Singing as Social Practice

Most groups of Black girls singing in harmony never made it to the hallowed halls of the Brill Building. Instead, they sang together as a way of friendship and sociality. They did so at school and church, in hallways and bathrooms, and in basements and upstairs apartments. As Reeves points out in her stage patter, the Shirelles arrived in the recording studio having honed their singing and songwriting chops while babysitting.Footnote ¹⁶ Few of these groups recorded any music, but school yearbooks, student newspapers, and local journalism provide copious documentary evidence that girls were singing together as a social activity on a regular basis in local clubs, theaters, talent shows, and at dances. For these girls, singing was a pastime that forged bonds of friendship, esteem from peers, and personal pleasure. Singing together was a cornerstone of girls’ musical pleasure culture.

The “girl group sound” of the early 1960s was but one facet of a longer tradition of girls singing together as social practice. Although Black girls certainly sang in gospel and vocal jazz groups prior to the start of the 1950s, the midcentury decade saw the beginning of rhythm and blues and doo-wop-style singing among girls. In 1951, for example, Jersey City’s Jersey Journal reported on a trio of sisters who performed under the name the Del Rio Sisters. The group, which comprised sisters Jacqueline, Grace, and Gloria Givens, was “long famous for singing” at Lincoln High School and charity events in town.Footnote ¹⁷ The sisters, with the addition of low alto Shirley Kee, would go on to be three-time winners of Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, and the Jersey City newspapers closely followed their performances on the show.Footnote ¹⁸ The Del Rio Sisters continued to sing together after high school under the name The Honeytones, and they enjoyed mentorship (and management) from elder Black colleagues such as Juanita Hall, Dinah Washington, and choreographer Clarence Robinson.Footnote ¹⁹ The Honeytones were primarily a live act, but their small body of recorded work includes Tin Pan Alley standards, jump blues, doo-wop ballads, and a novelty cha-cha, all delivered in the tight harmony style of vocal jazz acts like the Ginger Snaps or the Peters Sisters.Footnote ²⁰ The Honeytones began singing together in the late 1940s, and their work shows the diversity of the pre-1960s girl group sound.

Yet, the fact that the Honeytones made any records at all sets them apart from many girl singers of this era. Throughout the 1950s, Black newspapers and school yearbooks are full of girls who sang in groups but never made a record. In March 1955, for example, New York Age local correspondent and politician Maude Richardson reported that a “vocal quartet called the Sharp Tunes” participated in Bushwick High School’s second annual talent show.Footnote ²¹ The Brooklyn-based La Vals were first mentioned in the New York Age in 1958 as a promising new group, and while their 1961 performance at the Sarah J. Hale Vocational School’s talent show was covered in the school newspaper, they do not appear to have made a record.Footnote ²² Similarly, the 1961 edition of The Optimist (the yearbook of South Side High School in Newark, New Jersey) includes Thelma March, Mary Ann McTerrell, and Georgia Phillips, all of whom belonged to the “Antratones.”Footnote ²³ The Antratones do not appear in any newspaper coverage, suggesting that the group was a purely social endeavor. By the time the Shirelles’ 1961 crossover hit “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” signaled the potential profit in songs by Black girl groups, girls had already been singing together for years.Footnote ²⁴

The early-sixties rise of the Brill Building and Motown played a major role in codifying the “girl group sound” and launching a small number of groups to national fame. Girl group records became less popular after the mid-1960s, but this does not mean that high school girls ceased to sing. Late-1960s newspapers and yearbooks document myriad groups, such as the Kittens, the Flydels, and the Deb Tones, who sang together for fun in talent shows and at nightclubs.Footnote ²⁵ The few girl groups who made records during this time incorporated the new soul sound into the girl group format. For example, in Princeton, New Jersey, in the late 1960s, twins Michael and Johnnie Hill (both girls) and Louise Stephenson began singing together as high school students. The group, called the Devonnes, cultivated a vibrant career as a live nightclub act in the United States and abroad into the mid-1970s. In 1969, the group won an annual contest to record a jingle for the Schaefer beer company, and the Hill twins pursued modeling and acting in addition to singing.Footnote ²⁶ The Devonnes’ slim recorded catalog uses the creative basslines, deep horn sections, and lush strings of the sweet soul sound while retaining the prominent call-and-response between lead and backup singers typical in vocal harmony ensembles.Footnote ²⁷ Like the Honeytones, the Devonnes demonstrate that Black girls’ singing practice was a longstanding tradition that easily incorporated shifts in musical style.

Musical Pleasure Cultures and the Race of Romance

Black girls’ singing practice also involved listening. In the late 1950s, girls soliciting pen pal correspondence in the Baltimore Afro-American reported loving girl groups such as the Quintones and the Chantels.Footnote ²⁸ The Bronx-based Clickettes enjoyed support from a fan club founded by a friend of group members Trudy and Charlotte McCartney and their little sister Carlene.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, the 1964 edition of the yearbook of South Side High School in Newark, New Jersey, is full of girls who cite the Chiffons’ 1963 hit “He’s So Fine” as a particular favorite.Footnote ³⁰ Former member of the Exciters Lillian Walker-Moss remembers that records (including those by girl groups) were also important in bridging singing and listening culture. For her, singing along to records and televised performances in make-believe rehearsals was a key part of musical life. Walker-Moss describes meeting future lead singer of the Exciters, Brenda Reid, on her first day of high school at John Adams High School in Queens:

Walker-Moss had been singing for pleasure with her lifelong friend Sylvia Wilbur as a junior high school student, but with the addition of Reid and Carolyn Johnson, the group became more dedicated over time. Make-believe mirror rehearsals led to regular practice together at Reid’s home, where the girls began to gain skill.Footnote ³² Although the Exciters would eventually go on to open for the Beatles during their 1964 American tour, the group began with two girls singing along to records.

Romance was a central theme in girl group songs, and girls engaged in romantic fantasy through singing and listening both to other girl groups and to male stars. Cheryl Lusane, for example, grew up in Newark and is a graduate of Arts High School. Lusane sang in an amateur group that gave infrequent performances of original songs.Footnote ³³ More prominent in Lusane’s memory of her high school years, however, was her listening practice. She remembers being “madly and desperately in love with the music of the Four Tops. … Levi Stubbs had that haunting kind of sound. … When he sings ‘Just Ask the Lonely,’ you hear it, it’s painful.”Footnote ³⁴ Louise Harris Murray, formerly of the mid-1950s group The Hearts, similarly notes that she was “in love” with Willie Winfield of the Harptones.Footnote ³⁵ The strength of her feeling was such that, at one Harptones performance, she leapt up on the stage and joined in their song (Harris was disappointed when she learned that Winfield was already engaged to be married).Footnote ³⁶ Hattie Ramona Shockley of the Newark-based Shockley Singers swooned over Jackie Wilson. Despite her own considerable professional experience alongside celebrity gospel performers, Shockley noted that when Wilson kissed her on the cheek, she “didn’t wash [her] face for a week!”Footnote ³⁷ In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Black girls nurtured a musical pleasure culture through singing and listening together and engaging with their developing sense of sexual desire and romantic fantasy.

Black girls also cultivated this culture in the wake of a decades-long process that defined new norms around sexuality, marriage, and courtship. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of companionate marriage in which romantic, erotic love is central to the marriage bond.Footnote ³⁸ This ideal also transformed teenage courtship practices, as the advent of dating gave way to the “steady” system in the 1950s. Beth Bailey and Amanda Littauer have argued that steady dating relationships were akin to “play-marriages” in which exclusive, heterosexual romantic love provided social permission for teenage explorations of sexuality.Footnote ³⁹ By midcentury, the new vision of romance and domesticity was intensely marketed to girls through dolls, toys, magazines, songs, novels, films, and even sex education materials.Footnote ⁴⁰ Black girls participated in this phenomenon by writing and recording a slew of wedding songs in the 1950s and 1960s. In New York City, the Clickettes, the Quintones, and the Deltairs all released original wedding-themed songs in 1958 alone.Footnote ⁴¹ Romance comics focused on courtship and marriage exploded in popularity, and magazines such as Seventeen, Ebony, Jet, and Tan all ran wedding features.Footnote ⁴² In advice columns in Black papers, young people contributed a flurry of questions about courtship and marriage.Footnote ⁴³ As Black girls nurtured a musical pleasure culture grounded in romantic fantasy, their homosocial activities were framed within this media ecosystem and these larger cultural trends.

In fact, in Black communities especially, romance media was often specifically tied to music. Romance magazines such as Bronze Thrills and Tan Confessions featured record reviews and stories written by or about musicians.Footnote ⁴⁴ Jet and Ebony published photographs of Black female musicians as sex objects, and the sexy comic character Torchy Brown had a musician boyfriend named Earl.Footnote ⁴⁵ Likewise, the Baltimore Afro-American’s teen-focused dating advice column entitled “Tell It To Jan” ran clip-able photos of vocal groups alongside discussions of youthful sexuality.Footnote ⁴⁶ School yearbooks also included girls’ writing about both music and romance together. The 1957 edition of The Wadleigh Way (the yearbook for Harlem’s Wadleigh Junior High School), for example, contains a literary section. Selections include critical writing about popular music, a romance story in which the girl protagonist successfully gains a date with a popular boy, and an imagined diary kept by characters in Wuthering Heights, all authored by junior-high Black girls.Footnote ⁴⁷ Within the larger swirl of changing norms around sexuality, Black women and girls were often reading and writing about romance and music alongside one another.

However, this engagement with more permissive norms around sexuality was complicated by the implicit bourgeois whiteness of the companionate marriage ideal. Julian Carter has traced the process by which postwar discourses about marriage conflated white superiority with “affectionate, reproductive heterosexuality” under the banner of “normality.”Footnote ⁴⁸ As high school attendance rose throughout the 1930s and 1940s, sex education and the steady dating system served to further entrench connections between relationship norms and racial superiority.Footnote ⁴⁹ By the 1950s, a “normal” marriage was erotically charged, heterosexual, and implicitly white, and teenagers were expected and encouraged to emulate this ideal with their steadies.

For Black girls, the increased approval of sexuality in marriage and steady relationships collided with an older Black female culture of “dissemblance” that prized a politics of respectability.Footnote ⁵⁰ This generational difference is evident in advice columns in Black newspapers. For example, in 1961, a girl identified as R. C. wrote to the Baltimore Afro-American’s teen dating advice column with a concern about a rock and roll concert.Footnote ⁵¹ She wrote:

The advice columnist’s answer was unsympathetic. She chided R. C. for “embarrassing” her boyfriend by allowing herself to be “made a public spectacle” and encouraged her to wait for the boyfriend to come around on his own.Footnote ⁵³ R. C. receives blame for allowing an unwanted sexual advance to damage a steady relationship. Elsewhere, girls were bewildered by pressure from adults to go steady. In 1964, for example, a fourteen-year-old girl identified as “Janie E.” wrote to the advice column in the Chicago Defender asking for help dealing with her mother, who thought she “should be going steady.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Columnist Theresa “Teesee” Fambro, writing as “Arletta Claire,” responded that Janie was indeed “too young to be dating steady” and scolded “Mrs. E” for pressuring her daughter.Footnote ⁵⁵ In these instances, girls were caught between cultural expectations, their own desires, and the judgment of elders.

Black girls were also forced to reckon with the tension between mainstream norms and preexisting racist stereotypes about Black female sexuality. This was especially true when Black girls interacted with sociologists and social workers.Footnote ⁵⁶ In her analysis of Black girls’ interviews with sociologists in the mid-1930s, for example, Simmons notes that the girls responded to questions about sexuality with carefully constructed answers that emphasized their status as “nice girls.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Littauer finds that researchers conducting a 1950s study on venereal disease were “surprised” to find that the majority of their Black female respondents had had sexual contact only with their steady boyfriends.Footnote ⁵⁸ Separated by decades, these studies show that many Black girls attempted to conform to the new norm of steady dating relationships modeled after companionate marriages, only to be subjected to the racist assumptions of adults and the disapproval of Black elders.

Yet, during the postwar period, Black girls also encountered a political environment in which proximity to (bourgeois, white) “normal” heterosexuality was sometimes useful. During the first years of the Civil Rights Movement, dress and appearance played an important role in nonviolent action, and beauty standards for Black women were often defined by proximity to “respectable” whiteness.Footnote ⁵⁹ This period corresponded with the rise of girl group records, during which groups of normatively feminine Black girls contributed to the “integration” of Billboard charts. But as the late 1960s turn toward nationalist politics coincided with the formation of Black studies as an academic discipline, activists and thinkers rejected assimilation. This change in political priorities impacted Black women in particular. Sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig writes that in the Civil Rights era:

Black girls growing up in the 1950s and 1960s were among these “daughters” who had been raised within a culture fixated on white, middle-class ideals of beauty, femininity, romance, and marriage. As teenagers, they responded to this fixation in part by creating a vibrant culture of pleasure. But as they reached adulthood, their girlish interest in romantic love was recast as shallow, counter-revolutionary, and inconveniently “white.”

Importantly, this shift in political focus coincided with the earliest formation of disciplinary priorities in Black feminist and music studies and resulted in the ambivalent place of Black romance media in this field. For example, despite early interventions by literature scholars such as Ann duCille, Claudia Tate, and Belinda Edmondson, literary works that center themes of domesticity and romance remain routinely overlooked.Footnote ⁶¹ As duCille argued in 1993, this omission is due in part to a scholarly habit of evaluating Black cultural products “in terms of their fidelity to ‘the black experience’ and their attention to ‘authentically black’ subject matter.”Footnote ⁶² Despite decades of groundbreaking scholarship on Black female sexualities, in 2022 Margo Hendricks and Julie E. Moody-Freeman noted a continuing “sparsity of critical scholarship on late twentieth and twenty-first century Black romance.”Footnote ⁶³ Although these writers have argued time and again for the importance of romance and domesticity as themes in Black-authored literature, these themes seem too aligned with the priorities of middle-class whiteness to be fully considered as part of a Black literary tradition.

The playful, romantic songs written and sung by Black girls at midcentury are similarly easy to dismiss. Indeed, as discussed here, many feminist scholars argue for the importance of Black girl groups in shaping mainstream white culture. I suggest that scholarly perception of Black girls’ musical pleasure culture suffers from what Mark Burford calls a “retreat from listening.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Because girls’ musical practice does not conform to “the ways we have come to prize and distinguish African American musical traditions,” scholars overlook the facts of Black girls’ lives.Footnote ⁶⁵ It is true that a slim minority of the most famous girl groups enjoyed an integrated listenership in the early 1960s. But the documentary evidence shows that most Black girls sang together in Black community spaces and were nurtured by Black families and mentors. Most girl groups are documented in Black newspapers and in yearbooks of majority-Black public schools. Their music is Black music.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Black girls lived in an era that optimistically valued integration in the face of violence. They grew up within an ecosystem of media that naturalized the superiority of middle-class whiteness through idealized visions of courtship and love. The girls singing love songs together in this milieu may not have been legibly “resisting” their marginalized status as Black Americans, but they were repurposing the idea of romance to forge imaginative spaces within which they could craft new subjectivities. They were developing a pleasure culture grounded in homosociality and joy where they could imagine themselves outside the weight of adult assumptions and expectations. What’s more, girls documented and archived this culture by creating, performing, and circulating love songs. For them, romance was the register within which discourses about sexuality could be visible and audible.Footnote ⁶⁶ The evidence shows that girls in the postwar period mobilized fantasy and imagination to create realms in which they could be fully themselves. They did this not only by singing and listening, but also through writing songs.

The Songs Black Girls WriteFootnote ⁶⁷

In 1958, Gloria J. Mandly, Edythe Jones, Catherine Cooper, Audrey Maben, and Audrey Sparrow of the Chicago-based Starlettes recorded an original song called “Please Ring My Phone.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The song deals with the specifically midcentury, middle-class trial of waiting for a boy to call on the telephone. A spoken bridge lays out the stakes at hand in a direct address to the absent boy: “yes darling, I sit here alone/waiting by the phone, just wondering darling, wondering if you’ll call/You told me last night you loved me with all your heart and soul/please ring my phone.” The voices are supported with a small ensemble of a rhythm section and a hushed saxophone. The piano ticks out the 12/8 time, and a light snare hit articulates the backbeat. A guitar strums the typical I-vi-IV-V-I changes, which repeat for each verse and refrain. The lyrics are carried by an unsteady lead singer with wobbly intonation, who carefully reaches into her upper register for leaps on the words “the phone.” Backup singers support the lead with harmonized “oohs” before delivering the refrain: “ring, ring, ring, please ring/please ring my phone.” In other words, “Please Ring My Phone” sounds just like countless other doo-wop ballads.

The songs that girls write are often, like “Please Ring My Phone,” conventional popular songs about getting and losing love. But they are not inconsequential. I argue that girls’ songs remain important not as precursors to a more authentic adult artistry but in and of themselves, as a record of Black life. These songs form an archive of documentation that records the multimodal musical pleasure culture created by Black girls at this time. In writing and recording songs together, girl singers established what Kyra Gaunt calls a “background of relatedness to one another,” as they co-created a romantic fantasy realm within the conventions of a musical style pioneered by Black youth.Footnote ⁶⁹ Taking girls’ love songs seriously reveals an alternative history of Black girlhood centered around love, homosociality, and care. Recognizing this history, however, requires valuing ordinary, conventional music.

In some songs, this record is especially audible because it reverberates through the sonic language of musical play. In her ethnographic study of Black girls’ musical play, Gaunt cites play as a mode of enculturation; play is a peer-centric classroom in which girls learn to be “socially [B]lack” through music.Footnote ⁷⁰ As she traces relationships between girls’ game chants and recorded music through the 1990s, Gaunt reveals a clear relationship between the musical material generated by girls’ play and hip hop recorded by men.Footnote ⁷¹ In the vibrant localized record market of the 1950s and 1960s, some girls were able to write and record their own songs combining the sonic language of play with themes of romance. For example, the New York-based Bobbettes, made up of sisters Emma and Jannie Pought, Reather Dixon, Laura Webb, and Helen Gathers, collaboratively composed much of their recorded repertoire. Today, the Bobbettes are remembered as early representatives of the “girl group sound,” and like the Shirelles, they honed their skills by participating in a girl-centered musical pleasure culture. Many of the Bobbettes’ original songs incorporate the sound of musical play, including “Speedy,” “Zoomy,” and “Come-A” (all from 1958). But none is as well remembered as their first recording: “Mr. Lee” (1957).Footnote ⁷²

“Mr. Lee” was not intended to be a love song. The Bobbettes originally wrote it as a playful tune about their teacher that titillatingly poked fun at an authority figure.Footnote ⁷³ But before recording, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records required the group to rework the lyrics into a love song. The resulting recording combines strikingly erotic imagery with the sounds of the playground. “Mr. Lee” is bookended by a rhyming couplet that combines both an allusion to double-dutch chants with a command to direct a desirous gaze: “One, two, three, look at Mr. Lee!/Three, four, five, look at him jive!” The twelve-bar-blues verses describe the somatic experience of said desire (“my heart is aching/for you, Mr. Lee”) and issue an invitation for Mr. Lee to “come on … and do your stuff.” Syncopated shouts of “Hey!” punctuate this frank description of erotic feeling, and in the final iteration of the refrain, a soloist introduces an additional syncopated countermelody on the vocable “oh.” Throughout the verses, the backup singers accompany a soloist with shifting syllables, including “mmm-tadawaddaWAP.” Layered, syncopated shouts, rhymes based on counting, vocables that feature bright vowels, and varied vocal production (shouting, humming, etc.) are all musical characteristics that Gaunt cites as common to double-dutch chants and hand-clap games.Footnote ⁷⁴

In 1960, the Bobbettes intensified the rhyming counts, syncopated shouts, and creative diction of Black girls’ play in a follow-up song entitled “I Shot Mr. Lee,” recorded for Triple-X Records. The song begins with a thumping quotation from the Funeral March of Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata no. 2, op. 35, rendered by a honking saxophone and muddy piano chords.Footnote ⁷⁵ After a drum fill transition, voices deliver the opening line in close harmony: “One, two, three, I shot Mr. Lee/Three, four, five, got tired of his jive.” Other members of the ensemble offer syncopated, ad-libbed commentary between phrases, propelling the story along. “I Shot Mr. Lee” describes the infidelity of the titular character and his violent end at the hands of his jilted lover. The girls grow more gleeful as the song progresses, ventriloquizing Mr. Lee’s frightened calls for help and expanding the opening counting sequence to add “Six, seven, eight, Mr. Lee had a date/Nine, ten, eleven, now he’s up in heaven.”Footnote ⁷⁶ They create a sort of slant-assonance through vocalic harmonization on the words “High top hat” when describing Mr. Lee and emphasize the distinction between closed and bright vowels in the backup singers’ comment, “shot him in the head, boom, boom!,” pronouncing the “o” in “shot” as a bright [a] in contrast with the [u] of “boom.” The Bobbettes close the song with ad-libbed interjections of “he dead” and “too bad,” relishing the spitefulness of the song’s violence. In “I Shot Mr. Lee,” the Bobbettes extend the provocation of eroticism in the original “Mr. Lee” with the addition of cartoonish violence. As Gaunt remembers from her own childhood, games that include “sexual innuendos about boys and having babies” hold a particular charge for children.Footnote ⁷⁷ In “I Shot Mr. Lee,” the Bobbettes dispense with innuendo, instead reveling in their ability to blunt the emotional intensity of romantic rejection and specter of intimate violence through the playfulness of their performance.

The lyrics of “Mr. Lee” and “I Shot Mr. Lee” concern the trials and travails of a curdled romantic relationship, but the songs retain their sonic connection to the pleasure of play among girls. The Bobbettes’ play songs gesture toward the importance of understanding Black girls’ songwriting as fundamentally connected to homosociality, even when the lyrics center heterosexual romance. Although “Mr. Lee” became a love song only after the Bobbettes entered the adult-controlled space of the recording studio, the group was certainly interested in writing and singing love songs. Their first original ballad was “The Dream,” released just a year after “Mr. Lee.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In “The Dream,” exuberant ad-libs are replaced with a smooth, even-textured lead (likely Emma Pought), who sings with clear diction and even vibrato. The rest of the group supports the lead with sustained chords and open vowels. The group would reprise this sound in 1959 on “You Are My Sweetheart.”Footnote ⁷⁹ “The Dream” and “You Are My Sweetheart” demonstrate that the Bobbettes were equally fluent in the sounds of the playground and the sounds of romance.

The importance of homosociality is perhaps more difficult to hear in romantic love songs, but much of the feminist work on girl group songs convincingly argues that ballads are significant for their impact on girl listeners. This literature is deeply influenced by the priorities of Second Wave feminism and typically valorizes the girl group songs that subvert romance tropes. Warwick, for example, notes that although the figure of “The Guy” was central to girl group repertoire, the call-and-response structure of girl group songs allows for a range of representations of girlhood.Footnote ⁸⁰ Girl listeners might try on “different attitudes toward the whole enterprise of being a girl” as they sang along to the lovelorn lead or scolding backup singers.Footnote ⁸¹ After all, girls singing along to the Bobbettes could love “Mr. Lee” or shoot him. Describing a similar engagement with girl group songs, Douglas deems them a “pop culture harbinger” that “anticipate[s] women’s groups” of the Women’s Liberation movement.Footnote ⁸² In their careful focus on girl listeners and thoughtful analysis of musical sound, these writers find political usefulness in seemingly repressive musical texts.

However, girl group performers often experienced girlhoods far removed from the white suburban “norm.” I agree with girl group scholars that songs such as “Mr. Lee,” “The Dream,” and “You are My Sweetheart” are more important for what they say about the relationships between girls than what they say about boys. But in the case of “Mr. Lee,” the sounds of homosociality that reverberate most clearly are specifically gendered and racialized. They are the sounds of Black girls’ play in particular. Similarly, I contend that tropes of romance functioned specifically within the context of these singers’ Black girlhoods. The importance of romance lies in the imaginative space produced by the pleasure of creating together and the political possibility of playing with expectations of respectability. Black girls were forced to contend with adults’ assumptions of them as promiscuous, aggressive, and driven by their “innate and unfixable deficits.”Footnote ⁸³ Indeed, Marcia Chatelain notes that even when Black adults made passionate arguments for Black girls as children in need of care and protection, they did so by linking girls’ value to their future usefulness in antiracist organizing.Footnote ⁸⁴ Black girls were thus simultaneously libeled with racist stereotypes and charged with upholding the future of the race. For them, creating an imaginative sphere in which to form subjectivities outside the weight of these expectations was an act of radical refusal and possibility.

Like the sounds of Black girls’ play that resonate in the Bobbettes’ songs, girls’ love songs often adhered to the conventions of doo-wop, a musical style forged in Black, urban communities. Although popular perception of doo-wop history focuses on male groups, girls also participated. Schools, hallways, bathrooms, apartments, and basements served as the rehearsal halls for girls’ groups. Sonic cross-pollination was common, and romantic ballads are one facet of girls’ pleasure culture that was shared with boys and men. As Brian Ward has pointed out, male vocal harmony groups of the 1950s often sang raunchy songs like their blues and R&B counterparts, but the doo-wop repertoire always included love songs.Footnote ⁸⁵ It was also typical for male and female groups to record the same songs, meaning that a single love song could be heard in both male and female voices. In 1958, for example, The Jesters recorded Arlene Smith’s song, “The Plea,” originally recorded by the Chantels in 1957.Footnote ⁸⁶ Adam Jackson sings lead on the Jesters’ version, his clear falsetto in the same register as Smith’s high-flying original. Girls cultivated a homosocial pleasure culture around romance, but young Black people of all genders loved love songs.

The excitement of early sexual awareness and romantic attachment was certainly part of love songs’ appeal, but pleasure was also to be found in the act of mastering a conventional form and sharing it with one’s group mates. Barbara English’s songs for the Clickettes provide a good example. The original lineup of the Clickettes included English, sisters Charlotte and Trudy McCartney, and Sylvia Hammond, and the group was steeped in the sounds of doo-wop from the beginning.Footnote ⁸⁷ The McCartney sisters’ block in the Bronx included the Chantels and the Chords (of “Sh-Boom” fame), and the neighborhood was also home to pioneering Black female manager and record label owner Zell Sanders.Footnote ⁸⁸ Sanders was responsible for several local hits, and the Clickettes began recording for her label, Dice Records, in 1958.Footnote ⁸⁹ Within this fertile ground, Barbara English wrote songs for her group and others, typically conventional ballads on romantic themes. Several of the Clickettes’ records became regional hits in the Northeast, but none made the national Billboard charts. Instead, the Clickettes remained local favorites.Footnote ⁹⁰ Their work exemplifies that of the many New York groups who worked largely outside the Brill Building system.

Today, the Clickettes’ best-remembered song is English’s “Lover’s Prayer,” recorded in 1958 but released in 1959.Footnote ⁹¹ The song opens with thumping piano chords before the guitar and piano begin gentle arpeggios in a rocking 12/8 time accented by a soft snare backbeat. Over two measures, the band makes it through the first iteration of the familiar cyclical harmonic motion: I-vi-IV-V-I. Then English enters with a beseeching pickup on the word “Lord.” The McCartneys and Hammond answer English’s pickup with even quarter notes, completing the phrase with the words “Show me if he really loves me.” English echoes the backup harmony, syncopating against their square rhythm and showing off the crisp diction honed by the group in long hours of rehearsal. English breaks up the phrases with swooping disjunct motion, softened by gently bent pitches and vowels that slowly shapeshift. The song unfolds over five verses of equal length, with the third verse functioning as a contrasting bridge. The bridge features striking interplay between the singers in the group, with the first line, “O dear Lord, meet him, not me,” distributed across all the singers as each enters with one word sung on an additional chord tone. The final line of the bridge similarly makes use of all the singers, as the backup group and English finally syncopate homorhythmically for the line “when I open my eyes/Let him be standing there.” A brief crescendo in the drums launches the song into the final verse, the text of which claims: “And if he comes to me tomorrow/And tells me, tells me, that he truly cares/He takes me in his arms and kisses me/I’ll know that God has answered my prayer.” Like “Please Ring My Phone,” “Lover’s Prayer” features a text in which a passive female speaker awaits confirmation that a longed-for male beloved feels the same (although in English’s version, the confirmation comes by a more celestial route). Also like “Please Ring My Phone,” “Lover’s Prayer” uses the sonic language of neighborhood doo-wop.

In reflecting on “Lover’s Prayer,” English emphasizes that the importance of the song lies not in its textual themes, but in what the process of composition and recording meant to the Clickettes themselves.Footnote ⁹² In 1957, English had just moved to New York, and she wrote the poem for “Lover’s Prayer” on the bus ride to Yorkville Vocational High School.Footnote ⁹³ The romantic yearning in the song’s text may have held emotional resonance with English’s yearning for home in an unfamiliar environment, but she notes that the lyrics are not autobiographical. Indeed, when she wrote “Lover’s Prayer,” English had not yet entered into any romantic relationships. She says: “I wasn’t even, you know, actively seeking a boyfriend … I didn’t know anything about love, I just knew … what I heard on … the radio, what was popular at the time.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Here, English is clear that “Lover’s Prayer” is not a simple expression of her girlish preoccupation with a boy, but evidence of her mastery over the language and style of love songs. English was an avid songwriter since early childhood, and she characterizes her songwriting process as “natural.”Footnote ⁹⁵ She had a knack for beginning with an idea and building additional verses, choosing rhymes, and working within the themes that were “popular at the time,” such as moonlight, “lovers,” and “playboys.”Footnote ⁹⁶ English’s groupmate Trudy McCartney Cunningham similarly emphasized the pleasure of creating the songs together. She remarked: “The songs that Barbara wrote … I was so proud of them … our songs were really something to be proud of.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In reflecting on their teenage singing practice, both women point to the importance of songs like “Lover’s Prayer” as evidence of their facility with a particular form.

The Clickettes also found pleasure in the act of singing together. “Lover’s Prayer” played a particularly important role in bringing the Clickettes together, which in turn fostered lifelong friendships among the singers. Yorkville Vocational High School was a haven for Black girls’ singing practice; English and Hammond have both described girls harmonizing together as a feature of life at the school.Footnote ⁹⁸ When narrating the origin of the Clickettes, group members routinely tell the story of English approaching a group that included Hammond and Trudy McCartney and “auditioning” with “Lover’s Prayer.”Footnote ⁹⁹ In 2023, English told writers Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz that after hearing her song, Hammond and McCartney promptly left their group and formed the Clickettes (first called the Bouquets) with English and Trudy’s sister Charlotte.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In conversation with me, Cunningham noted that her respect for English’s skill was a major factor in the formation of the group, saying “I thought that Barbara was just … the best singer in the world.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Recording together was a particular joy. Cunningham remembers that “it was very thrilling … it was incredible just doing it … I love harmony. When I hear that I’m very, very thrilled.”Footnote ¹⁰² Even Hammond, for whom singing professionally was never an ambition, found the pleasure of singing together was enough to keep her in the group.Footnote ¹⁰³ For the Clickettes, love songs like “Lover’s Prayer” are significant for their role in fostering pleasure and sociality on several levels.

In her study of girls living in Jim Crow New Orleans, Simmons finds similar themes among those who wrote love poetry. Simmons notes that the love poetry written by Marie Boyer Brown in the 1930s was not representative of Brown’s actual experience with romance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Instead, she notes that for Brown, “pleasure was not just found in imagining a ‘serious boy’ with whom she could share her heart; it was found in the construction of the poem itself: she loved to write.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Like Brown’s poem, songs like “Lover’s Prayer” function on several affective levels to both generate and document girls’ musical pleasure culture. First, the fantasy realm of romance provides an imaginative register in which Black girls could explore erotic desire, hopeful romantic yearning, and (as in the case of “I Shot Mr. Lee”) even power and violence. The songs also index the more material pleasure of creating and singing together. This second pleasure is, as Simmons also points out, “erotic” in the sense of Audre Lorde’s expansive definition.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Songs about romance may not be politically legible or aesthetically innovative, but they remain crucially important texts, authored by and for Black girls, that document (as Simmons puts it) a “history of pleasure in black girls’ lives.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Singing Romance, Remembering Joy

When Shirley Alston Reeves, Iris Lammers, and Madeline Morris performed that night in 2018, they were dressed in glamorous finery. Reeves wore a flowing white caftan accented with sparkling trim, and her backup singers Lammers and Morris wore matching white, A-line cocktail dresses reminiscent of the early-1960s girl group heyday. They looked every bit the part of the feminine girl group. The song they performed, “Met Him on a Sunday (Ronde Ronde),” is simple: the song’s form nothing more than rotating solo lines interspersed with group refrains of harmonized vocables. The lyrics are about getting and rejecting a boy. There were hundreds of groups and songs such as these in the postwar period, and most of them failed to reach any kind of commercial recognition or secure a place in the historical record.

That night, however, Reeves emphasized that even she, who had reached the glittering heights of girl group success, was a product of the musical pleasure culture created by Black girls. As Reeves made clear in her introduction, songs like “Met Him on a Sunday (Ronde Ronde)” index a collaborative process of songwriting that took place within the context of the girls’ daily life. Reeves also demonstrated the centrality of sociality in girls’ singing culture when, after her backup singers expressed doubt about remembering their lines in the song, Reeves generously cued them. Lammers and Morris delivered their parts capably. But when Reeves reached her solo line, she substituted an energetic kick in the place of lyrics, acting out the rejection of the song’s imagined boy and playfully “failing” to remember her part. The important thing, her choice indicates, is not the fidelity of the performance but the dynamic of the group.

Reeves and countless other girls shared the experience of singing and songwriting with their sisters, cousins, and friends. They left documentary evidence in their yearbooks, theorized this practice as older women, and sometimes even recorded original songs. The music they produced in this process was often, like “Met Him on a Sunday (Ronde Ronde),” simple and conventional, with lyrics about imagined love and romance. In fact, much of Black girls’ musical practice during this time was enlivened by fantasies of romance that were themselves shaped by the modern, middle-class, white norm of companionate marriage. This new marriage ideal was a huge presence in the lives of girls, but Black girls such as those of the Bobbettes and the Clickettes recognized it as a fantasy. To them, romance was useful only as a manual for conformity to white expectations. Girls mobilized idealized love to co-create an imaginative sphere of pleasure and joy that they could share with their peers.

Today, scholars remember groups like the Shirelles as influences on their white listeners. But the evidence shows that famous groups were also participants in a much larger pleasure culture, created by and for Black girls, that took shape mostly outside the control of the Brill Building or Motown machines. The songs girls created typically fail to conform to the metrics of aesthetic innovation and political usefulness developed by scholars. Yet girls’ music remains important even when it incorporates the aesthetic language of heteronormative white femininity. Black girls’ love songs are compelling not for what they say about girls’ future potential as women, but in and of themselves. They document a history of Black girlhood that centers joy, desire, and friendship. This evidence stands in marked contrast to prevailing histories and policy positions that emphasize danger, deficit, and vulnerability as the main forces shaping the lives of Black girls. Furthermore, the songs, recordings, memories, and yearbook entries outlining this culture were all created by and for Black girls themselves. To “retreat from listening” to girls’ music because it does not conform to pre-arranged expectations for what “Black music” or “sexuality” or “desire” looks and sounds like means failing to hear the history of Black girls’ friendship, pleasure, and joy.