It doesn't take an academic to convince us that 1960s girl pop remains culturally significant; as Laurie Stras points out, girl group iconicity infuses contemporary media from Disney to Duffy and much in between (p. 7). It might, however, take a volume as rigorous, nuanced and heartfelt as She's so Fine in order to illuminate the socio-musical complexities that lie beneath the surface of our easy pop culture references to this seminal historical genre. And it might take love to show us the way – each of the contributors to this volume, part of Ashgate's Popular and Folk Music series, seems to adore girl groups and girl singers. I trust it will not surprise the authors that their work reads, in the best possible sense, as ‘girl talk’ – an enthusiastic conversation of overlapping voices, interjections and exclamations. As Martha Mockus notes in the short and smart response that closes this volume, ‘the admiration for girl singers that each author shows forms a vital part of the overall scholarly intervention of this project’ (p. 235). This admiration is infectious: I found myself scrambling to the internet to play the songs discussed here, ‘doo-langing’ and dancing with abandon, and responding aloud to especially exciting passages of text. This is, of course, exactly what an academic book on popular music should do.

I do not intend to suggest that because this scholarship is fun, it is lightweight. On the contrary, the essays in this volume construct a deep and wide listening space in which we can hear the many voices of 1960s girl pop as nested within a matrix of race, class and nation. Girl groups and girl pop soloists inhabited a historical moment marked by the flourishing and subsequent decline of post-World War II social norms and structures of feeling; this volume convincingly teases out the multiple ways in which female singers voiced and embodied dramatic social change in Britain and the United States from the late 1950s into the 1970s. In her introduction, Stras announces that many of the essays will examine girl pop's extra-musical resonances by focusing on explicitly musical elements, in part as a corrective to the prevalence of accounts of popular music – especially women in popular music – that foreground biographical information and visual or textual analysis (p. 23). This is a welcome premise and the contributors deliver, especially via a remarkably well-articulated, multivalent critical approach to singing style and vocal characteristics. In fact, ‘voice’ could easily have been included in the book's title, so weighty is its overall intervention on this topic.

The standard of quality here is set by Stras’ essay on vocal technique at the turn of the 1960s, which gets at what we really mean when we talk about the ‘girl group sound’. Stras clearly draws upon her experience as a singer; we can almost feel the larynx, the nasal passages, the vault of palate, all of those elements that Barthes might identify as contributing to the ‘grain’ of the teenage girl pop voice. Robyn J. Stilwell riffs on related themes in her essay on the ‘vocal decorum’ of rockabilly's youthful sweetheart, Brenda Lee. Stilwell's essay exposes the creepy undertones of ‘emptiness’ inherent in pop cultural formulations of the child prodigy, and provocatively locates the liminal cultural category of ‘white trash’ in a voice that is at once white and black, innocent and womanly, well-comported and lower class. Other contributors productively theorise vocal ‘crossings’ as well, among them: Sarah Hill, who employs Cusick's trope of the penetrated throat to examine Welshness and borders in the voice of Mary Hopkin; Annie J. Randall on Dusty Springfield's deployment of African American signifyin(g) techniques; and Susan Fast on evocations and modifications of black and white musical masculinity in Tina Turner's vocal timbre and stage persona.

As the essays in She's So Fine attest, the boundaries of 1960s teenage femininity were both aspirationally rigid, imagined as white, middle class and respectable, and, in practice, contingent upon the specificities of race, region, age, class and nation. Contributors to this volume articulate the ways in which female pop stars helped construct and delimit this complex social category. Jacqueline Warwick interrogates historical assumptions about the role of anger in girl pop and in teenage girls’ lives. Norma Coates's discussion of Marianne Faithfull theorises the ‘heterosexualizing’ of male homosocial rock-and-roll; almost as a side effect, her rich elaboration of Faithfull's appearance and behaviour implicitly points up some key distinctions between ‘girlhood’ and ‘womanhood’ during this time period. Patricia Juliana Smith's essay on the Brit Girls frames the mod aesthetic as a trans-Atlantic refraction, not a mirror image, of American female adolescence.

Of the multiple variables inflecting the socio-musical construction of the 1960s teenager, race is arguably the most powerful and the most difficult to articulate. While black musicians and black musical influences appear throughout the essays in She's So Fine, blackness as a multivocal construct is inconsistently theorised in places. For example, in some places the black femininity of the Supremes and other Motown acts is framed as engaged with ideas of ‘womanhood’ and thus outside the purview of girl pop, while in other places the Supremes’ restrained physical gestures are described as quintessentially girlish and located squarely within the genre. Elsewhere, authors acknowledge in general terms black contributions to the development of 1960s popular music, yet do not fully attend to the specificities of these contributions, as in where examinations of rock culture seem to ignore black R&B and early rock ’n’ roll. In discussions of the British cultural landscape, the social position of the Celtic ethnicities is sometimes identified with that of African Americans, an approach that undoubtedly reflects the subjectivities of some of the artists in question but could have been problematised or nuanced to a greater extent.

Given the ambitions and scope of this book, it is unsurprising that no unified approach is taken regarding the role of black artists and influences in the development of girl group music and in 1960s music more generally. Moreover, during the time period in question, African American experience was used, discarded, reframed or ignored to suit the needs of a diverse array of social actors; in this respect, any single approach has the potential to elide key distinctions. Happily, the powerful research that characterises She's So Fine has uncovered new lines of inquiry in many directions. The pop voice and the civil rights movement? A whole volume on girl pop and post-war teenage masculinity? Empire in 1960s popular music? I for one enthusiastically await this girl group's next release.