand the range of possibilities available to working class Black women and girls forced to negotiate the double bind of white racism and the Black middle class’s “politics of respectability.” By understanding the customs, values, and public styles of young Black women and girls coming of age in post-war urban America, my work shifts conversations about girl groups and girl group music away from record producers, songwriters, and white Baby Boomer audiences, and onto the disproportionately young Black female vocalists whose vocal practices and collective approaches to problem solving were central to the creative consciousness behind the sixties girl group phenomenon.