ABSTRACT
With their glamorous gowns, elegant choreography, theatrical vocal style, and songs dealing with adult themes such as marital infidelity (“Stop! In the Name of Love,” 1965), illegitimate children (“Love Child,” 1968), and filial guilt (“Livin’ in Shame,” 1969), the Supremes were in many ways never really a girl group, although they are often named first in a list of girl groups from the 60s. Even their earliest hits, “Where Did Our Love Go?,” “Baby Love,” and “Come See about Me” all appeared in 1964, a year in which the girl group “moment” was, for all intents and purposes, over. The girl group sound and style occupied a prominent position in mainstream popular culture at the very beginning of the 1960s, emerging in 1957 and dominating the pop charts from 1960 to 1963. The style was predicated on the sounds of adolescent female voices audibly going through hormonal development—most girl group singers really were girls, with ages ranging from eleven to eighteen in the most representative groups. Girl group records had lyrics addressing themes of special importance to teenage girls, such as boys, the strictness of parents, and the complexities of imminent womanhood. The genre generally involved young vocalists backed by studio musicians, performing material written by professional songwriters (though this book will present several examples of groups that operated differently). Girl group music was at the forefront of popular music during the early 1960s, an unprecedented instance of teenage girls occupying center stage of mainstream commercial culture. This phenomenon was not repeated until the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, when latter-day girl groups and solo singers including the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, and Avril Lavigne, among others, were immensely successful in bringing girl’s voices and concerns back to prominence in mainstream music.
