ABSTRACT
The construction of Helen Shapiro's image took place through the prism of the British inflection of the European stereotype of the Jewish woman that had evolved through the nineteenth century. More, the cultural construction of Shapiro was in part a function of the English re-visioning of the European association of Jews with blackness, with Africans and, by extension, with stereotypes of Africans. Norrie Paramor, who it is worth noting was not Jewish, was one of the most important shapers of British popular music through the 1950s and early 1960s. By the time Paramor signed Cliff Richard to EMI in 1958, his characteristic style of having a solo singer backed by a large and often dramatic orchestration was well established. Paramor's project, in the exclusionary world of early 1960s England, was to make a working-class Jewish girl acceptable enough to a large enough number of the British population to make her a highly visible star.
