ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a resume history of boys' singing that will explore how this phenomenon has come about. As Foucault suggests, the boy is beginning to emerge as a person with his own subjectivity, but moralistic adults see the need to gain absolute control of even the most private events of a boy's life. A paradoxical consequence is that boys gained more of a status as boys, being seen as future men rather than as miniature men in the present. The approximate period between 1850 and 1950 might be viewed as a 'golden century' for angel voices when adults with great enthusiasm and their singing according to their own tastes. The Second World War provides a convenient marker for the end of this golden century for boys' singing. It was Cohen (1987) who gave us the term 'moral panic' and, not insignificantly, he did so in writing about the mods and rockers, successors to the Teddy boys.
