Dusty!: queen of the postmods 9780195329438

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UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

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p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-532943-8

1. Springfield, Dusty—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Soul music—England—History and criticism. I. Title. ML420.8765R36 2009

782.42164092—dc22 2008014447

123456789 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

FOr SUZANNE

and Margaret

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First and foremost, I thank Paul Howes, editor and publisher of the Dusty Springfield Bulletin and author of The Complete Dusty Springfield. This book’s

numerous citations of his work indicate Howes’s essential role in the book. Beyond his willingness to elaborate on the enormous amount of information contained in his publications, Howes was extremely generous in sharing materials with me that were unavailable or even unknown in the United States. I am grateful for his professional help but also for his friendship and collegial support through the years of this book’s research and writing. Paul was instrumental in opening many doors for me in England; all of my contacts there can, in some way, be traced back to him. Dusty’s friends were also extraordinarily generous in sharing their memories and memorabilia with me; interviews in London with Dusty’s former personal assistant and friend, Pat Rhodes, and with Simon Bell, Dusty’s former backing singer and friend, helped to put the facts of Dusty’s life into human, lived perspective. My interview with Madeline Bell in Spain was the most musically valuable of all the interviews. Conversations with her, in addition to the access she granted me to her 1960s diaries, tapes, and other materials, helped me to formulate many of the ideas about the female gospel voice that are central to chapter 2’s story of 1960s transatlantic pop music. Derek Wadsworth and Mike Ross-Trevor also helped in my effort to piece

together Dusty’s thought process while she was in the recording studio. Though I corresponded with Vicki Wickham only briefly over e-mail, her remarks were useful in confirming some hunches and provided a point of departure for an important passage on Dusty’s campness in chapter 4. My long interview with Norma Tanega is quoted here only once; however, it was crucial for context, as she was part of Dusty’s life both in London and in California and was able to fill in some blanks regarding Dusty’s 1960s milieu and musical practices.

Performers associated with the Dusty drag and tribute traditions also very generously spent time with me, discussing their approach to performance in general and recreating Dusty in particular. Interviews with Howard Lifsey, Jayne County, and Karen Noble are at the heart of the discussion of

vill ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dusty impersonation and chapter 4 could not have been written without their help. Longtime fans from England, Canada, Australia, and the United States proved to be a rich source of information; interviews with Carole Gibson, John Harding, Peter Walmsley, Moira Tyson, Edward James, Mary and Jack Donohoe, Myra Brent, Jane Aronson, Bree McBroon, Dorothy Johnstone, Ann Brown, and Nancy J. Young enriched my understanding of the relationship between star and fan in ways that I could not have imagined. Carole, Moira, Edward, and Nancy—the subjects of chapter 4’s first section—were

especially forthcoming and I hope my account of their fandom captures something of the quality of their feeling for Dusty and her music. Other fans, the ones I met in Ealing on Dusty Day in 2007, assisted me by sending rare

audio and videotapes of Dusty’s performances and interviews—the kind that circulate among fans but are unavailable commercially. Jen Alexander in

Canada sent me several CDs and DVDs and also introduced me to the Dusty-dedicated poems of Canadian poet Jeanette Lynes. Such unexpected gifts from fans were in my e-mailbox on a daily basis and made the hard slog of writing not only easier but also joyful. As I researched and wrote this book in a number of locations—New York, London, Chicago, Detroit, and Lewisburg—lI have many people to thank in each. In Chicago, I would like to thank writers Becky Pavlatos and Nancy Beckett and musician P. Michael: Nancy for her specific suggestions about writing (I can hear her voice saying, “Now, tell the story’), Becky for her insightful questions, and P. Michael for sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of many of Dusty’s early soul and pop influences. Of those in New York, I would like to first thank Suzanne Cusick and Margaret McFadden for their support, especially in the early stages of this project, when many thought that this topic was more than a bit crazy to pursue. I thank them also for their all-weather friendship, hence the book’s dedication. Also in New York, I thank queer theorist Martha Mockus, who was supportive in the formative, preproposal stages of the book. Mike Beckerman was instrumental in smoothing the bureaucratic path to New York University’s library, for which I am grateful, and NYU and City University of New York grad students—Jenny Johnson, mle Wilbourne, Tes Slominski, Megan Jenkins, and Sean Murray— are to be thanked for their willingness to test out certain theoretical ideas with me. Jenny and mle’s performance of a scene from Vertigo (as part of my Dusty paper for the Feminist Theory and Music Conference in 2006) will last in my memory long after many others from that remarkable meeting have faded. What better demonstration of Robertson’s notion of “female

camp’ than their inspired rendition of Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak’s melodramatic dialogue?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1X

The librarians at the Schomburg and Performing Arts Libraries of the New York Public Library were always gracious and, especially at the Schomburg, generous with the in-demand microfilm machines. I am grateful to Jill Salathiel at the Detroit Public Library for helping me to track down newspaper and magazine articles that have not yet been transferred to microfilm. Naomi Andre kindly gave me a place to stay while I worked in Detroit and also shared her recent research on blackness in music. In Lewisburg, sociologist Linden Lewis made a number of very useful points about process and interpretation, especially in exploring questions of appropria-

tion, and poet and “Writing Doctor” Peg Cronin shared ways to work through a prolonged writing block. Deb Balducci helped enormously with the preparation of illustrations for the book. Jim Rice was, as always, very encouraging and supportive. Thanks to Karen Morin and Dan Olivetti for the parties, magic candles, basketball games, and understanding friendship. At Brooklyn College, McMaster University, NYU, and the University of California at Los Angeles, I received very useful feedback from faculty and graduate students after giving lectures there on my Dusty research: thanks to Ellie Hisama at BC; Mitchell Morris, Olivia Bloechl, Tim Taylor, Steph Pen-

nington, Jeremy Mikush, and Ross Fenimore at UCLA; those previously mentioned at NYU; and a huge word of thanks to Susan Fast at McMaster. In many conversations after the McMaster talk, Fast has very generously shared her expertise on popular music methodologies with me. Finally, I would like to thank the team at Oxford University Press. Senior editor Suzanne Ryan’s early enthusiasm got the project off to a good start, and her editorial comments helped enormously in the revision process. The anonymous readers also provided useful criticism; I am grateful for their attention to detail and also for their grasp of the larger issues at play here. The OUP New York production staff seemed genuinely interested in the project and has treated the manuscript with great care from beginning to end. Last but not least, I thank my mother, whose thinking outside the box I have tried to emulate here.

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List of Illustrations Xill

Introduction 3 Chicago, ca. 1965-1966

Questions, Critical Contexts, and Methodology

1 Dusty’s Hair 13 Mod Icon White Queen of Soul Signifyin(g)

Dustifying

2 Migrations of Soul 35 Madeline Bell, Black Nativity, and Gospel’s Transatlantic Leap, 1961-1963

Soul and Britpop in Dialogue Ready, Steady, Go! and Sounds of Motown:

Soul on British National Television, 1965 “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”

Dusty’s Soul Dream, 1968-1969

3 Soul + Melodrama = The 1960s Pop Aria 71 Audiences and the “Aesthetic of Excess”

Compression at Work, Part One: The Pop Aria’s Opening Seconds as “Establishing Shots” Lyrics and the Three-Minute Melodrama’s Structure Compression at Work, Part Two: The Melodramatic Arc

X11 CONTENTS

“You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”:

Physical Gesture and Dusty’s “Own Style”

Epilogue: Dusty and the Pop Aria after the 1960s

4 Dusty as Discourse 101 Self-Discovery

Virtuosity Identity, or Dancing with Discourses Legacy

Appendix A Major Record Releases and Events, 1961-1970 155

Appendix B Index of People 161

Notes 165 Bibliography 193 Index 207

1.1. Dusty Springfield as a teenager in the mid-1950s, then known as

Mary O’Brien 14 1.2 Publicity photo of Dusty Springfield,1964 15 1.3 Excerpt from Honey magazine (U.K.), ca.1965 17 1.4 Page from a fan’s scrapbook: newspaper article on Dusty’s wigs from Disc and Music Echo, August 17,1968 19 1.5 Martha Reeves and Dusty during Sounds of Motown television show, 1965 23 1.6 Page from a fan’s scrapbook: Record Mirror's reports of Dusty’s forced departure from South Africa, December 1964, along with an unrelated photo of Dusty with Martha Reeves and

the Vandellas 26

2.1 Madeline Bell in 1967 as pictured in the concert program for the Four Tops British tour 36 2.2 Black Nativity’s playbill from New York premiere, December 1961 39

2.3 Madeline and Dusty during Bell’s engagement at the Cabaret Club in Manchester, England, September 12,1966 46

Xi

XIV. ILLUSTRATIONS

2.4 Dusty in Brooklyn with two Ronettes (Nedra Talley and Ronnie Spector) and Martha Reeves of the Vandellas 52 2.5 Member's badge from East Anglia Soul Club,

United Kingdom 56

2.6 Blue Mink, ca.1970 58

3.1a “Beg you to come home” 13:51 93 3.16 “Sublime Adoration” as illustrated in Siddons (1822) 93

3.2a “Never tie you down’ 14:19 93 3.2b “Expectation” as illustrated in Siddons (1822) 93 3.3a “Life seems dead” 14:34 93 3.3b “Devotion” as illustrated in Siddons (1822) 93 3.4a “All that’s left is loneliness” 14:43 94

3.4b Sarah Bernhardt in Cléopdtre: longing 94 3.5a “Nothing left to feel” 14:46 94 3.56 Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorciére: protest, denial 94 3.6a “You don’t have to say you love me” 15:13 94

3.6b Sarah Bernhardt in Phédre: extreme passion 94 3.7a “Believe me’ 15:27 95 3.76 Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorciére: supplication 95

3.8 “Doubt” as illustrated in Siddons (1822) 95

eS ILLUSTRATIONS XV

4.14 Moira and Carole near the ABC Theatre in Blackpool, United Kingdom, August 1966 104

4.2 Carole, Sandie, and Eileen congregate in Eileen’s bedroom after seeing Dusty at the Castaway’s Club 105

4.3 Moira with Dusty, Peppi Borza, and Madeline Bell at the stage door of ABC Theatre, Blackpool 106 4.4 Carole in her Bolton backyard, posing with a poster stolen from the Manchester venue of Buddy Rich’s show 107 4.5 Stereotypical images of lesbians in the 1950s and1960s_ 139 4.6 Howard Lifsey as Lori Le Verne performing as Dusty singing “T Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” at the Doncaster Dome, Doncaster, England, February 2007 147

4.7 Concert flyer for Karen Noble’s Dusty tribute show, 2006 151

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INtroduction

Dusty! Queen of the Postmods is a study of the music and career of Dusty Springfield (1939-1999), one of Britain’s most revered singers and pop cultural figures of the “swinging 60s.” Of the many pop music storylines of the 1960s, two of the most important feature Springfield: the influx of Britpop into the United States and the introduction of African American soul into Britain, Europe, and the Commonwealth nations. While Dusty fits into both narratives, neither is an entirely suitable match for her story. As a solo female singer who sang across genres wearing large wigs and beaded gowns, she was

obviously doing something very different from her boy band compatriots. And as a white, middle-class, former convent girl from London whose biggest hit, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” originated in Italy, she was perhaps the unlikeliest of singers to establish soul credibility on both sides of the Atlantic. Dusty was certainly an important figure in both these histories, and her role in each is explored here; 1960s Britpop and soul are unimaginable without her iconic look and her landmark recordings of songs such as “T Only Want to Be with You” (1963) and “Son of a Preacher Man” (1968). Yet,

this book also invites readers to consider Dusty’s music and career within other storylines: the transatlantic migration of the female gospel voice, the pop arias melodramatic turn, and the emergence of camp in 1960s pop culture. Framing Dusty’s musical life within these narratives and also within the critical contexts of postmodern identity, decentered authorship, and fan reception allows a fresh, more complex view of the “sixties icon” and brings into sharp focus those elements of her career that have tended to fall between the cracks of the dominant “Beatles/Motown” discourse. Yet to be fully ac3

4 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

knowledged in histories of the period is the extent of Dusty’s role in creating and defining British soul and, likewise, the social significance of the diverse,

international fan community that has grown up around her music and image—one that should be considered alongside other extraordinary fan phenomena of the 1960s. I am, of course, a Dusty fan myself, a fact that explains many of this book’s questions and perspectives.

CHICAGO, CA. 1965-1966 I may have started writing this book at the age of nine or ten when my math teacher (I will call her Miss S) became the focal point of my fifth-grade circle of friends. She looked exactly like Dusty Springfield, something I realized only

three and a half decades later, in 1999, upon seeing a picture of Dusty in an obituary column. The resemblance was so close that Miss S could easily have been Dusty’s Chicago twin. Her hair was peroxide blond, styled along the lines of Dusty’s New York look (not the beehive, but the large, starched bouffant),! and her makeup consisted of layers of foundation, powder, and blush; it goes without saying that her eyes were thick with mascara and laden with shadow, and that her lipstick was white or pink, the latter matching her usual shade of fingernail polish. Miss S also dressed exactly like Dusty. I remember a pink outfit similar to Dusty’s pink tweed Jaeger suit and a seemingly limitless number of miniskirts topped with turtleneck sweaters accompanied by long necklaces, as well as a jingling gold charm bracelet. While none of this was particularly startling in the fashion world of 1965-1966, it was utterly shocking to us in our convent school as we entered our math classroom in September, fully expecting to see a black-habited nun. At the time, neither my friends nor I had any knowledge of Dusty or her sound, so we didn’t understand the source of Miss S’s look; had we known, however, we probably wouldn't have been any less astonished by her appearance. In this dark cosmos of Catholic nuns draped head to toe in yards of black fabric, trailed by mute children wearing navy blue woollen uniforms, Miss S inhabited a planet of color and style completely unto herself. She fascinated us and inspired outrageous, whispered stories about the exciting life we imagined she led. The school employed very few lay teachers at the time, and we wondered why someone like Miss S had been hired. Surely, we thought, it must have been as a last-minute replacement for a teaching slot that needed to be filled before the start of classes. The nuns would not have hired Miss S had there been another choice; indeed, part of the nuns’ duty was to keep us away from this sort of feminine display and the world it represented. The nuns didn’t lecture us on the evils of makeup, short skirts, and the like, all of which were against the strictly enforced dress code; instead, as a lesson for the younger

INTRODUCTION 5

girls, offending high school girls were routinely marched through the halls to the lavatory and made to lower their rolled-up skirts and scrub their faces clean of the makeup and lipstick they had dared to wear to school. This parade might have been an effective deterrent had it not been for Miss S’s quietly subversive presence. Somehow the rules that governed the appearance of every other adult female in our lives did not apply to her, a fact that intrigued us and seemed to amuse Miss S as she responded sphinxlike to the senior girls’ daily walk of shame. Miss S taught at the school for just one year and was remembered only as a brief aberration in our highly regulated and otherwise drab existence; she had, however, lodged somewhere in my mind, only to be remembered suddenly and vividly in 1999 as Dusty peered from a newspaper. The airwaves were saturated with tributes in the days and weeks following Dusty’s death, so I was able to hear Miss S’s model, as well as see her. Once I’d put the look and the sound together as coming from someone who was repeatedly identified as the “6os British soul singer, Dusty Springfield,” I wondered quite a bit about Miss S in Chicago and what the London singer’s music and look might have meant to her. As I listened to more of Dusty’s music, I became fascinated by her voice and repertoire—so different from other singers of her era—and began thinking and reading about the nature of fandom, Miss S's and now my own. As an academic musicologist who teaches courses on popular music, I also began wondering why Dusty’s music was not more widely known and why her career was absent or marginal in the many 1960s documentaries I’d seen and the pop music history books I'd assigned as reading

for my students. These questions led to various Dusty-related projects— conference papers, colloquia, invited lectures—that eventually developed into this book.’

QUESTIONS, CRITICAL CONTEXTS, AND METHODOLOGY

Given the fact that the singer’s spectacularly dyed and styled hair was the element that first sparked the link between Dusty and Miss S, it is hardly surprising that the title of my first essay on these topics was “Dusty’s Hair.” It became clear early on that the kind of musicology I had been trained to do was not set up to create the essay I wanted to write. As seems perfectly obvious now, but wasn’t then, Dusty’s postmodern pastiche—her audacious practice of musical and visual “quoting”’—required a parallel research approach that also drew from different sources and combined a variety of methods. A combination of historical source study, musical analysis, ethnogra-

phy, and cultural theory seemed to provide the set of tools I needed to do “Dusty’s Hair.”

6 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

Chapter 1 takes Springfield’s blond beehive as a point of departure for an introduction of the book’s major themes and approaches the task from the perspective of Dusty’s reception at the beginning of her solo career. These

themes—Dusty’s affinity for “black” music and its history, her status in Britain’s “mod revolution,” and her camp sensibility—were present in her music and public persona as early as 1963; each becomes the subject of its own chapter or section later in the book. Chapter 1 suggests that while Dusty’s “look” was the place where she seemed to play most with notions of identity, her voice was a richer site where she consistently upended commonly held assumptions concerning the expression of social identity—one’s gender, race, nationality, class, sexual orientation—through music. She did this by quoting other singers and referencing a variety of styles, sometimes very subtly, sometimes quite explicitly, often within the course of a single song; these included the signature vocal inflections or flourishes of Martha Reeves, Shirley Alston, Gwen Verdon, Carole King, Aretha Franklin, Peggy Lee, Baby Washington, Sam Cooke, Astrud Gilberto, Stevie Wonder, Mina,

and many others. This habit of quotation is taken up not only in terms of Dusty’s sound but also in terms of her look, both of which were composed of elements borrowed from a number of sources. While Dusty was a prodigious borrower of visual and sonic style elements, she was still perceived as “authentic, a perception that derived largely from the unique timbre of her voice—something that could not be borrowed.’ In this chapter (and later, in chapter 4), Dusty’s music is considered both within the highly charged context of cultural appropriation and also within the discourse of cultural attribution that she initiated. Notions of blackness and whiteness in music are addressed—the latter a topic that is rarely examined in connection with Dusty (or other 1960s musicians, for that matter).

The concept of signifyin(g), as formulated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and adapted to musical contexts by Samuel Floyd and others, provides cultural and historical grounding for the African American musical practices that are discussed in this chapter; the whiteness studies of Dyer, Frankenberg, Ignatiev, and Roediger provide a critical language with which to name and analyze the “white music” that was in constant dialogue with the “black music” of Dusty’s career.* Dyer’s observation that whiteness, though represented everywhere, is nowhere marked” explains why critiques of a “white sound” parallel to those of Dusty’s “black sound” have been slow to emerge. Chapter 2, “Migrations of Soul,” folds the concept of signifyin(g) into an

extended discussion of the emergence of soul in the United States and its transfer to London starting about 1963, primarily through the female gospel voice of Madeline Bell and her gospel-trained contemporaries Doris Troy, P. P. Arnold, and Gloria Jones. Bell’s decision to relocate permanently in Britain is considered within the context of the regime of invisibility limiting

INTRODUCTION 7

African American musicians’ opportunities in the United States and the emerging soul mentality that grew out of the accelerating civil rights movement. Examination of soul’s emergence and definition is informed by the work of Portia Maultsby and Nelson George, and the reception of soul’s gospel “presence” is considered through the critical lens provided by Charles Nero, Teresa Reed, Herman Gray, and Patrick Johnson.° The ready audience for American soul that existed among British Mods is also explored as the backdrop for Bell’s success in England. Bell and Dusty’s close collaboration and friendship in the years following their meeting in late 1964 laid the groundwork for Dusty’s increased interest in developing her own soul style, while Madeline incorporated Britpopisms into her gospel sound and cultivated a dual career as soloist and backing singer. The chapter follows Dusty to Brooklyn, where she first performed with several Mo-

town acts and after which she was determined to promote Motown soul singers in Britain. Soul’s nationwide exposure in Britain can be dated from the Dusty-hosted Ready Steady Go! television special in 1965, the lasting effects of which are considered here and compared with the Beatles’ commercially and culturally consequential 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in the United States. Dusty’s integration of soul with European melodrama is briefly explored through a discussion of her 1966 international hit, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” and is followed up in more detail in the next chapter. The chapter ends with a discussion of Dusty’s massive effort to create a definitive soul album, working with, for the first time, an American produc-

tion team and musicians. The result, Dusty in Memphis, though lauded today as one of Rolling Stone magazine’s 100 best albums, was a mixed success at best; this conclusion is drawn from readings of the album’s many cre-

ators own assessments of their goals and working methods. Finally, this “white soul” album’s 1968-1969 reception is interpreted within the context of the decade’s most racially polarized period, that following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Chapter 3, “Soul + Melodrama = The 1960s Pop Aria,” explores closely a topic that was raised briefly in the previous chapter: the idea that Dusty’s “own style” was the result of her merging of African American soul and Eu-

ropean melodrama. This seemingly odd pairing of musical and theatrical traditions from such different cultural sources flourished within the quintessentially 1960s genre, the pop aria. Collapsing high/low distinctions, Dusty’s “big ballads” were mini-arias that were crafted to do the emotional work of

an operatic aria within the industry-mandated three-minute constraint. They were also musical enactments of the melodramatic arc characteristic of nineteenth-century plays, Victorian novels, or 1940s “women’s films.” The decade’s highly trained pop composers in Britain, Europe, and the United

8 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

States—like Burt Bacharach, Ivor Raymonde, Clive Westlake, and Pino Don-

ageio—undertook the compressions that made this possible within the confines of a pop song. Fully conversant with opera’s compositional and orchestral devices, they, in effect, miniaturized the aria for popular consumption and found in Dusty a singer who was uniquely prepared to meet its considerable demands. Readers will probably note a marked shift in language and tone in chapter 3. This resulted from my desire to write about the music from the standpoint of the fan—one who often feels both pleasure and guilt while listening to this repertoire—and to suggest how these songs may be heard and interpreted in the moment of hearing. If the tone of my observations seems overheated, it is purely intentional and based on my own and many other fans’

reactions to Dusty’s pop arias. While standard music theory appears in places, the analysis is closely interwoven with a discussion of the operations of melodrama and in so doing departs from conventional music analysis. My point is that this repertoire is experienced as melodrama and thus invites discussion that not only acknowledges but also integrates that experience into the analysis. The last part of the chapter compares Dusty’s physical gestures with classic melodramatic acting poses to further highlight the pop aria’s connection to nineteenth-century aesthetic conventions. While no suggestion is made that Dusty actually studied the nineteenth-century acting manuals’ one-toone correspondences between emotions and stage gestures, Dusty’s poses would have been perfectly legible to nineteenth-century audiences, so close were they to that era’s standard of stage acting.° Melodrama, despite its high

visibility in Dusty’s performance style, has never acquired its own niche within 1960s pop music criticism; here historical, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives on melodrama demonstrate that the 1960s pop aria is clearly a latetwentieth-century manifestation of its “aesthetic of excess.”’ Its jump to the

1960s genre followed a century-long trajectory in which the principles of melodrama had been adapted to opera, the novel, the women’s film, and television soaps. In considering melodrama alongside the 1960s pop aria, parallels between the two seem obvious; their theatricality, strict conventions, and affective goals are identical. This discussion will, I hope, shed new light on the operations of soul music upon its transfer to Europe in the early 1960s and underscore its profound effects on European popular music consumption and the generation of transatlantic hybrids.

Chapter 4, “Dusty as Discourse,’ is built on the premise that “Dusty Springfield” is constituted by an ever-changing and always intersecting set of discourses created by Dusty’s fans, professional peers and friends, and journalists/biographers. Distilling the discourses to four broad areas—self discovery, virtuosity, identity, and legacy—the chapter explores the following:

INTRODUCTION 9

longtime fans’ relationship to Dusty’s music and image, aspects of Dusty’s reputation as a preternaturally gifted singer, Dusty’s identity as constructed through the press, and the evolving legacy discourses created by the journalistic mainstream and by nontraditional voices. The latter include drag and tribute performers who “do” Dusty and cultural theorists who have sought to place her performance style within a rigorous discourse of camp. While examining closely what various parties have said about Dusty, the chapter also asks why they have said it. Much of the material in chapter 4 came out of interviews with Dusty’s professional peers, friends, fans, and performers. The interview-based sections were inspired by Susan Fast’s work on Led Zeppelin and Harris Berger’s study of metal, rock, and jazz performance.® Fast and Berger’s use of extensive interviews in their research generated extraordinarily rich accounts of their subjects and, in so doing, demonstrated the efficacy of ethnography combined with cultural theory, music history and analysis, and performance

theory. As is evident through frequent references to fans throughout the book and especially in the first section of chapter 4, my work with fans was not conducted through surveys, nor was it intended to yield broad cross sections of opinion (though that would be a very interesting study). Rather, I approached self-identified longtime fans, along with Dusty’s peers, friends, and tribute artists, as a community of experts who knew Dusty’s music and career intimately and who had invested in certain discourses over the past forty years. Chapter 4’s four principal discourses came directly from interviews with this expert community. Each of the four discourses can be seen, in one way or another, as an expression of the “mother discourse” of Dusty’s self-invention. From the beginning of her solo career in 1963, when press coverage was intense, the idea that Dusty had transformed herself through sheer force of will from drab tomboy schoolgirl to glamorous international pop star was a seductive one for fans and journalists alike. Dusty herself fostered this discourse, and the press, for a time, accepted it uncritically. Toward the end of the 1960s, however, journalists reversed the dynamic and took control of Dusty’s identity discourse. Through a close reading of Dusty’s interviews over a period of thirty years and an analysis of posthumous biographies in print and broadcast media, I frame the struggle between the singer and the press over her identity as a danse grotesque that has continued even after the singer’s death. Identity, particularly the postmodern challenge to the notion of a fixed, “essential” self, is the book’s most recurrent theme and the reason I chose to title the book Dusty! Queen of the Postmods. I am particularly interested in Dusty’s play with musical signs as a means of constructing her public identity. Springfield built her musical identity from a mind-boggling variety of traditions and insisted throughout her career on performing music associ-

10 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

ated with each, despite the strong music industry convention to brand stars according to a single style or genre. As has been discussed by cultural theorists Patricia Juliana Smith and Adele Patrick, Dusty also played with visual identity markers, especially those linked to traditional gender roles and notions of femininity within western European and North American norms.’ Just as Dusty borrowed musical elements of gospel, soul, Britpop, music hall, samba, jazz, and folk and recontextualized them as components of her own self-invention, she also borrowed visual elements from movie stars and fashion models and resignified them within the context of her own camp sensibility that engaged elements of drag performance and, significantly, what Robertson has called “female camp.”!®

Decentered authorship is another thread running throughout the book and is especially useful in the sections of chapters 1, 2, and 3 that address the creation of musical hybrids. The creation of hybrid genres and styles in popular music is largely a function of performance and stems more from what singers and instrumentalists do onstage or in the recording studio than from what composers write down. Any comparison of a pop song’s “chart” (melody plus chord symbols) or even its piano-vocal score with its recording will illustrate this point immediately: The two do not match and, in fact, often diverge widely. The elements that give the song its character, that invite consumers to identify with its sentiments and even form an intersubjective bond with it are as much in the performer’s delivery as they are in the songwriter’s melody, words, and chords.!! As the writing down of music has consistently been privileged as the sole site of musical authorship, the performers who

are responsible for the creation of the transatlantic soul sound (gospeltrained singers like Madeline Bell and Doris Troy, whose influence on Dusty’s sound are discussed at length in chapter 2), have rarely received the authorial credit that is their due. In the 1950s and 1960s, this point was made repeatedly by African American writers such as Amiri Baraka and Langston Hughes, and later by Nelson George and others.'” The idea of shared authorship is applicable to both the new transatlantic soul style and the 1960s pop aria; it ac-

knowledges multiple agency in their creation and is certainly preferable to traditional concepts of sole authorship or, on the other extreme, an erasure of the authorial concept altogether. Georgina Born argues for a constellation or network model in which singers and instrumentalists, along with the songwriters, arrangers, and producers, are considered authors of products like pop songs or music videos where there are clearly many individual creative agents contributing to the whole.'? George Lewis’s work on Afrological and Eurological perspectives on “composition” has also been important in reconfiguring the authorial concept in popular music.'* Audience reception, too, must be considered part of the authorial mix; fans’ tastes and desires, as expressed through their discourses and patterns of

INTRODUCTION U1

consumption, directly affect what performers, songwriters, producers, and arrangers sell to the public. Taking a position somewhat less extreme than that of Ola Stockfelt, who maintains that “the listener and only the listener is the composer of the music,’ I have analyzed performances always factoring the listener and his or her subjectivity into the object of analysis.’ Subjectivity and its construction through music as examined from feminist, gay,

subcultural, and adolescent perspectives provides a groundwork for establishing the self-identifications and self-perceptions of fan groups here,

such as British and American adolescent girls around 1965 and Modinfluenced teens who faithfully tuned in to seminal television shows like Ready, Steady, Go! and became Dusty Springfield fans.!° Fan studies that have analyzed various kinds of reception communities were useful in interpreting the fan interviews I conducted for this book and placing them within broader social and cultural patterns of fandom." In addition to interviews, I also conducted archival work and searched as many 1960s British and American newspaper and magazine sources as possible in New York, London, and Detroit.'® The objective was to explore another important site of discourse—the print media—and to gain a sense of how journalists portrayed Dusty early in her career and how those portrayals changed over time.!’ In studying the different press discourses of chapter 4, my own findings echoed those of scholars who have identified as problem-

atic the fact that popular music criticism has been (and still is) written almost exclusively from a white, male, presumed heterosexual point of view.”° Examining the problem of exclusion from a gay critical perspective are Richard Meyer, Kris Kirk, and John Gill;*! Mavis Bayton, Sheila Whitely, Lisa

Rhodes, and others have done the same with respect to gender in pop and rock music criticism.” Their studies provided a foundation for much of the discussion in chapter 4. Though much of the book concerns discourses, especially those revolving around Dusty’s pastiche and identity disruption, its discussions carry a significant caveat concerning the evacuation of meaning and “waning of affect” that, according to Fredric Jameson, characterize postmodern cultural products.”? Audience perceptions of depth and feeling in Dusty’s performances call into question Jameson’s fleeting “intensities” while her work’s artful surfaces, unhooked from “natural” moorings, point to new rather than absent content. The following chapters explore configurations of emotion and meaning in Dusty Springfield’s performances along with the new social formations among mid-1960s audiences that made possible their lasting transatlantic impact.

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ustys Fair

By the time Dusty Springfield died in 1999, she had already been anointed by the music press and music industry as an icon of the swinging 1960s, if not the fab icon among Britpop solo singers of the era. Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of bygone pop celebrity, Dusty’s late-1980s revival seemed to ame-

liorate the bitterness associated with the public relations debacles that had plagued her for the preceding twenty years.’ Indeed, her aptly named hit of 1989,“ Nothing Has Been Proved,’ neutralized the singer’s unmarketable sexual ambiguities and rebranded her as a commercially viable “survivor”:* one

who had triumphed over press incursions into her personal life regarding “drink, drugs, and lesbian sex” and had claimed a place in pop’s pantheon of stars.” While the hit-induced lovefest between Dusty and the press ran its course through the 1990s, the only safe interview topics seemed to be Dusty’s over-the-top 1960s look—the trademark hairstyles and dark eye makeup—

and her often-repeated love of “black music.” Rarely treated with depth, these topics were mined instead for jokes and nostalgia—a consequence of the press’s usual avoidance of complexity (unless, of course, it involves scandal, in which case no detail is too small to report) and the singer’s own ap-

parent decision to stay firmly on neutral ground.‘ Yet, the interviews and newspaper articles of Dusty’s final years hint at a much larger and more interesting story than journalistic fixations on hair, makeup, and Motown would suggest.” It is a story in which the singer’s unique sound and look were

key factors in at least three important cultural phenomena of the 1960s: a distinctly camp sensibility in British pop culture; British and European fans’

participation in black American music, which had, heretofore, been the 13

14. Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

near-exclusive preserve of jazz aficionados; and a “mod revolution” among teenagers, especially girls. Indeed, during the years of her greatest celebrity, 1964 to 1969, Dusty’s look and sound seemed to embody her fans’ experience of profoundly changing gender roles and race relations and to give voice to emerging new perspectives. While Dusty’s sound is the main concern of the book, this chapter focuses on her sound in tandem with her look and considers the reception of both among her 1960s fans. Without the glamorous look, Dusty concluded, record producers would not have offered her a contract or promoted her as a solo singer; given pop music's strong visual component and constant traffic in culturally coded signs, she was probably right.° Dusty’s play with visual signs— the hair, the eyes, the clothes—ensured that her even more audacious play with musical signs would reach a broad public.

. ~ | s '\

9.4 , a[a:

\\ =" >, Zz oe | a9 “>

Fig. 1.1, Dusty Springfield as a teenager in the mid-1950s, then Known as Mary O’Brien (Rex USA)

Dusty’s Hair 15 MOD ICON

Thanks to the large number of posthumous tributes and TV biographies, it is now well known that Mary O’Brien was Dusty Springfield’s given name, that she was born a redhead to Irish, middle-class parents, and that she grew up in Ealing, London (see figure 1.1). For her countless British fans in the 1960s, many of them holdovers trom her days with the folk group the

Springfields, Dusty, the suburban accountant’s daughter, was a model of self-transformation, and no better symbol could be invented to represent her

|

story of ugly duckling to swan than her beacon-like wigs (see figure 1.2). In the post-2000 era of “makeover” television shows and routine plastic surgery, it is perhaps hard to recall a time when dramatic alteration of one’s looks was the

exclusive domain of movie stars and the very wealthy. Ordinary girls in the 1960s (and it is almost always girls and women who seek drastic change to their faces, bodies, and hair) had to settle for makeup and padded bras to satisfy their needs. The story of Dusty’s physical transformation—one the press seemed never to tire of telling—demonstrated that even plain girls could become glamorous and mod. Hence, legions of female fans copied Dusty’s look; they replaced their bookish glasses with false eyelashes, blackened their eyelids, and purchased blond wigs and “false pieces” to augment their own hair— now dyed blond like Dusty’s and held fastidiously in place with vast quantities of hairspray. The appeal of self-transformation was powerful, in part, because

eo

3 io Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa (Gene Pitney 1963) Nothing (Marie Knight 1961) > Anyone Who Had a Heart (Dionne Warwick 1964) * Will You Love Me Tomorrow? (Shirelles 1961) > Wishin’ and Hopin’ (Dionne Warwick 1963) Don’t You Know (Ray Charles 1953) [original artists listed in parentheses, * = cover versions that appeared on both U.K. and U.S. releases]

Dusty’s Harr 21

Table 1.2. Evrythings Coming Up Dusty (UK. release, October 1965; Phillos BL 1002) > Won't Be Long (Aretha Franklin 1960) * Oh No! Not My Baby (Maxine Brown 1965) > Long After Tonight Is All Over Jimmy Radcliffe 1964) * La Bamba (Ritchie Valens 1958) * Who Can I Turn To? (Tony Bennett 1964) Doodlin’ (Baby Washington 1963)

* Tf It Don’t Work Out That’s How Heartaches Are Made (Baby Washington 1958) * Jt Was Easier to Hurt Him (Garnett Mimms 1965) * T’ve Been Wrong Before (Cilla Black 1965)

> [Can't Hear You (Betty Everett 1964) * [Hada Talk with My Man (Mitty Collier 1964)

Packin’ Up (Margie Hendrix 1965) [original artists listed in parentheses, * = cover versions that appeared on both U.K. and USS. releases, * = first recordings of these songs were by Dusty Springfield]

respectively. In one sense, then, Dusty was following a well-worn path in her choice of material, and evidence was abundant that such covers could generate enormous sales.*! No doubt, such pragmatism was part of her thinking; yet, this fearless leap into black American music during such segregated times by a British, middle-class, female singer suggests that far more was at work than careerism or sheer daring.

Dusty’s affinity for the musical products of African American culture originated in her childhood contact with blues and jazz recordings and can be seen within the longer historical context of British fascination with the music of black Americans, starting with the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ tour through England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland about 1870.7" Many of the terms that Dusty used to describe the qualities she admired in such music

(its “strength” or “power”) were similar to those used by nineteenthcentury writers reporting on the Fisk singers’ renditions of spirituals or, later, in twentieth-century journalists’ reviews of black blues and jazz musicians recordings. A sense of the exotic, mysterious, and alluring black Other comes through vividly in the use of such terms, as does the colonial

reflex to capture and appropriate the Other’s unique cultural products. These recordings from childhood and the discourse of fascination surrounding them inspired Dusty at the age of eleven to declare her intention to become “a blues singer.””°

22 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

Introduced to this repertoire through her father, a jazz record collector and amateur classical musician who listened with his children to BBC and Armed Forces radio broadcasts of American music, Dusty modeled her own singing style largely on those of the singers she heard on these recordings and broadcasts; these included, most likely, Bessie Smith and her generation of blues artists.*4 As her own first recordings (made on an amateur recording device) attest, she had, by her early teens, already developed a feeling for syncopation, along with a mature-sounding voice that could reach high notes at full volume (often called “belting” or “shouting”) without shifting into the lighter head voice.*? Indeed, Dusty’s ability to dwell an octave above middle C in her chest voice was a key feature of her 1960s sound, as heard most famously in her number one hit of 1966, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.””° Notably, on these early tapes she invested the words with meaning through deft vocal inflection in the manner of a good blues singer—unlike the delivery one might have expected from a teenager imitating a foreign style.*” Further evidence of Dusty’s precocious affinity for a “black sound”

included her preteen performance of Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues” at a convent school talent show and her schoolmates’ testimonies to her habit of singing in the American style.”® Though Dusty’s early professional career shifted her attention away from blues and jazz toward the then-current style of vocal harmony pop (the Lana

Sisters) and folk music (the Springfields), she returned to it with almost religious fervor from the moment she heard the Exciters’ hit, “Tell Him,” blaring from the Colony Records shop window in Manhattan in 1963.7? This epiphany, as she told it, was the moment of musical conversion that determined her break with the Springfields and set her on a course toward a solo career built on a foundation of covers of U.S. songs mainly by African American singers. Along with “Tell Him” were two other recordings that Dusty said “changed my life”: Dionne Warwick’s “Don’t Make Me Over” (1962) and, later, Lorraine Ellison’s “Stay with Me” (1966). Certainly, the “power, precision, and ballsiness” of these records is inarguable,”? yet such qualities alone do not adequately explain Dusty’s lifelong, close personal identification with

their sounds and the cultural history they represented or her less passionate identification with white European music traditions. Attraction to “the music itself” does not explain Dusty’s determination to break through the heavily policed gender borders that prevented white female pop singers from jumping racialized musical boundaries, as had Elvis and others in the mid-1950s, or her drive to internalize the “inner secrets and ethnic rules” of the black American tradition and apply the soulful sound to all of her repertoire, not just the American covers.*! Dusty’s consistent soul style throughout her forty-year career demonstrates that she was not selectively mimicking musical devices or engaging in

Dusty’s Harr 23 what might be called “vocal blackface” but had embraced African American musical traditions wholeheartedly. In countless interviews for radio, television, and print media, Dusty acknowledged and promoted the many black American singers who had influenced her sound and to whom she was pro-

foundly indebted; indeed, as has been often quoted, she said that singing with Martha and the Vandellas at the Brooklyn Fox in 1964 was “the biggest thrill of my life” (see figure 1.5).°* Her Brooklyn performance with the Van-

dellas and other Motown acts, including Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, and the Supremes, led Dusty to vigorously promote Sounds of Motown, the historic 1965 special edition of Ready, Steady, Go! that was as important to the Motown artists’ careers in Europe as the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan Show appearance had been in the United States in 1964. (See chapter 3 for an extended discussion of this program and its significance.) Unlike

many of her British predecessors in the jazz field, who appropriated elements of jazz without attribution and with little affinity for the culture from which it came, Dusty was scrupulous throughout her career in attributing the source of her sound to African American musical traditions. Her role in the internationally broadcast Sounds of Motown made clear to Dusty’s fans

’7F== | as a ‘s \ e* — ~ ae ge : See ey / | ON r AR > , y . | ‘asee e Dee Pie, i 213 = a Mogi “Wi / ae Sue ete ik Y : ie oe A or eas aea. aay Da } 4 é- ; | a.: i i|eaPoe eh) g° ee fe a| PS as ke ‘ SRS ais i Sd . Sey Ee: ty ae 4 { rh. (4,Fa , yeae . | Fae. A Sf } ): ATA 7. Seems « “ | r : eae Pet om £2 ’

. f GieeMAR ces : Plt Holve se *fais a aaad peakeral a eR,

Fig. 1.5, Martha Reeves and Dusty during Sound's of Motown television show, 1965 (Rex USA)

24 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

both this connection and the importance she placed on acknowledging it. Martha Reeves has said that Dusty introduced the Motown sound to England. I think she can take credit for that... . There were other ladies who embraced our music and did cover versions: there was Cilla Black, Petula Clark, there was Lulu. . . however, Dusty was the one who got into the music and actually did cover versions and glorified the music; she was in awe of us and we were in awe of her.°°

SIGNIFYIN(G)

The singing tradition that Dusty learned initially from records, and later honed during her close association with gospel-trained Madeline Bell and Doris Troy, had evolved through historic and cultural conditions that unfolded over centuries on U.S. soil.“ As observed and analyzed by Henry Louis Gates Jr.,°° the practice of “signifyin(g),” developed (and is still developing) along the circuitous, geographically far-flung routes of African American mi-

gration—from south to north, rural to urban, plantation to farm to factory, from sacred bowers to churches, from juke joints to jazz clubs, from radios to boom boxes, along the minstrelsy and chitlin’ circuits, from steamboats to underground railroads to “pimped rides.” This traditional practice has produced countless individual artistic identities and has also served to preserve African American history and group identity against that of the dominant culture.°° Dusty’s close interest in such traditions and histories extended to the personal realm and was conveyed to her audiences through statements such as “I have a real bond with the music of coloured artists in the States. I feel more at ease with them than I do with many white people. We talk the same language... .I wish I’d been born coloured. When it comes to singing and feeling, I just want to be one of them and not me.””’ Such a clearly personal element may have stemmed from Dusty’s sense of her own Irish identity and her understanding of the tortured colonial relationship of Northern Ireland and England—indeed, a relationship that has been preserved in centuries of Irish folk music. As an English woman of Irish Catholic descent, she cannot have been impervious to the persistent secondclass status of the Irish in the United Kingdom and the many parallels between their treatment there and that of African Americans in the United States—the most obvious being the Northern Irish struggle for civil rights of the 1960s and the USS. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.°° Although her middle-class background insulated her from the anti-Irish hostility that was typically aimed at Irish laborers, the notion of “double consciousness” —coined by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the two identities

Dusty’s HAIR 25

that African Americans were, by necessity, forced to adopt as members of two nonintegrated social groups—would have resonated with her and many other Irish or Irish descendants living in England during the 1960s.”

Another point of connection between Dusty and African American culture was her affinity for the self-defined, highly individualistic personae projected by such blues and R&B singers as Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, and Ruth Brown and Jazz singers such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, and Abby Lincoln. Peggy Lee, a singer Dusty mentioned often as an influence who also crossed racial boundaries to participate in black musical traditions, also belongs in this group. Likewise, Tina Turner, a quintessentially powerful female stage presence, was cited by Dusty as her “favorite performer.’ To use Farah Jasmine Griffin’s succinct description of Billie Holiday, these women were “take no shit hip chicks”*° who were perceived to be in control of their musical and sexual lives, and while Dusty made frequent public defenses of her femininity (see chapter 4), she projected similar

independence and agency both professionally and personally. Dusty eschewed the suffocating image of the good girl, which, whether accurate or not, was projected publicly by most British female solo singers of the period, and was branded a troublemaker and hell-raiser for her transgressions of be-

havioral gender norms.*! These transgressions ranged from speaking out against apartheid in South Africa (see figure 1.6) to ruminations on why she chose not to marry or have children to public disclosures of her own promiscuity and bisexuality.’ African American musical traditions allowed Dusty to express herself in ways that white European musical traditions did not, and her early affinity for this mode of self-expression also explains her relative lack of identification with the conventions and devices of musical whiteness. The African American expressive traits that seemed to magnetize Dusty—principally, signifyin(g)’s emphasis on individualistic and stylized troping and playing

“against, “around, “behind,” or “in front of” the beat—are all frowned upon or outright forbidden in traditional European music as taught in schools or in private classical lessons. Having established her musical tastes

and an aural mode of learning at an unusually early age, she perceived a chasm between the tradition she had heard on records and the one she was being taught in school; hence, it is unsurprising that she resisted the central tool of European instruction, note reading, as a foundation of her musicality.*° The social, even political, authoritarianism embedded in note reading practices—especially its externally determined “right way” to execute the melody, harmony, and rhythm of a given piece—was antithetical to the signifying sensibilities Dusty had developed in her youth.“* She seemed to dismiss it summarily with the statement “I never got into Beethoven,” despite her father’s love of the composer’s music.*? Dusty’s signifying and simulta-

26 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

bie) ThE' ane ROWN BO a-tP4 q ,Bi"aFSuu BLA’ =e] : j j*a. *Ts?7“A2 abe ~%1 rhus a Pry DUSTY SPRINGFIELD im |i ai Fk >- 2os

man cooler friends osofwhite, ™ ‘¢¥reI| Here she ik and with three therm4i a. *a9— \ahi 3-. }+ MARTHA the VANDELIAS, 3a—— She fook thom ioe one of London’. aoe new siled =“ old eager " fichoea ."|, F ryaFr) | 'J|| fisisuraai:, «here the pelurr

tol 4.—hy i f 1 /i)im . * 4 j . € oe By Py ' :B." a Tae ‘ t F _ bal Se S

' T. a ;

: ’} }: Py pa: ”: wa a =er. =’ ai

DUSTY — ‘THERE ‘NO APARTHEID’ DUSTY

WERE THREATS’ quits SouTH AFRICA [pett flew =duce“?ia kave . Sawh Alicea on Wedne«lay, heme on SraIncrinLD Friday morning ta f per SPRIS CL IETS

aFieet heroine's welcome. Half§&of. oy @ live divs th « fanned, theTw M Tucel {Interior Street waited at lenden ultciks served horsoorer wh deportation ofdirmwhen im Cape

Alrpert ta greet her on her re- Fy oo Dunty had domed ring: from amy 1) hs 1 turn — ond prebe ber with 7 s hai shearegaion would ret questions ever the “international si La webe Pp¢ june nofoom

inctdeni” that developed ae Shends performed South Africae. i ef in“Mla \ dct heli veil

Tired, but ready to explain, . AY prs Lnoee a Dian i manager, Whetoday. Billings, my awyers * ix seeing ; = re a i- } V1 oe Dusty us: “I may sur on . i Losdon—whe mweinlion was”Reine Southtold African Government My . ° ‘a iment in Rome for (hii i cost teneen

“If they want to|thehave sling mid 7i Lf ip around they've picked wronga &far 4 ‘ai:_—s person barause

more deadly sim.” an *" .F,, Dusty had attoonlyleave South Africa after playing five 7 of her seven scheduled perfor| |‘J' 4 mances in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Officials of the ‘we Sn .| South African Government's Ministry of the Interior had presented her with an ulilima- F| -- a. |

tum “sign Unis mot to | “= ‘82 Play—before fon pledge - segregaled “a a|}a &

audiences or gel out” i .. ~ WARNED Questions, questions, questhons . 7 Re

And the Government told of phe oad oo "| “ike

South newspapers: “She africa.figure In theofbackground, the FS ysa was onAfrican twoher occasions warned pearded Wie Billings," throwgh manager te =obrervi: Dusty's manager. { ae‘ .

our SouthtoAfrican way oftheylife * Ve in enteriainment pial “ } 'fs wer regard informed thal if she failed back unti!and sort this' thing ,i wi do so she would have to leave = =o‘out which | don) think will be ' ¥ the country, She defy =o in mywas life-time.” ive Government andchose was ar-the Technically, Dusty nod . \ C

cordingly allowed to remain in deported, jurt “asked to brave.” ' : ea

the country for a limited time “They say | wasn't deported bui Fe only.” is aDusty wery finedeported lineand between 7' J At the airpert, con- being being given er firmed that a party of three 24 hours to leave,” said Durty. et

men “Halfway had threatened her mana. “I ifthink — il.o i ger. through my act«¢xplaining, . ence is that you the arediffer. deported the the Minietry saidcaplured they pay your fare.” they men wouldfrom be waiting for me Durty the headlines _, = o ; ; Vo on it at my hotel.” And Vic Billings of newspapers throughout the — ¢ ae =' ta : mz told for reporters: world with her story but she i oie a2 -*at me sbowt“They one pestercd and a half denies that ij war jurt= one great

dass trying to make me sign ig publicity stunt: “I resent bet ae. ile {y =D thee document.” the rfuggeesiion.” she said “I - lg = T ' 4: ; Why it her Dusty co adamant dontthe red this kind of about feelings over cily.” aspubli = 7 ies , an a ' ca xo 2 apartheid question? “Because | And ithe tart word from = = i | *t =. : vom just onvbedy, Dusty's press sgent,about Ketho = wantthink to buythal a ticket, shouldifbethey Geadwin: “I om annoyed opr' |2. |!| allowed ‘to. | was determined if. and anyone who honesily (5 aie Tr —

13-3

net to playshe te segregated audi.of belicver this is To a publicly stunt&= “2 @ ~’ EE ences,” said is out his mind. me, the ?e

Will she ever“Pd go back to implicalions : ‘| .xAF LS South Africa? sury lowe to [i wouldare be far jurttoo aosgreal rilly for f fe because ibe audiences were fan. fomeohe to say (hal aparthrd : tactic and the kids were mar. is a publicity stunt to draw Dusty Springfield arrives at London Airport vellouws. But - wont be going altention to South Africa.” yesterday after her ‘race row’ tour,

Fig. 1.6. Page from a fan's scrapbook: Hecord Mirrors reports of Dusty’s forced departure from South Africa, December 1964, along with an unrelated photo of Dusty with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas (Dusty Springfield Builetin)

Dusty’s Hair 27 neous rejection of note reading proved to be flashpoints in the singer’s professional career, representing a clash of black and white, old and new musical cultures. When confronted with conventionally trained British session musicians’ strict adherence to the printed score, Dusty found it difficult to communicate the individualistic sound she wanted from the drummer, the bassist, or the guitarist—sounds that would have required them to diverge from the printed score or adopt nonstandard playing techniques. As Derek

Wadsworth (trombonist and arranger for Dusty’s band, the Echoes) observed, the musicians often pretended not to know what she was talking about or claimed that the sounds she wanted were either impossible to produce or not worth the effort it would take to produce them.*° Despite such resistance in the recording studio, Dusty was determined to capture, for example, something of the exhilarating sound of Motown’s Funk Brothers or James Brown’s backing band, the Famous Flames; to this end, she paid for her band members’ tickets to see Brown in concert in London so that they could study the Flames’ playing techniques and instrumental arrangements. Dusty’s suggestions to Wadsworth were so detailed and astute that he altered his academic style of arranging according to her tastes. He said, unequivocally, “I learned the art of arranging from Dusty.’*’ Wadsworth also reports that Dusty fought with her record label, Philips, to get backing singers with vocal qualities similar to those she had heard on American records of girl groups such as the Shirelles, the Velvelettes, and the Chantels, regardless of whether they could sight-read their arrangements. Dusty preferred that her favorite singers—Madeline Bell, Doris Troy, Lesley Duncan (and after 1968, Kay Garner )—improvise their harmonies in the recording studio in order to produce a quality of spontaneity and individualism, a process that was more time-consuming and, consequently, more costly for the studio. Dusty’s midsixties popularity with the British public guaranteed her records’ profitability and, thus, allowed her to extract from Philips the expensive extra studio hours she needed to produce the instrumental and vocal sounds she wanted; given this liberty, she was notorious for taking several weeks to record tracks for her albums, whereas her contemporaries, Tom Jones and Lulu, by contrast, would take a single day. The superior sound quality, arrangements, instrumental/vocal balance, and overall production values of Dusty’s records, when compared with those of her contemporaries, were noted at the time and are still palpable today.*® Though John Franz is listed as the producer on virtually all of Dusty’s hit

records in the 1960s, Dusty herself was, for all intents and purposes, the actual producer who was responsible for their sound. She said in a 1973 interview: “All the hit records I had in England were found, produced and almost promoted by me. I never took any credit... . But I did the whole bloody lot

myself?’”? Thus, production credit was informally (rather than legally) claimed by Dusty and has been heartily confirmed by musicians such as

28 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

Derek Wadsworth. Certainly, for Dusty to have seized such authority in the highly sexist and very white world of London recording studios in the 1960s

required the determination of a “take no shit hip chick” whose musical imagination challenged the race and gender boundaries of popular music in the mid-sixties.

DUSTIFYING

The albums of 1964 and 1965 offer a wealth of examples of Dusty’s fertile musical imagination and demonstrate her voice’s distinctive “grain,”°® her sig-

nature control of a wide range of vocal devices, and the overall means by which she crafted a singular musical identity. Comparison of Dusty’s interpretations of selected songs with their originals reveals the singer’s individuality and also her close knowledge of the style characteristics of 1960s African American pop. In these songs, we hear clearly both Dusty’s adherence to a well-defined tradition with long historical roots and her specific contributions to it, hence the term “Dustifying.” Because all of the songs’ original versions were still very much within the public’s memory at the time of Dusty’s releases, the cover versions functioned as what might be called “transatlantic commentaries” and stimulated discourse among fans—still lively today—as to the relative merits of each. Often with academic precision, fans dissect elements and levels of Dustification in particular songs or perceived style pe-

riods in the singer's career. In that spirit and with the limited purpose of highlighting signature features of Dusty’s vocal style, here follow my own observations of some of her tropes in selected songs from 1964 and 1965. On her recording of Charlie and Inez Foxx’s duet, “Mockingbird,” Dusty

sings both the upper and lower vocal parts, thus demonstrating a wide range, consistent quality throughout the vocal registers, and an ability to generate volume in the low register (which often sounds quite breathy in women) as well as in the high. In other words, her reach into male vocal territory sounds effortless, and in fact, she sounds more comfortable there than Douggie Reece, with whom she sang the song in live performances.°! Dusty’s command of pop-gospel melodic embellishment is evident here, and though some of the florid upper line is cribbed verbatim from Inez Foxx, other passages and inflections are original. Again subverting gender roles, though this time via a change in text rather than vocal parts, Dusty’s cover of Garnett Mimms’s “It Was Easier to Hurt Him” presents a response to the original’s implied power dynamic between the song’s disaffected lovers. The male upper hand is decisively slapped down

as Dusty cuts out the opening lines, “Give her some hard times, treat her mean; that’s what all the guys say. It'll only make her love you more, but it

Dusty’s Hair 29 just don’t go down that way,’ and proceeds to sing the song from the perspective of a woman who, after mistreating her boyfriend, now regrets his departure. Needless to add, in popular songs from this era, it was atypical for the girlfriend to actively dole out abuse (think of “Johnny Get Angry” or “He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss”), yet here Dusty sings, “The way I cheated him

and mistreated him / How could I forget?” Just as Dusty takes over male vocal territory in “Mockingbird,” here she usurps male prerogative in a love relationship by taking over Mimms’s song. However, there is no analogue in Dusty’s version for Mimms’s universalized male position as expressed by lines such as “that’s what all the guys say” and “that’s what I thought was being a man.” By contrast, Dusty’s substitution, “that’s what I thought was being so smart,” personalizes the situation and avoids the unpleasant suggestion that all women might be inclined to behave nastily toward their lovers.

The notion that Dusty herself is the protagonist of her songs, genderswitching or otherwise, is a recurring theme in reviews of Dusty’s music. The

affect projected by Dusty’s covers of two girl group songs, the Supremes’ “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” and the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,’ would seem to feed this notion. In the latter, Dusty’s vocal “attack” (analogous to her gutsy public persona) is reinforced

throughout the song by a booming bass drum and militaristic snare figure that are absent in the original. While Dusty was a fan of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” aesthetic, the extra bombast seems misplaced here as accompaniment to the shy question, “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Indeed, the vaguely martial tone places a sense of threat behind the words that, while musically exhilarating, gives the innocent teenage plea the tone of a more mature woman’s ultimatum, as if the boyfriend will be given his marching orders should his reply to the question be anything other than an ardent “yes.” Dusty’s sense of vocal attack is also on display in her Supremes’ cover and is reinforced by a number of elements in the accompaniment: livelier horns,

accentuated bass drum, and replacement of handclaps with tambourine. These elements, in conjunction with a solo vocal track that is notably more foregrounded than Diana Ross’s, contribute to the intense forward motion of Dusty’s version. The good-natured group “grunt” by the Motown band, which adds a schoolyard flavor to the middle of the Supremes’ song, is absent from Dusty’s, and its deletion eliminates distraction from the vocal track and focuses more attention on its robust affect. Perhaps for these reasons, the producers of a commemorative box set of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Motown hits seem to have preferred Dusty’s version, which they chose to include rather than the Supremes’ version on the CDs. Paul Howes comments: “Tt sounds every bit as powerful as the Motown tracks alongside it. . . . It just doesn't sound out of place at all, which has to be a testament to Dusty’s skill

and determination in attempting to reproduce the Motown sound in a

30 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

London studio. . . . [It] somehow embraces her into the Motown family.”°? Howes’s comment reminds us that Dusty was indeed responsible for the overall sound of her records: the choice of songs, details of the instrumental and vocal arrangements, and recording/mixing decisions. In other words, it was most likely her decision to foreground the solo vocal track and to eliminate the aforementioned background elements that would have detracted from it; this was her sound, her desired affect, her commentary on the original. Dusty’s personal imprint, both as vocal interpreter and producer, is also clearly evident in her cover version of Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” The differences between the original and the cover leap out at the listener within the first few seconds of each song. Warwick’s interpretation might be characterized as a true whisper, the exhausted utterance of a depressed woman who is actually alone with her thoughts. Dusty’s is, by contrast, a stage whisper, full of theatrical gestures; she, too, is a woman alone,

but onstage in front of thousands of onlookers. Most indicative of this difference is Dusty’s gradual increase in volume, building to a sudden withdrawal of intensity at the climax on the words “what am I to do?” Such theatricality is underscored by the foregrounded vocal track, sharp violin accents, spooky guitar reverb, and crashing timpani at the end, none of which is present (or needed) in Warwick's decidedly less histrionic original version. Both songs are saturated with drama, thanks to the operatic recitative effect of Burt Bacharach’s music and Hal David’s text, but it is a very different type of drama in each, and the two recordings’ musical choices reflect two different tellings of the same story. (For a more detailed discussion of this song, see chapter 3.)

While the discussion of Dustifying has concentrated so far on Dusty’s solo voice, no assessment of her 1960s sound would be complete without reference to her voice in concert with other voices, specifically, when engaged in call-and-response with her backing singers. Two songs from this period 1llustrate Dusty’s handling of this fundamental feature of signifying: “Needle in a Haystack” (a cover version of the Velvelettes’ 1964 Motown hit) and “Go

Ahead On” (composed by Madeline Bell and Dusty, recorded in 1966). Dusty’s cover of “Needle in a Haystack” is faithful to the original in all important respects and is most notable for copying the close interaction between solo and backing singers; in both versions, the frequent “doo lang” interjections, “oooo” backup passages, and collective handclaps create a lively conversational quality, like overhearing candid girl talk between teenagers with boy trouble. At certain points in the song, the backing singers share the lead line with Dusty (“those guys are sly, slick and shy”) or finish her sentence (“finding a good man, girl, is like finding a needle in a haystack”) as girlfriends in conversation might do spontaneously. Likewise, the rhetorical “what did I say, girl?”—taken straight out of black American vernacular—

Dusty’s HAIR 31

might also occur in spoken conversation and is woven into the refrain naturalistically.

These various modes of call-and-response between lead and backing singers were also used in “Go Ahead On.» In contrast to many girl group songs of the era in which an “alpha female” lead vocalist musically dominated her subordinates, “Go Ahead On” conveyed equal status among the singers. As this brief excerpt from the song shows, the backing singers (in bold type) either start or finish the lead’s sentences, suggesting that the participants are of one mind or that there are no boundaries between them: You never call me on the phone, make me so sad Sittin’ all alone, feelin’ bad Tired of being your fool ‘cause you told me lies I can’t take no more of your alibis Go ’head on, go “head on Go ’head on, go “head on

While the hierarchical boundaries were musically blurred in songs like this, they were, however, fully evident visually; in live performance on Dusty’s television shows, the backing singers were dressed uniformly and very simply in contrast to Dusty’s glittering gowns.” This, in addition to the fact that the singers were almost always off-camera, reinforced Dusty’s status as a solo star, but it also masked the importance of her regular backing singers—Bell, Duncan, and Troy—who provided the response to her call on the recordings that forged her mid-sixties sound identity. One further example of call-and-response (in this case, a response that

was seen as well as heard) is worthy of mention and displays another of Dusty’s approaches to this device: “Gonna Build a Mountain,’ a gospelinfluenced song by British composers Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley.°? As can be seen on a video recording of her September 1966 performance on her first BBC series, Dusty and backing singers Madeline Bell, Lesley Dun-

can, and Maggie Stredder were engaged in an improvised passage of calland-response on the words “higher and higher” when Dusty suddenly substituted the words “lower and lower” as if to see whether the backing singers would continue to echo her faithfully. They did not take the bait and contin-

ued their decrescendo on the words “higher and higher” (even though Dusty’s “lower and lower” would have seemed a better match for the song’s

dwindling volume), which then proceeded to a vigorous crescendo and hand-clapping, foot-stomping climax. This brief group shot of soloist and backing singers seemed intended to demonstrate Dusty’s soul “authenticity”

by placing her in close musical and physical proximity to Madeline Bell, who was known as an accomplished gospel singer in her own right.°° Dusty’s

32 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POoSTMODS

affinity for call-and-response was evident throughout her career, and most of her albums included more than one song featuring some sort of interaction with backing singers. Dusty switched roles at times and, under the name Gladys Thong, sang backing vocals for others: for Madeline Bell in the mid1960s and for Anne Murray and Elton John in the 1970s, to name but a few.’ Though she occasionally backed others, especially in the so-called lost years of the mid-1970s when her career had lost momentum, Dusty’s voice and personality were those of a center-stage diva soloist. The sound of her voice and its ability to express a broad range of meanings and emotions are worthy of a chapter in themselves; yet, one trait can be isolated as the most important, the one carrying the greatest sense of individuality, the grain.°® Indeed, it would be difficult to find another recorded voice that sounds exactly like Dusty’s; she is instantly recognizable in the way that Billie Holiday,

Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee are. Each of these singers matches a singular vocal timbre with an equally singular musical imagination; the rare combination results in an intensely expressive blend of tone and text that transfixes fans and even inspires cult followings. While these qualities were on display in all of Dusty’s work, some songs exhibited a particularly serendipitous union of song and vocal grain in which the qualities were most evident; of the songs on Dusty’s albums in 1964 and 1965, “I’ve Been Wrong Before” stood out as such a union. Composer Randy Newman seems to have constructed this song’s deceptively simple accompaniment to foreground the dramatic text as much as possible.°? Dusty’s close microphone creates intimacy and allows us to hear the inner workings of the voice; it is almost uncomfortably intimate, not unlike an invasive film close-up. As a result, we can hear the slight rasp in her voice, a quality that vocal specialists refer to as “vocal noise” and that fans often cite as the aspect of Dusty’s voice that they find most touching and saturated with feeling. Dusty places this sound consistently on the first word of the phrase “I’ve been wrong before,” thus attaching its sense of damage directly to the singer herself, the “I” of the song.®°? While Dusty expresses the protagonist’s personal devastation clearly through consistent use of this device, she uses vibrato just as carefully to convey extreme despair. Dusty appears to have mapped her vibrato according to the song’s structure, which divides into roughly equal thirds: In the first, she uses a slow vibrato at the ends of melodically descending phrases; in the second, she employs a fast vibrato to accompany this section’s rising phrases and increased volume; in the third, she returns to a slow vibrato. Both singer and listener are wrung out at the end of this song, as if having experienced the emotional trajectory of a three-act drama condensed into less than three minutes.

Dusty’s Harr 33 Dusty’s voice, described variously as “rich,” “smoldering,” “like a reed instrument,’ “breathy,” “dusky,” and “husky,” cannot be characterized by one set of descriptors because it changed over the course of her career, taking on different hues in the 1970s (when she used her head voice more frequently, sang higher generally, and developed a breathy quality) and in the 1980s and 1990s (by which time years of smoking and drinking had dried out her voice and diminished her breath support, consequently limiting her ability to create long phrases or execute dynamics as she had in the past). Nevertheless,

Dusty retained her compelling stage presence to the end of her career, and despite its changes, her voice remained a highly expressive instrument. As Elvis Costello stated, “Her voice [was] one of the greatest voices in pop music, without a doubt.”¢! One cannot argue with this or the rest of his statement, the sense of which is at the heart of this chapter’s first section: “I don’t think she’s ever really got credit for that because people concentrate on the icon aspect of it—the hair, the eyelashes, and the hand movements.” Yet, as much as

one might want to separate the voice from the icon aspect and treat it in its abstracted, disembodied form, it must be acknowledged that voices do not operate independently of the bodies that contain them, the values we attach to them, or, indeed, the things we say and feel about them.

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Migrations of Soul

Many of the visual elements that Elvis Costello has called Dusty’s “icon aspect” were already glued, painted, or sprayed firmly in place by the end of 1964. Dusty’s voice, too, had made its mark on U.K. and U.S. pop charts with “IT Only Want to Be with You,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’,.” and her first album, A Girl Called Dusty (1964).' Placing near the top of nearly every British “favorite singer” poll, Dusty had also begun to establish a presence in continental Europe with releases of Italian, French, and German versions of her hit

singles.” To recap the 1964 events, including those mentioned in the last chapter: Dusty had made her national U.S. television debut on the Ed Sullivan Show (May 1964), had sung live with the Motown Revue at the Brooklyn Fox (August 1964), and in December, had sparked an international political incident by challenging apartheid laws while on tour in South Africa. Dusty and her manager, Vic Billings, could hardly have steered the first year of her

solo career more skillfully; in addition to breaking into U.S. and European markets, Dusty’s hits circulated throughout the Commonwealth nations. By any measure, then, 1964 was a success, and as the year drew to a close, Dusty

seemed poised to extend her reign as Britain’s top female singer by doing what most pop stars do: repeating market-tested musical formulas, a strategy strongly encouraged by most record companies. Yet, as a result of one of 1964's final events—Dusty’s first meeting with gospel singer Madeline Bell (see figure 2.1) at a New Year’s Eve party—Dusty started down a new musical path that was, as Howes has noted, clearly audible in their March 1965 recording of “In the Middle of Nowhere.” In pursuing this new sound, created in collaboration with her backing singers Bell, Doris Troy, and Lesley Dun35

36 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

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a ~ a, / —" Pia About the Dusty in Memphis tracks, she goes on to say, “Those songs are the ‘voice records’ of all time.”!"”

While she was proud of her technical accomplishment in creating these “voice records,’ one wonders if she was also pleased with how their unrelieved affect served to link her, especially within the U.S. recording industry, with repertoire associated with nightclub singers, or “chantoosies,’ as she dismissively called them. Indeed, she soon saw the slippery career slope into American nightclubs to be a fate worse than death and did everything to resist it, though it must be noted that the song choices on Dusty in Memphis led managers to think that Dusty could, and might even want to, embrace the role of nightclub singer. It is entirely possible, however, that the sometimes saccharine orchestrations and overdone production—which Dusty could not have imagined upon first hearing the demo tapes when she made her choices—altered the affect of the songs, thus accentuating their nightclub qualities while neutral-

MIGRATIONS OF SOUL 67

izing the very soul qualities that attracted Dusty to them in the first place. From what has been said about this album by the various contributors, it is apparent that Dusty was surprised and disappointed by the final mix;'°® she did not know that these songs would sound this way—an outcome that would have been unthinkable in Dusty’s London studio environment. One wonders what these songs would have sounded like if they had been orchestrated and mixed differently, taken at a faster pace, had more bass and a less busy surface, or had been performed in slightly lower keys. What if Dusty had signed a contract with Motown instead of Atlantic? One cannot help but notice that the most successful song on the album, indeed, its only breakout hit, “Son of a Preacher Man,’ not only has the least precious arrangement but also features Dusty’s lower range and uses her chest voice to maximum effect—something she had done on all her previous albums. Dusty’s strong subject position in “Preacher Man” (one that maps onto her use of chest voice consistently) is also closer to that of her earlier work: She is not an abject victim but a willing participant—in this case, a participant in something deliciously naughty. Straight-faced, Dusty sings, “Being good isn’t always easy, no matter how I try,” allowing a glimpse of the humor and thinly veiled cheekiness—key elements of Britpop—of her pre-

vious recordings. “Preacher Man” is also, I think, the song that most accurately portrays Dusty’s relationship to the music of African American culture. She was willingly seduced by it, a fact embodied by the mysteriously inviting figure of the preacher's son, representative of black churches and, of course, gospel music. Within the course of the song’s three minutes, it becomes apparent that the seduction has become a conversion. Dusty has adopted every feature of the preacher man’s music and has gone even one step further: She has signified (Dustified) upon it. With the exception of “Preacher Man,” humor, irony, and Dusty’s characteristic play with style and genre are missing from Dusty in Memphis. Missing also are Motownesque ravers, or what Dusty called up-tempo pub songs. Call-and-response interaction with backing singers is also, for the most part, missing. All were casualties, no doubt, of the desire to create a uniform concept album; their absence had the unfortunate effect of making Dusty seem a one-dimensional singer, stripped of the many musical dimensions for which she was, deservedly, famous. Had the concept to create a definitive soul album remained stable and not collapsed into something less focused that allowed production values to overtake the content, Dusty in Memphis may have been realized as Dusty had originally intended. As it turned out, it appears that at some point it was determined that Dusty’s previous categorydefying strengths were somehow at cross-purposes with the notion of a single-category album. This decision would seem to represent a retreat from both Dusty’s established persona and the new transatlantic soul style; it rep-

68 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POoSTMODS

resented an embrace of a more conventional and flat feminine image and a safer sound more associated with her producers’ notion of “white soul” than the transatlantic soul sound that Dusty and her team had been developing in London. She noted candidly, “It’s a very white record really?!”

DUSTY IN MEMPAS'S RECEP TION

Dusty’s persona and voice had been so closely associated with blackness since 1964 that no amount of marketing hype could undo it, yet that seemed to be one of the objectives of Stanley Booth’s liner notes. Booth’s original notes mention the word soul only once, and then it is to distance Dusty from it in terms that can only be called polarizing: “Another quality of Dusty’s voice, one which seems quite miraculous these days, is that it manages to express emotion without screaming, grunting, going out of tune, or using any

of the other devices common to singers who attempt to make bad taste a substitute for soul.”!!° One suspects that Booth’s language is less about soul’s musical devices than soul’s separatist representations at a time when “many soul singers became spokespersons for Black Power . . . by 1968, the Nation-

alist message of Black Power had begun to overshadow the integrationist ideology of the civil rights leaders.”!'! The “hard” soul sound of James Brown had overtaken the “sweet” soul sound of the Supremes or the Miracles, a shift with complex market implications that blocked the path of crossover songs

and singers.'!? Of the period following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, just weeks before the U.S. release of Dusty in Memphis (January 1969), Portia Maultsby writes: “Say It Loud (?m Black and Proud)” had sailed to the number one position on Billboard’s R&B charts and number ten on the pop chart [Sept 68]. Yet according to Brown: “That song scared people too. Many white people didn’t understand it... . They thought I was saying kill the honky, and every time I did something else around the idea of black pride another top forty station quit playing my records.”!'?

The threat of financial consequences that were sure to result from lack of radio play sent a chill through the Atlantic Records marketing department and must have motivated their sales strategists to try to downplay Dusty’s long association with soul and to steer the discourse around her voice and the album away from blackness. While it is as true today as it was in 1968 that

“the sound of blackness is what people hear in her voice and think is soulful,;’'™ it is also true, as Herman Gray reminds us, that “black musical sound-

MIGRATIONS OF SOUL 69

ings are never just about sound” but convey worlds of cultural history and social meaning.''° Blackness and African American culture in the form of the female gospel voice were firmly embedded in Dusty’s sound, and no amount of marketing spin or production tricks could make it sound otherwise. Given the hateful racial climate of 1968 and the worsening polarization of 1969, it is not surprising that Dusty in Memphis was a commercial failure.''® In the United States, the album’s orchestrations and production values were too white for some and Dusty’s voice too black for others—a fatal problem in a market that was still organized along racial lines of pop and R&B. In the United Kingdom, the album seemed to represent a capitulation to U.S. tastes and an abandonment of the persona the British public had known since the early 1960s. The fact that “Son of a Preacher Man” was the album’s first and only hit (reaching number ten and number nine in the U.S. and U.K. pop charts, respectively, but remaining on neither chart for longer than thirteen weeks after its release in November 1968)'!” suggests that Atlantic’s marketing strategy to distance Dusty from soul backfired and, even more so, their idea to set up a false opposition between Dusty as a British singer of “big ballady things” and the Memphis Cats as prime representatives of R&B and soul. It is, perhaps, unrealistic to imagine the average marketer in 1968 embracing rather than rejecting the transatlantic soul notion as a marketing strategy, a

strategy that might have, in other words, emphasized a blend of traditions rather than an opposition. They did not, probably, because it would have represented an integrationist ideal whose moment had already passed. As a Dusty fan from the Bronx told me, attitudes within the black communities of most major cities had hardened by the late 1960s and early 1970s: It was kill whitey, down with honky pig, choke-the-man-until-hedrowns-in-his-own-saliva kinda thing. Then there was “Free Huey” and “Free Bobby” written, it seemed, on every open space of a ghetto wall. It created a climate. Dusty was caught up in a time that I think most black people were trying to recoup whatever it was that they felt they had lost.'!®

It is hard to know how, exactly, marketers might have successfully pitched someone like Dusty to the increasingly fragmented publics on both sides of the Atlantic; it may have been impossible to create any discourse that would have made sense of Dusty’s boundary-crossing and category-defying voice at that late-sixties time of redrawn boundaries and newly policed categories. As one of the Muscle Shoals musicians recalls, the hard-won common ground between black and white soul musicians seemed irretrievably lost in the sociopolitical conditions of late 1968: “Suddenly our music—when I say our

music I mean black and white people cutting it, writing it and putting it down together, was gone. . . . Suddenly, after Dr. King’s death, it was over.”!!”

70 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

Though Dusty in Memphis’s production and reception developed in directions that could have been neither predicted nor controlled, the international success of “Son of a Preacher Man” in 1968-1969 (and its much wider circulation in 1994 as the principal song of Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction) demonstrated that soul had generated a hardy new strain—transatlantic soul. This was the result of soul’s migrations, especially its core female gospel elements as carried by singers like Madeline Bell, its cultural rep-

resentations, and its strong reception across the Atlantic among social groups like the Mods, the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society, soul clubs, and advocates within London’s music and television circles. The next chapter picks up an earlier thread in the story of soul’s migrations: Dusty’s 1966 realization of “her own style” through the blend of soul with European melodrama.

Soul + Melodrama = [ne 1960s Pop Ara

One of the guiltiest pleasures of the 1960s is the pop aria: a short-lived, rarefied genre laden with musical and emotional bombast that can only be described as histrionic and shamelessly manipulative. Songs like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (1966) work to expose emotions that we have been

taught to hide—jealousy, rage, lust, self-pity—and to express them openly with a high degree of theatricality and morning-after guilt. In giving voice to and unleashing such tortured affect, the genre offers listeners a path to musical catharsis, one that operates outside the rhetoric of rock liberation. Indeed, the pop aria stands in uncomfortable relationship to the “rockist” narrative that has attached itself to the era.'! Despite this, the distinctly nonrock pop aria merits attention both for its strong roots in the mid-sixties postmodern aesthetic of pastiche and for its sustained international popularity thereafter. Unlike contemporaneous genres that had their roots in 1950s rhythm and blues, the girl group sound, or teen idol makeout songs (which, in turn, had their roots in early-twentieth-century popular genres), the pop aria is a quintessential 1960s creation, fully displaying the era’s postmodern patching together of disparate styles, historical references, and cultural tropes. Most compelling is the pairing of soul and melodrama that Dusty Springfield brought to the genre; her performances fused a gospel-influenced, emotionally expressive vocal style with European melodrama’s “dynamics of repres-

sion”’ and produced a transatlantic fan phenomenon that has not yet been addressed by the rock-obsessed music historians of the period. The genre is defined by Dusty Springfield’s 1964-1970 recordings, and throughout this chapter I refer to the following songs and composers: “Anyone Who Had a 71

72 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

Heart” (by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, recorded in 1964), “I Wish I Never Loved You” (by Ivor Raymonde and Mike Hawker, rec. 1964), “Summer Is

Over” (by Tom Springfield and Clive Westlake, rec. 1964), “Di fronte alamore” (by Silvana Simoni, Mario Coppola, and Umberto Bindi, rec. 1965), “Tu che ne sai” (by Vito Pallavicini, Antonio Amurri, and Francesco Pisano, rec. 1965), You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (by Pino Donaggio and Vito Pallavicini with English lyrics by Vicki Wickham and Simon Napier-Bell, rec. 1966), “All I See Is You” (by Clive Westlake and Ben Weisman, rec. 1966), “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” (by Clive Westlake, rec. 1968), and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” (by Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman, and Marilyn Bergman, rec. 1970).

Melodrama and soul were home territory for Dusty, who became more closely associated with the genre than any other singer; her ability to draw from both traditions simultaneously was key to establishing the songs as a genre. To put it slightly differently, glossing Muddy Waters: Soul and melodrama had a baby, they called it the pop aria, and Dusty was its improbably glamorous midwife. While Dusty’s identification with the pop aria is this chapter’s main focus, others’ investments in the genre were equally important. Audiences, composers, and the music industry were drawn for their own reasons to melodrama’s “aesthetic of excess”? and share credit in this discussion of the genre’s mid-sixties flourishing. As this chapter shows, the 1960s pop aria was a strange beast made up of elements drawn not only from soul and melodrama but also from opera and film—a beast caged within the commodified emotion of the three-minute pop song.

AUDIENCES AND THE “AESTHETIC OF EXCESS'

The word “melodramatic,” most often used to describe excessively demonstrative or emotional behavior, derives from the immensely popular stage melodramas of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and American theaters. Characters were plainly good or evil, and the action centered on the teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, mustache-twirling struggles between them. Through a set of broadly gestural acting conventions (“pain will place a hand on its forehead; despair will tear out its hair, and joy will kick a leg in the air”), audiences could “take in at a glance the psychological and moral condition of each character.”* Such easy legibility was, no doubt, a large part of melodrama’s allure, although its psychologically dark underside was, and

still is, even more so. Originating in late-eighteenth-century French and German entertainments,’ the melodrama’s approach to characterization, plot, and performance style seemed to touch a collective cultural nerve; audience desire for melodramatic excess spurred its viral leap from the play to other genres—to opera, the Victorian novel and poem, British music hall

SOUL + MELODRAMA = THE 1960S Pop ARIA 73

and pantomime, film and television (“soap operas”), popular song, and most recently, to Internet “hip-hoperas.”® Alive even in children’s cartoons, melodrama is, clearly, among the hardiest and most adaptive of theatrical strains.’ Its appeal, at root, lies in its promise of a “return of the repressed”® chan-

neled most often through plots featuring a desperately imperiled woman; melodrama’s strict conventions of “the return” ensure that the evils besetting its heroine will be confronted in a cathartic orgy of theatrical excess. Anyone who has seen Dusty’s live or recorded performances will recognize some version of these melodramatic elements in them, especially the singer’s exaggerated arm and hand movements while performing songs like “All I See Is You.” How did such nineteenth-century conventions find their way into the musical imagination of a mid-twentieth-century pop star, and also into the minds of listeners who so readily cast her as a melodramatic heroine? In addition to the local influences of British music hall and pantomime, likely explanations lie in two other sources of cultural imagery that were influential on both sides of the Atlantic: Hollywood and the world of opera.

CONSTRUCTING DUSTY AS MELODRAMATIC HEROINE: BORROVVING FROM FILM AND OPERA

From the “women’s film” of the 1940s and 1950s—such as Stella Dallas, Sorry, Wrong Number, Mildred Pierce, I Want to Live, I'll Cry Tomorrow, Madame X,

and Now, Voyager, to name but a few—the postwar generation in North America and Europe received a potent dose of melodrama and its characteristic female heroine.'° Projected on screen steadily throughout these decades by a generation of female titans headed by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the melodramatic stage heroine had by the 1960s not only been transferred to cinema but also become an impressive new “type” in the popular imaginary. At the same time, the figure of the opera diva also entered mass culture

through classical music’s popularizing efforts, such as live national radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera of New York and the BBC’s Third Programme opera productions for television. Appearances by opera stars on mass media interview shows further increased the visibility and accessibility of the opera diva.'! With these two powerful female images circulating widely in Western European and North American popular culture, it is unsurprising that Dusty—given her musical and dramatic sensibilities—would have drawn inspiration from them and woven them into her project of selffashioning.” While blond female screen stars of the early 1960s were sources of Dusty’s look (as discussed in chapter 1), stars of a previous era may have exerted a stronger if less visible influence and probably had much to do with an aspect of Dusty’s self-invention as the tortured heroine of her own three-minute

74 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

melodramas. The 1940s and 1950s queens of melodrama such as Davis, Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and Susan Hayward portrayed heroines who stood alone in situations of clearly defined good and evil and were

powerless but for their own force of character—not unlike the situations Dusty would find herself in as the heroine of her “big ballads.” They struggled in their films against a variety of villains—sexual predators, corrupt politicians, parasitic husbands, narcissistic daughters, cruel mothers, and gangster boyfriends—and whether they prevailed or succumbed, reliably delivered emotional release on cue as, indeed, would Dusty in her pop arias.

Audience discourse abetted Dusty’s construction as a melodramatic heroine and did so through a reception phenomenon that Maria LaPlace has called the “Bette Davis Discourse” in her study of screen melodrama’s most iconic actress. In her discussion of Davis’s Now, Voyager LaPlace notes that much of Davis’s acclaim in the role derived from the viewer’s tendency to conflate Charlotte Vale (Davis’s character in the film) with Davis and to imagine that Davis was, in some verifiable sense, playing herself. The narrative of spinster/ugly duckling to swan, in addition to Now, Voyager's plucky girl to independent woman story line, seemed to map neatly onto Davis's personal life, or so audiences chose to believe. Dusty’s audience reception often worked the same way; the emotion she conveyed in her pop arias was thought to be personal and real, as attested by countless fan magazine articles and radio interviews. This echoes, in many respects, the centuries-old discourse of opera fans concerning their favorite divas—female singers whose extraordinary command of both their musical and real-life roles were seen to stem from the same personal source. Maria Callas is perhaps the twentieth century’s most

prominent example of the diva phenomenon, the latest in a long line of larger-than-life figures who have magnetized audiences throughout opera's history. The discourse of the diva and its unbounded circuit of emotion connecting singer, song, and listener certainly apply in Dusty’s case.!° Through public discussion of her “real” life (with details often supplied by the singer herself), fans could reasonably imagine that the songs’ tales of torture, torment, longing, and deceit mirrored Dusty’s own and, by phenomenal extension, theirs, too. Dusty’s extraordinary performances are credited, almost exclusively it would seem, with this repertoire’s emotional impact, yet the pop arias com-

positional strategies are also extraordinary and worthy of close reading. Within precise musical structures drawn along conventional melodramatic lines, composers engineered titanic struggles that proceeded toward deftly placed, explosive climaxes. In so doing, they produced vehicles that were perfectly matched to Dusty’s temperament and capabilities and also to her fans’ desires.

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The diva releases what we are constrained to suppress; she gives vent to our nameless furies; in her, our madness reigns. We sin, she suffers.

SONG AS COMMODIFIED EMOTION: THE POP ARIA AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Melodrama’s leap to the mass medium of popular song was made possible

through techniques of musical compression as practiced by classically trained 1960s composers such as Pino Donaggio, Burt Bacharach, Ivor Raymonde, and Clive Westlake.'* Their marshaling of devices drawn from opera

was but the latest instance of the music industry's commodification of emotion, a process by which ever-shrinking units of song were packaged and sold to an insatiable public.!? Having begun with the sale of opera excerpts

in the nineteenth century—arias compressed into printed piano-vocal reductions for home use—commodification took a quantum leap with the advent of mass-marketed recordings in the early 1900s. This meant that arias could be sold to previously unimaginable numbers of buyers; the downsized emotional product was, for the first time, now accessible to an outsized public. Recorded arias now reached those for whom the experience of live opera was inaccessible (for reasons of class, custom, expense, or geographic distance) and the millions who were unable to use piano-vocal scores. Clearly, neither the practice of compressing opera’s music nor the principle of commodifying its emotional content was new in the 1960s; both had followed a well-worn industrial path. The aria’s leap to the Top Forty charts in the form of the pop aria capped more than a century's worth of traffic between musi-

cal high and low culture; slipping through cracks in the high/low border, opera stars became pop icons, and pop stars became divas. By the end of the twentieth century, the Three Tenors would compete with the Beastie Boys for slots in the Top Ten, while the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, would

record an aria from an Italian opera about a Chinese empress (“Nessun dorma,” from Puccini’s Turandot [1926]).'°

What was new about the 1960s pop aria was the nature of its musical compression and the vast scale of its commodification: Unlike nineteenthcentury piano-vocal scores, whose reductions sacrificed instrumental affect and narrative (while maintaining, at least, the real time of the operatic aria), the 1960s pop aria stripped down all of the musical devices (orchestral, harmonic, melodic, gestural, textual) to their bare essentials and instituted in their stead a language of allusion and abbreviation. And unlike earlier forms of commodification, whose markets were limited by consumers’ ability to read music, the 1960s pop aria enjoyed virtually unlimited circulation in the

form of radio broadcasts, records, televised and live performances, film

76 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

soundtracks, and only secondarily, and very distantly, printed music. Hence,

the composers of the 1960s built upon the idea of packaging and selling emotion through intensely emotive slices of recorded music while reducing

the amount of time and effort needed to consume it. Given the music industry's ever-increasing profits from practices of commodification and compression, it was predictable that commercially minded composers would find a way to transfer melodrama’s crowd-pleasing aesthetic of excess to the recorded music industry’s three-minute song format.'” Furthermore, it seems equally predictable that pop composers who were conversant with opera would identify opera's affective devices as the surest means to do it.

These operatic devices already constituted a compressed musical language—a system of musical signs, a code—through which specific emotions could be telegraphed instantly to opera audiences.'® So effective was this code in triggering feeling that it was adopted almost without modification in the silent films’ earliest days of live musical accompaniment and was later adapted for use as underscoring in sound films.'? Conservatory-trained composers such as Donaggio, Bacharach, Legrand, and Raymonde were not only fully aware of this sign system and fluent in its use but also prepared to distill it for mass consumption.”

Such signs have saturated European and North American film, television, and advertising; hence, audiences have become fully attuned to the code. Most readers will recognize the following catalogue of musical devices borrowed from nineteenth-century opera orchestras. They will also recognize their most usual associations, given in parentheses, that have now become clichés through overuse in mass media: massed strings, horns, or large chorus (to signal monumentality, nobility, awe); lengthening or shortening of note values (prolonging or speeding up of action); sudden silence (abrupt break in narrative thread); forceful or delicate attack (startling break with or expected resumption of action); presence or absence of anacrusis (preparation or lack thereof for action immediately following); major and minor mode (associated with binaries: positive/negative, happy/ sad, joyful/mournful); modulation to a closely related key (move to an expected plot point), modulation to a remote key (move to an unexpected plot point), or abrupt modulation (disruptive move to an unexpected plot point); extended modulatory passages (unstable, unpredictable part of narrative); fast, slow, or moderate tempi (quickly, slowly, or moderately unfolding action); acceleration/deceleration (move toward or away from climactic point); instrumental affect such as that associated with horns (martial), woodwinds (pastoral), or saxophones (modernity, sexuality, blackness); gradations of loud and soft (used to intensify or add nuance to other signifiers); diatonic chord progressions (simple logic, nature, innocence);

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chromaticism (complications, uneasiness, a grave situation); and atonality (break with reality, fear of the unknown/unseen). While opera can luxuriate in infinite shades of all of these—contextualizing and resignifying the devices in countless combinations on a vast, three-hour narrative canvas— the three-minute pop aria allows no time for resignification or narrative unfolding. Severe musical compression produces miniatures containing highly concentrated emotive content that succeed only through the listener’s foreknowledge of the parent musical signs—heavily marked sonic elements drawn from opera—and recognition that they are now operating within the pop song’s long-established conventions. Such musical miniatures, as seems perfectly evident in Dusty’s performances, share melodrama’s objective: to stage a return of the repressed in all its overwrought glory and “to exteriorize a world within.”*! How these pop arias work as mini-melodramas—through opera’s compressed code, now compressed to the extreme, and Dusty’s vocal and gestural labor, also operating according to its own sign system—is the object of the following discussion of individual songs. (Readers will, I hope, listen to the songs as they come up in the next few pages. The CD source of each recording is given in the note, and song passages are referenced according to their exact minute and second markings.)

COMPRESSION AT VVORK, PART ONE: THE POP ARIAS OPENING SECONDS AS "ESTABLISHING SHOTS"

What happens in these songs’ first seconds constitutes both an invitation and a warning. By telegraphing the terms of its central conceit—compression—the pithy introduction invites participation in a musical logic of abbreviation: a participation that is possible only if the listener knows what is being abbreviated, hinted at, glimpsed but never fully seen. Drawing on listeners’ familiarity with parent musical codes as mentioned previously, the opening moments of pop arias serve as musical equivalents of “establishing shots” in film; they set the stage for the singer’s entrance by conveying quickly both the situation she is in and the forces that are aligned for or against her. Such establishing shots occur in the first seconds of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (o—0:01), “I Wish I Never Loved You” (o—0:08), “Summer Is Over” (o—0:13), “Di fronte all’amore” (o—0:05), “Tu che ne sai” (o—0:03), “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (0-0:17), “All I See Is You” (o-0:11), “I

Close My Eyes and Count to Ten (o—0:18), and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” (o-—0:21).77

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EX. 1, QO-O101 “ANYONE VWWHO HAD A HEART” (1964)

In “Anyone Who Had a Heart,’ unlike any of the other pop arias considered here, the singer plunges directly into the song’s text with only the barest shred of a musical introduction. The introductory half bar (containing in a single second, three eighth notes), while minimal, contains much information and would seem to be a sonic equivalent to a subliminal visual image flashing across a screen: It is a minor chord repeated in a quietly insistent rhythm against an aural backdrop made desolate by the electric guitar’s echo and reverb.” This one second of sound, flashed across the musical space too quickly for a listener to make conscious sense of it, is given context immediately by the singer’s entrance: She matches the guitar’s top pitch (d'), repeats it, and neatly subdivides its rhythm with sixteenth notes while whispering the words “Anyone who ever loved.” Thus, with rhetorically charged pitch

and word repetitions, she steps into the musical space and inscribes it instantly and urgently. The introduction, though severely foreshortened, prepares us in just a few seconds for the song’s melodramatic work: to convey musically the singer’s struggle with an obsessively repeated and very painful thought.

EX. 2, O-0:08 “ VVISH | NEVER LOVED YOU" (1964)

The snare drum’s militaristic figure, combined with the trumpet’s detached, accented descending line, suggests the resolve—and it is heard twice, lest there be any doubt—with which the singer enters the musical frame. By the

time she begins, we have heard, in addition to the resolute trumpets and drums, an alternating two-chord pattern—B to G# minor and back again— over two measures. Through this static harmonic movement, listeners learn that there will be no budging from the position that is about to be articulated.

EX, 3, 0-018 "SUMMER IS OVER" (1964)

Though “Summer Is Over” begins decisively on the downbeat, placing listeners in a vivid musical “present,” the minor mode darkens the energy of its rising sixteenth-note figure while the guiro’s accent and guitar’s metallic afterbeat give it a distinct chill. The trumpet’s announcement (of what, exactly, is not yet known), containing an ancient-sounding Dorian sixth scale degree, evokes a distant past. The raised sixth, heard throughout the song in recurring countermelodies, serves not only as an insistent reminder of something long gone but also threatens to escape the scale, paralleling, perhaps,

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the closely tended images of summer that threaten to slip through the sing-

ers desperate grasp. The twice-heard clarion announcement, concluding firmly on the tonic each time, establishes the heroine’s nightmarishly circular sense of something finishing but never ending.

EX, 4, O-O:05 “DIFRONTE ALLAMORE" (1965)

This song begins on the downbeat with a confident, almost swaggering, three-note trumpet figure accented by timpani with 12/8 eighth-note subdivisions articulated crisply by the snare drum. The martial affect of this combination in the song’s first five seconds sets up the listener for the confrontation and ultimatum that follow.

EX, 0, O-O1710 “TU CHE NE SAT (1965)

Though this is another Italian song of impending confrontation, “Tu che ne sal’ starts from an emotional point of departure vastly different from that of “Di fronte all’amore.” Here, the piano’s loud, aggressive octaves, reinforced on the afterbeat by a heavily accented, repeated minor chord, contain a hint of violence. An important part of the piano music’s sign works from the listener’s visualization of how this sound is created: The pianist must strike the keys with a decisive attack, the physical force of which is embedded in the

sound’s meaning. Thus, the song opens with several musical blows and builds momentum with the snare drum joining in at 0:03 and the trumpet kicking in a high, repeated note of its own. By o:10, in the introduction’s dominant cadence, there is a clear sense of a gathering conflict, the gauntlet thrown down. By the time the singer enters, listeners already anticipate what she means, if not, exactly, what she is going to say.

EX, 6, O-O17 “YOU DONT FAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME" (1966)

“You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” begins with an orchestral introduction so arresting that it seems intended to cause an abrupt break with the listener’s immediate mental surroundings. This is accomplished in a mere seventeen seconds through a dense concentration of orchestral signs: a piercing solo French horn, followed by full brass, strings, percussion, and a chorus of heavenly voices. The horn’s line is taken up by an equally piercing trumpet

in an inexorable melodic ascent punctuated by drum rolls and crashing cymbals. The passage concludes with a sudden drop into a pit of silence

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(0:17). In this silence, saturated with tense expectations, an aura of monumentality gathers about the singer and what she is about to sing. The silence also isolates the singer from the army of orchestral instruments and chorus we have just heard and positions her as the stoic melodramatic heroine who must hold her ground in the face of forces more powerful than herself.

EX /, O-O11 “ALL | SEE Is YOU" (1966)

As in “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” this musical establishing shot would seem intended to instigate a radical break in the listener’s thoughts and rivet attention exclusively on the matter at hand. Its musical signs, particularly the commanding use of brass, tell us none too subtly that what we are about to hear is important. A solo horn races to its highest register via an octave leap and two glissandi; its goal notes ring out with overtones piling up on top of one another in a richly resonant space. The orchestra undergirds this with modally ambiguous seventh harmonies and an accumulation of brass timbres. Solo trumpet takes up where the horn left off, lifting the melody to an even higher point. Like an overture that foreshadows an opera's content by offering snippets of arias that we will hear later, here the opening horn solo intones the impassioned melody (“the days have come and gone’); we will not hear it again until 0:57, an eternity in pop time. Unlike “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” in which the opening orchestral

melody is immediately taken over by the singer (on the words “when I said”), allowing listeners to connect the orchestra’s affect with hers, “All I See Is You” delays the connection for nearly a full minute. Westlake acknowledged that the idea for this delay was Dusty’s. Upon hearing the song

for the first time in a meeting with the composer, Dusty requested that Westlake add an introductory verse (“I tried so hard all summer through”)

rather than beginning the song with the main melody (“The days have come and gone since you were here’’). This accounts for the long buildup to 0:57.~4 Withholding the opening melody for this length of time (fifty-four seconds have come and gone since it was heard) engages listeners and the singer in an act of longing (for “you,” for the melody) that is, after all, the

very point of the song. The long-awaited melody’s second coming, now with words, takes on the character of revelation.”°

EX. 8, 0-018 “| CLOSE MY EYES AND COUNT TO TEN" (1968)

The first five seconds of “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” draw explicitly from the piano’s nineteenth-century repertory of signs, which, in turn, draw

from opera’s musical signs of waiting, worrying, and dread anticipation:

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closely voiced minor chords in a static, repeated eighth-note rhythm under a melody that paces back and forth along the narrow path of successive

minor thirds. The piano’s muted introspective sound is suddenly overwhelmed by crashing bass and banging treble octaves. The two gestures con-

tinue as a duet—probably one recorded over the other—with the original muted sound carrying on its Chopinesque repeated chords in the middle register while the amplified piano continues its octave flailings at the outer reaches of the instrument. These two sounds, both in minor, seem designed to telegraph opposite moods that alternate throughout the song and later Open onto a space of resolution in major. Though we actually hear twelve beats in the first gesture and twelve in the next, they would seem to represent, quite literally, the act of counting to ten with eyes closed, which precedes the feared disappearance of the beloved.

EX, 9, O-O:21 "WHAT ARE YOU DOING THE REST OF YOUR LIFE’?” (1970)

Harp, tremolo strings, close harmonies, and absence of percussion create an out-of-time sense, while the saxophone solo fixes the listeners’ attention and draws it into the psychological world of the protagonist. In the first three seconds, the solo saxophone presents a clear musical thought for our consideration: Its ascending line, the first notes of a simple Ab major scale, is troubled by the appearance of E4 and is troubled further by the sharp dissonance (at 0:03) created by lower neighbor F’s clash with the line’s goal note, G. F's downward turn is maintained in counterpoint to the saxophone’s continuing melody, now stalled on G. The saxophone is incapable of further ascent, it is implied, because of F’s gravitational pull. In the world of musical signs, the game is already over: We do not need the rest of the piece to tell us what is going to happen, so portentous is F’s continued descent against G’s arrested ascent. These first ten seconds cast a pall over the rest of the song; the words, sung to the same melody, are unable to dispel or resignify them. The voice, beginning at 0:21, matches the saxophone’s affect closely and creates an impossible sensation of hearing a shadow. (A similarly ghostly exchange of expressive signs between voice and saxophone occurs unforgettably at 2:06 in “Look of Love.”)

Before moving to part two of the discussion of musical compression, the lyrics’ role in helping to construct the three-minute melodrama should be considered. While the music, both the way it is structured and the way it is performed, does most of the labor in building a melodramatic arc, certain words and key phrases fuel the music’s forward motion by adding an explicit

82 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

layer of meaning to amplify the music’s message. The music, already intense and riveting because of its compression, becomes even more so with the addition of strategically placed textual elements.

LYRICS AND THE THREE-MINUTE MELODRAMAS STRUCTURE

Listeners, armed with the explicit information of the opening instrumental salvo and now participating in its musical logic of abbreviation, anticipate certain emotional scripts and deduce instantly what sort of text might be

coming next. The pop aria’s introduction and first few words point to specific mental landscapes and center on the following melodramatic tropes:

forbidden or rejected love, abjection resulting from both or either, bitter feelings of isolation or abandonment, and fruitless obsession with the love object. The music’s extremely concentrated code is paired with the text’s nonspecificity to create a story with no names, places, or dates; there is no dock of the bay or graveyard where no one has been, no preacher’s son, love child, leader of the pack, party lights, blue suede shoes, or flowers in your hair. Rather, the deliberate absence of narrative detail leaves a vacuum that must be filled. These songs invite listeners to supply their own stories as the song goes about its business of effecting movement from one psychological state to another. Like the pop aria’s first seconds of music establishing firmly “where” on the emotional continuum the song begins, its first few words are also crucial

in positioning the “who,” that is, establishing a point of view but not a specific identity. Again, borrowing a term from film studies, “point of view”

shots reveal who is telling the story and how they are telling it. The most effective first words of a pop aria set up the point of view and also allow a tantalizing glimpse of the “problem.” There can be no doubt about the point of view and the problem in first lines such as “Anyone who ever loved could look at me and know that I love you,’ “I wish I’d never loved you, I wish I'd never wanted you so much,” “Eri il ragazzo di un altra e non potevo parlarti” [You were someone else’s boyfriend and I couldn't talk to you], “Tu che ne sai delle volte che ho pianto per te” [You don’t know how many times I’ve cried over you], “I tried so hard all summer through not to think too much of you,” “When I said, ‘I needed you, you said you would always stay,’ and “What are you doing the rest of your life, north and south and east and west of your life?” Though there are no specifics, much is implied; we know what

must be coming after first lines such as these. Other first lines are more metaphorical and require us to listen closely for the metaphor’s possible

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meaning, for instance, “The night runs away with the day, the grass that was green is now hay.” Still others begin as if in the middle of a private conversation, and we must wait for the other shoe to drop: “It isn’t the way that you look, and it isn’t the way that you talk.” These first lines all establish an intimate and complex relationship between “I” and “you,” the problematic nature of which we expect to be addressed in the body of the song. Thus, the lyrics do their job in the pop aria’s structure; their first words assist the music in fixing a point of departure from which the repressed emotion of the I/you relationship begins its journey of exteriorization. After the all-important first words are sung, text fades in importance; from this point on, only small portions of text perform structural functions. These are the strategically placed key words and phrases that adorn melodic or harmonic high points, draw the ear to structural pillars, or accentuate the song’s climax and/or resolution. Examples of this are the o ending the word pero [but] in “Di fronte al’?amore” (at 2:11-2:16), and “oh” in “All I See Is You” (at 2:37) to foreground the modulations, or the ethereal “you” at the end of “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life” to emphasize the song’s musical and psy-

chological transformation. Aside from such examples, it could be argued that beyond the first few words and a select few thereafter, text becomes superfluous to the creation of a melodramatic arc. Dusty’s comments seem to confirm this view of the words’ role relative to the music: I don’t pay attention to the lyrics until after they’re over. ’m more occupied with hitting the notes... . Lyrics mean very little to me... . The drama always comes from where the notes come for me: musical drama rather than lyrical drama. If the two happen to coincide, it’s wonderful... . If you really listen there’s tremendous emphasis on words like “if? “and” and “but”... . the lyrics always come second, and if they match, it’s a good day.”°

COMPRESSION AT VVORK, PART TVVO: THE MELODRAMATIC ARC

In the course of this discussion of compression and the ways in which a melodramatic arc is executed musically within three minutes, the functional differences between the pop aria and other three-minute genres come into focus clearly. In contrast to dance music or teen makeout music, pop arias avoid short hooks, verse-refrain forms, and call-and-response in favor of long-breathed melodies, less predictable forms, and solo delivery. It follows that rock’s insistent, heavy beat is rarely foregrounded. Unlike the vast majority of pop songs, the pop aria’s purpose is not to set up a feel-good groove

84 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

and keep it going through the fade or to suit a broad range of moods, situations, and locations. Rather, its goal is to effect a change in the listener’s state and to do it very quickly: to speed the listener to a specific emotional location far removed from the equally specific one that started the song. By taking a route filled with emotional and musical upheaval—indeed, the only route possible, given the affective terms of the first few notes and words— the songs are deliberately antigroove; indeed, they set up a groove only to disrupt and replace it with an entirely different sentiment. Each pop aria does its work in a slightly different way, using the orchestra to create a mood and atmosphere appropriate to its particular conceits, yet they all share a melodramatic structure in three parts: an introduction saturated with devices that fix our emotional location and point of view; at least one modal shift and/or modulation to a higher key, which leads inexorably toward the final payoff: the singer’s vocal breaking point. The musical “return of the repressed” lies in the concentrated, directed force of the modulations and the nearly unbearable sensation of imminent collapse caused by the knowledge that the singer has been literally driven into an unsustainable

vocal register. Surviving the perilous return, the singer ends the song in weary triumph; she is still standing and continues to sing, albeit with battered voice, past the point of near, but never complete, collapse. Like the melodramatic film heroine who fends off manifold evils and threats, the singer prevails against the cruel, rising modulations articulated by an unrelenting orchestra. Listeners share the terror of the singer’s impending vocal doom but also the thrill of her heroic survival, and both are rewarded with

hard-earned catharsis after emerging from the three-minute gauntlet of compressed musical and verbal devices. Consistent though these features are, they by no means constitute a template or formula. The following examples illustrate both the frequent resort to certain devices and the variety of ways in which they have been used within the strict limits of a threeminute space. The first example, “Di fronte all’amore,” might well be considered the mother of all pop arias. Though “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (orig-

inally “Io che non vivo pid di un ora senza te”) was to become the biggest chart success of Dusty’s career, her relatively unknown recording of “Di fronte all’amore’” is an equally affecting model of the melodramatic pop aria genre. In terms of two features previously mentioned—strategically placed modulations and the threat of vocal collapse—“Di fronte all’amore” displays their clearest, most concentrated, and most thrilling use. Literally packed with modulations, the song’s first section (an AABA design) begins in Bb minor and circles back to it by 1:32 after traveling through three other key areas: to B minor at 0:27, to C minor at 0:50, and to F minor at 1:09. The Bb minor “middle eight” instrumental section (1:32 to 1:53) serves as a tonal

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bridge both closing off the first section and providing a launch for the second. Section two (BA) would seem to be reenacting the modulation sequence of section one, but the tonal scheme has been truncated (gasp!), and we lunge into F minor without first going through C minor. It looks like this: Bbm—Bm—-Cm->Fm-> Bbm—-Bm-—Fm (middle eight in italics). The over-

all effect of this large number of modulations within such a short time span is one of dangerously escalating tension and instability, with an element of extreme urgency added by part two’s truncation. A spectacular congruence of dramatic elements occurs between 2:10 and 2:16: It is here that we leap over C minor, reach the highest point of the melody (c”) on the word pero [but], and become aware that the voice has been driven by the modulations to the very end of its range and is starting to crack. The singer hurtles into the song’s final line and highest notes, imploring, “non avere paura di me” [don’t be afraid of me], with orchestra playing at full volume and crashing timpani announcing an equally crashing silence at 2:38, directly before the cadential “di me.” On this vocal precipice and with the singer’s previously repressed emotions now on full sonic display, we are held at full throttle until the very end of the song. In contrast to the constant, agitated flight into new key areas of “Di fronte all’amore,’ “All I See Is You” modulates only once at 2:38. But like its Italian

models, the modulation instigates the vocal strain that signals both the singer's spectacular release of emotion and attendant vocal perils in so doing. Though the composer, Clive Westlake, has kept us waiting for nearly two and a half minutes for this moment, he has, in the meantime, prepared us for it with a variety of other affective devices: a recitative-like opening passage in minor from 0:12 to 0:57; a long-building melody in major mode beginning at 0:57 that is as nostalgic as its text (“the days have come and gone since you were here’); a repetition of the melody starting at 1:25, leading to a ramping up of intensity from 1:50 to 1:55 (“And when I throw my arms out wide”); and a full cadence accompanying the words “all I see is you.””” At 2:24, after the instrumental break, Westlake approaches the long-awaited modulation with melody and text that we have heard just moments before (“every day I find”). Just as we are settling into the repeated melody, its comfort and familiarity is shattered by the sudden modulation to a higher key initiated during the word oh. To say that this device delivers an immensely satisfying moment to listeners would be an understatement; fans often burst into song at the modulation as if cued by Dusty’s heartfelt, modulatory “oh.” For fans unable to contain themselves at this point, the song takes on the character of an anthem and, indeed, it functions as such for legions of Springfield fans, worldwide. The song’s final moments, beginning at 2:38 (“I won't live again until I’m with you’), climb to the point of greatest vocal tension, reached on the word way, and trigger the kind of release that few songs can match.

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“I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten,’ also by Clive Westlake, foregrounds modal shifts rather than modulation; the clear association of major/minor with the protagonist’s shifting assessment of her own situation is the song’s chief musical conceit. The shifts progress as follows: minor until 0:56, major until 1:30, minor until 2:09, major until 2:43, minor to end. The four shifts in mode create a seesaw effect expressing the singer’s vacillation between belief (major) and disbelief (minor), optimism and pessimism concerning the love object (“it’s a feeling so unreal I can’t believe it’s true”). The song would seem

to end in a draw, having spent half its time in major and the other half in minor. Though we might expect the voice, once it reaches its highest notes, to be the deciding factor, it only reaffirms the ambiguity by saying one thing (the optimistic “yourre still here”) while accompanied by another (the pessimistic minor mode). Though the existential dilemma remains unresolved, the singer succeeds in expressing the crippling doubt that the song’s intro-

duction foretold. She achieves this musically only at the end of the song, when she is catapulted into her upper register through the simple device of an octave leap at 2:52. Poised on the vocal brink, she repeats the phrase “I close my eyes and count to ten and when I| open them youre still here” through the song’s fade. While the voice survives this expression of extreme doubt, the fact that the song ends in minor and without the closure of a final cadence suggests that the doubt, unfortunately, survives also. If the pop aria is about moving from one emotional state to another, then “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” provides an extraordinarily sensuous example of such transport, taking listeners from a focus on “me” and “my” at the song’s beginning to a profound awareness of “you” by its end. Dusty’s alternating use of head voice and chest voice (as at 2:28-2:35, where she moves from head to chest on the word two) maps precisely onto the shift in awareness that becomes perfectly conscious (for both singer and listener) by the end of the song. Prior to that point, Michel Legrand takes listeners on an emotionally extravagant journey with orchestral gestures that can only be described as over the top. Most arresting is the sudden tidal wave of orchestral sound at 1:26 to 1:30; it crashes into a new, higher key, lifting the singer into her highest vocal register, where at 1:29 we hear Dusty’s top note (“I want to see your face”) in full-throated chest voice. Yet, when we revisit this pitch (c”) ninety-three seconds later at 3:02, it is now in Dusty’s head voice—on the word you—a stunning sign that a transformation has taken place. This song, like the others discussed thus far, takes the singer to the point of collapse but, unlike the others, shows us that there is life after impending vocal death. Dusty holds her resurrected high c” from 3:02 to 3:12, riveting us on the word you for ten seconds, a musical eternity. Thus she ex-

ecutes a favorite device of opera composers—withholding the high note only to wallow in it later—of which audiences also seem never to tire.

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“Summer Is Over” represents a complete contrast to “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” in terms of its textual and musical conceits. There is no “I” or “you,” nor is there a single moment of music that stands out as transformative; rather, the music works itself up to the return via accumulation of timbres and steadily thickening orchestral texture. Despite its allusive quality, the text is clear; yet, the orchestral and vocal signs deny the textual evidence, and summer remains firmly within the protagonist’s viselike grip. Indeed, not until the song’s bitter end does she finally and very reluctantly concede that summer (and whatever it represents) really 1s over. Concession is heard unmistakably in the sudden and highly evocative shift to Dusty’s head voice at 3:22-3:32. Although not nearly as breathtaking as the final “you” in “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” the unexpected change in vocal quality telegraphs the change in perspective that we have been waiting for throughout the song. Accumulation of timbres allows the melodramatic arc to emerge from the AABA BA form: Distinctive countermelodies weave around the voice at 0:44-1:14 (muted trumpet), 1:14-1:30 (strings), and 1:30-1:44 (trumpet and strings together) and complicate the deceptively simple observations of the text (“the rains tumble down from the sky ... the sun and the moon take turns in the sky . . . the meadows are kissed by a cool autumn mist”). Such instrumental affect and contrapuntal writing (rather than modulations as in “Di fronte all’amore” or modal shifts as in “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten”) create the melodramatic tension that will be resolved by the singer. In the final climactic B section, the singer flees into her highest range at 2:49, thus leaving behind, registrally at least, the complicating horns and strings. Her chest voice refuses concession one last time before her head voice finally signals its grudging acceptance of harsh reality. “IT Wish I Never Loved You” also uses AABA BA form, though Ivor Raymonde calibrates his orchestral devices and key changes to create a false climax at the end of section one at 2:19. By the time we reach this point, the song would seem to have exhausted its musical resources: We have already

heard Dusty’s top notes not once but twice on “tortured, tormented, and cheated” and have lingered long in the dominant key area (1:24-1:44) while the singer’s lover has a rendezvous with another woman (“I saw you with another / I watched you hold her tenderly”). After a satisfying return to the home key with a full cadence on the resolute words “I wish I’d never loved you at 1:45, there seems little work left for the song to do. Yet in the concluding BA section's fade at 3:18, we discover that something has been held in reserve: A note and its companion vocal crack still higher than the c’ heard at 2:19. We only hear it in the improvised “I wish I never, no no never” at 3:18,

just ten seconds before the end of the song. Though Dusty’s improvised fades (as in “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” and “I Just Don’t Know What

88 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS

to Do with Myself”) sound spontaneous, it seems obvious that she and Raymonde conspired to save the high D and sound of maximum vocal strain for this moment in order to surpass the affect of 2:19, thus crafting a true climax for the song. “Tu che ne sai” is virtually all climax and is the most mannered of the nine pop arias discussed here. It is practically pornographic in its full frontal display of sensational vocal and orchestral excess. “Tu che ne sai” flogs its material and the singer mercilessly, substituting refrain form and shameless text repetition for a carefully paced affective plan. The inherent predictability of refrain form, along with the song’s failure to modulate, forecloses the possibility of melodrama’s necessary setup and explosive transformation. Nevertheless, it does effect a return of the repressed, albeit in the most inelegant way: The refrain’s blunt musical and textual elements are simply repeated over and over, until singer and listener have endured not one but three musically climactic and emotionally draining events (the refrain occurring thrice at 0:43, 1:50, and 2:07). Vocally, precious little is left to the imagination, as we

reach the singer’s top range as early as 0:16 into the song. Unable to reach higher, the singer is forced to sing louder if the song is to go anywhere; similarly, the orchestra, already playing flat out early in the song, becomes increasingly bombastic. They maintain full volume from the time of the instrumental break (1:50) through the song’s violent and thrashing fade (2:40). “Tu che ne sai” demonstrates that a “more violent melodramatic graph inevitably produces itself” because of the necessary compressions of the pop aria; however, composers like Donaggio, Raymonde, Westlake, Tom Springfield, Legrand, and Bacharach managed to write music that avoided overuse of sensationalist techniques and “hysteria bubbling all the time just below the surface.”*® Bacharach’s music for “Anyone Who Had a Heart” demonstrates perhaps better than any of the previously mentioned songs that a melodramatic arc can be conveyed just as effectively through formal and rhythmic nuance as through the more obvious types of modal, modulatory, and vocal devices discussed here. Through the internal and structural repetitions of the AB AB AB form, Bacharach crafts the return in “Anyone Who Had a Heart” by setting up melodic and rhythmic expectations and then denying or rerouting them at the song’s climactic point. At the end of the first and second AB sections, we hear identical endings (at 0:37-0:45 and 1:24-1:32, respectively) with a distinctive rhythmic displacement (a measure of 3/4 over 6/8) within the phrase “And hurt me like you hurt me / And be so untrue / What am I to do?” (displacement in italics). Setting us up to expect the same line of text and music the third time around, Bacharach turns his material toward a different end: Beginning at 2:12, he brings forward the rhythmic displacement and excises

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the line “What am I to do?” while pushing the melody upward and onward through an enjambment that does not allow the section to cadence. In place of the expected “what am I to do?” we revisit the song’s key phrase, “anyone who had a heart” (at 2:18), but now it is repeated at the singer’s highest and most emphatic pitch level. Dusty adds a layer of meaning to these subverted expectations on this particular line by staying in her chest voice, thus breaking the pattern established earlier in the song of reverting to her head voice at the end of the section. (The phrase “and be so untrue,” when we first heard it at 0:42, was delivered in a strident chest voice but was followed immediately by the pathetic “what am I to do” at 0:44 in a much weaker-sounding head voice; the same retreat occurred at 1:31.) But when we hear “and be so untrue” for the third and final time at 2:18, Dusty does not backslide into the weaker head voice as before. This breakthrough is backed up by the timpani, which, at the song’s final iterations of “take me in his arms and always love

me why won't you,’ bangs out the rhythmic displacement with abandon (now expanded to three measures of 3/4 over 6/8, heard twice through at 2:24

to 2:32 and again at 2:40 to 2:48). The singer remains resolute in her chest voice throughout the fade, having finally expressed that which she was constrained to repress earlier in the song.

Melodrama’s compositional strategies and vocal and instrumental signs have occupied most of the chapter thus far. A final and equally important topic concludes the discussion: melodramatic stage gestures as adapted to the pop aria. The broad physical signs of the kind mentioned earlier in the chapter (“pain will place a hand on its forehead; despair will tear out its hair,

and joy will kick a leg in the air”) were the stock in trade of nineteenthcentury actors and were used at moments of particular intensity over the course of a two-hour (or longer) play.*? Dusty, by contrast, packed two hours’ worth of nineteenth-century gestures into her 1960s three-minute performances; indeed, Dusty’s gestures provided a continuous counterpoint to her voice during performances such as “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” One gesture led immediately into the next, sometimes smoothly, sometimes with startling suddenness. That Dusty left no space between them ac-

counted, in large part, for the unbroken tension of her performances and amplified the already very powerful effects of the music’s compression and calibrated structure. Given the song’s dense layers of musical and gestural signs and the precision with which they were coordinated, it is unsurprising that this song—especially the video recording of a 1967 BBC television performance—has attained legendary status among Dusty’s various fan com-

munities worldwide. This performance is a virtual catalogue of Dusty’s trademark gestures and a landmark of the genre. The rich discourse elicited

90 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

by such performances would almost seem to suggest that this gestural element was as important as her voice in forging the singer's close association with the genre.

"YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME" PHYSICAL GESTURE AND DUSTY’S “"OWIN STYLE"

Stating that Dusty had a soul voice and a melodramatic body may seem to be a suspiciously tidy and simplistic way of thinking about the complex entanglement of soul and melodrama in her performances, yet it seems inarguable, considering her own remarks on the subject of her style influences, that Dusty drew selectively from both and did so to wring maximum feeling from the pop aria repertoire. That Dusty deliberately adopted soul’s vocal strategies for its emotive power is something she articulated in a 1977 interview with Ray Coleman: That was never my real voice. It was a strain for that effect, all the time a strain. I shouted and screamed because I believed with all my naiveté that that was the way to sing with soul. Here was I (her voice was cracking a little as she spoke)—this white girl singer .. . quite capable of nice music, but all the time I thought no, this has got to be done with more FEELING.°°

As she indicates here, and as demonstrated in all of the pop arias discussed in this chapter, Dusty’s borrowing from soul—specifically its vocal brinksmanship—was not without cost. The fact that Dusty persisted in drawing from this source—indeed, making it part of her vocal signature—despite the toll it took on her voice, suggests the great value she placed on the potency of soul’s musical signs. Referring to “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” she said, It kills me every time I sing it. It's MURDER... .I used to dread the moment for that song in the act. I got the chills when the band started up. The apprehension of getting into the first three notes, and thinking: I’ve got three minutes, this is going on for three whole minutes, and it’s going to be torture night after night.°!

Dusty imprinted her borrowed and difficult-to-produce soul sound with her own sensibility when she directed it toward the Italian ballads and matched its vocal gestures with equally emotive physical gestures of her own. As she said to Kris Kirk, “It took me some time to find my own style— which came with the ballads.’** Dusty’s physical gestures’ strong resem-

SOUL + MELODRAMA = THE 1960S PoP ARIA 91

blance to those of nineteenth-century stage melodrama is unmistakable (figures 3.1 through 3.8), and though Springfield never mentioned a conscious connection between them, the similarity suggests that the singer was

instinctively attuned to melodramatic acting’s central assumption: that shapeless, formless emotions can be rendered visible through a set of physical movements and poses. This aesthetic, related also to principles of mime performance, is based on the belief that the entire range of emotions can and should be shown rather than implied on stage. Pictures illustrating this

connection are arranged as follows for purposes of comparison and are taken from three sources: Dusty’s September 1967 television performance of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” an 1822 acting treatise (figures 3.1b,

3.2b, 3.3b, and 3.8), and a study of the nineteenth-century actress Sarah Bernhardt (figures 3.4b, 3.5b, 3.6b, and 3.7b).°° In the song’s text as shown here, underlined words correspond exactly to the gestures, taken from the 1967 performance (figures 3.1a through 3.7a); the minute and second of the underlined words and their accompanying gestures appear in parentheses after each figure number and again underneath each picture.** There are, of

course, many more gestures in the performance than appear here; these have been selected to best illustrate Dusty’s principal gestures and their likely nineteenth-century sources. You Don’t Have To Say You LovE ME When I said I needed you You said you would always stay It wasn’t me who changed but you And now you've gone away Don’t you see that now you've gone And I’m left here on my own That I have to follow you And beg you to come home (fig. 3.1, 13:51)

You don’t have to say you love me Just be close at hand You don’t have to stay forever

I will understand Believe me, believe me

I can’t help but love you But believe me [ll never tie you down (fig. 3.2, 14:19)

Left alone with just a memory Life seems dead and so unreal (fig. 3.3, 14:34)

92 Dusty! QUEEN OF THE PosTMODS

All that’s left is loneliness (fig. 3.4, 14:43)

There’s nothing left to feel (fig. 3.5, 14:46) You don’t have to say you love me Just be close at hand You don’t have to stay forever

I will understand Believe me, believe me You don’t have to say you love me (fig. 3.6, 15:13)

Just be close at hand You don’t have to stay forever I will understand Believe me, believe me, believe me (fig. 3.7, 15:27)

Though the pictures speak for themselves, one requires additional comment. The illustration of “Doubt” (figure 3.8) stands alone because Dusty’s corresponding gesture—actually a quick sequence of gestures—proved impossible to capture as a single still image. Occurring at 13:44—13:46 of the 1967

television performance, Dusty’s expression of doubt involves a slight shaking of the head and downcast eyes, accompanied by a descending hand gesture that loosely follows the head’s motion and rhythm. This hand gesture, starting waist high, eventually drops to the singer’s side and seems to convey erasure, denial, or refusal to accept what is being sung at that moment. As head and hand are slightly out of sync and each is, in turn, out of sync with the voice, a fleeting but dense moment of rhythmic counterpoint is created. Appearing frequently in Dusty’s performances, this motion is often cited by fans, both as a favorite and as the one most difficult to imitate accurately.°° As mentioned earlier, nineteenth-century melodramatic acting conventions were adopted by opera singers and twentieth-century silent film actors, while the notion of gestural literalness continued to thrive in European pantomime; hence, for someone born in 1939, as was Springfield, the value of theatricalized emotion, writ large, was not at all in the far past. Models were readily available, and the practice may even have been taught in school in the form of tableau poses (popular in Catholic girls’ schools for the staged depiction of episodes in saints’ lives) or holiday pantomime. In other words, one need not have studied Siddons’s acting treatise or seen Bernhardt to have been exposed to the stock gesture/emotion equivalencies that characterized

the nineteenth-century approach to performance. Dusty was the only British singer of her generation to draw so liberally from this stage tradition; this, along with her sound, distinguished her from her contemporaries and is almost always cited by fans, peers, and critics as a key element of her style.

SOUL + MELODRAMA = THE 1960S PoP ARIA 93

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