I thought my school blog was going to die a peaceful breath but it looks like it’ll get used for the fourth semester in a row! It’s been very hardworking so don’t mind the weird Dutch URL and the obligatory Bowie reference title.
The two songs sung by black women in this unit are really interesting to look at -- we just got out of a unit about gender roles in the 50s through sitcoms, and naturally the same ideas can be seen in music.
The first song, “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton, distinguishes itself partially just through its sound—Thornton’s powerful voice is definitely a departure from (for example) the oft-referenced “How Much is that Doggie in the Window.” Her voice is much more in line with other black R&B musicians of the time, but her adaptation of that style and her authoritative tone are particularly interesting for a woman. She sings lyrics like “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog/Been snoopin’ ‘round my door/You can wag your tail/But I ain’t gonna feed you no more,” constituting an assertive shutdown of a man and stepping outside of the typical “submissive” role.
“Roll with Me, Henry” follows a similar vein. Etta James sings a song that begins with a male voice asking “Hey baby, what do I have to do/To make you love me too”—putting her in control from the beginning of the song. “You’d better get with it,” she says, and later: “Henry, you ain’t movin me/You better feel that boogie beat.” James, like Thornton, is telling off a male suitor, putting her in an assertive position. “Dance with Me, Henry,” the “toned-down” cover by Georgia Gibbs, loses the vocal style and makes it a bit more goofy, but keeps the assertive lyrics.
These songs are in contrast to “Bobby’s Girl” by Marcie Blaine, after the “blanching” of rock & roll. With lyrics like “I want to be Bobby’s girl/That’s the most important thing to me” and “If I was Bobby’s girl/What a faithful, thankful girl I’d be/Each night I sit at home/Hoping that he will phone,” the song is much more in line with traditional gender roles, where the girl pines after the boy and wants nothing more than to be his. It’s a far cry from Etta James and Big Mama Thornton.
Endnote: Big Mama Thornton is also interesting in that she dressed in men’s clothes onstage —pants & work shirts, and occasionally men’s suits—sparking rumors about her sexuality. This is an early predecessor of the experimenting with gender presentation prevalent in rock and roll in later decades (see title of blog!).
Right on with your points about assertiveness vs. docility in regards to the three songs you discuss in this prompt. Here are some thoughts:
ReplyDelete1) One fascinating thing is that I was trying to think of examples of white female artists of the mid-1950s that were making rock and roll inspired music, and I was struggling. Both "assertive" artists you list were black and truly RB rather than RR. The rock and roll breakout was very male-dominated.
2) If one wanted to dig deeper into this, you'd have to look at the late 1950s and early 1960s. That's when female pop stars break out (Lesley Gore comes to mind), and you have a bunch of girl groups (Ronettes, Shirelles, Shangri-Las, and of course the Supremes). Analyze those and you can painful stuff in the line of Bobby's Girl (listen to Tell Him by the exciters https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah-tui1ubnU), but you can also find stuff that sounds like a proto-feminist anthem ("You Don't Own Me" by Lesley Gore, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUjeR01wnU
3) Interesting point about Big Mama Thornton's stage persona. As I discussed in a response to Donna's blog (http://thegiraffees.blogspot.com/2015/02/lovin-dan-and-runaround-sue.html), it's interesting that large black women are perhaps able to be more assertive than the thin white ingenues. Given the recent Super Bowl reemergence of Missy Elliott, I can't help thinking of her lyric "I'm not Halle Berry, but I can give you what you want"
Arggghh this is what happens when you quote from memory. I conflated two parts of Missy's rhymes. She says "I'm not a prostitute, but I can give you what you want" (which makes more sense actually). And then, earlier in the song, she says
Delete"Boy, lift it up, let's make a toast-a
Let's get drunk, that's gon' bring us closer
Don't I look like a Halle Berry poster
See the Belvedere playin' tricks on ya"
So she does making a joking comparison to herself to Halle Berry, just in a different part...
Wow, I'm amazed at your thoughtful post, Adina! I cannot believe that we are so drift compatible (do you get the reference, ol' sport? Did you get that one that I just made? Haha! So bamboozling.) that we wrote posts that parallel each other. But more importantly, I think that your post fails to touch upon the racial elements that "Unknown" has commented about; even today, when someone says a stereotypical American family, we imagine a white, middle class woman and man with a few kids. Appearance wise, Big Mama Thornton is certainly not the small white woman that we imagine. Like her name suggests, she's big. Large and in charge. Perhaps white woman felt pressure to conform to talking about a cute "Doggie in the Window" and playing up the submissive white woman who just wants to buy cute dogs. It's interesting how we can consider the dynamic not only between the sexes, but also between the races.
ReplyDeleteAwesome post Adina! We've definitely seen male white artists become more assertive on stage after Rock and Roll exploded, with the obvious example being Elvis. Clearly here, the female black artists use their sexuality to take a dominant position, here over this "Henry." Neither force was present before and after the rise of Rock and Roll, but we don't (or at least I) don't associate Rock and Roll and larger feminist movements in general. When I think of fifties gender roles, the general image that comes to mind is more like what we see in Father Knows Best, and it's interesting to know that artists like Big Mama Thorton and Etta James were subverting those traditional gender roles long before anyone was burning their bra's.
ReplyDelete