Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods [First Edition] 0195329430, 9780195329438, 9780199716302

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DUSTY!

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DUSTY! Queen of the Postmods

ANNIE J. RANDALL

1 2009

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Randall, Annie Janeiro. Dusty! : queen of the postmods / by Annie J. Randall. 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.S765R36 2009 782.42164092—dc22 2008014447

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Suzanne and Margaret

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Acknowledgments

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

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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—I 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?

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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 Andrè 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 appropriation, 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 Pennington, 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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Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction

xiii 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 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

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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

Illustrations

Chapter 1 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

Chapter 2 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 xiii

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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

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Chapter 3 3.1a “Beg you to come home” 13:51

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3.1b “Sublime Adoration” as illustrated in Siddons (1822) 3.2a “Never tie you down” 14:19

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3.2b “Expectation” as illustrated in Siddons (1822) 3.3a “Life seems dead” 14:34

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3.3b “Devotion” as illustrated in Siddons (1822) 3.4a “All that’s left is loneliness” 14:43

3.5a “Nothing left to feel” 14:46

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3.4b Sarah Bernhardt in Cléopâtre: longing

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3.5b Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorcière: protest, denial 3.6a “You don’t have to say you love me” 15:13

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3.6b Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre: extreme passion 3.7a “Believe me” 15:27

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3.7b Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorcière: supplication 3.8 “Doubt” as illustrated in Siddons (1822)

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Illustrations

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Chapter 4 4.1 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 and 1960s

139

4.6 Howard Lifsey as Lori Le Verne performing as Dusty singing

“I 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

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DUSTY!

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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 “I 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 aria’s 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 ac

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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),1 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

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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 “60s 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.2

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

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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.3 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.4 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

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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.5 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 Motown 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 production 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 creators’ 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 European 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

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods

States—like Burt Bacharach, Ivor Raymonde, Clive Westlake, and Pino Donaggio—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.6 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.”7 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

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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.8 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-

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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.9 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.”10 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.11 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.12 The idea of shared authorship is applicable to both the new transatlantic soul style and the 1960s pop aria; it acknowledges 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.13 George Lewis’s work on Afrological and Eurological perspectives on “composition” has also been important in reconfiguring the authorial concept in popular music.14 Audience reception, too, must be considered part of the authorial mix; fans’ tastes and desires, as expressed through their discourses and patterns of

Introduction

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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.15 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.16 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.17 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.18 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.19 In studying the different press discourses of chapter 4, my own findings echoed those of scholars who have identified as problematic the fact that popular music criticism has been (and still is) written almost exclusively from a white, male, presumed heterosexual point of view.20 Examining the problem of exclusion from a gay critical perspective are Richard Meyer, Kris Kirk, and John Gill;21 Mavis Bayton, Sheila Whitely, Lisa Rhodes, and others have done the same with respect to gender in pop and rock music criticism.22 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.23 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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1 Dusty’s Hair

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 ameliorate the bitterness associated with the public relations debacles that had plagued her for the preceding twenty years.1 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”:2 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.3 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 apparent decision to stay firmly on neutral ground.4 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.5 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 

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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.6 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.

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

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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 from 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

Fig. 1.2. Publicity photo of Dusty Springfield, 1964 (Pictorial Press)

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods

it seemed so easy and fun; the labor and discomfort, both physical and psychological, behind Dusty’s look were largely concealed from public view while her fun-loving, down-to-earth qualities were accentuated. Her heavily reported transfiguration from an “overweight blob” (her term) to an attractive, stylish woman seemed within the grasp of nearly everyone, and as a result, Dusty developed an extraordinarily loyal fan base among girls and boys who identified themselves as “mods.”7 Journalist Ray Coleman noted the phenomenon in a Melody Maker article of 1964: “Her gay, dashing image clicked with thousands. And girl hit parade fans, notoriously apathetic towards girl singers until now, accepted her as the symbol of a new ‘mod revolution.’ ”8 Dusty borrowed elements of her look from blond glamour queens of the 1950s and 1960s—Brigitte Bardot, Kim Novak, Monica Vitti, Catherine Deneuve—and pasted them together according to her own taste. The result was unlike that envisioned by record producer Svengalis such as Berry Gordy and Phil Spector, who were largely responsible for the uniform appearance and projection of wholesome femininity of American girl groups; rather, it was a camp version of feminine display that drew attention to its artificiality and communicated with delicious theatricality its own obvious fakeness.9 Tapping into the emerging camp wellspring of the early 1960s British arts scene and, indeed, helping to create it, Dusty was able to participate in pop music’s dance of teenage sexual attraction while at the same time parodying it. Too brazen for some (mothers, for instance, who refused to allow their daughters to leave the house if they did not wash off their Dusty-clone makeup) and intoxicatingly liberating for others (the first wielders of “girl power” according to Lulu),10 Dusty’s outré look seems now, in retrospect, to have been a stroke of genius that served at least two purposes: It satisfied the record company’s demands for sex appeal but allowed the singer to express her own ambivalent relationship to such calculated allure. Dusty herself later acknowledged that her look was a form of drag and repeatedly pointed up its extreme contrivance in her public self-referential remarks.11 If camp is defined as “the lie that tells the truth,” then Dusty’s highly artificial look speaks volumes about the material, constructed, and highly constricted nature of mid-sixties white, middle-class femininity.12 Creating this look required the kind of leisure and disposable income that had not been known among teenagers in Britain for generations; many fans recall spending a week’s wages on a pair of fashionable shoes, a dress, or other items of the female mod uniform. Special magazine features like “Dusty’s Top Twenty Hair Tips” were among hundreds of items aimed at girls that encouraged them to spend their time and money on a particularly elaborate and costly style of personal grooming that was peddled as essential for their social success (see figure 1.3).13 Once such commercialized trappings of femininity were cast in the harsh light of “false consciousness” by writers such as

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Fig. 1.3. Excerpt from Honey magazine, ca. 1965 (IPC Media)

Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan, the taste for blond beehives, “dolly frocks,” and thick makeup dwindled and was replaced by the “natural” look of the late 1960s and early 1970s.14 One need only compare cover photographs of Dusty Springfield and Carole King on their respective albums, Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty (1965) and Carole King’s million-selling Tapestry (1971), for evidence of this. The photo of King, showing the singer without shoes or makeup, with “hippy” hair and jeans, contrasted sharply with Dusty’s be-

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wigged, peroxided, and mascaraed persona and underscored its camp artifice. (See chapter 4 for further discussion of Dusty and camp.) Just as this hyperfeminine look played on the unnaturalness of traditional gender roles, the stiff hyperblondness of Dusty’s wigs (especially when viewed alongside the Ronettes’ or Vandellas’ equally over-the-top black beehives) seemed also to demonstrate the constructed nature of racial difference by sending up one of its chief signifiers: hair. Its campy, gross exaggeration of hair color and texture ridiculed broader notions of “natural” racial characteristics that had, just decades earlier, been used to justify anti-Semitic policies in Europe and were still being used in the United States and South Africa to justify racial segregation. What more deliciously camp mockery could there be of Aryan superiority, ethnic authenticity, or racial essentialism than an Irish redhead wearing an überblond, mile-high, beehive wig while singing cover versions of black American music?15 There was, clearly, no pretense of authenticity attached to Dusty’s look, as numerous newspaper articles from the period attest (see figure 1.4). Her real name, along with images and testimonies of her pre-Dusty appearance, had always been a staple of articles and interviews. Yet, musical authenticity was, nevertheless, thought to emit from the elaborately prepared mask in the form of her soul sound. Discourses of authenticity were reserved for Dusty’s voice, even though, as was perfectly obvious to her fans across the globe, its characteristic features originated in cultural and historical traditions far removed from her own.16 While this seemingly glaring contradiction was blithely perceived as but another colorful strand in the fabric of swinging London, it was just one of a veritable postmodern pileup of disjunctures that came together in the figure of Dusty Springfield. Fans took in stride the apparent contradictions between Mary and Dusty, Britpop and U.S. pop, a blond singer with a black sound, colonial privilege and black Americans’ commensurate lack of privilege, and after 1970, Dusty’s allegedly “bent” sexuality and her songs’ straight lyrics.17 The spectacular collision of these elements at the intersection of gender, race, nation, and sexuality and its constant presence in Dusty’s music makes Springfield one of the most fascinating pop phenomena of her era. In the following section, I discuss Dusty’s signature sound within the context of this intersection at the time of the release of her first albums in Britain and the United States in 1964–1965. WHITE QUEEN OF SOUL

When Dusty decided to pursue a solo career in 1963, the break with her musical past was dramatic. She adopted not only the new look of a blond movie star but also a compelling new repertoire. As her albums of 1964 and 1965

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Fig. 1.4. Page from a fan’s scrapbook: newspaper article on Dusty’s wigs from Disc and Music Echo, August 17, 1968 (Dusty Springfield Bulletin)

show, this new music was unmistakably American urban pop—soul—and was influenced most strongly by the vocal and instrumental sounds of black American artists. As a result of this strong identification with the United States, she became known as the “White Queen of Soul” and was even called the “White Negress” by Cliff Richard.18 Of the eight cover songs that appeared on both Dusty’s U.K. and U.S. albums of 1964 (see bulleted items in

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table 1.1), six were originally recorded by black American singers: “Mama Said” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (the Shirelles), “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” (the Supremes), “Mockingbird” (Charlie and Inez Foxx), and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” (Dionne Warwick). Dusty’s second album, Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty (see table 1.2), was also dominated by cover versions of songs originally recorded by African American singers; of the thirteen songs released in Britain, the only exceptions were “Who Can I Turn To” (Tony Bennett), “If It Don’t Work Out” (composed for Dusty by Rod Argent), and “I’ve Been Wrong Before” (first recorded in Britain by Cilla Black). As Paul Howes has written, such a concentration on American songs “was unheard of for a British artist in 1964 and an extraordinary coup for Dusty merely to get her record company [Philips] to agree.”19 Already viewed as a “generational leader,” largely because of her wildly popular radio and television appearances on programs such as Saturday Club, Top of the Pops, and Ready, Steady, Go! Dusty had fans who followed her enthusiastically into this new musical terrain.20 While the notion of covering the hits of African American artists on such a scale was unheard of in Britain in 1964, it was common practice in the United States; the early careers of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and Pat Boone, for example, were built on covers such as Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” and the El Dorados’ “At My Front Door,”

Table 1.1 A Girl Called Dusty (U.K. release, April 1964; Philips BL7594)

• Mama Said (Shirelles 1961) • You Don’t Own Me (Lesley Gore 1964) Do Re Mi (Lee Dorsey 1962) • When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes (Supremes 1963) My Colouring Book (Kitty Kallen 1963, Sandy Stewart 1963) • Mockingbird (Charlie and Inez Foxx 1963) • 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]

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Table 1.2 Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty (U.K. release, October 1965; Philips 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) If It Don’t Work Out That’s How Heartaches Are Made (Baby Washington 1958) It Was Easier to Hurt Him (Garnett Mimms 1965) I’ve Been Wrong Before (Cilla Black 1965) I Can’t Hear You (Betty Everett 1964) I Had a 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 U.S. 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.21 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 1870.22 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.”23

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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.24 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.25 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.”26 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.27 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.28 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 1963.29 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,30 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.31 Dusty’s consistent soul style throughout her forty-year career demonstrates that she was not selectively mimicking musical devices or engaging in

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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 profoundly 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).32 Her Brooklyn performance with the Vandellas 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

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

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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.33

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.34 As observed and analyzed by Henry Louis Gates Jr.,35 the practice of “signifyin(g),” developed (and is still developing) along the circuitous, geographically far-flung routes of African American migration—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.36 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.”37 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 U.S. civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.38 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

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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.39 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”40 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 behavioral gender norms.41 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.42 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.43 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.44 She seemed to dismiss it summarily with the statement “I never got into Beethoven,” despite her father’s love of the composer’s music.45 Dusty’s signifying and simulta-

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Fig. 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 (Dusty Springfield Bulletin)

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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.46 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.”47 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.48 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.”49 Thus, production credit was informally (rather than legally) claimed by Dusty and has been heartily confirmed by musicians such as

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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,”50 her signature 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 periods 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.51 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

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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: “It 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

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London studio. . . . [It] somehow embraces her into the Motown family.”52 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 illustrate 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—

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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.”53 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.54 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.55 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 Duncan, 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 continued 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.56 Dusty’s

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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.57 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.58 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.59 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.60 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.

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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.”61 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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2 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 “I Only Want to Be with You,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” and her first album, A Girl Called Dusty (1964).1 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.2 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 Dun

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Fig. 2.1. Madeline Bell in 1967 as pictured in the concert program for the Four Tops British tour (Madeline Bell)

can, Dusty was able to avoid the kind of mindless repetition of style and genre that would limit the careers of her contemporaries; she moved closer to finding what she would later recognize as her own style. Thus began 1965: The two singers exchanged telephone numbers at dawn and began a fiveyear musical relationship and lifelong friendship that would shape their individual sounds and careers irrevocably. While Madeline absorbed Britpop, Dusty absorbed gospel; both landed in the uncharted waters of an emerging transatlantic pop that was neither one nor the other. Through their collaborations, they defined the style and expanded its reach into new markets; if ever the image of a melting pot were apt, it would be in the exchange of music and culture that occurred between these two musicians. Madeline Bell’s relationship with Dusty was one of several musical alliances that were formed during the 1960s between expatriate female soul singers and British musicians. In this period, the church-trained Doris Troy, P. P. Arnold, and Gloria Jones were all resident in London and appeared regularly on British and European radio, record, television, and stage as solo singers and also in performance with Joe Cocker, John Lennon, Johnny Halliday, Marc Bolan, John Paul Jones, the Rolling Stones, the Dave Clark Five, The Nice, Small Faces, Blue Mink, Eric Clapton, and Pink Floyd. While much has been made in the popular music press of the influence of male blues guitarists and early rock-and-roll stars Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard on the instrumental style of British bands, little has been written about the new transatlantic style’s complex vocal element—

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with strongly avowed roots in the gospel tradition—and the role these women played in its creation. As the chapter’s title suggests, the focus here is on such movements of soul music: specifically, its emergence from black churches in the United States, its transmission from the United States to Europe principally through female gospel voices such as Madeline Bell’s after 1963, and its 1968 journey back across the Atlantic in the form of a new hybrid vocal style such as that heard on the album Dusty in Memphis. Sounding unlike any of the British Invasion singers or those associated with Motown or Atlantic records, Dusty’s sound fits in neither category. Clearly, a separate musical development, transatlantic soul, had evolved alongside the Invasion and U.S. pop soul—a sound that carried with it different representations, cultural sources, and fan reception. A goal of this chapter is to explore the sonic and representational dimensions of that development. This transatlantic soul sound developed within the time frame bracketed by Madeline Bell’s 1963 move to London after her debut in the gospel show Black Nativity and Dusty’s 1968 trip to the United States to record Dusty in Memphis; I wish to give an account of its development through four interrelated stories, each with its own plots and subplots. I begin with the story of Bell’s move to Britain in September 1963 and her collaborations with Dusty beginning in March 1965. To convey the crucially important social-historical backdrop to Bell’s transatlantic move, I contrast the early 1960s professional climate for black musicians in the United States with British Mod culture, in which African American musicians were revered as heroes. This is followed by a discussion of Sounds of Motown, the seminal television broadcast of April 28, 1965, that enabled soul to reach a national audience in Britain and allowed its principal record label, Tamla Motown, to make London its international marketing portal. The third concentrates on Dusty’s 1966 hit “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” as one of the first hybrid fruits of soul’s merging with European styles. The final story concerns the conceptual foundation of the transatlantic soul album Dusty in Memphis (1968) and the chilly reception the album received upon its U.S. and U.K. release in 1969.

MADELINE BELL, BLACK NATIVITY, AND GOSPEL’S TRANSATLANTIC LEAP, 1961–1963

In her native Newark, New Jersey, during the years 1958 to 1961, Madeline was developing her vocal and harmonizing skills, first as a member of Four Jacks and a Jill, a high school street-corner doo-wop group, and then with the Glovertones and the Alex Bradford Singers, both gospel ensembles. At the same time, in London’s suburbs and the British provinces, Dusty was learn-

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ing a McGuire Sisters type of harmonizing with the Lana Sisters and pop folk with the Springfields. While Madeline and Dusty’s musical apprenticeships may seem to have been poles apart in every conceivable way, they were linked fundamentally by their experience of ensemble vocalizing, albeit within very different cultural and performance traditions, a fact that probably explains the extraordinarily dynamic effect of their eventual musical pairing. Madeline was, by the age of eighteen in 1960, already a seasoned solo and ensemble gospel singer, having spent years in Newark’s musically renowned Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church. Though young, she exhibited the precocity often seen in children of theatrical parents or grandparents. Raised by her grandmother, Mattie White, a former Cotton Club dancer of Josephine Baker and Adelaide Hall’s generation, Madeline was regaled with stories of Mattie’s adventures in 1920s Harlem; thus Madeline’s desire to perform was cultivated at an early age, and she sought recording opportunities that would bring her closer to realizing her ambitions. This opportunity came with the arrival of Professor Alex Bradford as music minister of her church in the mid-1950s. Bradford, a star on the U.S. performing circuit known as the Gospel Highway and a composer who had influenced the evolving soul idiom of Ray Charles,3 assigned solos to Madeline on his albums for Vee-Jay Records. She was featured also on his Shakin’ the Rafters, an album that has acquired cult status among gospel record collectors.4 In addition, Bradford conferred on Madeline the considerable honor of inviting her to join his touring group, the Alex Bradford Singers, as the group’s only female. Bradford’s reputation as the eccentric, innovative, and outrageously theatrical “Singing Rage of the Gospel Age”5 had been established in the United States through his 1950s hits such as “Too Close to Heaven”; his remaining challenge was to establish himself and the gospel sound on the international stage. He accomplished this through Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity: A Gospel Song-Play, a work in which Bradford and his singers starred beginning on December 11, 1961 in New York City (see figure 2.2).6 Hughes’s text for Black Nativity was, like his poetry, shaped by African American musical forms; accordingly, he arranged a set of gospel songs, dances, and tableaux around a recitation of Jesus’ nativity story, all of which was tailored to the improvisatory capabilities of Bradford’s singers and Marion Williams’s female quartet. By foregrounding gospel improvisation, Hughes wished to recreate the atmosphere of venues like Newark’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, in which the Holy Spirit could be invoked through impassioned performance.7 Despite its status as the first Broadway-type musical with actual gospel singing—an element upon which Langston Hughes insisted8—Black Nativity was, according to Robert Darden, only “a mild success” in New York. A local review reported the scene in the 41st Street Theater: “As they sing, they beat time with their hands and feet, and one of the women moves into the

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Fig. 2.2. Black Nativity’s playbill from New York premiere, December 1961 (Schomburg Center, New York Public Library)

aisle, dancing and shouting the great hope of immortality. Some of the parishioners in the audience clap their hands, too, and a voice up front cries out, ‘That’s right!’ ”9 Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad echoes this in his description of the New York audience’s reaction to the premiere: “Aroused by the religious and musical fervor onstage, the capacity audience yelled and cooed ecstatically. One White woman sprang from her seat with a cry, then fainted dead away.”10 Clearly, the show’s relatively short run in New York belied its powerful effect on audiences and its long-term influence on Broadway composers, the latter most strikingly evident just a few years later in the gospel-inspired musicals Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Charles I. Nero argues persuasively that, in addition to its lasting impact on composers, Black Nativity “signaled the advent of a new type of singing voice for the Broadway stage: the female gospel-trained voice” that became a primary musical marker of black authenticity and, according to Hughes’s conception, positioned gospel-voiced women as the “carriers of black communal values.”11 Though Hughes’s conception of the female gospel voice took some years after 1961 to take hold on the Broadway stage and in U.S. pop music in general, London audiences were immediately responsive and seized upon its sound and representational value instantly; Black Nativity was, according to Darden, “a smash hit overseas,”12 and the internationalization of gospel took a quantum leap with the show’s transfer to London in 1962. Initially booked

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for only a six-week run in early 1962, the show played in London for a total of eighteen months and, over the space of two years, Black Nativity was invited back four separate times and played to packed houses in four different theaters.13 This first-of-its-kind London production was filmed as a documentary by Westinghouse Broadcasting Company and shown on both British and American television.14 Numerous British pop musicians attended the London performances and appear to have found in it musical treasures that had yet to capture the imaginations of their white American counterparts. Among the treasures was Madeline Bell’s voice; upon hearing it, British manager and talent scout Norman Newell sought out Madeline and proposed that she pursue a solo singing career in London. That Madeline and her gospel voice were welcomed by many Britons as bearers of African American music, culture, and history is illustrated by the actions of one of Black Nativity’s early London fans, British jazz musician Chris Barber, who, inspired by the show, made a musical pilgrimage to Newark.15 His express purpose was to trace and hear for himself Madeline’s gospel roots in the worship services of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Newell found that Madeline did not need much convincing to move to London, given the sociopolitical climate in the United States in 1963. Though Madeline, now twenty-one years old, was grateful to her mentor Alex Bradford for the professional opportunities he had given her, those very opportunities—particularly the singing tour of venues in the Jim Crow South, during which the realities of American apartheid were on constant display— may have spurred her to leave the group and the United States altogether at the soonest possible opportunity. Like many other African American writers and performers of the mid-twentieth century who chose to live abroad, Madeline became aware of the narrow and strictly policed limits placed on her career aspirations in the United States by racial segregation in stage venues, radio, television, and print media. The regime of invisibility—the unspoken doctrine of exclusion or, at best, extreme marginalization—meant that black entertainers were denied access to majority markets through a thicket of de facto or de jure practices; any attempts to perform outside of blacks-only venues were highly restricted in most parts of the United States, not just in the South. African American musicians, actors, dancers, and athletes were subjected to intense scrutiny and the threat of violence when they ventured into the majority white market.16 Madeline cannot have been unaware, for instance, of reports of Nat King Cole’s performance in 1956: While singing for an all-white audience at the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, six white men—later identified as members of the Alabama White Citizens’ Council—rushed the stage. As was widely reported in the black press, the group that tried to attack Cole was infamous for their frequent resort to violence in defense of

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white supremacy in the South during the civil rights movement.17 Typical throughout the 1960s were incidents such as that involving bandleader Jeb Stuart, who was “booed, boycotted, and fired because he refused to fire the two white members of his interracial, 7-piece band . . . playing to all white audiences at Memphis’ Club Tiki.”18 And just as Madeline was beginning her association with Dusty in London, Harry Belafonte was protesting his American peers’ refusal to appear with him in the United States. Reported under the headline “White Stars Refuse to Share Stage with Me—Belafonte,” the singer was quoted as saying, “I asked Judy Garland, Gene Kelly . . . Danny Kaye but nothing happened. I was told they were for it, but their agents were against it. . . . Anyway, by necessity, I was forced to turn outside this country in order to make my alliances. I found wonderful artists abroad and brought them here . . . Miriam Makeba . . . Nana Mouskouri.”19 Unsurprisingly, the young Madeline and many other talents of her generation also turned outside their country. Though Madeline was not so naive as to think that Britain was free of racism,20 Black Nativity’s enthusiastic reception in London suggested to her that there was a market there for her “stunning” contralto gospel voice and years of experience with gospel repertoire and performance practice.21 She was, indeed, able to make a living singing in cabaret venues throughout England and on American military bases and, by mid-1964, had established financial independence from her manager, Newell. Madeline was able to build a solid career in Britain and, later, in Europe, both as a solo and backing singer; initially, however, she shared some of her compatriots’ mixed reactions to Britain as expressed by Mary Wells (touring in the wake of her hit “My Guy”) and Doris Troy (coauthor and singer of “Just One Look”) in a Jet magazine interview: “Although little known singer, Doris Troy, 25, declared in London, England, that she found the race discrimination there ‘like I never expected to see outside the Deep (US) South,’ well-known rock ’n’ roll singer Mary Wells, 21, told Jet she found England ‘not half as bad as over here.’” 22 With experiences more like Wells’s, though not entirely unlike Troy’s, Madeline found herself in a professional environment far more promising than anything that would have been available to her in the United States. She succeeded in 1963–1964 in creating a string of contacts among London studio musicians that eventually led her to Dusty Springfield at the end of 1964. Invited to sing on Dusty’s forthcoming recording projects, Madeline gained, from that point on, new professional momentum and musical direction; indeed, so did Dusty. As Madeline was beginning her new life in Britain, the word soul as a label for gospel-infused pop music of the kind pioneered by the crossover hits of Ray Charles, James Brown, and Sam Cooke was just beginning to enter public discourse both in the States and in Britain, though from the start, the dis-

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courses were very different; soul in the United States and soul in the United Kingdom most certainly did not mean the same things. Newspapers like the New York Times in early 1964—six years after Ray Charles had first used the word soul in an album title23—were still using the term within quotation marks, as if unsure of its precise meaning. For example, in an article on Harlem’s musical profile, reporter Theodore Jones wrote: “Loudspeakers from 10 record shops and many small stores entice and entertain passers-by with jazz and ‘soul music.’ ”24 Despite its uncertain early 1960s labeling, by the mid-1960s, the new sound was widely understood to be “newly black and newly bold,”25 representative not only of African Americans’ rapidly changing self-definition but also of a challenge by black artists to the regime of invisibility under which they had been forced to operate in the United States throughout the previous decades. Rejecting the regime in which black performers’ musical resources received token remuneration, if any, and were exploited for profits many times that amount in whites-only media markets were producers like Berry Gordy at Motown, Gamble and Huff at PRI, and the musicians who chose to work with them exclusively.26 Ruth Brown, in her autobiography, describes the situation of the 1950s and early 1960s in unvarnished detail: “Throughout my biggest hit-making period I was forced to stand by as white singers like Georgia Gibbs and Patti Page duplicated my records note for note and were able to plug them on top television shows like the Ed Sullivan Show, to which I had no access.”27 Brown cites as examples her “Oh What a Dream,” written for her by Chuck Willis, which was sung on national television by Patti Page with an identical arrangement, and “Mambo Baby,” which was “copied note for note by Georgia Gibbs.”28 Brown observed a similar situation across the Atlantic: “I was denied sales abroad as well, although I knew nothing of this at the time . . . my version of “Lucky Lips” was ignored in Britain. The number itself hit there years later in a 1963 version by Cliff Richard.”29 Dionne Warwick registered a similar complaint with regard to Cilla Black’s cover of a song that had been a hit for Warwick in the United States, “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” noting in 2000, with an irritation still palpable thirty-seven years after the fact, that such covers, released in Britain only one month after hers in the United States, prevented her version from duplicating its American success abroad.30 She adds that this preemption delayed but did not extinguish her chances for success in Britain and Europe; music consumers there became curious about the original versions and, after Cilla’s chart success, eventually found their way to hers—a pattern that was repeated in Dusty’s case, too, after her early-sixties covers of songs by Baby Washington, Mitty Collier, and Garnett Mimms, as mentioned in the previous chapter. This particular kind of trafficking in black music took different forms in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the United States, white mu-

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sicians adopted approximations of a black pop idiom via covers that closely mimicked the original’s vocal and instrumental parts, and at the same time, their record companies benefited from the suppression of competition from the originating musicians; segregationist practices ensured the originating artists’ invisibility on television and severely limited their radio exposure. In the United Kingdom, British musicians took advantage of the delay in records crossing the Atlantic and beat U.S. artists to the U.K. and European charts with quickly produced cover versions of American hits. Brian Poole and the Tremoloes’ covers of U.S. hits such as the Contours’ “Do You Love Me,” “did a lot of damage” according to Dave Godin, one of Britain’s first soul experts.31 In both scenarios, originating singers and instrumentalists’ interpretations were not remunerated, though the songwriter’s efforts were.32 Unprotected by the copyright laws’ narrow definition of authorship, the musicians had no means of redress. Langston Hughes had summed up the situation as early as 1955: “What the Negro artist is saying is, ‘It’s nice to have white performers imitate us—but cut us in on the jobs and dough, too.’ The white man . . . makes the money, we make the basic music.”33 These practices were dealt a critical blow by the emergence of gospelinfluenced soul music and the soul mentality (as manifested in Black Pride and Black Power movements) in the early 1960s. The new audibility of gospel in soul music catalyzed a new visibility for black recording artists on the heretofore white Top Forty charts. Gospel’s role as agent of this visibility is inestimable. It was a sound that could not be peeled away from the culture it represented and the history that produced it; indeed, by virtue of its vocal origins in the improvised black church tradition, it was a sound that was comparatively difficult to copy and whiten as R&B had been by rock and roll. Regardless of who was making the music—black or white musicians, Motown’s Funk Brothers or Atlantic’s Muscle Shoals boys—the African American cultural presence as represented by the gospel aesthetic was the ineradicable sonic centerpiece of soul. The early 1960s shift from R&B to soul was, then, as much a shift in black consciousness as it was a change in sound. So numerous were the resulting crossover hits of the soul artists who had successfully challenged the segregationist status quo—Motown’s lineup, most visibly—that the music sales charts’ traditional labels (strictly maintained in the United States along thinly veiled racial lines by Billboard as “pop” and “R&B”) were temporarily suspended in late 1963.34 In January 1965, however, in a move that has been analyzed by David Brackett, Billboard reinstated the R&B chart, along with the racial divide it represented.35 Though the reinstatement did not prohibit crossover, it was, most likely, a backlash in response to the steadily increasing number of black artists on the Top Forty charts and seems, in effect, to have been an attempt to limit and contain the “uppity” performers’ mes-

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sage—uppity being the term used by music critic Robert Christgau to describe James Brown.36 Despite the backlash, soul discourse and the music that was labeled insistently as “soul” served to keep the new black consciousness at the forefront of national discourse.37 The emergence and continued existence of the word soul was itself a historical landmark: As Portia Maultsby has noted, “White Americans had adopted a term first coined, sanctioned, and used by African Americans to describe themselves, their unique cultural productions, and their cultural institutions.”38 This was, of course, in stark contrast to the origin of earlier terms like “rhythm and blues,” which had been coined by white record executives as a euphemism, in the words of Ruth Brown, for “race and black.”39 Furthermore, soul was not confined to the realm of music but connoted a new aesthetic outlook that pervaded all art forms, influencing black painters, playwrights, and poets, as well as musicians, in the United States and abroad. As Suzanne Smith notes, influential writers like Langston Hughes broadened soul’s meaning even more by linking it to the concepts of philosopher Frantz Fanon. Hughes “invoked Négritude, or its American equivalent, soul, as the central principle to guide the Negro writer. Soul, ‘a synthesis of the essence of Negro folk art redistilled,’ revealed ‘to the Negro people and the world the beauty within themselves.’ ”40 In the Britain that awaited Madeline Bell, soul’s evolving discourse was shaped by conditions that differed greatly from those in the United States. Chart “crossover” was a nonissue because there were no race-coded music charts; also, there was already a fan base—the Mods—that revered black American music and black consciousness in ways that mapped directly onto a distinctly British, early 1960s brand of class consciousness. The Mods’ keen sense of style, as is well documented, extended to every aspect of daily life, from their Italian mopeds and precise French-cut hairstyles (for men) to their oversized parkas, carefully pressed tailored trousers, and skinny ties.41 A Mod was instantly recognizable through such sartorial emblems, and their “underground” music—strictly American R&B and soul—set them apart from their peers and elders. While anyone who could afford and master the dress code and musical rules could be a Mod, the originating majority was drawn from working-class or lower-middle-class urban youth, a fact that made class solidarity central to the Mod ethos. Despite the Mods’ novel culture, the strong degree of subjective identification between these Mod-identified youth and black American musicians was not new; seeds had been sown several years earlier, which accounts, partly, for the depth of the Mods’ dramatic and conscious linking of race, class, and music. A symbolically important antecedent from the 1940s was the political and musical solidarity that had been established between British workers— specifically, Welsh miners—and black American actor and singer Paul Robe-

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son during the actor’s several engagements in Britain, most notably during the making of Ealing Studio’s 1940 film Proud Valley.42 As drawn by the film in which Robeson starred, the social and political parallels between the singing, striking miners and the grandson of slaves were unmistakable. Robeson reinforced these parallels during his 1958 appearances in Britain through his acclaimed performances of “Ol’ Man River,” in which his text changes overlaid the language of class struggle onto the repertoire of black spirituals.43 The spiritual’s representations as embodied in Robeson’s British performances laid at least part of the groundwork for the Mods’ use of African American musical styles as emblems of their oppositional stance to cultural authority, one they believed resonated with the black experience in the United States. Dick Hebdige, who explores black American music as an integral element of Mod subcultural self-fashioning, writes, in a passage that links the Mods’ romanticization of blackness with the appeal of soul music: An integral part of the “secret identity” [of Mods] constructed here beyond the limited experiential scope of the bosses and teachers, was an emotional affinity with black people . . . an affinity which was transposed into style. . . . the Black Man was a constant, serving symbolically as a dark passage down into an imagined “underworld . . . situated beneath the familiar surfaces of life” where another order was disclosed: a beautifully intricate system in which the values, norms and conventions of the “straight” world were inverted. . . . It was the Black Man who made this all possible . . . throughout the mid-60s he provided the hidden inspirational stimulus (“outta sight” in the words of James Brown) for the whole mod style.44

To this I would add, and it is one of this chapter’s main points, that the black woman was also “a constant” and bearer of a sonic presence that was integral to the identity that Hebdige describes. Such was the high value of soul in 1960s Britain—indeed, a “stimulus for the whole mod style”—that a former Mod would recall, “People used to walk around with records under their arms. It was the ultimate in posing. My friend John used to carry Carla Thomas and Otis Redding’s King & Queen album under his arm. That was his badge, his calling card.”45 While it is tempting to imagine this phenomenon to be a reverse image of U.S. Beatlemania, “Soulmania” even, the Mods’ embrace of soul was substantially different from U.S. teens’ reception of the Beatles. As soul’s sound was radically different from early 1960s Britpop, its embrace by a sect of devoted Mods was considered un-British, un-European, and even, by some, unmusical. Dave Godin reminds us of British mainstream opposition to the new sounds: “It was regarded by many as a cacophony simply because it went counter to all accepted British notions of melody, and (most importantly), it

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went against the grain of accepted rhythmic tradition . . . black American music had invented the back-beat. The bit that was normally silent in European music now exploded with percussive noise.”46 By contrast, the sound of the Beatles’ early music in the United States was an entirely familiar one and was regarded as “safe” by parents of girls in the grip of Beatlemania. Fan reception associated with it reflected no mania for a new music, but a desire for new performers in place of the increasing number of black performers crossing over into white pop. And while the Beatles had many U.S. imitators (who copied their suits, ties, boots, and hairstyles) as a result of their early releases, no new musical style or subculture on the scale of the Mods emerged in the United States as a result of Beatlemania. Soul in 1960s Britain, on the other hand, spawned a new genre, known variously as northern soul, British soul, or transatlantic soul, and has maintained a continuous presence in British and European pop music ever since. Indeed, given soul’s current embeddedness in British pop, it is hard to believe that Dave Godin could once write, “Black American music is an entirely alien musical genre for Europe. It is foreign, and it had to be imported into our consciousness.”47 His statement puts in perspective the significance of individuals like Madeline Bell, who was among the first to import the alien genre to Britain in person rather than

Fig. 2.3. Madeline and Dusty during Bell’s engagement at the Cabaret Club in Manchester, England, September 12, 1966 (Glyn Keeling)

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on vinyl. Demand for Bell’s sound transformed her initial role as musical importer to the more complex one of musical collaborator from 1965 on (see figure 2.3).48

SOUL AND BRITPOP IN DIALOGUE

From 1965 to 1968, both Madeline’s and Dusty’s individual vocal identities took on new dimensions that can be heard clearly in both singers’ recordings of those years as their choice of repertoire and manner of delivery shifted once they began to work together. While Dusty increased the “gospelisms” in her music, Madeline increased the “Britpopisms” in hers; in so doing, both were moving toward a hybrid that was stylistically related to but audibly distinct from both styles. Gospelisms, so much a part of everyday popular culture now, were hardly known outside the black church in the early 1960s and consisted of spontaneous hand clapping, call-and-response between soloist and backing singers, improvised melodic flourishes or extended departures from the melody, a “deep South” U.S. accent, and what Darden calls “sermonphones”—a particular type of text interpolation drawn from the black sermon tradition, such as “that’s right,” “yes, it is,” “tell it,” and expressive nonverbal sounds such as “uh-huh” and “mmm.”49 The 1960s Britpopisms were characterized by variants of British regional diction, especially as heard in sung vowels, diphthongs, consonants, or finals such as “o,” “a,” “ai,” “au,” “r,” or “er”; unembellished principal melodies; pervasive monorhythm; strictly accented strong beats; limited use of vibrato; and lyrics and performance style that were often subtly humorous or ironic. Constantly exposed to the others’ repertoire and “isms,” the two singers’ collaborative work during this period included writing songs together (“Go Ahead On” and, with Lesley Duncan, “I’m Gonna Leave You”) and providing backing vocals for each other’s records, as described later. The earliest and most obvious fruit of their collaboration is probably also the most underestimated: the sound of backing vocals on their respective records. This ubiquitous background sound contributed much to the distinctive character of these records and was created by Madeline and Dusty in collaboration with Lesley Duncan, Doris Troy, and later, Kay Garner. Prior to these releases, the backing vocal sound of British recording studios could be characterized as somewhat stiff, unspontaneous, and choral—not at all an unpleasant sound but one that often worked at cross-purposes with the soul-oriented principal voice. Once Madeline and Dusty provided backing for each other, an improvised gospel vocal sound began to take root in British pop; it brought the soul solo and backing vocals into affective alignment, which, in turn, gave the records a soulful stylistic coherence. This back-

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ing sound became the desired sound in London’s recording studios, and Madeline’s vocals can be heard later on songs such as Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends,” John Lennon’s “Power to the People,” and Dave Clark’s “Everybody Get Together.”50 Dusty and Madeline’s songwriting collaborations solidified their influence on each other and demonstrated gospel and Britpop’s evolving entwinement. Their method of creating “Go Ahead On” was improvisatory: Dusty worked out chords on the guitar while both she and Madeline tried out melodic ideas for lead and backing vocals by singing them to each other. One’s lyric fragment or musical hook would generate additional fragments and music phrases from the other until, gradually, via constant mutual refinement and critique of their ideas, the principal components—hook (which was also the title), text repetitions, and form (AABA→middle eight→A→coda/fade)— were in place. Through this additive, closely interactive process, the collaborators produced a finished draft that they then sang for John Franz in Franz’s London office overlooking Hyde Park. As neither Dusty nor Madeline could write down their song’s music, Franz employed arrangers to notate it for them (Peter Knight for “I’m Gonna Leave You” and Alan Tew for “Go Ahead On”). Based on Dusty and Madeline’s ideas for instrumentation, the arrangers then orchestrated the song.51 The arrangement for “Go Ahead On” integrates orchestral strings and horns with a prominent rhythm section driven by a foregrounded bass line. Strings and handclaps, characteristic of U.S. girl groups, dominate the middle-eight section. The vocals, as discussed in the previous chapter, feature close call-and-response interaction between lead and backing singers, a direct result, no doubt, of the closely collaborative way the song was created.52 “I’m Gonna Leave You” was created somewhat differently, with Dusty providing the chords and melody and Madeline and Lesley Duncan providing the lyrics.53 The simpler form (AABA coda/fade) and minimal use of call-and-response reflects the song’s melody-first, words-later evolution. The arrangement, again featuring a rich layering of strings and horns over a rhythm section, is tailored to the song’s somber mood, beginning with a spare accompaniment and gradually working up to the kind of instrumental climax that Dusty favored increasingly as she approached her landmark hits, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” and “All I See Is You.” Without Dusty’s orchestral climaxes to disrupt the groove, one can imagine Marvin Gaye singing this song over a more conventional R&B backing ensemble. Like all good pop songwriters, Dusty, Madeline, and Lesley borrowed from their contemporaries; in this case, rather than any specific melodic element, the songwriters seem to have borrowed Gaye’s own brand of gospel-pop affect and even his male subject position, the latter a feat that few female singers in 1964 could pull off.

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While Dusty’s absorption of gospelisms was evident in her sound, they were largely absent in her physical stage movements. It was apparent in her live performances that Dusty did not take on board gospel’s “use of the entire body” or “kinetic activity” that Maultsby and Burnim describe as “central to the aesthetic of soul . . . generating continuous verbal and nonverbal feedback from the audience.”54 Dusty’s 1960s performances in clubs (as remembered by those who had full view of the stage rather than the restricted view of television’s tiny rectangle) were highly energetic and memorably electric performances; Dusty’s “bounding onto the stage” and charismatic engagement with the audience often elicited excited screams from young female fans.55 Yet, she is more often associated with a formally gestural physical style that emphasized the hands, arms, and face rather than the lower body (discussed at length in the next chapter). Furthermore, the closely fitted beaded gowns she favored for her television appearances restricted her dance movements to small steps within a small spotlit area; even when she wore less confining, shorter dresses, her movements were still constrained, in stark contrast to the broad physicality and unrestricted, ranging-acrossthe-stage-and-in-the aisles commandeering of space associated with gospel performance. Madeline’s presence mitigated the absence of soul’s bodily element in Dusty’ performances; her appearances with Dusty on television, in live performance, and in newspaper publicity photos also affirmed the source of this dimension in Dusty’s sound.56 Indeed, it emphasized the cultural origin of the gospel sound and gave Dusty the stamp of credibility she seemed to crave. This credibility and authenticity-by-association were not only important to Dusty but also required by the large number of recordbuying British youth who identified as Mods or were influenced by the trend-setting Mods’ tastes in music. Their devotion to soul music and innate suspicion of British imitators only increased the value of such a stamp. As one Mod denizen of the London club scene recalls: We didn’t listen to much “white” music. . . . Almost the only white music we listened to was that performed by singers who had been influenced by black American soul music—who themselves had soul. The Righteous Brothers . . . hit the right emotional button, Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” was another firm favorite. But then we all agreed—Dusty . . . was always guaranteed to crank out a good heartrending number sung with as much soul as any white singer could decently manage.57

Dusty did not incorporate the bodily dimension of gospel, and Madeline did not take on board Dusty’s vocal or physical mannerisms; there was a limit to their exchange, bounded by their own sense of individuality and pride in

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their particular vocal qualities. Both gave the other crucial credibility, thus emboldening and enabling the other to cross boundaries into repertoire that they otherwise might not have attempted: Dusty could perform songs like Gloria Jones’s “Heartbeat” or Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything Is Alright)” with legitimacy, while Madeline could record Broadway (such as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Climb Every Mountain”) and middle-of-theroad pop (Bacharach and David’s “What the World Needs Now”) in addition to gospel and soul, as heard on her albums Bell’s A-Poppin’ (1967) and Doin’ Things (1968) and on later solo releases.58 In so doing, they led the way for others to do the same—that is, to contribute to the new style without erasing their own musical identities and without opening themselves up to criticisms of cultural or racial impersonation—and created a model of musical practice for the next generation of transatlantic soul musicians. Keeping their own identities fully intact, Dusty and Madeline were also subtly performing each others’ identities, demonstrating for their audiences “how the deeply different can be deeply known without becoming any less different”59 and creating “an instant of pure potentiality”60 in which restrictive identity markers of race and nation were resignified or, at least, shown to be pliable. The fact that this play with identity took place over a period of years on so broad a stage—British national television, radio, and newspapers (which circulated internationally)—accounts for the lasting impact of Dusty and Madeline’s collaborative activities, both on popular culture in mid-sixties Britain and in countries within Britain’s sphere of cultural influence. Their appearances, either individually or together, on Dusty’s television series, on nationally broadcast radio programs, on Ready, Steady, Go! or captured in newspaper photographs are remembered vividly by the fans I interviewed and occupy a place of significance in many of that generation’s collective memory of the mid-sixties.61 The impact of television programs like Ready, Steady, Go! on which Dusty appeared numerous times is beyond dispute. From the time of its ITV debut on August 9, 1963, Ready, Steady, Go! “made pop music work on a truly national scale,”62 sending “a tremor of pubescent excitement from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.”63 Paolo Hewitt writes that the show’s “most important function was to take Mod culture out of the London club scene and into every home in Britain. Ready, Steady, Go! nationalized Mod.”64 Richard Williams notes the show’s specifically musical influence: “Thanks to [Vicki] Wickham, influenced by the taste of her friend Dusty Springfield, the show proselytized soul music and R&B, the underground music of the day.”65 Wickham confirms: “We did specials with Otis Redding and James Brown and it was great because nobody in England had ever seen these people. . . . England was still a very virgin country when it came to that music, so we made a big impact.”66

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READY, STEADY, GO! AND SOUNDS OF MOTOWN: SOUL ON BRITISH NATIONAL TELEVISION, 1965

It is hard to imagine a time when any country was “virgin” with respect to the 1960s soul sound, given its global ubiquity in the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first. Soul now appears in film soundtracks,67 countless television commercials, CD reissues, and commemorative box sets, and it has been the subject of documentaries such as Standing in the Shadows of Motown.68 Numerous books and scholarly articles have also appeared to chronicle soul’s birth and global dissemination: works by Gerald Early, Nelson George, Portia Maultsby, Robert Darden, Peter Guralnick, Gillian Gaar, Sharon Davis, Brian Ward, Gerri Hirshey, Horace Boyer, Mark Anthony Neal, and Les Back are, deservedly, among the most widely read. In addition, film biographies of figures like Ray Charles and Tina Turner, fictional accounts such as Dreamgirls and The Commitments, and autobiographical books of some of soul’s central musicians have been released over the past two decades. Little Richard, Ruth Brown, James Brown, Berry Gordy, Martha Reeves, and Ronnie Spector have all told their stories and added their voices to the evolving history of soul in 1960s pop. One can only imagine what kind of autobiography Dusty might have written and how her recollections would have added detail to the ever-sharpening picture of soul as the principal soundtrack of the 1960s and the crucial role of soul’s transatlantic migrations in that story. Foundational to those migrations’ lasting impact were the musical events of 1965, and among the most significant of those was the television program The Sounds of Motown, a special edition of Ready, Steady, Go! At 9:40 p.m., the landmark show was broadcast from London on April 28, 1965. The genesis of the idea to devote an entire hour-long, prime-time television program to Motown’s stars lies in Dusty’s appearance at the Brooklyn Fox theater on September 4–13, 1964. Though Dusty’s first meeting with Madeline was still three months in the future, she was only about twenty miles from Madeline’s birthplace when she performed at the Fox on Brooklyn’s busy main thoroughfare, Flatbush Avenue. There Dusty shared the stage with many of the Motown acts and a dressing room with the Ronettes (see figure 2.4), and as mentioned in the previous chapter, it was at the Brooklyn Fox that Dusty established a friendship with Martha Reeves and sang backup as an offstage Vandella for Marvin Gaye.69 DJ Murray the K, one of the most powerful U.S. radio hosts, whose station WINS 1010 reached millions of listeners, organized the event as a series of short shows (six per day, starting in the morning and finishing in the evening) that catered to his primary audience: high school students at the tail end of their summer vacations. In a single show, the screaming and

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Fig. 2.4. Dusty in Brooklyn with two Ronettes (Nedra Talley and Ronnie Spector) and Martha Reeves of the Vandellas (second from right) (Carole Gibson)

dancing-in-the-aisles teens could hear the current hit songs of their favorite performers. Among the acts performing there were Marvin Gaye, Millie, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, the Temptations, the Ronettes, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Jay and the Americans, the Contours, the Newbeats, the Dovells, and the Shangri-Las.70 Dusty was known to U.S. teens through her three hits of 1964, “I Only Want to Be with You,” “Stay Awhile,” and “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” which had reached numbers 12, 38, and 6, respectively, in the U.S. Top Forty in February, May, and July of that year. Those who attended the concerts describe the atmosphere as barely controlled pandemonium among the mixed audience of black and white teens, though with little of the racial tension that was a common feature of daily life outside the theater. The pandemonium was not confined to the theater but spilled out onto the sidewalk in front, where Murray the K and various fan clubs fueled the flames of teen enthusiasm and increased ticket sales by staging events for the singers, complete with fans wielding “WELCOME!” banners. Of the many acts, four were from New York—Little Anthony and the Imperials from Brooklyn, the Ronettes from Harlem, Jay and the Americans from Manhattan, and the Shangri-Las from Long Island—and

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several were from Detroit, giving the show the feeling of a national event. Only two were from abroad, Millie from Trinidad and Dusty, both lending an air of international excitement to the shows. Wishing to generate the same level of teen enthusiasm and transatlantic publicity by staging the Motown Revue in London, Dusty set the wheels in motion for the Sounds of Motown television special. Putting the Motown acts onstage together struck Dusty as precisely the way to market the new soul sound on British television. They had been touring this way in the United States for years, thus executing Berry Gordy’s strategy to present the singers collectively to a race-wary white public (who, he judged correctly, would accept an all-black show more readily than individual black acts integrated with white ones). Some months after Dusty’s appearance at the Brooklyn Fox, the Ready, Steady, Go! production team— Elkan Allan, Francis Hitching, and Vicki Wickham—decided to book the entire Motown Revue for their television show—with Dusty as host—when they next came to Britain.71 Individual Motown singers and groups had already appeared individually on Ready, Steady, Go!—Stevie Wonder and the Supremes, for example—but this would be their first appearance together as representatives of the Motown label and the soul sound. It could not escape anyone’s notice, especially Dusty’s and Vicki’s, that such an appearance would also convey the impression of a musical movement, exactly representative of the social and political sea change that was well under way in the United States and, of course, in countries like South Africa, where this music’s representations could not be clearer. Indeed, only a few weeks after Brooklyn, Dusty had traveled to South Africa (December 9–18, 1964) and refused complicity in the spectacle of hypocrisy that her performance of black-influenced music for whites-only audiences would have been. Her experiences in Brooklyn and South Africa, separated by only a few months and preceded by her new friendships with Martha Reeves and other Motown musicians, may have caused a crisis of conscience. Nina Simone had not yet thrown a drink in Dusty’s “honky” face, though this was the kind of reaction she wished to preempt.72 Even though “all the British bands did it,” Dusty did not want to be perceived as someone who simply appropriated black music and denied, either directly or indirectly, the originating artists from profiting in Britain and Europe; rather, she wished to be perceived, first, as a promoter, even proselytizer, of soul music, and second, as a contributor to it.73 Not content to be described as a “good thief,”74 she fulfilled the first with her role in Sounds of Motown (one she maintained throughout her life) and made a bid for the second, with Dusty in Memphis, two and a half years later. Berry Gordy had already planned a Motown tour of Britain for 1965 and speculated that crowds there would be as enthusiastic as they had been in

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Brooklyn. Despite the large number of hits Motown had generated in the United States, the British tour that began on March 20 and ended on April 12 was a financial disaster. British audiences must have been either “stone deaf or cabbages in disguise” according one disgusted music reviewer who could not explain why halls were not filled for the singers who had consistently topped the U.S. charts with “Heat Wave,” “Dancing in the Street,” “Shop Around,” “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Fingertips, Pt. II,” “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “The Way You Do the Things You Do,” and “My Girl.”75 Yet, according to the Supremes’ Mary Wilson, one of the tour’s participants, “It was a flop. What’s the use in denying it. The audiences were good but they were kinda thin. We didn’t get too many people along.”76 By the end of the tour in mid-April, the Motown acts were only marginally better known in England than they had been before the tour— that is, as an underground music with a small, devoted band of Mod followers. Soul’s fortunes changed radically, however, once it received national exposure on Ready, Steady, Go! on April 28. Berry Gordy recalled the post-April 1965 period with astonishment: “When I look back at these years from 1965 to 1968 it seems we could do no wrong. The stream of hits was endless. The whole world was fast becoming aware of our overall success—our artists, our songs.”77 Paolo Hewitt uses similar language: In 1965, Tamla Motown Records was finally launched in the UK. Within a year its acts . . . were ruling. Motown was unstoppable. Hit after hit. . . . Atlantic Records was also making inroads into the British consciousness and dividing people over the merits of its grittier soul sound . . . in comparison to Motown’s pop-soul sensibility. Through such labels, soul music could now launch a major assault on the British charts.78

Martha Reeves remembers: “When she invited us all it helped open not only my career up here, it got the Supremes introduced, it got the Temptations their number one spot for a moment, and the tour went all over the UK after that show. A lot of things were booked after Ready, Steady, Go! was taped.”79 It is surprising how rarely this 1965 appearance on Ready, Steady, Go! has been compared to the Beatles’ 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show— the latter having become a touchstone in pop histories as one of those “daythe-world-changed” moments. Yet, the two are historically comparable: In both cases, lucrative international markets were opened up virtually overnight by exposure on a top-rated television program, and in turn, both entered transatlantic pop music discourse. After Sounds of Motown, Berry Gordy could fund a London office for Tamla Motown—a foothold from which he was able to funnel hits directly from Detroit to Britain and Europe. The usual transatlantic time lag that had allowed some British covers (such

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as the aforementioned Brian Poole’s cover of the Contours’ “Do You Love Me”) to saturate the European market before the original had ever been heard was now nonexistent. Though this financial aspect linked the Beatles’ appearance on Sullivan’s show with the Sounds of Motown, the similarities end there because of the shows’ vastly different orientations and audiences. The two shows were very different from one another and targeted opposite audiences: Sullivan’s Sunday night hour was the bulwark of conservative, family entertainment; hence, it rarely strayed far from the tastes of middle America for whom the “old” rock and roll was now a staple. When it did stray, as in the famous case of Elvis Presley’s hips, the show’s producers sanitized the act promptly simply by keeping the offending hip action from the camera’s (and the audience’s) view.80 Ready, Steady, Go! on the other hand, purveyor of the new soul sound, thrived on the unpredictability of its guests and prided itself on a production team all under the age of twenty-five for whom little was beyond the pale. Closely attuned to trends in youth cultures and subcultures, Ready, Steady, Go! enticed its loyal Friday night audience with the slogan “The weekend starts here!” Such viewers expected the opposite of safe entertainment when they rushed home to see the program beamed live from London, which by that time was “swinging London.” Fan reaction, too, was different: Beatlemania among U.S. teenage girls is well documented in its endlessly reproduced images of screaming, fainting teenagers. So ubiquitous are these images that one cannot visualize the 1960s without the shrieking would-be brides of John, George, Paul, or Ringo or imagine a 1960s pop culture soundscape without their prolonged cries. By contrast, the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society, though certainly capable of whipping its members into a frenzy, manifested its fandom in the formation of soul clubs throughout Britain, with greatest concentrations in the north. As Paolo Hewitt witnessed, after mid-1965, “in response to this invasion, various soul clubs . . . appeared everywhere.”81 The clubs met regularly to sponsor dances and trade imported records; their identity badges, by the late sixties, often used the clenched fist symbol of the U.S. Black Power movement as its icon (see figure 2.5). The new social formations around soul music were anything but a fad. Many of the soul clubs still exist in some form, nearly fifty years later, and the cultural phenomenon known as northern soul is the direct outgrowth of the 1960s proliferation of soul clubs. These still-extant reception communities exist in great number on the Internet and regularly sponsor nostalgia tours of stars of the 1960s such as Martha Reeves, who, as leader of the Vandellas, was among the northern soul movement’s favorites. These communities, with members of all ages, also reserve special affection for Madeline Bell, who is known as the Queen of Northern Dance Soul. In addition to these differences between The Sounds of Motown and the

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Fig. 2.5. Member’s badge from East Anglia Soul Club, United Kingdom (northernsoulmusic.co.uk)

Ed Sullivan Show were the respective images of their hosts and their interaction with the shows’ guests. The fatherly Sullivan’s introduction of acts such as the Beatles carried the weight of a public papal benediction; upon bestowing it, he then watched the performance from his usual offstage location and afterward received from his guests the show business equivalent of a papal ring-kiss. Unlike Sullivan, Dusty was onstage with her guests as if welcoming friends into her home and introduced each act to the audience less as a compere type of intermediary between audience and performers than as a gleeful party host introducing one set of friends to another. She also performed three times during the course of the show: once by herself (“You Lost the Sweetest Boy”), then with the Vandellas (“Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” and “I Can’t Hear You”), and last in the show’s finale. There she took part in the improvised “Mickey’s Monkey” with all of the Motown singers and Earl Van Dyke’s instrumentalists assembled onstage in a free-for-all song-and-dancenumber reminiscent of a ring shout. The camaraderie between Dusty and the Motown group, especially evident when she was onstage with the Vandellas, underscored the fact that she was introducing not only musicians she revered but also individuals who were her personal friends. Interwoven thus among the acts, Dusty achieved the image she hoped to create—as promoter rather than thief of soul music—and strengthened the perception, in Britain at least, that she could perform soul legitimately and could, indeed, contribute something credible of her own to the new style. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME”

Early 1965 to mid-1968 were the years of greatest musical interaction between Dusty and Madeline and the time when both crafted and refined their respective signature transatlantic sounds. Following the triumph of Sounds of

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Motown, Dusty released a steady stream of recordings in the United Kingdom—ten singles and three albums.82 As mentioned earlier, Madeline cowrote two and appeared as backing singer on nine: “In the Middle of Nowhere,” “Baby Don’t You Know” (June 1965), “Some of Your Lovin’” (September 1965), “Little by Little,” “If It Hadn’t Been for You” (January 1966), “I’m Gonna Leave You” (July 1966), “Go Ahead On” (September 1966), “I’ll Try Anything” (February 1967), and “Small Town Girl” (September 1967). Of these, seven were released as singles or on albums in the United States between June 1965 and October 1967, all of the preceding except “Go Ahead On” and “If It Hadn’t Been for You.”83 Dusty, too, performed backing vocals for other singers in this period, mainly on Madeline’s recordings. Using the pseudonym Gladys Thong to avoid complicating her legal relationship with her record label, Philips (also Madeline’s label), Dusty provided backing vocals on twelve of Madeline’s songs, all of which appeared on Bell’s albums.84 On Bell’s A Poppin’ (1967), these included “Picture Me Gone,” “You Don’t Love Me No More,” “Beat the Clock,” “Soul Time,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” “I’m Gonna Leave You,” and “I Didn’t Want to Have to Do It,” and on Doin’ Things (1968), Dusty backed Madeline on “After All Is Said and Done,” “Doin’ Things Together with You,” “Hold It,” and “Ain’t Gonna Cry Anymore.” Of these, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and “Picture Me Gone” received enough radio airplay in the United States to make an appearance on both the R&B and Top Forty charts, reaching, respectively, positions 32 and 26 in March 1968. The singers’ constant contact had lasting effects on both their styles; their continuous presence on the pop charts, onstage, and in television appearances kept their evolving transatlantic soul style in the British public’s ear and, although to a lesser degree, also in the ear of the U.S. public. In the course of this constant contact and mutual influence, Dusty took a decisive step in 1966 toward establishing “her own style” when she recorded an English-language version of the Italian San Remo hit “Io che non vivo (senza te).”85 Transformed into “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” by Vicki Wickham and Simon Napier-Bell’s new text, the single reached number one in the United Kingdom in March 1966 and number four in the United States in June of the same year.86 With this song, Dusty declared that she had indeed found her own style, no small claim considering the pains she took in interviews to publicly acknowledge her debt to others. As I discuss at length in the next chapter, this style emerged from the rather unlikely pairing of U.S. soul and European melodrama; Dusty’s combination of melodrama’s tightly stylized conventions with soul’s seemingly limitless emotional register accounts, perhaps, for the compelling tension in her performances of this song and others like it. Soul had fully settled in Dusty’s musical imagination to the degree that she could blend it with what seemed to be her innate melo-

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dramatic sensibility. The marriage of soul and melodrama represented not only a stylistic turning point in Dusty’s career but also an important moment in 1960s pop, as it spawned a new transatlantic genre, what has been called the “rock torch” song or, as I call it in the next chapter, the “1960s pop aria.” Requiring vocal and acting skills well beyond the grasp of most pop singers, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” has not been successfully covered by any other singer, even though Elvis Presley made a noble attempt in 1970. It remains solidly associated with Dusty’s persona and is a significant landmark in mid-sixties popular music and culture. With their respective mid-sixties releases behind them, by 1968 both Dusty and Madeline’s vocal personalities, stage personae, and professional reputations were firmly established within the British recording industry. On this foundation, each branched out into new collaborative relationships that would strongly shape the next phase of each singer’s career. Madeline joined the British band Blue Mink (see figure 2.6) and, for the first time, entered the U.K. top ten with Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway’s song “Melting Pot” (rising to number three in March 1969). From 1969 to 1973, Blue Mink placed six songs in the U.K. top twenty and occupied the British charts for a total of eighty-three weeks.87 Madeline’s presence in this band as a lead singer with Roger Cook and her obvious influence on Blue Mink’s sound and identity serve to further illus-

Fig. 2.6. Blue Mink, ca. 1970 (Sanctuary Records)

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trate the point made at the outset of this chapter: that American churchtrained, female soul singers were deeply embedded in London’s recording culture for a period of years and, by virtue of their continuous work with British musicians, left a lasting imprint on the sound of British pop. Madeline’s vocal gospelisms and even her body language were imitated closely by Cook in their duets and indicate the degree to which soul had become an integral, even expected, element in British pop. This is abundantly clear in video recordings that survive from Blue Mink’s television appearances of the late 1960s and early 1970s.88 “Melting Pot,” Blue Mink’s highest charting song, has been covered by other bands—Culture Club in the 1980s and Boyzone in the 1990s—and, as indicated by fans’ frequent requests for it during the band’s reunion appearances in the 1980s and 1990s, has become both their signature song and a beloved late-1960s anthem. The language of its lyrics, permissible in the United Kingdom but unacceptable in the United States then, makes a case for racial integration while its vocal delivery foregrounds the stylistic integration of soul and Britpop as Madeline and Roger trade the lead on the following lines: Take a pinch of white man / Wrap him up in black skin / Add a touch of blue blood / And a little bit of red Indian boy / Curly latin kinkies mixed with yellow chinkees / Lump it all together / And you got a recipe for a get along scene / Oh, what a beautiful dream / If it could only come true / REFRAIN: What we need is a great big melting pot / Big enough to take the world and all it’s got / And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more / And turn out coffee colored people by the score.

The group toured the United Kingdom and Europe, appearing regularly on British television and radio until the band’s breakup in 1974. From that point on, Madeline’s voice became a fixture in the British mass media, heard in the form of television and radio advertisement jingles and as an omnipresent backing voice on British pop records over the course of three decades. While Madeline’s work with Blue Mink drew her more deeply into British recording circles and across the Channel into European pop markets (especially Holland, where she remains very popular),89 Dusty’s new collaborative relationships drew her toward Memphis and New York. Having set and reached her personal goal of sounding like no one else—as much the product of artistic pride and ego as the result of her desire to erase the “thief ” label—and armed with the media clout that accompanied her international hit, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” Dusty planned to take her style, persona, and professional capital to the United States and make an album there in the evolving language of transatlantic soul. When Dusty set off for the United States with her new Atlantic Records contract in hand and an ex-

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clusive agreement to work with producer Jerry Wexler, she was well aware of the risk to her reputation in taking her brand of soul to the music’s place of origin. As she put it, “What was viewed as soulful here is not necessarily viewed as soulful there by the real soul people.”90 In numerous print interviews and television and radio documentaries, Dusty has admitted to feeling deeply intimidated by the legends of Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, with whom the Atlantic musicians had recently worked. She was, nevertheless, determined to fulfill “her dream to make a definitive and authentic soul album,” as she put it to Vicki Wickham, and felt that she could do so under the auspices of the famed American R&B and soul record label with the guidance of their top producer.91 Such was the genesis of 1969’s Dusty in Memphis album.

DUSTY’S SOUL DREAM, 1968–1969

Declared by Rolling Stone as one of the “best 100 albums,” Dusty in Memphis has been written about endlessly as “one of the greatest white soul albums ever made” and has received an unusual amount of close critical attention detailing how and where the album was produced and who was involved in its production.92 This kind of attention was spawned by the album’s marketing hype at the time of its original release: It centers on a predicted clash between the British singer of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” on one side of the ocean and the R&B “Memphis Cats” on the other. Stanley Booth’s original liner notes are worth quoting at length because the notions expressed there have formed the foundation for most critiques of Dusty in Memphis. On the back of the album one could learn: For the past several months, since it became known that Dusty Springfield had signed an agreement to record with Atlantic Records, one of the recurring topics of conversation in the international pop community has been this, her first album [with Atlantic]. . . . [P]op people everywhere were wondering what it would be. . . . Then word got around that Dusty would be recorded in Memphis, Tennessee. The plot thickened. The “Memphis Cats” have a great international reputation also, but they are mostly associated with such artists as Aretha and Wilson Pickett—not singers of “big ballady things” [a term Dusty had used to describe “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”]. A lot of people weren’t sure Dusty in Memphis was such a good idea.93

The narrative goes on to say that the anticipated clash between Dusty and the Memphis Cats was ultimately resolved and resulted in a product superior to Dusty’s previous albums. Abandoning British recording habits and

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adopting those of the American studio musicians “must inevitably produce music with greater involvement and more genuine emotion than that which results from reading a chart while standing alone in a studio,” Booth writes. This account of the making of Dusty in Memphis, which has been repeated hundreds of times in some form or other, goes on to claim that the full extent of Dusty’s vocal and interpretive capabilities were miraculously and for the first time revealed, once the singer had touched the hem of the Cats’ collective garment: “The Memphis sessions revealed something new in Dusty’s singing that we had not heard before—a softness, a vulnerability that is quite moving and attractive.”94 The premise and conclusion of such passages, that Dusty was naive about American music-making practices before arriving in Memphis and even had a vocal epiphany there, forms the core of the Dusty in Memphis legend. Despite its initial hype, Dusty in Memphis was a not a chart success in the United States or the United Kingdom; it failed to find an audience until thirty years after its release, and even this was small compared with that of Dusty’s earlier albums. Discourse in recent years seems directed toward explaining why the album was a financial failure and trots out familiar notions such as “a work ahead of its time” or “too sophisticated for the tastes of typical pop audiences.” Certainly, this album breaks new ground in many respects and stands apart, stylistically, from the best-selling albums of the late 1960s. It is, however, difficult to believe that this album, so startlingly different from Dusty’s previous albums, represents her dream of a definitive soul album; indeed, though she stated what her goals were in making Dusty in Memphis, she never suggested that she had reached them. While others involved in its production have lauded the album—namely, its producers and the Memphis Cats95—Springfield’s own assessments of Dusty in Memphis have been more muted and notably less self-congratulatory, with praise limited to specific aspects of production or vocal technique. She seems never to have ascribed to the “ahead of its time” theories or to have felt vindicated by the album’s delayed success; she even suggested that the album was overrated. Dusty in Memphis, for all its putative groundbreaking qualities, seems not to have realized Dusty’s dream of a definitive soul record, one that would have built on the stylistic foundation that she and her London team had already established; rather, it was Wexler, Dowd, and Mardin’s dream of a Memphis soul album crowned by their particular and tightly framed concept of the “softness” and “vulnerability” of Dusty’s voice. As Booth correctly asserts, Dusty in Memphis was built on a fissure; Dusty was indeed uncomfortable with the working methods of the Memphis Cats, and as I will discuss shortly, they did not really work together, at least not in the collaborative way Booth describes. Another fissure, however, proved to be far more consequential: the clash between Dusty’s concept for the album

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and that of her three producers. Dusty had ceded production control to Wexler, Dowd, and Mardin, trusting that the experienced trio shared her artistic objectives and were best positioned to execute them and market them internationally. To the dismay of all concerned, as the recording and mixing processes unfolded in Memphis and New York, it became increasingly apparent that the artistic objectives of the producers, the Cats, and Dusty were not shared but at odds. Realizing this, and with production control out of her hands (something that had never happened in London), Dusty may have tried to salvage some shreds of her original dream by simply refusing to sing on Wexler’s command, refusing to record the collaboratively created vocal tracks he had envisioned, and refusing to lay down the final vocals until she was ready. Her well-documented refusals are often framed simplistically as the result of fear, but they may have had another purpose: to maintain control, at the very least, of her own voice. Also beyond Dusty’s or anyone’s control was the sociopolitical climate at the time of the album’s release in early 1969 and the closely related, rapidly changing discourse on soul, both of which greatly affected its reception. In the following discussion, I offer a reading of Dusty in Memphis’s production and reception that locates the album within the broader stories of soul’s 1960s migrations, its cultural representations, and Dusty’s evolving transatlantic soul sound.

DUSTY AND THE CATS

By 1968, soul as created in London was very different from soul as created in the United States, especially Memphis or Muscle Shoals, both centers of Atlantic’s distinctive instrumental sound. Dusty describes her own experience in Philips’s London studios: “For five years, since I started recording, I had been coming into studios and finding everything all done beforehand—the arrangements worked out and nothing to do but bounce off what was written.”96 When bouncing off what was written, Dusty would improvise backing vocals with Bell and others, request adjustments in microphone placements and recording levels for the individual tracks, suggest elements of arrangements (such as which motifs to emphasize or instruments to use in certain passages), and collaborate with the recording engineers during the final mix of the tracks. The arrangers, singers, instrumentalists, and engineers with whom she worked coalesced around a sound characterized by Derek Wadsworth’s horn arrangements, Ivor Raymonde’s strings, the Echoes’ rhythm section, Madeline, Lesley, Doris, Maggie, and Kay’s backing vocals, and Dusty’s solo voice. In addition to the gospel and soul influences on the primary and backing vocal tracks, there were other obvious influences: Motown and James Brown’s instrumental sounds and recording tech-

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niques invented by the U.K.’s Joe Meek and American Phil Spector. Dusty’s team worked within the traditions established by classically trained composers and arrangers, all members of the British Musician’s Union. Accordingly, arrangers quickly transformed a songwriter’s demo tape (often consisting of nothing more than voice with rudimentary accompaniment, with or without a lead sheet consisting of melody, lyrics, and chords) into an arrangement with fully notated parts for an instrumental ensemble that had been decided upon in advance, often in consultation with Dusty. According to the Musician’s Union’s strict rules, the entire ensemble would convene in the recording studio, rehearse their parts, make minor adjustments, and then record (usually on three tracks), with the singer in a soundproof booth recording on a fourth, dedicated track. Once all the instrumental tracks were finished and mixed together, Dusty would rerecord her vocal track over the instrumental track as it was piped into her headphones. In other words, Dusty’s vocal creativity, which involved equal parts singing (sometimes more than fifty takes) and editing, came last. The final stages—from the addition of Dusty’s finished vocal to the final mixing and editing—were the most labored of all because of Dusty’s well-known “stigmata of perfectibility” and attention to musical nuances.97 Any perceived infelicity of vocal intonation, phrasing, inflection, or interpretation—even if virtually inaudible to others—was excised and rerecorded; the corrected passages were then spliced into the vocal track until Dusty was satisfied with its quality. Her vocal was ultimately mixed into the master tape along with the backing tracks according to Dusty’s tastes, which often meant that the voice was placed “back” in the mix, folded into the ensemble rather than completely dominating it. In stark contrast to these procedures were the arranging, performing, and recording customs of the Memphis Cats that Jerry Wexler has vividly described. For Paul Sexton’s closely researched BBC Radio 2 documentary on Dusty in Memphis, Wexler gave the following account: [From the demo] we would have the arranger make the charts on all the songs, but they were simple, almost simplistic. Because instead of regulation chord symbols they went by numbers, 1 to 7. My practice was to start the session at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and the musicians were ready with all of the songs on their music stands with the very simple chord sequences. That’s all there were; there were not arrangements, there were just chord sequences. This was the Southern way of recording that I had learned in Memphis and Muscle Shoals: to build the song organically what you did, you had the musicians start to play these chords, and just playing the chords the guitarist or a keyboard man would come up with a lick or an idea, and after a while— it never took too long—a rhythm pattern would be established that would really be the basis of the song. And when the rhythm track was almost

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finished, in the penultimate moment, that’s where I would have the singer come in and start to sing so that he or she could interface with the musicians at that point and they could modify what they were doing to particularly suit and accommodate the singer’s phrasing. Only one problem: Dusty wouldn’t sing. So we had to imagine it.98

Dusty did, in fact, sing in Memphis, as producer Arif Mardin recalls (contradicting Wexler), but only enough to give the instrumentalists an idea of what she might do, so that they could then “imagine it” and build their parts accordingly.99 When Wexler stated that “she wouldn’t sing,” he meant that she refused to engage in the group improvisation that he had set up with Gene Chrisman (drums), Reggie Young (guitar), Tommy Cogbill (bass), Bobby Emmons (electric keyboards), and Bobby Wood (piano), from which the final arrangements would customarily emerge. Dusty was completely out of her element and, fearing comparisons with Aretha—the Queen of Soul and an accomplished pianist—for whom this method was second nature, she declined the invitation to “interface with the musicians” and help create the arrangements that had, in London, been the exclusive preserve of professional arrangers. Fearing even more the creation of a vocal track that might embarrass or even humiliate her and that she could not alter, she decided not to record one at all, at least not in Memphis with the Cats, and not in this way. Recognizing her limits, she insisted that she could not “throw it down” spontaneously like Aretha or engage in a process of continuous modification with studio musicians. Rather, she withheld her final vocals until the basic rhythm track, at least, was finished.100 Clearly, Dusty’s love of improvisation was confined to live performance and creating backing vocals and did not extend to recordings of on-the-spot collaborations;101 such working methods were anathema to Dusty, who, according to Vicki Wickham, “was a control freak to a fault.”102

JERRY, TOM, ARIF, AND DUSTY IN NEW YORK

Dusty thought, perhaps, that by slipping out of Memphis with her final vocal unrecorded and her voice still within her control, her dream of creating a definitive soul album was still possible. Eluding the Cats, however, proved to be the easy part; once Dusty arrived at Atlantic’s New York studios to record her vocal tracks over the instrumentals that had been recorded in Memphis, she soon found that Wexler, Dowd, and Mardin’s vision would prevail. Even though Dusty had chosen all of the songs for the album and seemed, initially at least, to have shared Wexler’s enthusiasm for a concept album in which a single mood would pervade the whole, her collaboration with the producers

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was severely limited; she had no control over how her voice was recorded or how it would be later mixed with the instrumental tracks. Furthermore, horns and strings had not yet been added; hence, even more of the music was beyond her control. It is likely that she had not even heard finished versions of Mardin’s strings or Dowd and Mardin’s horn parts at the time she recorded her vocals in New York, nor the many instrumental effects and flourishes that crowd the album. So, just as the Cats had to imagine Dusty’s voice, Dusty had to imagine what the producers would do with her voice and what they would surround it with once she had recorded it. The creation of the record in imagined fragments—by contributors in different parts of the country, in discontinuous periods of time separated by several weeks or months—allowed Dusty’s original concept to lose focus and made the album susceptible to the “too many cooks” syndrome. The recording of Dusty in Memphis was in Tom Dowd’s hands, and though he was regarded as a technical wizard and the most sought-after sound engineer of his generation, the final mix seems to betray a horror of a vacuum or perhaps just his and Mardin’s arrangers’ taste for overdone orchestral textures.103 Though the album was recorded on four tracks, Dowd was able to make it sound like more with various instruments (oboes, flutes, maracas, castanets, glockenspiel—all uncredited on the album sleeve) dropping in and out of the texture seamlessly. It would seem that the allure of a complex orchestral sound (and the ability to capture its every nuance) could not be resisted, even though it compromised the record’s soul elements. While the final result is a technological wonder on four tracks, the features that would have made this a definitive soul album are stifled by the strings or some combination of strings, horns, and assorted instrumental bit players all densely layered on top of the rhythm section. The orchestra’s omnipresence, straight beat, and overuse of high strings work subtly at cross-purposes with the soulful rhythm section and voice, causing an unfortunate dilution of the soul groove that, presumably, was to be emphasized. The orchestral effects on this album have received well-deserved praise, yet they seem to have been achieved at the expense of the rhythm section (which comes out from under the weight of the orchestra only on “Son of a Preacher Man”) and its crucial interplay with the voice. The virtuosity of the album’s sound engineering is apparent—perhaps, in Dusty’s opinion, too much so—and was probably the reason she called Dowd a “prima donna.”104 Another element of Dowd’s final mix, foregrounding the voice rather than placing it further back in the texture, creates a sense of intimacy that is consistent from track to track, though it, too, ran contrary to Dusty’s usual preference. Though we know much about this record’s production, thanks to the testimonies of Wexler, Dowd, Mardin, Chrisman, and others, many mysteries remain, most of them centering on its departures from the singer’s previous

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albums and the decision to veer so far from Dusty’s established practices and persona. Why is Dusty singing here predominantly in her upper register, when, as Vicki Wickham tells us, “She liked and preferred her voice in a lower range so she would choose songs that fitted it”?105 Why did she choose songs that took her voice out of its customary soul placement when the project was supposed to be a definitive soul album? A related question concerns the overall affect of this particular set of songs. The collection’s general air of supplication and abjection, coupled with what Dusty called her soft voice, seems strangely out of character with Dusty’s carefully crafted persona; no stranger to songs of supplication and abjection, Dusty had, prior to Memphis, tempered such affect with the stridency of her chest voice. In other words, Dusty was perfectly capable of conveying abjection and resilience simultaneously, a capability that gave prior albums affective depth, yet it was not put to work here. In the near-total absence of her chest voice, the underlying strength of Dusty’s persona is missing; the album’s abjection thus seems more a permanent character trait than a temporary slump from which the protagonist shall recover. There is no tempering here—Dusty’s other half is missing—hence, her persona seems uncharacteristically submissive and weak, even pleading. For Dusty’s British fans, this must have seemed to be an inexplicable act of self-erasure or, at best, an ill-considered self-refashioning. It would seem that in choosing to concentrate on her soft voice, Dusty was responding to what she thought Wexler and the others wanted from her, bending to their conception of what her contribution to the album would be. She said, “The soft voice, that’s the hardest, but they’re always the ones [songs] that people want, and I stand there, like, going blue in the face; there’s never any time to breathe, I’m holding on to the microphone with both hands just trying to stay upright.”106 About the Dusty in Memphis tracks, she goes on to say, “Those songs are the ‘voice records’ of all time.”107 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-

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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;108 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 previous 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-

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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.”109

DUSTY IN MEMPHIS ’S RECEPTION

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.”110 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 Nationalist message of Black Power had begun to overshadow the integrationist ideology of the civil rights leaders.”111 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.112 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 (I’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.”113

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,”114 it is also true, as Herman Gray reminds us, that “black musical sound-

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ings are never just about sound” but convey worlds of cultural history and social meaning.115 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.116 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)117 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.118

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.”119

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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 representations, 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.

3 Soul + Melodrama = The 1960s Pop Aria

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.1 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 repression”2 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 

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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 all’amore” (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”3 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.”4 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,5 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

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and pantomime, film and television (“soap operas”), popular song, and most recently, to Internet “hip-hoperas.”6 Alive even in children’s cartoons, melodrama is, clearly, among the hardiest and most adaptive of theatrical strains.7 Its appeal, at root, lies in its promise of a “return of the repressed”8 channeled 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.”9 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: BORROWING 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.10 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.11 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.12 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

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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.13 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 aria’s compositional 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.14 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.15 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 musical 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]).16 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

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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.17 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.18 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.19 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.20 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.”21 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 WORK, PART ONE: THE POP ARIA’S 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” (0–0:01), “I Wish I Never Loved You” (0–0:08), “Summer Is Over” (0–0:13), “Di fronte all’amore” (0–0:05), “Tu che ne sai” (0–0:03), “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (0–0:17), “All I See Is You” (0–0:11), “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten (0–0:18), and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” (0–0:21).22

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EX. 1. 0–0:01 “ANYONE WHO 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.23 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. 0–0:08 “I WISH I 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. 0–0:13 “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 singer’s 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. 0–0:05 “DI FRONTE ALL’AMORE” (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. 5. 0–0:10 “TU CHE NE SAI” (1965)

Though this is another Italian song of impending confrontation, “Tu che ne sai” 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 0:10, 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. 0–0:17 “YOU DON’T HAVE 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. 7. 0–0:11 “ALL I 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 0:57.24 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.25

EX. 8. 0–0:18 “I 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 continue 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. 0–0:21 “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 A ♭ major scale, is troubled by the appearance of E ♮ 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

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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 MELODRAMA’S 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 all’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 psychological 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. I’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.26

COMPRESSION AT WORK, PART TWO: 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

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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” (originally “Io che non vivo piú 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 B ♭ 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 B ♭ 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: B ♭m→Bm→Cm→Fm→B ♭m→Bm→Fm (middle eight in italics). The overall 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.”27 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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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods

“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 “you’re 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 introduction 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 you’re 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 executes 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 is 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. “I 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

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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.”28 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.29 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 accounted, 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 communities worldwide. This performance is a virtual catalogue of Dusty’s trademark gestures and a landmark of the genre. The rich discourse elicited

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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 “OWN 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 naïveté 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.30

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.31

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.”32 Dusty’s physical gestures’ strong resem-

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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).33 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.34 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 I’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)

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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.35 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.

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Fig. 3.1a. “Beg you to come home” 13:51

Fig. 3.1b. “Sublime Adoration” as illustrated

(British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC])

in Siddons (1822)

Fig. 3.2a. “Never tie you down” 14:19

Fig. 3.2b. “Expectation” (Siddons)

(BBC)

Fig. 3.3a. “Life seems dead” 14:34 (BBC)

Fig. 3.3b. “Devotion” (Siddons)

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Fig. 3.4a. “All that’s left is loneliness” 14:43 (BBC) Fig. 3.4b. Sarah Bernhardt in Cléopâtre: longing (Emboden)

Fig. 3.5a. “Nothing left to feel” 14:46 (BBC)

Fig. 3.5b. Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorcière: protest, denial (Emboden)

Fig. 3.6a. “You don’t have to say you love

Fig. 3.6b. Sarah Bernhardt in Phèdre:

me” 15:13 (BBC)

extreme passion (Emboden)

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Fig. 3.7a. “Believe me” 15:27 (BBC) Fig. 3.7b. Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorcière: supplication (Emboden)

Fig. 3.8. “Doubt” (Siddons)

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Although such strongly gestural performance was virtually unknown among Dusty’s British and American pop music contemporaries, it was by no means unknown in Italy. Melodramatic gesture was particularly evident in the performances of Italian pop singer Pino Donaggio and, to a lesser extent, his perennial San Remo Song Festival cohorts, Claudio Villa, Umberto Bindi, and Mina. Donaggio’s performance of “Come Sinfonia” is an excellent example of this highly gestural style.36 In this performance, Donaggio matches each of the song’s images and emotions with a physical action of some sort, ranging from broad arm and hand motions to a variety of head poses and facial expressions. He even starts the song from an onstage sitting position that allows him to rise at a chosen moment, thus making visible the emotional escalation of the song’s text. While Dusty was always careful to acknowledge the sources of her musical style and credited Donaggio and Pallavicini’s music as enormously influential—especially, of course, their “Io che non viv più di un ora senza te”—she appears never to have mentioned publicly that Donaggio’s gestures and the highly physical Italian manner of pop performance may have helped shape her own. Seeing Donaggio’s grand emotive displays at the San Remo Song Festival and observing Italian audiences’ enthusiastic response to them probably emboldened Dusty to amplify her own gestural performance style and present it to British and American pop music audiences, even though it would have seemed utterly foreign to them. What Brooks has called the “plastic figurability of emotion” was not only foreign in the realm of Anglo-American pop music but also contrary to the naturalistic method acting of the 1960s, which stressed interiority and emotional inference; it was also the polar opposite of 1960s pop notions of “cool.” Out of step with prevailing trends, lacking a stylistic home, and with one foot in the U.S. present and the other in the European past, it would seem surprising that Dusty’s postmodern pastiche of melodrama and soul managed to attract such a large international audience, yet when received as transatlantic and new, and when wrapped within various fan discourses as mentioned earlier, its fascination for reception communities on both sides of the Atlantic becomes more understandable. This song’s persistent resonance with audiences must also have something to do with its lyrics, particularly the sentiment expressed by the song’s title. While intense devotion to the beloved is an eternal theme in pop songs, Wickham and Napier-Bell’s text diverges significantly from Donaggio and Pallavicini’s in its protagonist’s willingness to accept much less than devoted fidelity in return: “you don’t have to stay forever, I will understand. . . . I will never tie you down.” This perspective—one that seemed to grant almost anything, including a certain amount of straying, to preserve the relationship— was unusual relative to other love songs of the era and tapped into Dusty’s public image as a single woman looking for, but rarely finding, love. Wickham and

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Napier-Bell were certainly aware of fans’ tendency to conflate the singer and her songs and, in crafting the English lyrics especially for Dusty, probably factored this in.37 Though this song has been recorded by others, most notably by Elvis Presley, Springfield’s version is regarded as definitive not only because of the seemingly close identification of singer and text but also because Springfield’s “volcanic” temperament seemed perfectly matched by this pop aria’s music.38 The music of the melodramatic pop aria, with its calculated return of the repressed and commensurate modulatory, registral, and dynamic demands on the singer, was, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, home territory for Springfield, who was a self-confessed drama queen and whose vocal technique could withstand the genre’s rigors. Despite her stated affinity for the pop aria’s melodramatic content, Springfield was, nevertheless, “afraid” of this particular song, and her fear of it has become part of the song’s legend. She said, “I’ve sung it for years and every time the band strikes up, it’s like magic but it’s a hard song to sing in terms of pitch and emotion. I’m simply petrified of that key change. I always fear I’m not going to make it.”39 The modulation to which Dusty referred occurs at 15:10 (of the BBC video recording) with an appropriately intense orchestral accompaniment on the words “believe me, believe me” during the song’s final B section. As in “Di fronte all’amore,” the first part of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” breaks into two large sections—the introduction and self-contained AABA— that provide all of the elements of the now-familiar melodramatic arc and serve to position an unnamed “I” and “you” within the context of an emotionally fraught situation. The emotions of the situation explode via modulation in the concluding BB section, during which the singer is also forced into a higher and palpably uncomfortable vocal register—a moment in which singer (and listener) are gripped by dread and desire.40 While Dusty’s vocal work makes audible the melodramatic arc, her physical gestures double the voice’s impact by making visible the emotion of the text—a difficult task, given the fact that there is no action to act out. Nothing “happens” in any conventional sense; hence, what is acted out, exteriorized, is an otherwise formless change in feeling. The seismic shift in the protagonist’s mental state is seen and heard in the change from the relatively calm exposition of AABA to the emotional eruption of the final BB. Dusty did not perform this song the same way each time; if all her recorded performances of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” were placed along a gestural continuum and compared, this one would most certainly be positioned at its extravagant extreme. Nonetheless, there was great consistency in Dusty’s repertoire of gestures. From one song to another, she matched the same gestures to the same emotions repeatedly throughout her decades-long career. Doubt, for example, was matched with the head and hand motions described previously, while passionate assertions were usually ac-

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companied by arms flung wide and high. Protest or denial was rendered visible by shoulder-high arms outstretched in front, hands at an angle, palms facing out, while supplication found the arms cast down and to the side, palms facing slightly out. For devotion or longing, the hands were near the face in a prayerlike position or clasped together under the chin. Whatever variance occurred would appear to have been only a matter of scale rather than content; their consistency suggests that Dusty had practiced them to the degree that they seemed to come directly and automatically from the song’s emotional content, as if on cue. EPILOGUE: DUSTY AND THE POP ARIA AFTER THE 1960S

Dusty’s recording of “Sometimes Like Butterflies” (1985) illustrates aspects of the pop aria’s fate—some might say its complete demise—after the 1960s. A confluence of factors undermined the quality of its key elements: the canned sound of early synthesizers was seized upon by profit-minded producers as a substitute for expensive live orchestras, and the musical decision making Dusty had enjoyed in the mid-1960s was co-opted by and concentrated in the hands of nonmusician producers like Peter Stringfellow. Furthermore, as a result of Dusty’s move to California in the early 1970s, her musical contact with British and Italian composers waned as contact with the middle-of theroad sound favored by American composers like Barry Manilow increased. Hence, the economic and aesthetic environment in which the transatlantic pop aria had thrived had all but disappeared, and its component parts had atrophied. Among these parts was Dusty’s voice itself. Through the 1970s, Dusty had reoriented her vocal technique and tended to choose material that required less exertion from her chest voice. The demand, however, for an emotion-packed three minutes of music remained steady, and “Sometimes Like Butterflies” is the type of song that was created to meet the demand. Its bland synthpop accompaniment and Dusty’s regrettable choice to utilize her 1960s chest voice (which by 1985 was depleted) make parts of this recording “excruciatingly painful to listen to.”41 Composed by Bruce Roberts and Donna Summer and recorded more than a decade after the pop arias discussed earlier, “Sometimes Like Butterflies” seems to have had the affective goal and many of the formal features of its 1960s predecessors: to create a sense of emotional repression and then to effect its release through musical compressions and calibrated excesses. Its positioning of a distressed heroine alone in a bleak psychological landscape also echoes its earlier models. However, one need listen for only a couple of seconds to hear that the new synthpop fails to deliver the sonic complexities of a real orchestra; furthermore, the structural tensions necessary for musical release are missing.

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The introduction, so crucial to the melodramatic arc’s structure, does little more than lay down a dull, wallpaper-like rhythmic pattern; it discloses minimal information and allows the three minutes to begin in an ill-defined sonic space. With little in the way of an establishing shot, there is nothing to generate momentum; hence, the song relies on clichés such as gradually increasing volume and diminishing note values to wind up the tension. Dusty’s delivery becomes more and more labored as she struggles to make up for the dramatic void left by the absence of orchestral affect and lack of compositional craft. The strategically placed crack in her voice is replaced by full-blown, catastrophic vocal failure in order to achieve the changed state that had, in the past, been executed by both voice and orchestra. Adding insult to injury—literally, for the singer’s voice seems truly injured in the effort—the song outstays its welcome, weighing in at a bloated four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. “Butterflies” takes at least a full minute longer than its 1960s predecessors to do its work and does it, arguably, not half as well. The extra time is especially gratuitous in light of the fact that the thrilling modulation that once launched the singer into her highest register has been cut; instead, she just sings ever louder and reaches dangerously higher in place of the missing modulation’s intensity. This is melodrama done on the cheap. Clearly, by the mid-1980s the genre that had successfully blended soul and melodrama was now formulaic and mannered; corners had been cut so extremely that only the bare outlines of the 1960s pop aria were left. The heroine, too, seemed to perish in this period, finding herself without orchestras in the synthesizer era, without composers who specialized in pop arias, and now living in California, separated from her loyal audience. By the mid-1970s, Dusty’s fame, along with the pop aria genre, seemed to have evaporated; yet, her 1960s persona survived not only in the memories of her fans but also in the live performances of drag queens and tribute artists who specialized in “doing Dusty.”42 The tradition of imitating Dusty and her signature delivery of pop arias continues to the present day and is taken up in the next chapter as one of the many sites of discourse that have grown up around the singer, her voice, and her life.

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4 Dusty as Discourse

Self-discovery, virtuosity, identity, and legacy: these are the discourses that have recurred with the most frequency and passion in the many interviews I have conducted for this book. While noting that Dusty as agent of selfdiscovery, as preternaturally skilled pop singer, as model of postmodern identity, and as subject-victim of biographers/journalists occupy the most space in my notebooks and tapes, I observe also that these topics are rarely engaged without invoking the others; indeed, the primary Dusty discourses are interlocking and mutually reinforcing. They fuel one another, intersect, and constantly adjust to absorb new information; thus, they produce an ever-changing Dusty. These four have circulated at various levels of intensity throughout Dusty’s career and have gained force in the years after her death. Although there has been considerable contestation concerning Dusty’s legacy, discourse among the singer’s professional peers, friends, music industry associates, and diverse fan communities has coalesced around these same four topics. Even taking into account the inevitable slide toward an “official” view that seems to be the fate of all pop stars—that is, the commercially driven, reductive tendency to erase conflicting stories in service of the most broadly marketable narrative—the degree of genuine common ground among Dusty’s different reception communities and the longevity of these particular discourses seem remarkable. They agree, at least, on what they will argue about. The discourse of Dusty’s self-invention, as broached from various angles in previous chapters, accounts for this; a complicated mother discourse, it lies beneath and animates all the rest and has sustained the circuit of in-

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formation and ideas about the singer long beyond that of most of her 1960s pop music contemporaries. In the following sections, I explore these discourses and attempt to establish their origins and major threads through the voices, memories, and writings of people who knew Dusty, worked with her, or wrote about her; these include her personal friends and professional associates, fans, journalists, and finally, drag and tribute performers who have specialized in “doing Dusty.”1

SELF-DISCOVERY

Dusty’s perceived self-invention appears to have provided a powerful model for young fans who seized upon the singer’s voice, music, and persona (always the three together) as points of departure for their own projects of selfdiscovery. In speaking to Dusty’s earliest fans and hearing their stories of devoted teen fandom, I learned that the singer’s enormous personal charisma ignited in them a desire to follow her down the path she herself had traveled—if not full-blown self-invention, then at least self-discovery. Indeed, through her example, Dusty seemed to plant the subversive idea that one could discover and cultivate oneself as one wished, not necessarily according to one’s circumstances of birth, and create an identity that, once uncovered and embraced, might come into serious conflict with those circumstances. Dusty projected exhilarating transgressions of social and behavioral boundaries that her earliest fans absorbed with curiosity and delight; these included Dusty’s apparent force of will in the act of self-invention, her presumed self-confidence that audiences would embrace her postSpringfields persona, and her well-documented refusals to back away from the friction caused by her actions. As Simon Bell told me, and as was quoted in chapter 1, young people who identified as fans felt that “Dusty was the leader of a gang we wanted to be part of.” The discourse of Dusty as an agent of self-discovery started among British youth who were in their teens and early twenties around 1964. As members of the Dusty Springfield Fan Club, they, in turn, shared it with fans in the United States and Commonwealth countries with whom they corresponded as pen pals. The discourse was kept alive through Dusty’s period of obscurity in the 1970s and 1980s, largely through readers’ letters to a variety of fan publications, and transferred to the Internet through a multiplicity of Dusty fan forums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In this section, I concentrate on the activities and letters of a cluster of fans who were members of the 1960s fan club—Carole, Moira, and Edward—who were kind enough to share with me their recollections and memorabilia from the period of their early Dusty fandom.2 This section is organized around their Dusty-centered

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relationships: I focus first on the friendship of nineteen-year-old Carole and seventeen-year-old Moira (both from Manchester, U.K.) as they followed Dusty’s performances from venue to venue in the north of England from 1965 to 1968; second, the 1967 pen pal friendship between Moira and seventeen-year-old Edward (from New York City); and third, the Internet friendship of Carole and Nancy (from Boston), whose Let’s Talk Dusty! Web site, launched in 2006, has, in turn, spawned countless other relationships— real and virtual—among Dusty fans across the world.3

CAROLE AND MOIRA

Carole and Moira first became Dusty fans when Dusty was a member of the Springfields, a broadly popular folk-pop group that included Dusty’s older brother, Tom, and Tim Feild (later replaced by Mike Hurst).4 As preteenagers, Carole and Moira, like many of Dusty’s fans in Britain, watched the Springfields’ television show and took particular delight in Dusty’s playful, “little sister” interaction with Tom, Tim, and Mike but also in her notably mature, attention-grabbing solo passages (as heard, for instance, in “Island of Dreams”). In transforming herself into a figure of glamour and then leaving the secure, family-like Springfields fold to become a soloist, Dusty grew up, quite literally, in front of the British public; she established her independence and became a career girl in ways that resonated with unprecedented numbers of British girls who were doing, or trying to do, the same thing. Many fans have remarked on their reaction to Dusty’s solos while she was with the Springfields: Dusty held her own onstage with the boys while demonstrating a vocal identity and musical talent that was fully distinct from her brother’s. This appears to have positioned Dusty as an important model for young listeners who also were approaching adulthood and beginning to negotiate their own relationships with their families. Vocally, Dusty demonstrated that she could blend in beautifully with Tom, Mike, and Tim, but she also proved that she had a separate musical identity and was capable of creating a musical life independent of them. Carole and Moira, both in their late teens, were among Dusty’s legions of fans, boys and girls alike, who witnessed this performance of vocal and social independence on television; they were just leaving school, beginning jobs, and becoming financially independent from their own families. It was through their families that Carole and Moira met around 1965 (see figure 4.1). While chatting about their children’s interests, Carole’s mother and Moira’s father, both employed by British Aerospace, found that their daughters were avid fans of Dusty Springfield, each having entered Dustyworld (Carole’s term) in late 1963 upon hearing Dusty’s first solo hit, “I Only

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Fig. 4.1. Moira (left) and Carole near the ABC Theatre in Blackpool, United Kingdom, August 1966 (Carole Gibson)

Want to Be with You.” Moira, at the suggestion of her father, wrote a letter to Carole, which he delivered to Carole’s mother. Through the parental gobetweens, Carole received the letter, and soon thereafter the girls met regularly to share their many Dusty fan activities. Other members of this Manchester-centered outpost of Dustyworld included equally passionate fans: Glynis, another Carole, Sandie, Judy, and Eileen (from Scotland) among them (see figure 4.2). The girls’ immersion in all things Dusty involved the following activities: weekly monitoring of Dusty’s position on the pop charts, viewing and hearing all of Dusty’s television and radio appearances (on Ready, Steady, Go! and Top of the Pops and, later, her own television series), scouring the music newspapers (New Musical Express, Disc and Music Echo, Melody Maker, Record Mirror) and national and local daily papers for mention of Dusty, finding posters of Dusty that were suitable for decorating their bedroom walls (the magazine FAB, published by the pirate radio station Radio Luxembourg, was a favorite source),5 maintaining a scrapbook with all of Dusty’s newspaper clippings (sometimes using a homemade mixture of flour and water for glue), playing Dusty’s latest singles until all the songs’ lyrics were memorized, corresponding weekly with up to ten pen pals from Britain and abroad (Carole’s pen pals included Joe, a U.S. soldier stationed in Vietnam,

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Fig. 4.2. Carole, Sandie, and Eileen congregate in Eileen’s bedroom after seeing Dusty at the Castaway’s Club (Carole Gibson)

and Vikki, a friend of one of the Ronettes’ cousins), sewing dresses that looked exactly like the ones worn by Dusty on her television appearances (see figure 4.3) or as pictured in the newspaper, attending to their hair and makeup to be as Dusty-like as their parents would allow, and, whenever necessary, defending Dusty from detractors. Seeing Dusty perform live was, by far, the most important of all these activities. Though live performance was costly, logistically complicated (sometimes involving train tickets and hotel accommodations in addition to the price of admission), and even marginally illegal for the underage teenagers, it was the most highly valued activity because it included the possibility of meeting Dusty. Carole and Moira would often arrive at the theater five hours early in order to stand at the stage door hoping to catch a glimpse of Dusty as she entered or exited the building. With cameras and autograph books at the ready, the girls stood sentinel until the star arrived. Dusty and her entourage—including at this time Madeline Bell, friend Peppi Borza, and personal assistant Pat Rhodes (née Barnett)—began to recognize the two girls who were often posted outside her stage door when she performed in Manchester, Liverpool, or Bolton. Dusty posed for pictures with Carole and Moira and on at least two occasions sent Peppi to single them out of the autograph queue and invite them into her dressing room for a private chat. Carole remembers that one of the most elaborately planned trips to see Dusty—a Boxing Day pantomime at the Liverpool Empire—required several fans to share the cost of a room at the Stork Hotel but did not yield a personal meeting with the star. After shows at such large venues, as described by Moira below in her letter to

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Fig. 4.3. Moira with Dusty, Peppi Borza, and Madeline Bell at the stage door of ABC Theatre, Blackpool; Moira (front) is wearing a handmade copy of the dress Dusty had worn on Thank Your Lucky Stars TV show in June 1965 (Carole Gibson)

Edward, the theater was likely to become a place of screaming pandemonium and aggressive jostling for a limited number of free Dusty photographs. The girls soon learned that it was at the smaller venues in the hours before the show that they were likely to make personal contact with Dusty and her friends. Another of Carole’s vivid memories of a live performance did not actually feature Dusty at all, but Buddy Rich, an American jazz bandleader and drummer, who had publicly insulted Dusty during their joint engagement at New York’s Basin Street East nightclub in November 1966. Rich, apparently miffed that Dusty had received top billing when he was booked to appear with her, had initially refused the singer’s request for extra rehearsals in New York with his top-rated band.6 Grudgingly agreeing to rehearse, Rich deliberately made the sessions difficult; after one of them, Dusty slapped him (or, in some accounts, punched him). Before or after the slap, he issued an epithet aimed at Dusty that circulated in the New York and London newspapers in the days following. In solidarity with Dusty, a number of Dusty’s fans, including Carole and Moira, attended Rich’s show at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall for the express purpose of booing the arrogant bandleader and heckling his performance from the cheap seats (see figure 4.4). Carole found herself in the position of “defending” Dusty again when rumors of the singer’s gay sexual orientation—for years an open secret in London’s media and performing circles—began to circulate among audiences

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Fig. 4.4. Carole in her Bolton backyard, posing with a poster stolen from the Manchester venue of Buddy Rich’s show (Carole Gibson)

around 1967. Sometime in 1967 or 1968 Carole recalled that, while ironing, she was jolted to attention when listening to Emperor Rosko’s radio show. On the live show, during which Rosko typically took calls from his listeners, one caller asked, “Is it true that Dusty is a lesbian?” Though Rosko changed the subject instantly without answering the question and moved quickly onto another topic, Carole stopped ironing, stood “stock still,” and felt “mortified.” Her reaction, she said, had less to do with whatever truth the caller’s question may or may not have contained than with Carole’s fear of irreparable damage to Dusty’s career. Though it is now well known that a large number of the 1960s London pop music world was gay or bisexual, most remained closeted in their public lives and knew that being “out” would lead to prurient media attention, loss of record contracts, and eventual banishment from the public sphere. Despite the dreaded sequence of events that was sure to follow an outing, few performers feared the press until the late 1960s or early 1970s, when the tabloids became obsessively interested in the contents of celebrity closets. As the 1960s came to a close, both Carole and Moira found their fan activities limited by their changing social situations. At a Dusty performance at Darwen’s Cranberry Fold Inn in August 1968—this time, both girls were with their boyfriends and another couple, not the usual girls’ circle of Dusty

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fans—Carole knew that she could not expect her boyfriend to stand in the autograph queue with her after the show. Leaving the theater without queuing to see Dusty, after years of doing so with Moira and the girls, Carole felt as if “a door was closing.” Struck by the cold realization that this part of her life seemed to be over, she recalled feeling “torn between old and new behavior,” “empty,” and “upset.” Another factor that limited the girls’ fan activities or, more accurately, limited their openness about those activities was a kind of peer censorship or “fan policing” that had the effect of causing many Dusty fans to conceal their fandom or at least, as Carole put it, to “hide the extent of it.” Carole, Moira, and many other fans I interviewed mentioned that the full range of fan behavior, characterized by the activities just described, seemed to be acceptable only when focused on male performers. The fans I spoke to, both male and female, sensed disapproval from their peers when such activities were centered on Dusty and devised strategies to disguise their fandom. For example, in order to plaster images of their beehived idol on the inside of their desks or on the covers of their schoolbooks without fear of censure, fans camouflaged the object of their attention by surrounding Dusty’s pictures with those of the Beatles, Elvis, or the Stones. Though this dodge prevented fans from devoting all available surfaces exclusively to Dusty and muted the message they intended to send—that Dusty was their primary idol and hero—it served the practical purpose of diverting the fan police and allowing the ritual adornment of personal possessions to proceed unmolested. Carole felt that only other fans understood her and said, “I could only be myself with other Dusty fans.” She sensed that the unspoken message was that “it wasn’t acceptable for a girl to be affected by another girl” and soon found herself leading “two different lives—one with the Dusty friends and the other with the non-Dusty friends.” The fan police had decreed, “I [Carole] could be a Beatles fan and go crazy for them and it wouldn’t be weird, but not for Dusty.” Carole and Moira’s period of greatest fan activity came to an end in late 1968. From this point, their Dustyworld began to disintegrate as a result of changes both in Dusty’s career and in their own lives. After 1968, Dusty’s career became more focused on the United States, and shortly after Dusty in Memphis she began to make plans to move to California while reducing the number of her live appearances in Britain. For fans like Carole and Moira, for whom live performances had been so important, this left a void that could not be filled by other activities or by other singers’ performances. Fewer releases of singles and albums meant less chart action and less publicity in general; hence, other fan activities that derived from Dusty’s media appearances and newspaper articles began to dry up also. Even if Dusty had continued at her 1960s pace, Carole and Moira’s lives, increasingly absorbed

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with the concerns of their respective impending marriages, jobs, and later, children, left little time for personal interests. For these kinds of reasons, the intensity of Carole and Moira’s fandom dropped off considerably in the 1970s and 1980s, though their admiration, loyalty, and affection for Dusty remained constant. Despite the nearly twenty-year gap in fan activity that coincided with Dusty’s “wilderness years” and Carole and Moira’s years of immersion in their families and jobs, both view their early fandom as having shaped their musical tastes and imprinted them indelibly as lifelong “massive Dusty fans.” Carole maintains, “If Dusty hadn’t been in my life since the age of eleven, I’d be a different person,” and Moira states that “no other singer came even close” to affecting her as Dusty had in the 1960s.

MOIRA AND EDWARD, 1967

With addresses supplied by Pat Barnett (Dusty’s personal assistant and manager of the fan club), Moira sent weekly letters to her pen pals while maintaining a full schedule of fan activities. One of Moira’s surviving letters, written to Edward in New York, is fourteen pages long—typed, singlespaced—and provides an extraordinarily detailed firsthand account of her circle’s Dusty-centered activities.7 She began by listing all of Dusty’s top ten singles to date (there had been eight in the United Kingdom by 1967), along with their highest U.K. chart position. She also explained how the chart positions were calculated (from an amalgam of several national and regional sales charts and newspaper and radio sources) and added her critique of its methodology. She then related a brief history of her fandom that started with the Springfields and intensified when Dusty released her first solo single, “I Only Want to Be with You.” In the wake of this song’s release, Dusty traveled to Manchester to promote the record on the radio program The Beat Show. As Moira explains, she obtained a free ticket to the show and saw Dusty for the first time in a live performance. Well, that night in November the show finished about 9:30 p.m. and we all waited outside hoping to catch a glimpse of her as she dashed off. We waited about thirty minutes until ten o’clock then we saw her come into the foyer of the theatre. . . . She stayed in the foyer signing photos of herself for about ten minutes then the policeman came out and said, “when Dusty gets in the car, we’ll give out the photos.” So a couple of minutes later out trots Dusty and everyone rushed forward. (I had been right at the front, just next to Dusty but when everyone surged forward I ended up at the back somehow. Something went wrong somewhere!!!). . . . Anyway, Dusty got in this big blue car and a man drove her off to catch a train in Manchester. . . . Just as this man

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was driving her off the men at the theatre threw all the photos up in the air because there wasn’t enough to go around. Everyone dived for them . . . they were clambouring over walls, fighting in the gutters so I gave up hope of getting one . . . instead I looked up and watched the car move away. Just as I was doing so Dusty turned around in the seat, smiled and waved to me. I was thrilled to bits. At that moment I valued that more than an autograph. Well, that was the very first time I ever saw Dusty in person.

Moira went on to give Edward a complete report of major and minor Dusty news in the period from November 1963 to mid-1967 that ranged from information regarding Dusty’s professional honors and politics to her love life. Taken from the pages of the musical weeklies, national dailies, and fan newsletters, Moira even summarized Dusty’s ailments: colds, flu, laryngitis, exhaustion, myopia, and an infected foot wound incurred during a barefoot walk on Brazil’s Ipanema beach. Following this was an item regarding a newspaper’s beauty contest: “In the spring of 1965 two readers from the Record Mirror held a beauty contest of all the girl singers and they wrote: ‘We’ve been going through all the pictures of girl singers in the Record Mirror and decided that if you held a beauty contest for all of them, the voting would be: number one, Dusty Springfield.” Moira devoted more than a full page to informing Edward of the December 1964 South Africa incident. Using a “headline news” reporting technique, Moira gave her account by quoting directly from different newspapers’ headlines: These were the headlines of the story of only two papers, The Daily Express and the Manchester Evening News: “Dusty Leaves Hopping Mad,” “Dusty Ordered Out—Colour Bar Rumpus,” “Dusty Back With a Rap for S. Africa,” “MPs Give Dusty a Pat on the Back,” “Other Stars Cancel Tours after Race Row,” “‘No Apartheid’ Dusty Quits South Africa,” “Dusty—M.U. [Musician’s Union] Must Shoulder the Blame,” “Miners Back Pop Star Dusty.”

Guessing correctly that the New York press would cover the incident less thoroughly than the British papers, Moira explained to Edward what the dispute was about: She was just asked either to leave, or play to segregated audiences—so Dusty decided to leave (I think I would have done that under the circumstances. I can’t stand racial prejudice). Before Dusty left for S. Africa she said there was an agreement which said she would not be playing before segregated audiences and Dusty said “If they try to alter it I shall be home on the next aircraft.”

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Clearly delighted with the week’s worth of daily newspaper and television coverage generated by Dusty’s stand against apartheid, Moira continued to quote the newspapers: “In another paper it said, ‘Dusty Springfield flew home on Friday morning to a heroine’s welcome.’ Half of Fleet Street waited at London Airport to greet her on her return.” She concluded her report with the story of Dusty’s commendation by four members of Parliament: I think the best article I liked about this subject was when the four M.P.s backed her up . . . the motion says: “This house warmly applauds the action of Miss Dusty Springfield in standing firmly and courageously against the obnoxious doctrine of apartheid in South Africa.” It goes on to urge other entertainers invited to South Africa to be equally forthright in their condemnation of racial policies.

In the year following the South Africa incident, Moira reported with pride that her favorite singer had been voted Number One World Singer by the readers of the New Musical Express and explained the significance of the honor: “it was the first time a British Girl Singer had been voted No. 1 World Singer in the fourteen years the Poll had been going. . . . One headline was ‘Dusty Sweeps to the Top of the Pop World.’ ” American singers had taken the award in previous years, most recently Brenda Lee, and Moira’s pleasure was palpable as she quoted another newspaper report: “It said Dusty Springfield has been voted the world’s top girl singer in a poll which has upset the Tin Pan Alley formbook. . . . One of the other headlines was ‘Dusty on Top of the World.’ ” Though Dusty was busy sweeping to the top of the pop world, she had time, as Moira wrote, for numerous practical jokes, mostly aimed at her brother Tom. As though recounting the exploits of a personal friend or sibling, Moira regaled Edward with tales of Dusty’s notorious practical jokes, such as sending fifteen taxis or expensive gourmet meals to Tom’s door without his knowledge, removing all the furniture from her brother’s apartment while he was out of town, or falsely reporting catastrophic water leaks—on her brother’s behalf—to the Water Board, warranting emergency visits from an inspector in the middle of the night. Several other references to Dusty’s sense of humor appeared in connection with her brother, her band, and her fans. For instance, after seeing Dusty perform in a Blackpool club, Moira reflected, “That’s one thing I like about Dusty. She doesn’t just get up and sing, she jokes with the audience and holds discussions with them and treats them just like you would friends, as if she’s known them for years.” Reflecting again, this time gauging and trying to explain her own intensely emotional responses to Dusty’s performances, Moira responded to what appears to have been a question in Edward’s letter to her:

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When you said about “over-liking” Dusty, perhaps you are right in some respect because there was a time when she had been on T.V. one night and after she had finished I felt really upset—I don’t mind admitting it—but I used to feel such a fool that I carried on in this way I began to think there was something abnormal about me but I just couldn’t pin down what set me off like that (I think I must have reacted in some ways like all the millions of Beatles and Stones fans when they are at a concert only in a different way.) I didn’t scream or anything like that and I didn’t go wild, I used to just join in with my friends singing along with Dusty and cheering her on whenever we were at her shows and then when it had finished I never quite knew what hit me, I was ready to burst into tears, honest, and as I say I just didn’t know what was wrong with me (I’m perfectly normal believe it or not, but I just think it was all the excitement and I was always longing to meet Dusty). . . . I think now that I have met Dusty I don’t get all upset the way I used to, I just keep raving on and on for months after. I think all it was really is that I wanted to meet her and get myself known by her. Well I’ve done that . . . met her four times and each time she has remembered my face and my name.

The passage, while it ended on a note of triumph—Moira’s success in getting Dusty to recognize her not just as one of many fans, but as Moira—also echoed Carole’s feelings regarding peer disapproval of a level of fandom that, had it been channeled into Beatles or Stones fan activities, would have been regarded as “normal.” Like Carole, Moira learned to mute her enthusiasm when she was in the company of disapproving individuals and gravitated toward those who shared or, at least, accepted it: Another thing that I hated was going into work the day after I had seen Dusty in a show—you just can’t tell them all what it was like because I used to rave on and on and I’m sure I got on everyone’s nerves because none of them were really interested, least of all interested in Dusty. There’s only one girl in the office I can go and tell about these shows. She is a fan of Dusty’s but has never seen her on stage although she says she would love to and next time she comes around she is going to.

One imagines that Moira succeeded in adding this officemate to the Dusty circle at the soonest possible opportunity. Moira also shared with Edward and, no doubt, her officemate news of Dusty’s personal life, reporting not only what she had read in the newspapers but also what she had gleaned from her own firsthand observations of Dusty’s stage door comings and goings during her stakeouts with Carole. In a section of the letter headed “About LOVE,” Moira listed the various men with whom, according to the newspapers, Dusty may have been involved.

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These included singer Eden Kane, actor/singer John Leyton, “one of the Dave Clark Five but I don’t know which one,” Chris Curtis of the Searchers, and Burt Bacharach. Of these, Bacharach seemed to hold special promise: “Now that’s one person I would have loved to see her marry. I think he’s gorgeous.” Relying more on what she had seen than what she had read, Moira concluded that, among Dusty’s constellation of suitors, Peppi Borza was probably her favorite. “I believe they’ve been going out together for some time . . . when we went to see Dusty in Liverpool last October Peppi was there again and we saw them going in and coming out of a restaurant holding hands and arms around each other.” She supplemented this by quoting a newspaper item in which Peppi stated, “I know Dusty won’t take this as a proposal in print but let’s say she is the girl I would love to marry.” Moira joked that Dusty and her many boyfriends “could have all gone out on tour as one big group and called themselves The Mutual Admiration Society or Dusty and the Possibles!!!” Moira had not yet picked up on the gay innuendo that was beginning to surface in articles about Dusty, articles that continually noted Dusty’s unmarried, unattached status while noting also that she had bought a house in London and was sharing it, decorating it, and throwing parties in it with a woman, the American musician and painter Norma Tanega. Edward’s fan circle in New York had, however, picked up on it. Edward told me in an interview in 2006: “My friend, Linda, and fellow Dusty fan, eventually told me in 1968 that she knew Dusty was gay and although the news didn’t shock me, it did not surprise me.” Edward, like Carole, was unsettled by the knowledge that such revelations, if circulated publicly, would have ended Dusty’s career. Moira’s letter provides a rare snapshot of Dusty’s British fans’ last days of innocence and recalls a time in Dusty’s career that is almost unimaginable now—when facts of her personal life were unknown to the public, and journalists and biographers had not yet dissected them. From the late 1960s on, British fans became increasingly aware of the fissures in Dusty’s personal and professional life—distorted, of course, by the press, and further distorted by Dusty’s efforts to withhold information from, or deliberately misinform, reporters. American fans, however, were mostly unaware of this until years later. American audiences, as I learned from Edward, had barely known the early, folksy Dusty of the Springfields. Though the Springfields had had a U.S. hit with “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” (on the U.S. pop charts for six weeks in 1962, rising to number twenty), audiences in the States had not experienced the televised family narrative of Tom’s little sister who struck out on her own, became glamorous, established a career independent of her older brother, and far surpassed her middle-class family’s expectations of their formerly tomboyish daughter. They had not experienced her as Carole

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and Moira had, in small nightclubs, through stage door encounters, or dressing room chats. American audiences had not seen Dusty’s countless television appearances on her own television series or on teen-oriented shows such as Ready, Steady, Go! during which she frequently displayed the humor and charisma for which she was known in Britain. Despite her television appearances on nationally broadcast U.S. shows such as the Ed Sullivan Show (as discussed in chapter 2), Dusty’s exposure in the United States was limited in comparison with the media saturation she enjoyed in Britain for most of the 1960s. She was still a relatively blank slate in the United States, a status that seemed to offer the singer relief from the British press storm that was gathering concerning her sexual orientation and provided an opportunity to create herself anew as a transatlantic soul singer. Edward, one of the first wave of U.S. Dusty fans, became aware of her when he was about thirteen years old. He described the moment he first heard “I Only Want to Be with You” on the radio: “I was mesmerized by Dusty’s voice and talent. I formed an instant fascination with her voice and began an active search to learn more about her.” From that point on, Edward’s activities mirrored those of Dusty’s British fans. He “checked the T.V. listings for any mention of a Dusty appearance in the States.” It became a weekly routine “to make sure I was able to see her whenever she did American TV.” Dusty appeared on teen-oriented programs like Shivaree and Hulabaloo but also on the musical comedy shows of Red Skelton and Jonathan Winters and the talk shows of Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop, Della Reese, Pat Boone, and Jimmy Dean.8 Like Moira and Carole, Edward regularly checked the U.S. music press for information on the chart positions of Dusty’s songs and reviews of her latest releases. On the day of Dusty’s record releases, he would take a forty-minute train ride from his home in the Bronx to Colony Records in midtown Manhattan’s Brill Building “to make sure I got one of the first copies.” On the return trip, he remembers, “I very carefully held the record in my hands ’til I arrived home and was able to put it on the hi-fi and play it over and over.” In addition to the American papers, he sought out imported British papers, New Musical Express, Disc and Music Echo, and Melody Maker, to track Dusty’s U.K. releases and appearances. Upon becoming a member of Dusty’s American fan club at the age of sixteen in 1965, Edward received the fan club newsletter, “which contained personal messages from Dusty to her fans” and established the pen pal relationship with Moira that generated detailed correspondence of the kind previously quoted. The two exchanged photographs of themselves, newspaper clippings, and fan paraphernalia. Of Moira’s letters, Edward’s favorite parts concerned “her experiences seeing Dusty in cabaret in the Manchester area and meeting her after or before the shows.” Inspired by Moira’s reports of personal meetings with Dusty, Edward was

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determined to meet Dusty himself and became “somewhat relentless” in finding her during her trips to New York. First meeting with Dusty in 1967, he recalled: A secretary in the Philips Records NY publicity office let it slip that Dusty was staying at the Gorham Hotel on West 55th St. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying to call her to ask if I could see her. After many calls one night I finally reached Dusty at 12:30 AM! I guess she really did like to talk on the phone. She was so friendly it was almost unimaginable that she was willing to speak with me. . . . I finally worked up the nerve to ask if she had any free time to meet with me. I was shocked when she said that although she was leaving NY for London the next night perhaps I could come down and meet her at her hotel in the early evening. I arrived at her hotel early and was told Dusty was out. I waited in the lobby and soon a big black limo pulled up in front of the hotel. When the driver opened the limo door a vision in multicolored mini skirt and a black wrap sealskin fur coat appeared. She came into the hotel lobby, looked at me and exclaimed, “You must be Edward!”

With the eighteen-year-old Edward now carrying Dusty’s several shopping bags, the two proceeded to Dusty’s hotel room, where they conversed about her career. Dusty related that she had spoken with American songwriters Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, whose proprietary relationship with Motown prevented her, unfortunately, from recording their new material, and also that she had met with Carole King to discuss the possibility of recording one of her latest songs. In addition, Dusty alluded to the problems she had encountered in conducting business between the U.S. and British branches of Philips records; with simultaneous releases on both sides of the Atlantic, record promotion had become increasingly difficult for her. Edward, unlike Carole and Moira, had no circle of Dusty friends with whom to share his fan activities. He, too, though, experienced a form of fan policing at the Catholic boys’ school he attended: “Young teenage boys weren’t supposed to have an interest in female pop singing stars. Baseball stars, yes, girl singers from England, no. So I kept my interest to myself and rarely shared it with others. Dusty became my hobby and secret passion. Somehow Dusty became part of my private world.” About five years following this meeting, Dusty moved to the United States, and Edward attended as many of her performances as possible. These included her 1972 Persian Room show at New York’s Plaza Hotel, a 1980 appearance with Peter Allen at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, and her shows at the Grand Finale in New York, also in 1980.9 At the Grand Finale, Edward was invited to Dusty’s opening and closing night parties, and he was invited to similar events in Los Angeles following her Greek Theater show. Yet, such

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occurrences were few and far between because of Dusty’s reduced number of live appearances in the 1970s and 1980s and her sporadic record releases. This meant that fans like Edward were increasingly reliant on fan newsletters for information; his main sources of Dusty information were the fan groups he had joined, mainly the “authorized” Dusty Springfield International (for whom he acted as Dusty’s liaison at her request). Through these, Edward gleaned bits of news regarding Dusty’s new life in California and her occasional nightclub dates, TV appearances, and record releases. Though Dusty was not entirely invisible after moving to the United States and had made a number of comeback attempts in the 1970s and 1980s that were timed to coincide with the releases of It Begins Again (1978), Living Without Your Love (1979), and an alliance with Peter Stringfellow in 1985, she was by no means the ubiquitous media presence that she had been in Britain in the 1960s. The 1978 and 1979 albums were poorly received, and the Stringfellow deal proved to be disastrous; hence, the publicity generated by these ventures was fleeting, and many fans lost sight of Dusty. Fan organizations, especially the Dusty Springfield International, sustained the fan community throughout Dusty’s wilderness years and were largely responsible for keeping interest in her career alive in the period before her comeback in the late 1980s. Another publication, the Dusty Springfield Bulletin, in continuous circulation from 1987 to the present, reminded sales-oriented record executives that Dusty’s substantial and loyal fan base was viable even after two decades of relative obscurity.10 In the years before widespread Internet use, the Bulletin sustained Dusty’s role in fans’ lives and functioned not only as a source of information and locus of community but also as an emotional touchstone, the latter assuming even greater significance, given the fan policing that many Dusty fans still experienced.

CAROLE, NANCY, AND THE DUSTY COMMUNITY, 2007

Carole has been a subscriber and regular contributor of letters, reviews, and articles to the Dusty Springfield Bulletin since early 1997. By the early 1990s, when her family no longer required round-the-clock attention and when Dusty was again visible in Britain (having finally sustained a true comeback with a succession of viable singles following 1987’s “What Have I Done to Deserve This”), Carole was able to gradually revivify her fandom. This included few of the old activities she had shared with Moira in the mid-1960s but took the form of upgrading and updating her collection of Dusty recordings, contributing to the Bulletin, and following Dusty’s television and radio engagements. After Dusty’s death in 1999, Carole established new Dusty friendships through the Bulletin and also through the many fan Web sites that had

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sprung up in the 1990s. It was in an Internet Dusty forum that Carole first “met” Nancy, a U.S. fan, whom she later met in person at the annual Dusty Day event at Henley-upon-Thames in 2005.11 The two began to correspond regularly in early 2006. Having met in person only a couple of times, Carole and Nancy today maintain a correspondence via e-mail and have been active participants on discussion boards maintained by various Dusty Web sites. Though Carole and Nancy grew up an ocean apart—in northern England and the southern United States, respectively—they shared a sense of community centered on their love of Dusty’s voice, music, and persona. This sense of community inspired them (along with a group of collaborators) to create a new Web site, Let’s Talk Dusty! to complement the already comprehensive archival Web sites of long standing, Woman of Repute, A Girl Called Dusty, and Devotedly Dusty;12 Carole serves as one of the new site’s moderators.13 While Carole and Nancy have this activity in common, their narratives of fandom and self-discovery draw from different aspects of Dusty’s life and music. Unlike the fans discussed thus far, whose first experiences of Dusty as a soloist came through the song “I Only Want to Be with You,” Nancy recalls that “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” was the first Dusty song she remembered.14 Though the song is often ridiculed for its prefeminist sentiment (Dusty herself joked about it) or heralded as a classic of the drag queen circuit, Nancy notes that it was the quality of Dusty’s voice that made her pay attention to lyrics that she may have otherwise ignored; it seemed to rework the lyrics’ surface meaning into a different message. Nancy remembered, “I think W&H made a big impact on me as a young adolescent because I fantasized about being a girl who took charge of her destiny . . . for me it’s always been the antithesis of a sexist lyric . . . it was about a ‘girl’ who wasn’t going to sit around and wait for love to come to her . . . she was going to take action to draw the ‘man’ to her. . . . And again there’s that deep strong voice—and this time solo [no longer blended in a trio]—so intense—maybe that’s what sold me on the weight of the lyrics—because as many have said, when Dusty sang, there was so much more meaning, gravitas, weight, substance.” For a period of years after the 1960s, Nancy lost track of Dusty, as did many early fans, but became reacquainted with her music after Dusty’s death. Especially taken with Dusty in Memphis, Nancy shared her reawakened enthusiasm with friends, who later gave her Dancing with Demons shortly after its U.S. paperback publication in 2002. Acknowledging that it is “a trashography,” to use Nancy’s term (“one of those books rushed to print to make money before the corpse is cold”), Dancing with Demons gave Nancy a new perspective on Dusty’s life and career; it laid bare for the first time and in startling detail Dusty’s psychological and sexual orientation. Dwelling on features of Dusty’s life that the singer had long tried to conceal—alcohol and

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drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, self-cutting, suicide attempts, a slide into near poverty, and the permanently disfiguring beating she received from the woman she married15—Valentine and Wickham’s account came as a shock to most readers.16 Despite its obvious intent to scandalize, the book held great meaning for Nancy. She explained: I think that Dusty touched some memories of my adolescence and young adulthood, of having to be in the closet, of being emotionally tormented. I’ve often thought it strange that I would relate to someone so amazingly talented as Dusty. But there was some link on the feeling level. Perhaps in having compassion for Dusty I was able to offer some for my younger (and older) self. I think I sort of grew up that part of me through caring for Dusty. The process had a lot to do with grieving what I had lost, getting in touch with the sadness of those years. Dusty allowed me to do that through feeling those things first for her.

As regards the book’s seemingly irrefutable evidence that Dusty’s main affective and sexual relationships had always been with women despite the singer’s own claims of bisexuality, Nancy welcomed the information, though took a position that is shared by most fans, gay and straight: “I am not one who thinks that Dusty’s private life should have been kept a secret after her death. I just wish it had been told with more respect and insight.” She is also proud that Dusty is “one of ‘us’ ” elaborating: It’s not just that there are so few “gay role models.” It’s that she was so talented and unique, that she had the ability to move people with her songs, that she was the greatest popular singer Britain has produced, that she was absolutely fabulous—exotic, funny, sexy, cute, and feminine. When’s the last time lesbians could lay claim to a talent and personality like that? Dusty is like a shooting star that lighted up the sky. She defied all the tired and annoying stereotypes of lesbians.

Nancy knows that Dusty “didn’t want to be a part of anyone’s cause or be put in any camp” yet is unapologetic that “we claim her as ours.” Understanding Dusty’s need to remain mostly closeted to preserve her career, Nancy states, “Who could blame her. I don’t.” She adds that Dusty “is free now and it’s all right that she inspires us and makes us proud.” The “us” of Nancy’s statements refers proudly to lesbians but would seem also to have an expanded meaning—the “us” of an international Dusty community—given the inclusive dynamics of the Let’s Talk Dusty! fansite. As an example of this community, Nancy described the arrangements made by users of the site to attend the 2007 Dusty Day in London:

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A group of us LTDers rented a flat for a week in London . . . there was a twenty year-old British babi dyke, a seventeen year-old straight Aussie girl, a forty-something queer artist from Bournemouth, a bisexual British girl of sixteen, a straight Welshman in his fifties, me (fifty-five at the time, and American)—you get the picture. I think you could say that’s community. I mean this Aussie had never met any of us in person, and flew halfway around the world to be with her “Dusty family.”

Nancy finds that the feature most characteristic of Dusty family members is their acute perception of the lasting impression Dusty has made on them; she adds that a vast majority of the LTD fans she has surveyed say that “their lives would be seriously diminished without Dusty in it.” She concluded, “You will hear at times on LTD about the emotional impact that Dusty has on fans. Hell, she changed my life.” In these stories of early fandom and the persistent discourse of selfdiscovery, the sound of Dusty’s voice was consistently cited as the single most compelling element. Many underscored this by pointing out that they were fascinated not only by Dusty’s singing voice but also by her speaking voice and even the wheezing laughter of her last interviews. In trying to establish what, exactly, fans were responding to in Dusty’s voice, I learned only that there is a universally perceived presence of a “mysterious” and “mesmerizing” vocal quality: that her voice contains something that cannot be pinned down, a magnetizing element that lies beyond rational explanation. Efforts to describe Dusty’s voice have generated much of the discourse of virtuosity that, unsurprisingly, is articulated most closely by Dusty’s fellow singers, those who are invested professionally in a perpetual quest for and analysis of that which Dusty possessed—the means to mesmerize listeners. It is equally unsurprising that their discourse relies on the musical insiders’ daily language of metaphor, bypassing the clichés and conventions that critics and scholars often marshal to describe sound’s affective qualities. The following section draws on the words, music, and metaphors of Dusty’s professional peers to address aspects of the singer’s virtuosity: her perceived triumph over category, her widely cited ability to elicit intense emotional reactions in her listeners, and her mesmerizing voice. VIRTUOSITY DUSTY’S VOICE AND THE “MOMENT OF FIRST HEARING”

Central to the discourse of Dusty’s virtuosity is the “moment of first hearing,” the exact time when fans recall being “stopped in their tracks” by Dusty’s voice. Jerry Wexler’s recollection is typical: “I think my first con-

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sciousness of Dusty Springfield was driving to work one day in 1965 from Long Island into our Atlantic Records office in Manhattan and I had the radio on, of course. And here comes this beautiful voice; I hadn’t heard it before and it was just mesmerizing.”17 Though Wexler attaches this memory to Dusty’s recording of “Some of Your Lovin’,” most British fans date their first experience of Dusty’s post-Springfields voice to late 1963 and “I Only Want to Be with You.” The song is held in special regard by British singers as it represents not only the first time they had heard Dusty’s solo voice but also the first song to be performed by a solo singer on the now-legendary U.K. music show Top of the Pops in 1963 and the first British Invasion solo hit to appear on the U.S. charts in 1964 (one month after the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand”). For these reasons, the song is a landmark in transatlantic pop and has been recorded numerous times by British singers: the Bay City Rollers in 1976, Annie Lennox (with The Tourists) in 1979, and Samantha Fox in 1989. While the charms of Ivor Raymonde’s bouncy pop confection are reason enough for anyone to want to record it, the desire to invoke a generation’s shared memory of Dusty’s voice, “that incredible voice,” as Petula Clark put it, must also be another.18 Indeed, so strongly is the song associated with Springfield that Lennox, the Bay City Rollers, and Fox conjure the “moment of first hearing” in their versions simply by having chosen to record it. Lennox, when invited to contribute a statement for inclusion in the liner notes of the posthumous box set Simply . . . Dusty, chose to send a poem that seems to dwell on the arresting moment of realization that the voice one is hearing is unique. The poem begins with an act of listening that is suddenly transformed into a riveting event: “Listen / Now / Dusty is singing.” The singer, clad “in sparkle gown,” is “colouring / the drab evening once again” by virtue of her “perfection” and “impossible / arcs of vibrato,” which she spins “through / smouldering / waves / of invisible / sound.” Repeating the opening line at the end, Lennox attaches special gravity to the moment when “Dusty is singing”; she exhorts us to “listen / now.”19 Lennox’s poem would seem to echo Wexler’s experience when, on that day in 1965, he recalls that “her voice really struck me and I knew that this was somebody very special.”20 Blossom Dearie’s 1970 song, “Dusty Springfield,” also focuses on the listener’s instantly galvanized moment of attention: “Suddenly the song’s the thing / Fill your cup / come to the spring / And you’ll stand so still / And you’ll feel the thrill / Dusty Springfield.”21 Though separated by three decades, Dearie’s song and Lennox’s poem are notably similar in that they imbue elements of Dusty’s appearance—her gown, hair, eyes—with magical effects: with “pink and paisley skies / shining in green eyes,” flowers are “blooming in her hair”; later, “petals fall from her glance,” and “feathers float from her dance.” Despite these lines devoted to Dusty’s appearance, Dearie’s music

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makes clear that “the song’s the thing” by using a musical climax typical of Dusty’s own recordings to drive home the point. Seeming to copy Dusty’s favorite devices, at 1:06 to about 1:20, Dearie combines the highest pitch with the thickest orchestration and most intense dynamics to underscore the words “the song’s the thing,” leaving no doubt as to what is, ultimately, commanding the listener’s attention. Dearie also seems to signal Dusty’s preternatural abilities by setting her name in high relief (sung three times throughout the song at 0:00–0:03, 0:38–0:41, and 1:29–1:32), thus isolating it from the surrounding musical material: Its block chords, outlining a descending D minor chord with a final stepwise uptick in the soprano—A-F-D-E—and dry articulation—sound almost like a solemn intonation when compared with the chatty rhythms and legato C major melodic material immediately following. Furthermore, the built-in dissonances of the seventh chords— B ♭7-Gm7-E ♭7-F7—serve to cloak the name in mystery, one that seems all the more mysterious in its deliberate mismatch with the simple, even childlike, quality of the verse that follows. Yet another musical element serves to set apart the words “Dusty Springfield” from the rest of the text: Each of the three times Blossom Dearie sings it, it is accompanied by piano alone, a dramatic textural contrast with the song’s otherwise thoroughgoing orchestral accompaniment. It is worth noting that this song is markedly different from the other two tribute songs, “Hey John” and “Sweet Georgie Fame,” on Dearie’s album, Just the Way I Want to Be, the latter written as an appreciation of Fame, a British star who failed inexplicably to make an impact in the United States, and the former to commemorate Dearie’s first meeting with John Lennon. The more consequential musical and poetic tone of “Dusty Springfield” could be, in part, due to the collaboration of Dusty’s then-partner, Norma Tanega, who cowrote the song with Dearie and Jim Council. The fanciful images bear the imaginative stamp of Tanega’s lyrical style as heard in her “No Stranger Am I” (released in 1968 as the B side of “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten”) and other songs on her 1971 Philips album, It Won’t Hurt If You Smile. Dearie, often mentioned by Dusty as one of her favorite singers, returned Dusty’s admiration with this portrait of virtuosity that is, itself, virtuosic.

DEFYING CATEGORY

Another frequently cited element of Dusty’s virtuosity was her ability to sing convincingly in a number of genres. As Petula Clark observed, “I thought she was amazing, absolutely amazing . . . she was so versatile. She was able to sing all sorts of things and sing them very well.”22 Though Dusty is most strongly

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identified with soul music and melodrama, she insisted on addressing other genres and including them on her albums—jazz, samba, disco, Celtic traditional songs, country, even quasi-rap—and sang in several languages as well. On her British television programs, Dusty also performed material that she never released on record, the variety of which is demonstrated on CD and DVD compilations of her BBC appearances.23 Simon Bell, who performed and recorded with Dusty over a period of years, declared: “She was a great pop singer, a great soul singer, a great ballad singer, a great folk singer, a great jazz singer, she was so good at so many different things.”24 Dusty’s peers’ remarks on her versatility are almost always delivered with a tone of amazement; performers seem struck not only by her knowledge of and ability to address several genres but also by her unilateral dismissal of music industry norms that demanded specialization and branding of pop singers with a single musical identity. British audiences who had seen Dusty’s television programs grew accustomed to her cavalier attitude toward musical category and found nothing odd in the shows’ sequence of, say, a Motown song, a jazz number, an Irish traditional ballad, Broadway and British music hall songs, concluding with an Italian pop aria. This was, in fact, the exact program for the BBC television broadcast of Dusty on September 19, 1967: “Nowhere to Run,” “Sweet Lover No More,” “My Lagan Love,” “The Mood I’m In,” “It Ain’t All Honey and It Ain’t All Jam,” and “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” Vicki Wickham, then a production assistant for Ready, Steady, Go! observed: “Dusty had the most eclectic and diverse knowledge of music of anyone I have ever met. She knew classical, Brazilian, African, Jazz, electronic, comedy—Flanagan & Allan, Flanders & Swan, The Goons—Broadway and theatre, film music, pop and her all-time love, Rhythm and Blues—with everything including the kitchen sink (if it played music) in between.”25 Fans in the United Kingdom came to understand and value Dusty’s avoidance of category as one of the core features that distinguished her from other British and American singers who, though they may have ventured occasionally into other genres, almost always stayed firmly within their industry-determined niches. In declaring her “the best singer England has produced,” Universal recording engineer Gary Moore judged Dusty’s versatility to be an area in which her contemporaries could not compete: “I can’t think of any other, you know. There just isn’t. Dusty could do everything from country and western to soul to big band, ballads; she could do the lot with ease.”26 This avoidance of musical category, a trait that British audiences appreciated as singularly “Dusty,” worked against the singer when she relocated to the United States; American audiences had had only sporadic exposure to her on television and therefore had no frame of reference for Dusty’s ongo-

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ing embrace of various types of music. Failure to grasp this element of her musical personality explains, in large part, why Dusty was unable to match her British success in the United States; rather than recognizing it and foregrounding it as a selling point, U.S. managers and producers viewed it as a weakness, something they could not sell to the American public. They operated on the assumption that the U.S. mass market would not embrace such multiplicity of genres and sought a single marketing category for Dusty. As Pat Rhodes put it, “She got an American manager who said he could do this, he could do that, but when she got there what she found was they had no idea what type of artist she was. They thought she was somebody like another Peggy Lee who sat down at the piano or had a pianist there and just sang over the chink of glasses in the nightclub. Well, of course that wasn’t Dusty at all. That wasn’t her scene.”27 Seen in retrospect, and considering most audiences’ deep attachments to notions of category, the mid-sixties moment in which Dusty was able to circumvent musical labels with ease and achieve commercial success without industry branding must be seen as anomalous. The extent of the anomaly comes into focus in the seventies and eighties when, by contrast, Dusty found it increasingly difficult to withstand attempts to slot her—not only in the United States but also in Britain. At the same time U.S. managers were viewing her as a Las Vegas nightclub singer (largely a result of the Dusty in Memphis album, as suggested in chapter 2),28 British audiences had begun to categorize her as a sixties icon. When she tried to move away from the misguided cabaret image chosen for her by American managers and to throw off the British yoke of nostalgia, audiences seemed much less willing to accept Dusty’s play with musical boundaries. Indeed, her bid to reinvent herself with White Heat’s U.S. release in 1982 met with audience indifference and was stymied in Britain by her 1985 involvement with music entrepreneur Peter Stringfellow, whose contractual insistence on nostalgizing Dusty worked against her efforts to promote herself as a harder-edged “rock chick.”29 Dusty’s disregard of musical category, while widely praised, is usually understood simply as the singer’s eclectic tendency, evidence of a multifaceted talent, or a precocious desire to experiment. It is rarely framed as a conscious refusal of category’s cultural work; yet, Dusty’s lifelong traversal of numerous musical genres—always contrary to music industry practice—and willingness to go down with the ship rather than surrender her right to do so suggests that it was indeed just that. Dusty’s ability to sing across a range of genres and styles has an obvious place in the discourse of virtuosity, but her persistent choice to do so—to identify with all categories but, at the same time, with none—engages the discourse of postmodern identity also, a point to which I will return later.

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SPECTACLES OF FEELING

Regardless of the genre, Dusty’s theatrical delivery remained consistent; the result, whether the song was a cheery pub song or moody pop aria, were performances that visibly and audibly harnessed emotion in intensely pleasurable spectacles of feeling. Displaying levels of emotion that were perceived as impossible to manufacture, Dusty conveyed the impression that when she sang, “she meant it,” to paraphrase a song that illustrates the point, “Quiet Please, There’s a Lady Onstage.” As Simon Bell recalls of Dusty’s live stage performance of “I’m Coming Home Again” in 1979, “Every time she got to the chorus which was ‘I’m coming home again,’ the audience erupted and Dusty ended up in tears and almost couldn’t sing. I was in tears . . . I’ll never forget that, the atmosphere was electric that night.”30 While the trade in feeling is, obviously, something that all singers do with varying degrees of taste and success, Dusty’s peers laud her virtuosic command of emotion, both her ability to translate it into vocal sound and her ability to convey it to listeners with economy and precision. Her sharply focused vocal affect, about which Burt Bacharach remarked, “You only have to hear three notes and you know it’s Dusty,”31 when combined with the “natural ability to communicate” that Kiki Dee observed,32 enabled Dusty to target and hit her emotional mark. Bacharach sums up the response of many listeners: “I trusted what she sang.”33 Not all listeners trusted the emotion of Dusty’s performances; alongside the discourse of Dusty’s virtuosic command of emotion, there has always been a discourse of ridiculing such emotion—both the singer that produced it and the audiences that hungrily consumed it. Paul Howes quotes a New Musical Express review of the song to which Simon Bell refers above: “A heart-wrenching warble breaks with risible emotion. . . . What specious rot! . . . Springfield tells a calculated sob story, winking knowingly in the direction of the fatted calf. . . . Rumor has it Dusty stabs her eyeballs with sharpened pencils before performing this song on stage.” If Howes appears unfazed by the negative critique when he adds dryly that this is “definitely not one of her better reviews,”34 it is probably because he and most fans had, by 1979, come to expect such criticism as part of the fan policing they had experienced from the time of Dusty’s earliest fame. Sharp sarcasm aimed toward openly sentimental music had become characteristic of rockist pop music criticism at the time. A “heart-wrenching warble” like Dusty’s must, it seemed, be declared fake or “risible” lest its ability to move listeners undermine rock’s implicit claims to supremacy in the realm of emotional release. Dusty’s emotion, or any singer’s, for that matter, is impossible to judge as real or fake, and attempts to do so, such as the New Musical Express reviewer’s, surely operate on their own tedious level of fakery. Yet, the technique of expressing emotion—vocally, gesturally, and through the recording pro-

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cess—was something Dusty worked at constantly and spoke about on numerous occasions in the context of “the sounds I was trying to get.” According to those who observed her working process, she studied songs deliberately and systematically, searching lines for expressive nuances, accents, and cues while summoning “motivation” as carefully as an actor preparing for a role. As related in Valentine and Wickham’s biography: Once she tried to explain to Norma [Tanega] what happened to her when she sang, coming up with an analogy of a river and its two currents: one the notes, one the emotion. And the two currents would make the river flow smoothly. “She would always know when the emotion would drop off and that’s when she’d stop and start again,” says Norma. “The emotion and the tone had to mesh. People said that she didn’t know her own ability, how good she was. She knew her ability all right, that’s why it had to be perfect. She knew how to ride that river better than any other raft in the business.”35

Dusty appears to have mastered the two currents in her interpretation of “The Look of Love,” of which its composer, Burt Bacharach, said, “It just was smoky, it was sexy, it was restrained, it was held in check, but underneath it was smoldering, it was on fire. Just so much romance and passion and coolness.”36 Underlying the artisanal craft of such interpretations, Dusty’s peers have identified the quality of vulnerability as a key element in the success of her spectacles of feeling. Elton John perceived “a vulnerability about her voice and about her personality . . . that attracts audiences” and speculated that “they [the audience] are waiting for them [the singer] to crack open at any second.”37 Neil Tennant echoes John, “She has a very vulnerable quality in her voice,”38 as does Kiki Dee, “I think she had a vulnerability which gave her great soul.”39 “Vulnerability” seems to imply that Dusty was not simply transmitting emotion to listeners but was also receiving it from them as she performed; John, Tennant, and Dee’s observation that Dusty was remarkably open—vulnerable—to this emotional response reminds us that acts of singing, whether they are recorded or live performances, must always take into account acts of listening and that a song’s emotion travels a circuit between performer and audience for which both are responsible. According to the discourse of her peers, Dusty’s level of vulnerability appears to have been the factor that determined the circuit’s intensity during these spectacles of feeling.40 This circuit was most in evidence during the spring 1979 comeback concerts and, as Simon Bell commented earlier, the song “I’m Coming Home Again” provoked seemingly uncontrollable waves of emotion in both the singer and her audience. One newspaper’s brief report on the Drury Lane concert focused only on this aspect: “Dusty Springfield . . . was in tears last

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night—and the audience loved it. The emotion became too much for the 38year-old Dusty as she sang ‘I’m Coming Home Again’, and she broke down and cried. The audience spontaneously reacted with rapturous applause and shouted ‘Welcome Home Dusty.’” 41 Dusty’s large contingent of gay fans, to which she alluded in several interviews in 1979, responded particularly strongly. “I didn’t realize what a gay following I had until this tour. They identify with me. They know I’m emotional, they know I cry a lot, they were there to cry with me. . . . Why do gay people like me? I think it’s for the same reason they like Shirley Bassey. We are both sad, emotional women. I am one of those people who is always the victim. . . . Things have happened that have disappointed me.”42 Though Dusty mentions Shirley Bassey, the reaction of crowds to her 1979 London concerts was closer to that elicited by Judy Garland’s performances. About Garland’s own comeback attempts and their highly emotional reception among gay male audiences, Richard Dyer writes, “The come-back was the defining motif of the register of feeling I’m trying to characterize, for it is always having come back from something (sufferings and tribulations) and always keeping on coming, no matter what. . . . The very act of coming back set off the feeling and it was reprised in countless details.”43 Dyer perceives some of these details in the songs themselves: “This come-back . . . could even be read in the performance of the songs. . . . However demanding the melody now seemed for her, she did get to the end of the song and this became a mini-enactment of the come-back motif.”44 The difficulty Garland experienced in reaching the climactic high note of her signature song, “Over the Rainbow,” is the prime example of this, according to Dyer, and has a direct parallel in Dusty’s repertoire: the concluding high note of her signature song, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” While Dusty also performed this at the Drury Lane concert, the mini-enactment of the comeback motif was most palpable in “I’m Coming Home Again,” both in its characteristic high-note climax for which Dusty was known and in the direct meaning of the lyrics and the song’s title itself. On the subject of why the comeback motif and its attendant affect held special importance for Garland’s gay fans, Dyer concludes that it is “in some way representing the situation and experience of being gay in a homophobic society.” Drawing Dusty even closer to some of her gay fans was the fact that singer Simon Bell, well known not only as Dusty’s longtime backing singer but also as one of her closest gay male friends, actually sang the concluding high notes in “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” for Dusty on the nights when her voice was incapable of reaching it. His voice, on these notes at least, when partially covered by the orchestral backing, sounded so close to Dusty’s own vocal timbre that the two worked out in advance that he would actually sing it, undetected by the audience, while she either mouthed the note silently or sang a lower note to harmonize with his.45 Either way, audi-

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ences thought it was Dusty’s high note they were hearing and reveled in it, but fans inside the gossip loop had the double pleasure of knowing that Simon Bell had actually sung it, thus assisting her in executing the minienactment of the comeback. While Dusty’s peers may have understood the crucial role of the audience better than the fans themselves, fans’ grasp of the singer’s emotional range would seem to surpass that of Dusty’s peers. Professional singers tend to dwell on Dusty’s ability to wring pathos from a song, as Simon Bell’s comment suggests: When “expressing the depth of unhappiness, no one else sounds more unhappy than Dusty.”46 Madeline Bell, too, singles out the element of pathos: “Dusty’s voice could make me cry.”47 Fans certainly shared these assessments but also told me that they marveled at Dusty’s ability to make them smile, laugh, or dance. Fans’ close attention to and appreciation of the lighter end of the emotional spectrum highlight two aspects of Dusty’s performances that have been overlooked in documentaries to date: first, that Dusty’s performances, especially live ones, always included significant amounts of humor and camp in the form of spoken, between-song comments or songs chosen for their comic value, and, second, that repertoire that could be described as happy, cheeky, naughty, elated, or ballsy was as important to fans and as moving as the emotionally fraught “suicide songs.”48 This repertoire would include, for instance, “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” “In the Middle of Nowhere,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “Spooky,” “Doodlin’,” “Packin’ Up,” “Can I Get a Witness,” “Heartbeat,” “Anna (El Baion),” “Gonna Build a Mountain,” “Live It Up,” “What Did She Know About Railways?” “Love Power,” “Mockingbird,” “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” “It Ain’t All Honey and It Ain’t All Jam,” and “Where Am I Going?” some of which can be seen on the DVD release (2007) of Dusty’s BBC television performances. Rather than considering these simply as up-tempo songs, fans insist that critics include this repertoire in discussions of Dusty’s expressive virtuosity and maintain that its emotional content is as deserving of attention as that displayed in the big ballads. Simply put, the highs were as meaningful as the lows, and to consider one at the expense of the other yields only a partial picture of Dusty’s emotional range. This critique could be extended to Dusty’s biography, which, as constructed by print, television, and radio journalists’ selective identity discourses, tends to dwell on the tragic for reasons that will emerge from the discussion that follows. IDENTITY, OR DANCING WITH DISCOURSES

Though Dusty constructed and controlled her “black” voice and hyperfeminine appearance, she had no control over the discourses that would arise in response to them and was in a constant struggle with the press over their

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meaning. In this section, I attempt to give a sense of Dusty’s danse grotesque with journalists; they insisted on rigid, “this or that” identity distinctions, while Dusty, with equal insistence, embraced “none of the above.”49 While the press has given obsessive and narrowly focused attention to two principal discourses of Dusty’s identity—race and sexual orientation—Dusty herself initiated an additional two—class and the “real me”—which she raised in multiple interviews and even made their way into album liner notes.50 Of the four identity discourses that circulated throughout Springfield’s fortyyear career, the discourse of “two people”—Dusty and Mary—was, chronologically, the first and acted as springboard for the “real me.”

DUSTY, MARY, AND THE “REAL ME”

Dusty recognized early the power and malleability of identity signs and, equally important, grasped the fact that it was the privilege of her class to rearrange them at will. The new Dusty, fashioned from a mind-boggling number of musical and visual signs, did not “bin” Mary O’Brien but rather pressed her into service as yet another sign; old Mary took her place as the sign of Dusty’s “real me.”51 For example, when explaining her four-year hiatus from singing in the early 1970s, Dusty said in a radio interview, “What it [the hiatus] really did was give me time to reassess my life because I had invented Dusty Springfield and had sort of lived it to the hilt and I had never learned anything about being the person I was born to be which is Mary O’Brien. . . . I’d stopped growing when I was about seventeen emotionally. I was just so busy being Dusty Springfield.”52 This tale of two people is the identity discourse to which the singer and her friends contributed most regularly and that provided narrative closure of almost biblical dimensions at the end of the singer’s life, as suggested by the headline “I Just Want to Die as Mary O’Brien.”53 While it is commonplace for entertainers to change their names and adopt glamorous looks, few have kept alive the prior name or referred to the earlier look as assiduously as Dusty. Had she not referenced the notion of “two people” so frequently, it is doubtful that the press would have seized on it as a handy metaphor for the bipolar personality disorder with which, it was revealed after her death, Dusty had been diagnosed. (Those familiar with the singer’s many television and radio interviews will recall the countless recitations of her full name: “Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien.”) Comments on the “two people” include Lee Everett’s opinion that “Mary was the real Dusty, with Dusty bursting to get out”54 and Madeline Bell’s tactful observation that “Mary was a nice person; Dusty had to be

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Dusty.”55 Norma Tanega, when asked if the notion of “two people” concerned Dusty at all, replied, “Absolutely, we talked about it all the time.”56 Of those on record regarding this discourse, Simon Bell is among the few who perceived just one Dusty: “It’s very easy to decide there were two people, Mary and Dusty, but they were the one person. Dusty was most definitely Dusty right to the end.”57 Contrary to Simon Bell’s view, the notion of “two people” and the idea of a fatally divided, “broken” personality provided the framing device for the BBC2’s Living Famously documentary, televised in Britain in 2003.58 With a pop-psych narrative punctuated by images and sounds of shattering glass (yes, actual pictures and sounds of broken dishes interpolated between segments), the documentary neatly packaged the Dusty/Mary discourse for mass consumption. If one imagines the broken dishes = broken personality motif as originating in the camp mind of one of the writers or producers, then the incredibly reductive device might be redeemed; indeed, if seen this way, the broken dishes might even enter the pantheon of iconic camp props, possibly even challenging Mommie Dearest’s wire hanger for top place. Camp, alas, seems not to have been the origin; rather, the writers took as their point of departure the fact that Dusty enjoyed the sound of breaking dishes and was known to have hurled teacups and saucers against doors and floors when frustrated (as related by Martha Reeves and many others) or to have dropped entire tea sets down a flight of stairs.59 From there, the writers took the leap to a suggestion of mental illness. If the purest camp is unintentional, exhibiting, according to Sontag, “a failed seriousness,” then the documentary’s offer of a broken dish as sign of Dusty/ Mary’s split personality must rate as a prime example.60 Split personalities are rarely, if ever, portrayed as desirable, and the documentary’s producers were well in line with the psychiatric and self-help industries that insist, rather unimaginatively, on a one-personality-per-person model. Most documentaries, implicitly or explicitly, shade the Dusty/Mary discourse negatively and leave little room for alternative perspectives; none sees pragmatism rather than pathology behind the deliberate cultivation of two personalities or entertains the idea that the one-per-person model may not be universally applicable. Dusty, at times, spoke disparagingly of Mary and, at others, praised her for carrying the accumulated emotional baggage of a tumultuous life. A similar ambivalence characterizes Dusty’s published remarks on her position within the British class system. On the one hand, she generated a discourse of class-based entrapment, saying to a journalist in 1971: “I live by this totally inhibiting middle class morality syndrome. It is virtually impossible to escape from it when it is ingrained in you very early on as it was with me. . . .

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Unfortunately, I have been trapped by it. I didn’t have the outrageousness of an upper class breeding or the innate vulgarity of the working class. It’s rather like being a stateless person.”61 And on at least one occasion, the singer implied that one of the motivations behind the creation of Dusty was to escape the system’s limits. Reminded by an interviewer that she had once bemoaned her “middle class inhibitions,” Dusty responded, “Just by becoming Dusty Springfield . . . I felt I didn’t have to worry so much about the things the middle classes worry about.”62 Inhibitions notwithstanding, Dusty was, on the other hand, aware of the privilege her British middle-class status afforded her and used it to her professional advantage, thus offsetting somewhat the disadvantage of being a woman in the recording industry (“girl pop singers just can’t last in this country. . . . Boy singers are more likely to last though. . . . Maybe it’s because all girl singers are novelties. But as soon as the novelty’s worn off you become part of the furniture”).63 Class entitlement, no doubt, played a role in trumping gender during Dusty’s battles with recalcitrant session musicians in Philips’s recording studios and also provided a rationale for “borrowing” any music from any culture at any time—a privilege exercised by practically every British musician of her generation not only in their encounters with black American musicians but also with Indian sitar players, Jamaican Rastafarians, Moroccan drummers, and the list goes on.64 Acknowledging this colonial privilege and, indeed, citing it as standard practice when explaining her own musical appropriations (“because that’s what all the British bands did”),65 Dusty nevertheless disavowed personal identification with the British middle class: “My parents were never essentially middle class . . . we had a very eccentric background . . . we got stuck in being on a middle class level when actually our attitudes I don’t think were middle class at all. . . . But by our income bracket, you could put us in the middle class but I don’t remember either of my parents as having essentially what you might call middle class minds.”66 In what would seem like a timely reappearance of the “real me,” Dusty disclaimed personal identification with the middle-class mind while asserting class prerogative in her professional life.67 As much as Dusty tried to distance herself from middle-class minds and morality, her middle-class background was instantly legible to British audiences within a split-second of hearing her accent (described simply as “posh” by a British fan). Hence, even when diluted by American overtones as a result of her move to California in the 1970s, Dusty’s speaking voice was a constant reminder that class was a prominent element of her identity discourse. Her middle-class speaking voice differed so radically from her black American soul singing voice that the two were, in effect, engaged in an ongoing dialectic for the duration of Dusty’s career.

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THE BLACK PRESS ON WHITE SOUL

At the same time the Dusty/Mary concept was taking root in the mid-sixties with its embedded component of class, journalists spun the audibly black aspect of the singer’s persona into the discourse of “the white negress.” Without repeating what has been said in previous chapters, suffice it to say here that Dusty was not alone among 1960s performers who crossed identity boundaries; Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Johnny Mathis, The Supremes, and the Righteous Brothers, for instance, each generated individual discourses on the subject of racial identity as expressed through music. Soul, as discussed in chapter 2, became the musical lightning rod for racial beliefs and occupied acres of newsprint in both the black and white press; questions of who had soul “naturally,” what soul represented, and the possibility of white soul were addressed regularly and contentiously. In such a climate, it would seem surprising that Dusty’s music, though trumpeted throughout the U.S. and U.K. white press as the work of the “White Queen of Soul,” never became an object of scrutiny among black journalists. Other performers crossing over into black music, however, were often the subject of articles whose tone ranged from bemusement to unvarnished outrage. Some examples include reviews of Wayne Cockran’s debut and the British acts of the T.A.M.I. show (Teenage Awards Music International), both from the year 1965. In November 1965, Jet magazine covered the phenomenon of white soul in an article titled “White ‘Soul Brother’ Says He Takes Advice from James Brown.” Wayne Cockran’s (also spelled “Cochran”) debut on Chicago’s predominantly black South Side included the singer’s story of his blessing from James Brown: “the tall, self-acknowledged, blue-eyed ‘soul brother’ . . . [said] ‘You know,’ he began, I come from Macon, Ga., the same hometown of the one and only James Brown. And you know what he told me brothers, he says, ‘Wayne, you may not have a hit record like Please, Please Please, but you do have what it takes to make the grade—soul.”68 Brown’s blessing appears not to have extended to what was called the British Invasion by the white press and what was treated as the “British Appropriation” by the black press. Nelson George’s commentary on the T.A.M.I. show of 1965 (filmed in front of a live audience in Santa Monica, California, featuring Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, and Jan and Dean) conveys a far less generous view of white and, in this case, British, versions of soul: [The] auditorium [was] filled with shrill, screaming teenage fans—predominantly white girls. That constant barrage of noise is particularly significant.

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It remained loud no matter who was on stage. Some therefore interpreted this vocal benediction of the integrated proceedings as an example of brotherhood: teens of all colors cheering acts of all colors. However, those shouters also suggested that, to the ears of these young record buyers such foul English products as Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy Kramer sounded as good as Chuck Berry. . . . That they could cheer as Mick Jagger jiggled across the stage doing his lame funky chicken after James Brown’s incredible, camel-walking, proto-moon-walking, athletically daring performance—greeting each with equal decibels—revealed a dangerous lack of discrimination. To applaud black excellence and white mediocrity with the same vigor is to view them as equals, in which case the black artist in America always loses.69

In a book published two years after the T.A.M.I. show, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) put an even sharper point on this view of the British Invasion by likening it to the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy: They steals, minstrelizes (but here a minstrelsy that “hippens” with cats like Stones and Beatles saying, “Yeh, I got everything I know from Chuck Berry,” is a scream dropping the final. . . . “But I got all the dough . . . ”) [ellipses in original] Actually, the more intelligent the white, the more the realization he has to steal from niggers. They take from us all the way up the line. Finally, what is the difference between Beatles, Stones, etc., and Minstrelsy. Minstrels never convinced anybody they were Black either.70

As increasing numbers of white performers adopted the musical language of soul, soul’s exclusive blackness was questioned with growing frequency.71 When asked by a Time magazine reporter about the rise of white soul, Godfrey Cambridge (black activist, social critic, and comedian) responded as follows, asserting what bell hooks might call a “strategic essentialism”: Soul is “the language of the subculture; but you can’t learn it, because no one can give you black lessons.” Used in this way, the soul concept becomes a mystique, a glorification of Negritude in all its manifestations. . . . Does this mean that white musicians by definition don’t have soul? . . for the most part, Negroes leave it up to whites to defend the idea of “blue-eyed soul,” whether by the criterion of talent, experience, or temperament.72

Cambridge would seem to have described the case of Dusty Springfield exactly: It was indeed left almost entirely to white journalists on both sides of the Atlantic to puzzle over the British singer’s putative soulfulness. The “white negress” was practically invisible to black journalists; she appeared

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nowhere in the African American mass media discourse on the phenomenon of soul. In Ebony, Jet, and Sepia, national magazines aimed toward an African American readership that regularly included articles on music, writers paid no attention to Dusty’s “soul” record releases. Detroit journalists covering Motown’s tours to Britain scarcely mentioned her, not even in the context of the Sounds of Motown television program. Indeed, in what can only be interpreted as a sexist or, at best, commercially cynical arrangement of facts, the Beatles, not Dusty, were credited by the Detroit press for Motown’s success in Britain, as indicated by the Detroit News headline of April 11, 1965: “Nod from Beatles Puts Detroit Sound on Map.” Such silence speaks volumes when considered alongside white writers’ years-long preoccupation with the White Queen of Soul. The New York Times’s Clayton Riley is virtually alone in mentioning Dusty directly, and that is only to call her a “good thief ” of soul music.73 For the black press, Dusty’s play with racial identity simply did not register as anything singular enough to write about, while the white press fixated on it for decades. Another reason the black press may have studiously ignored her is precisely because she was a “good thief ” and had acquired credibility among soul performers, especially those associated with Motown. As quoted earlier in chapter 1, Martha Reeves stated that Dusty “introduced the Motown sound to England”; she was perceived to have “glorified” rather than “minstrelized” soul music. Though Dusty escaped the charges of minstrelsy and appropriation that were leveled against other British acts of the 1960s, that is the most that can be said about her reception among the black press in that decade. Discourses on Dusty’s identity, however, were never exclusively about race but intersected with perceived discontinuities in the areas of sexual orientation, class, gender, and nation as well. In simultaneously circulating stories, she was portrayed as a “hellraiser” who was also a class loyalist, a Brit who often acted and sounded like a Yank, and a woman whose songs upheld traditional gender roles and straight sexual orientation while the singer herself did not. Race certainly remained a constant presence in these story lines, with nation and class always operating in the background; yet, in the late 1960s, there was a discernible shift in the press’s attention. Race was bumped to second position by journalists’ obsession with Dusty’s sexual orientation.

“GAY, GAY, GAY, GAY, GAY, GAY, GAY, GAY”

Music journalists’ collective subject position, which in the 1960s was overwhelmingly white, male, and presumed straight, has had much to do with what has been projected about Dusty’s sexual identity; their power to create and steer discourse has derived from the rarely questioned, universalizing

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“we” position of their writings.74 According to scholar Holly Kruse, writing in the late 1990s, “Control over the discourses and institutions of popular music is still exercised almost exclusively by men. Both popular and academic rock and pop discourses have been generated largely from masculine subject positions.”75 Kembrew McLeod supports this view with figures: “In 1999, the number of female editors or senior writers at Rolling Stone hovered around a whopping 15 percent, at Spin and Raygun, roughly 20 percent,”76 while Mark Fenster adds, “There is an overwhelming number and influence of baby-boomer white males in the rock journalism business.”77 Fenster goes on to say, Race, along with gender and sexuality, remains relatively unproblematized . . . in all of popular-music criticism and journalism . . . rock criticism . . . often conceals the social hierarchies that underlie many of the accepted assumptions of rock music and its audience: that it is the domain of heterosexual white males of a certain age. This remains among rock culture’s and rock criticism’s most important and unaddressed problems.78

Though Fenster published this around 2000 and identified as problematic the predominance of a single group in the music press, the same could be said of the British and American press of the 1960s and 1970s; indeed, the majority of journalists who wrote about Dusty for the popular music press did so from the perspective of straight white men, whether or not they actually were straight white men.79 Female U.K. newspaper writers such as Cathy Couzens of the Daily Star and Disc and Music Echo’s Penny Valentine covered Dusty in the 1960s and 1970s from a “woman’s” perspective; that is, they wrote about Dusty as a woman first—assuming that she shared the concerns of their presumed straight readers: boyfriends, marriage, children—and as a musician second (the article depicted in figure 1.4 was by Penny Valentine). Marcelle Bernstein’s Observer feature of 1968 is a notable exception; hers is one of the few articles to place Dusty’s musical activities in the foreground and to describe them in detail.80 The often cloying “woman’s” purview was temporarily supplanted by the music-centered biographical writings of journalist Lucy O’Brien in the 1990s, though a superannuated Valentine resurfaced in 2000 to cowrite Dancing with Demons with Vicki Wickham, thus reviving for readers of a later generation a rather stale 1960s women’s pages perspective, albeit a luridly updated one. In the 1960s, Ray Connelly, Valentine, Bernstein, and others wrote feature articles that were based on long interviews with Dusty and are still cited today as primary sources of information; some included visits to Dusty’s home or adopted a behind the scenes, day-in-the-life-of-a-star angle. Of such interviews’ selective omissions John Gill writes, “Closets stick out a

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mile . . . the contents of their room have materialized there anonymously, or perhaps have been planted in them. There are no intimate relationships encountered during that day in their life, only an echoing absence. In fact, they might as well have a neon sign flashing on and off that says, ‘Spot the missing boyfriend/girlfriend.’” 81 Such was the case in Ray Connelly’s now famous 1970 article for the Evening Standard in which Dusty first outed herself. Her then-girlfriend is acknowledged only in a non sequitur: “I think [Dusty’s] a bit sad, but she says no, not at all. The last thing she wants is to be pitied. Only occasionally, when she needs someone to lean on is she lonely. Much of the time she shares her house with songwriter-painter Norma Tanega.” Most journalists tackled the requisite section on Dusty’s “single” life with a rationale of the career girl who was too busy for love or whose success as a global pop star scared off less successful potential boyfriends. Alternately, Dusty was pictured with a variety of men with whom she was rumored to have had affairs. She claimed that her career’s demands doomed her relationships to failure and was quoted in an interview as saying, “Some men are almost afraid of me because I’m famous.”82 This quote appeared underlined, capitalized, and in a large boldface font (the aptly named “screaming” headline) in the title of a 1964 article for News of the World. Catholicism was recruited to explain her apparent reluctance to marry the rare man who might have been undaunted by her celebrity: Her career would have prevented the marriage’s success and, as a Catholic, divorce was not an option. Maureen Cleave’s article titled “What’s Wrong with Me?—by Miss Springfield” quotes Dusty as saying, “I pray I can become adjusted to marriage. You have to concentrate on marriage and I’m a Catholic and I can’t get divorced. I’m so selfcentered and selfish. If I weren’t self-centered how could I get on in this business?”83 Thus she positioned herself as a victim of fame, religion, and selfishness and persuaded most journalists to adopt this explanation of her continuing bachelor status. According to press accounts, swinging but sadly single Catholic Dusty of the early 1960s had turned into the single, over thirty, lonely career girl by mid-1969. By 1970, Dusty was boxed into a narrative corner: The promiscuous rock star persona was available only to men, while the Catholic and career girl storylines had lost their credibility as her Britgirl cohort—Petula, Cilla, Lulu, and Sandie—demonstrated the ability to sing while maintaining long-term relationships with men. As most fans now know and as most journalists knew then, Dusty was rarely single during the 1960s; photographed with girlfriends who were necessarily invisible as girlfriends, Dusty had had during this time period “two or three seriously great relationships,” according to Vicki Wickham.84 Dusty’s reality, however, was not only unprintable, but was unreal to the journalists who wrote about her from the universalizing heterosexual “we” subject position. Of this position, Cheshire Calhoun has written:

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Heterosexuals . . . claim as natural and normal an arrangement where only heterosexuals have socio-politico-legal standing. Lesbians and gay men are not recognized as social beings because they cannot enter into the most basic social unit, the male-female couple. . . . At best, lesbians and gay men have negative social reality. Lesbians are not-women, engaged in nonsex within nonrelationships that may constitute a nonfamily. . . . In short, unlike the heterosexual woman, including the heterosexual feminist, the lesbian experience of the institution of heterosexuality is of a system that makes her sexual, affectional, domestic, and reproductive life unreal.85

Dusty’s “negative social reality” was remarkably similar to that of another nonheterosexual celebrity, Rock Hudson, who fifteen years earlier, when he was also around the age of thirty, was trapped in the same narrative corner. Richard Mayer quotes a 1955 Life magazine article titled, “The Simple Life of a Busy Bachelor: Rock Hudson Gets Rich Alone”: “[Fans] are beginning to grumble. Their complaints, expressed in fan magazine articles, range from a shrill ‘Scared of Marriage?’ to a more understanding ‘Don’t Rush Rock.’ Fans are urging 29-year-old Hudson to get married—or explain why not.” Mayer cites additional sources: “A tabloid publication called Movie/T.V. Secrets fagbaited the bachelor star rather more overtly: ‘He is handsome, personable, intelligent, and a top-salaried actor—what’s wrong with Rock where the fair sex is concerned, we ask.’ ”86 Upon threat of an exposé by Confidential magazine, Hudson arranged what is believed to have been a fake marriage that lasted three years, after which the press stopped hounding him on the subject of his sexual orientation (until, of course, the sensationalist coverage of his AIDS infection in 1985). One wonders if Dusty’s wish to preempt an exposé prompted her to make her now-famous, self-outing statements, “I am just as easily swayed by a girl as by a boy,” to Connelly in 1970, and “people say that I’m gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. I’m not anything. . . . People are people. . . . I go from men to women; I don’t give a shit” to Chris Van Ness in 1973. If such statements were thought to quash an exposé or were imagined to put an end to journalists’ persistent questions, Dusty learned quickly upon her return to England in 1978 and 1979 that this would not be the case. Cathy Couzen’s Star article of 1979 typifies this phase of Dusty’s dance with the press. Granting an interview to Couzens to help promote her latest album, Living Without Your Love, Dusty found that music was barely mentioned in the article. The piece begins as follows under yet another screaming headline, IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH, SAYS DUSTY SPRINGFIELD, ASK THOSE WHO GO TO BED WITH ME: Dusty Springfield’s love life is a source of great curiosity. But she hates to talk about it. At 39 she is unmarried, is not living with anyone and has no

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boyfriend. “What you want to know,” she [Dusty] says, “is am I gay? I’ve had that thrown at me so many times. People love to catalogue me. If I had been constantly surrounded by fellas they would have called me a sexpot or a whore. Because they didn’t see the fellas they said I was a lesbian. I am sick of trying to justify myself. The world, especially the Press, will think what it wants to think. All I can say is: If you want to know the truth, ask the people who go to bed with me.”87

While print media instigated such discourse in the 1960s and 1970s with articles like Couzens’s setting the tone, television and radio assumed greater importance from the late 1970s on. The shift from print to television transferred from one medium to another the predominantly white, heterosexual lens through which Dusty was viewed, yet interviewers were, for obvious reasons, less demanding and censorious when they were face to face with their subject in front of a camera. British and American chat shows allowed Dusty to contribute to the discourse as an active participant (or, at least, appear to contribute) and provided an alternative to the cooked quotations through which print journalists had portrayed her.88 Though she was no more forthcoming in response to coded questions about her sexual orientation, and knew by this time that little about her personal life and relationships would qualify as real anyway, she adopted the image of a wearily “past it” pop star who, having raved up enough for several lifetimes, was now content to live alone, celibate, with her cats. For journalists who wanted to go “there,” Dusty signaled resolutely that she would not accompany them. Interviewers certainly knew in advance how Dusty would respond to their queries, having raised the same questions about boyfriends, relationships, and marriage for nearly thirty years either directly or through insinuation. In the mid-eighties, Dusty recalled one journalist in particular: “I had a woman the other day who just wouldn’t pack it in. It was endless—‘Why aren’t you married? Why aren’t you married? Why aren’t you married?’ ”89 Receiving the same rehearsed evasions time after time, interviewers in the 1980s and 1990s expected Dusty to stay on script and tell nothing. What if she had decided to tell all instead? What if she had suddenly started prattling on about her gay wedding or the domestic abuse she had endured from her female spouse, or reminiscing about the good old days when she fabricated boyfriends to put the press dogs off the scent?90 Would they, in response, have smiled, frowned, or nodded on cue, giving the standard robotic rejoinders to her I-have-seen-the-light tale, the bread and butter of celebrity chat show segments? What if Dusty had introduced a political dimension into her chats with straight, white interviewers, something like “You know, I just got off the phone with my friend Judy (Butler, of course), and she says that—oh, let’s see if I can remember exactly how she put it, ‘identity cate-

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gories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression.’91 Isn’t she clever! She’s one of my very own favorite philosophers! You should read her!” Or Dusty might have offered a charged anecdote on her Good Morning Britain segment: “While I was feeding the cats this morning—you know, bacon and donuts, they’re so spoiled!—I remembered something Monique Wittig wrote; it just popped into my head like that, isn’t it funny? I think it goes something like this: ‘the political structure of slavery is no more natural than the political structure of heterosexuality.’92 Stunning parallel, don’t you think? The cats thought so, too!” Needless to say, Dusty never engaged in the kind of self-disclosure typical of chat shows (except where it concerned drug and alcohol abuse) or anything remotely resembling political dialogue; she remained staunchly apolitical, and stayed in character as the “past it” rock star and formerlydebauched-now-reformed convent girl throughout the 1990s. Indeed, both Dusty and her hosts knew the dance well and performed their unscripted roles automatically. She knew they would ask, and they knew she would evade. Fans watching also knew. Yet, interviewers asked and asked, knowing that she could not, would not answer. Dusty met volleys of nonquestions with nonanswers, confirming for millions of viewers the existence of her nonrelationships. And though these interviews were ostensibly about music and the promotion of a new album, they also served to ensure gay invisibility through the discourse of Dusty’s nonsexuality. Dusty did not need to proffer the potted answers for long; after her cancer diagnosis in 1994, journalists stopped asking her about her sexual orientation. With their subject safely dead and unable to respond, the British print media in 2000 reasserted its dominance as arbiter of Dusty’s sexual identity discourse with the Daily Mail’s serialization of Dancing with Demons. As readers of “red tops” in Britain know and fans elsewhere in the world know also, courtesy of the Internet, Dusty’s sexual orientation was once again on the front pages via the book’s most sensationalistic passages. The information contained therein was marshaled in service of two ends: first, to finally assign Dusty an unequivocal sexual identity category and, second, to frame Dusty’s life within the stereotype of the “tragic lesbian,” doomed to abject sadness and social isolation because of, it is implied, her “unnatural” desires and the disruptions caused by her need to conceal them. To craft their story into a commercially viable product, one that would go down easily as readers scanned the good bits on the morning train to work, Valentine and Wickham drew on tropes that had circulated unchanged since the films of the 1960s, such as The Killing of Sister George, The Foxes, and The Children’s Hour, and Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp fiction novels of the 1950s (see figure 4.5).93

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Fig. 4.5. Stereotypical images of lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s (Cleis Press)

Bannon’s book cover come-ons sum up the perspective: For the unfortunate Women in the Shadows, “their dark and troubled loves could flourish only in secret,” while another of Bannon’s books, I Am Woman, asks desperately, “In love with a woman—must society reject me?”94 The immediate and broad acceptance of such tropes fifty years later is evident in the slant of the BBC television documentaries whose producers could now cite this “authorized” biography’s account of Dusty’s sexual orientation to explain practically everything that was perceived as “wrong” about her personal behavior and career choices. It goes without saying that nothing “right” is credited to Dusty’s sexuality or to the camp sensibility that went along with it. As if in an echo chamber, the book’s message resounded for months in newspaper reviews with titles such as “White Soul Diva Bites the Dust: She made classics of romantic clichés, then turned into the biggest cliché of all”; “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me . . . but it would help if you did. Dusty Springfield had the voice and the songs but never conquered her self-doubt”; “Drinks, drugs and Dusty’s dark side”; “The beehive Blonde who could never escape her roots”; and “Dusty Springfield’s tough frailty.”95 Though Dancing with Demons ends on a weakly positive note, the impression it leaves is one of unrelieved mental instability that is either a cause or an effect of Dusty’s sexual orientation. As Richard Smith notes, when such stories are recounted as “monstrous martyrdoms” or “tragedies retold as parables,”96 they are no longer about the artist’s life and music but about the

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evils—inevitable and deserved, it is implied—that befall those who live outside the social-political system of heterosexuality.97 Though Smith is referring here to the press’s cautionary tale type of treatment of Joe Meek’s and Brian Epstein’s suicides, his observation applies equally well to Valentine and Wickham’s biography and the documentaries that have been based on it. Resistance to this reductionist view explains why many fans “threw the book across the room” when they read Dusty’s “authorized biography.” They do not dispute the facts therein or question that Dusty’s life contained a great deal of suffering and misdirection, yet they abhor the framework of pathology within which the authors arranged the events of Dusty’s life. Other fans recognize that Valentine and Wickham were merely extending to its logical conclusion the not-so-swinging 1960s discourse on Dusty’s sexuality and, in fact, predicted that a book like Dancing with Demons was bound to surface. They predicted, too, the eventual tabloid publication of Dusty’s wedding pictures and the generally prurient interest with which they were received.98 By the same reasoning, they could also have foreseen in Dusty’s evolving legacy discourse the glaring absence of a quality that was present in most aspects of the singer’s life—camp.

LEGACY CONVENTIONS OF LEGACY

Since her death, Dusty Springfield has received nearly every traditional award and tribute that a pop singer can receive: She has been inducted into both the U.S. and U.K. rock halls of fame; Rolling Stone has placed Dusty in Memphis among its 100 best albums; several television and radio documentaries have been broadcast to millions of listeners and viewers; at least six books have been written about her (including a book of poems);99 various Dusty Day celebrations in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia celebrate her birthday; more than a dozen Web sites have been up and running for years; numerous Dusty stage plays and musicals have appeared;100 the Dusty Springfield Bulletin has been in continuous existence for twenty years; and last, but not least, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Dusty the Order of the British Empire. Providing essential scaffolding for all of these honors are the judgments of her professional peers, many of which have been quoted throughout this book; taken together, they establish her official status as one of the great pop singers of the recording era and, possibly, the best pop singer England has ever produced, as many of her peers have claimed. The posthumous accolades are recorded, printed, quoted, and disseminated on the In-

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ternet and are thus duly recorded for posterity. They include remarks from fellow singers, songwriters, and producers such as Dusty’s Britpop cohort Petula Clark, Lulu, Elton John, Kiki Dee, and Paul McCartney; her American contemporaries Dionne Warwick, Martha Reeves, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Jerry Wexler; and a later generation of singers that includes Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello, Alison Moyet, Joss Stone, and Shelby Lynne. Added to these are the intimate views offered by Dusty’s inner circle, those who lived and worked with her, who knew her well both professionally and personally: Pat Rhodes, Madeline Bell, Simon Bell, Norma Tanega, Vicki Wickham, and Carole Pope. (Her brother, Tom, is a notable exception.) With repetition and endless circulation among an infinite number of media platforms, the discourse of Dusty’s pop greatness is boiled down to a set of unique attributes—her vocal quality, iconic look, charismatic stage presence, gesture-laden manner of performance, and selected elements of her biography—so that she may take her place among pop’s elite unique voices, like Patsy, Nat, Billie, Ella, and Frank. When combined with the talents of the songwriters, backing singers, instrumentalists, arrangers, and producers with whom she worked and the emotional connection she shared with diverse legions of fans worldwide, the scope of Dusty’s legacy begins to take shape. And finally, when her years of celebrity are viewed against the backdrop of the historical narratives that were played out quite plainly through the popular music of her time—radical reimaginings of notions of race, gender, class, and nation—it is hard to imagine the pop culture of the 1960s without her sound, look, and persona. What is missing from this evolving legacy are the nontraditional perspectives of those whose voices barely register in mainstream media: drag performers and tribute artists who have specialized in “doing Dusty” and cultural theory scholars who have included Dusty in their work on camp. These voices are as vital a part of Dusty’s legacy discourse as those coming from more conventional quarters; they address a key aspect of Dusty’s creative sensibility—camp—that receives almost no serious attention elsewhere. While the silence on Dusty’s campness is, on the one hand, predictable because of “the resistance of institutions to the queer challenge of camp,”101 it is nonetheless surprising, given camp’s obvious presence in her performances throughout her career, not only in the 1960s when camp was fashionable but also in later decades. Before turning to a discussion of the drag and tribute acts that illuminate this dimension of Dusty’s performance in ways that traditional paeans do not, I would like to consider two statements of Dusty’s close friends, Vicki Wickham and Lee Everett, as a way into a discussion of why camp is relegated to the margins of discourse and what a camp perspective might offer in this particular context.

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DUSTY AND CAMP

“Dusty was camp and she knew it!” wrote Vicki Wickham in response to one of my questions in an e-mail interview.102 Lee Everett, saying something very similar in the course of an interview for Definitely Dusty, offered: “She was just camp.” What strikes me about both these statements is that they seem to identify Dusty, the person, as camp rather than any particular characteristic; they use the word as they would any other that describes a person’s instinctive approach or general perspective. The simplicity of the remarks points to the obviousness of the quality; campness, at least to Wickham and Everett, was an element of Dusty’s persona because she was “just camp.” Had they said Dusty was clever or arch, funny, cheeky, or naughty, no one would disagree and few would be puzzled. Yet, the word camp is met with reactions ranging from tacit acceptance to tacit rejection with discomfiting incomprehension in between. If, as Wickham and Everett seem to contend, Dusty’s campness was in plain sight, was something that anyone could see, and was an outgrowth of who she was, then the paucity of serious discourse on the topic is even more striking. If anyone could see it, why have so few named it and discussed it or taken camp on board as the valuable critical tool it has long been thought to be?103 If only for the sake of historical accuracy, one might imagine that the topic would have elicited more attention. It probably goes without saying that avoidance of the topic has much to do with the fact that mainstream discourse, largely shaped by the popular music press and pop music scholars, grants the word camp “just one simplistic meaning (synonym for gay)” and is treated with commensurate phobia; Patricia Juliana Smith’s essay “Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield” is, of course, a notable exception—indeed, the exception that proves the rule.104 This simplistic use, according to cultural theorist Fabio Cleto, has doomed camp’s promise as a means of naming a distinct aesthetic that informs performance. Until, he argues, critics grasp camp’s complex origins and manifold meanings—embedded in the historical and etymological link between camp and queer—camp’s movements will remain undetected and, hence, closed to discourse. Because of its persistent, simplistic usage, camp as a critical tool “had to be given up . . . until queer was addressed by cultural theory.” In other words, queer is the foundational key to camp’s critical utility; without it, camp’s potential—to identify certain modes of performance and spectatorship—remains unfulfilled. Camp, with historic origins in the gay ghetto’s coded speech and behavior,105 is the performance vehicle for a queer sensibility that sees and hears the operation of social binaries in their absurd, quotidian, hegemonic glory. Through camp performance, all binaries such as homo/hetero but also mas-

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culine/feminine, native/foreign, authentic/fake, high/low, black/white, and working class/aristocracy can be shown to be constructed opposites, thus disrupting their claims to God-given “naturalness” and, by extension, the hierarchies built upon those claims. The means by which such social constructions are exposed vary from performer to performer but invariably involve high concentrations of “fun, artifice, and elegance,” according to Christopher Isherwood.106 While Cleto’s argument is compelling, there is little reason to think that the work of cultural theorists will expand the everyday lexicon of music critics who interpret popular culture on a daily basis for millions of consumers; their stock words and phrases change as glacially as the worldview they convey. It is, nevertheless, harmless to imagine what might happen if a new and improved camp, with its historic cognate term queer acknowledged at its core, were applied to a critical view of Dusty Springfield.107 Wickham’s and Everett’s remarks might be taken to mean that Dusty was a person who was attuned to the operations of social binaries and, as Dusty put it, rejected “this or that” identity distinctions. Seeing “this” as a means of subordinating “that,” she chose “none of the above” from the usual gay/straight, black/white, masculine/feminine binaries that structured the 1960s bourgeois milieu into which she was born and “promote[d] a sabotage” via camp performance.108 Her camp performance, while presenting a transfixing surface of polished sounds and elaborately prepared sights, exposed the binaries’ flaws and portrayed them as anything but natural. Dusty queered binaries in a number of ways: as discussed earlier, by refusing musical style and genre categories, poaching the male vocal range, embracing African American musical practices, engaging in a kind of feminine drag (called “body camp” by Caryl Flinn),109 and even undermining the notion of the unitary self through the Dusty/Mary discourse. As it is the nature of camp to speak in code—a strategy of performing identity while at the same time masking it—the perception of Dusty’s camp will always be in the eye of the beholder and relies on the spectator’s ability to decode the performance, indeed, on the spectator’s own attunement to the operations of binaries in everyday life. Moreover, the degree of perceived camp will vary among spectators; some will focus on Dusty’s camping of a gender binary, others will see the camping of race or nation, and still others will see no queering going on at all and will not “get” the code. The genius of Dusty’s brand of camp is that several axes are camped at once, all staged to collide in the intersection of a pop song’s performance. And like all camp, the core seriousness of its content is thoroughly costumed by fascinating surface elements and wrapped in reflexive wit. As quoted partially before, Isherwood remarked, “You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously . . . you’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”110

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As examples of Dusty’s brand of camp, dozens of performances come to mind; in some of them, the element of camp is principally seen, while in others the camp element need only be heard to be identified as camp. Of the first type, I would offer an example drawn from Dusty’s BBC television series of 1966, the performance of “Bring Him Back.” Here, to my eye and ear, the many role reversals between Dusty and the two male dancers, along with the discontinuities between what is seen and what is heard, are pure camp. The male dancers are feminized the instant they dance into the frame: The focus is entirely on their bodies and their distinctly unmasculine movements, thus transferring the camera’s typical gaze from the female to the male object. Reinforcing this reversal is the fact that they, like typical go-go girls, are also mute; only Dusty gets to sing, along with her offstage female backing singers. The boys’ moves are accompanied by Dusty’s full-throated belting voice, the one she borrowed from the African American gospel tradition, the blackness of which is discontinuous with the whiteness of everyone in the frame. The voice takes over male territory in its attack, low range, and affect, and it contrasts sharply not only with Dusty’s hyperfeminine appearance but also with the gestures of the male dancers. She is singing in their “natural” vocal range while the boys serve the function of dancing girls. Another example of Dusty’s camp is heard in her recording of “Don’t Speak of Love,” mentioned in chapter 1. There is no need to see a performance of this to grasp some, if not all, of its camp content. Here the high/low divide is the butt of the joke as the song steals a melody from Richard Wagner, the solemn “Pilgrim’s Chorus” of the opera Tannhäuser, and uses it as a pop song hook. Completely bypassing the genuflection that usually accompanies any mention of the name Richard Wagner and with blithe disregard for the highness of high art, the songwriters (Simon Napier-Bell and Vicki Wickham) not only plunder the tune but also attach a saccharine lyric to it and even add a tambourine to Wagner’s sacred score. Wagner’s melody no longer accompanies the pilgrim’s transcendent passion but carries aloft on a wave of orchestral horns and strings a lover’s earnest, if unimaginative, exhortation: “Don’t say you care if you are going to hurt me / don’t tell me lies, ’cause I can see they’re not true / Don’t say you’ll stay if you are going to leave me / Don’t speak of love ’cause you know I’ll always love you.” Wickham confirms that all participants in this enterprise of bringing Wagner to the pop charts had tongues firmly in cheek, including, it seemed, its arranger and orchestrator, Wally Stott; even if one is at first unaware of the camp gloss on Wagner, the discontinuities are still palpable. Though Dusty’s pop voice suits the initial pop instrumentation (electric guitar and tambourine), it soon clashes with the refrain’s operatic tsunami as she intones its pedestrian lyric. The seriousness of the sentiment is undermined once the song goes into over-

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drive and becomes an orgy of sound that camps both the corny language of love relationships and the equally corny emotional button-pushing of latenineteenth-century orchestral music. As I write this, arguing that the reversals and discontinuities of “Bring Him Back” and “Don’t Speak of Love” are emblematic of Dusty’s rich camp sensibility, I am reminded of Carole-Anne Tyler’s question: “If camp is a parodic distance from an identity . . . what guarantees are there that such a distance is not . . . complicit with phallogocentric hierarchies? . . . Whether revalued or devalued, camp and its interpretations participate in the reproduction of subjectivity.”111 Tyler is right in warning that camp performance, in making available to viewers multiple possible readings, can stand as complicit with, rather than as a challenge to, the binaries that provide scaffolding for subordinating social hierarchies. In this case, Dusty’s hyperfeminine midsixties appearance could be read as reinforcing rather than teasing traditional gender roles, her vocal blackness could be seen to bolster rather than dismantle the notion of racial difference, and ambivalence regarding her sexual orientation could be read as embracing rather than rejecting homophobia. While Dusty’s performance could be read thus as complicit, there were so many indications to the opposite, so many deliberately placed signs to suggest her noncompliance with hierarchies (many of which have been mentioned in earlier chapters), that a simple reading of complicity is difficult to support. Indeed, to forestall such simple readings and contest their possible entrenchment in Dusty’s legacy discourse is, perhaps, the single most compelling reason for placing a camp frame around Dusty’s performance and resisting the impulse to restrict its discourse to the margins. Drag performers have been the most consistent and astute purveyors of Dusty’s camp, keeping it alive by distilling it for audiences, highlighting and celebrating its presence in Dusty’s persona by imitating it in their own. Yet a history of Dusty drag, one that recorded its 1960s flourishing and followed it through the next decades, has never been written. It perhaps never will be, for at least two reasons: First, many queens of the U.K. and U.S. 1960s drag communities are now dead, suffering in disproportionately large numbers from the 1980s AIDS crisis; indeed, Kris Kirk, whose Men in Frocks chronicled the 1970s drag phenomenon in which a radically new drag movement in the United Kingdom challenged the centuries-old tradition of British pub drag, would have been an ideal candidate to write such a history, had he not himself fallen victim to AIDS.112 Second, drag has received the same chilly or uncomprehending reception as the word camp among music writers and even among many Dusty fans; as a result, drag performances of Dusty have not been documented or invited into the mainstream. Despite its importance in British and American pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s (“every drag queen in the coun-

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try was doing Dusty”),113 the topic of drag performances of Dusty remains disconnected from the legacy discourse. It is not entirely the case that drag is ignored completely or edited out of documentaries; rather, the rare occasions when it is mentioned are left dangling for viewers to ponder on their own. As an example, Lee Everett, after stating that “Dusty was just camp,” went on to say, “That’s what attracted them. Every drag queen wanted to look like her, didn’t they really. I can’t tell you how many parties I’ve been to where some drag queen would turn up dressed like her.” This would seem to be a statement requiring at least one follow-up question, but there was none. If the Dusty drag tradition were properly historicized and if camp, in its richest meanings, were employed as a way of interpreting aspects of Dusty’s career, then the silences that surround their appearances might begin to be addressed and allowed to contribute to her legacy discourse.114 While camp as a critical tool makes available a language that can be useful in bringing to the surface layers of pleasure and meaning in Dusty’s performance, its limits must also be acknowledged. The drawback of written or spoken analysis of camp is that it loses sight of the whole; while pulling things apart for purposes of critique, the performance—in which all the elements are in play—gets lost. Drag and tribute artists, on the other hand, who perform about performance, present their subject whole; they can, I believe, reveal more vividly than most scholars the movements of camp in Dusty’s performance.

DOING DUSTY: DISCOURSES OF DRAG AND TRIBUTE PERFORMANCE

Though camp was relatively sidelined in Britpop after its peak of success in the mid-sixties, and despite Dusty’s fade from public view during the 1970s and 1980s, a number of drag performers sustained interest in her throughout this period and continued to “do” her or publicly acknowledge her influence through their performances. In addition to being a perennial favorite among amateur drag queens at 1960s parties and later, post-Stonewall, at Gay Pride parades, professional drag performers like Howard Lifsey and transgendered Jayne County (formerly Wayne County) made a specialty of Dusty. Both became aware of Dusty in the early 1960s when they were teenagers: Jayne in the U.S. rural Georgia and Howard in Doncaster, England. Through his stage persona, “Mr. Lori Le Verne, a most misleading lady” (see figure 4.6), Howard performs a range of Dusty songs from the 1960s hits to the 1980s comeback songs and has produced three full-length CDs of Lori Le Verne singing Dusty’s songs: Gatherin’ Dust, Down the Dusty Road, and

Dusty as Discourse

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Fig. 4.6. Howard Lifsey as Lori Le Verne performing as Dusty singing “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” at the Doncaster Dome, Doncaster, England, February 2007 (Howard Lifsey)

Specks of Dust.115 Howard as Lori has given numerous live performances as Dusty since 1984 singing in his own voice (Lori’s voice, actually) rather than miming to Dusty’s recordings. Jayne’s manner of doing Dusty has changed over the years from mimed drag performances in Atlanta’s Catacombs Club in 1966 (when she was Wayne) to the performance of her own punk tribute song, “I’m in Love with Dusty Springfield” in the early 1990s (after becoming Jayne). Their approaches to Dusty are different and their audiences also differ greatly—Howard performs for family-oriented variety audiences mainly in the north of England, and Jayne has entertained punk audiences in New York, London, and Berlin—yet their motivations for doing Dusty are similar. Both see parallels between their own gendered dualities—Howard/Lori, Wayne/Jayne—and Dusty’s Mary/Dusty narrative; furthermore, both regard their representations as a way of keeping Dusty’s stage persona in front of the public. Believing that recorded performances alone cannot serve the function of preserving this aspect of Dusty’s legacy, Howard stated with urgency, “We must not let this go,” and does Dusty in order to allow audiences to experience Dusty’s transformation and its effects in a live show. Howard and Jayne insist that their performance of Dusty is in no sense a send-up or mockery of her stage persona. Jayne says, “I just wanted to state simply that I love that woman like crazy!!!” and Howard stresses, “It’s all down to this

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods

word, sincerity . . . there’s no way I would do anything to damage my icon. . . . I wouldn’t deliberately go out of my way to camp anything she did because her whole existence was camp, in a way, so you don’t need any more campness. And how much more camp can you get anyway than a man going on in a dress doing a Dusty Springfield song?” Howard’s shows, with their careful thought to gowns, wigs, makeup, musical phrasing, and physical gestures (“Dustyisms”), highlight the distance he must travel to portray his icon; it comes through clearly in Howard’s statements that he believes Mary traveled the same road in her creation of Dusty. Howard’s elaborately constructed surface, like Dusty’s, covers but does not conceal who is underneath, while its many fascinating elements focus attention on the vocal and physical acts of transformation and selfinvention. Whether Howard/Lori sounds like Dusty seems beside the point; few drag artists even attempt it, admitting that, no matter how much they practice, it is beyond their capabilities. Most concentrate their efforts on recreating Dusty’s stage persona while miming to her recordings. Lip-synching in Dusty drag, while it spares performers inevitable negative comparisons between their voices and Dusty’s, has the drawback of leaving untouched in performance the constructed web of quotation that characterized Dusty’s sound—a much more remarkable and original invention than her looks, as discussed in chapter 1. Howard’s decision to do Dusty, via Lori, in his own voice engages Dusty’s vocal artfulness and makes him and his audiences consider how Dusty did what she did with her voice.116 Those who do Dusty in their own voices admit that it is impossible to get the voice quality “right” but insist that attempting to recreate vocal Dustyisms is an essential part of the performance. And only while attempting to copy her style (or watching someone else attempt it) does it becomes clear why it is so difficult: Dusty had not one but many vocal styles. To imitate Dusty, one must also be able to imitate the dozens of singers that she herself imitated— Shirley Alston, Martha Reeves, Aretha Franklin, Peggy Lee, Gwen Verdon, Carole Pope, Madeline Bell, Garnett Mimms, Carole King, Baby Washington, Sam Cooke, Astrud Gilberto, and many others—and insert their minute identifying vocal tags into the performance while staying vocally “in character” as Dusty. Despite the inevitable pitfalls of trying to recreate such a complex style, tribute artists, in their vocal, physical, and sartorial Dustyisms, reenact for viewers Dusty’s postmodern construction as a spectacularly imagined mélange of vocal, physical, and sartorial signs. Jayne County’s tribute to Dusty’s vocal and physical construction heralded her own as a transgendered person; the song draws an astute and very camp parallel between Jayne’s transformation and Dusty’s. Jayne sings, “I’m in love with Dusty Springfield / Girls like her make me know I am real” for audiences that are well aware of the performer’s previous life as Wayne, having

Dusty as Discourse

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seen and heard her in Andy Warhol’s Pork and at venues like New York’s CBGB as leader of her own band, Wayne County and the Electric Chairs.117 Formally changing from Wayne to Jayne in 1979, Jayne continued to reference her previous identity by incorporating a narrative of gender bending into all her shows. The song “I’m in Love with Dusty Springfield” helped to enrich this narrative by engaging Dusty’s do-it-yourself reality and adopting it as her own. The refrain, “I’ll tease my hair up high / Right up to the sky / False eyelashes and pink lipstick / Gets a boyfriend every time,” focuses attention on the constructed surface of Dusty’s femininity and revels in its immediate efficacy. The song’s strictly formulaic chord progressions and standard musical gestures match the formulaic feminine allure offered up by the refrain while its heavy, raucous, loud, and raw masculine punk band accompaniment drones on in deliberately incongruous counterpoint. Appearing on County’s 1995 album, Deviation, Jayne’s performances referenced a later Dusty, the one known to younger audiences via the Pet Shop Boys collaborations rather than her 1960s persona.118 The song demonstrates that Dusty’s camp was as perceptible in a 1995 tribute song as it was in her own performances of 1965, even though the site of camp disjuncture, discontinuity, and reversal had clearly changed. By the time this song was created, Dusty had become not only an icon but also a camp signifier. Tribute performances by female singers like Karen Noble, Tina Oberman, Emma Wilkinson, and Katy Setterfield in Britain and Wendy Stapleton, Tamsin Carroll, and Sheena Crouch in Australia engage in a more recently acknowledged species of female camp performance,119 one that would seem to answer Pamela Robertson’s call for a broadening of commonly held notions about camp. Robertson observes: Most people who have written about camp assume that the exchange between gay men’s and women’s cultures has been wholly one-sided, in other words, that gay men appropriate a feminine aesthetic and certain female stars but that women, lesbian or heterosexual, do not similarly appropriate aspects of gay male culture. This suggests that women are camp but do not knowingly produce themselves as camp and, furthermore, do not even have access to a camp sensibility. Women, by this logic, are objects of camp and subject to it but are not camp subjects.120

This would seem to echo the crucial point of camp self-awareness implied in the second half of Vicki Wickham’s statement (“and she knew it!”) and explain why Wickham felt it important to state so emphatically. It seems beyond dispute, when taking statements like these and Dusty’s own into account, that Dusty produced herself as camp and, as Robertson envisioned, claimed “camp as a kind of parodic play” in which she “laughs at and plays

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods

with her own image.” By this reasoning, Dusty was “distancing herself from her own image by making fun of, and out of, that image—without losing sight of the real power that image ha[d] over her.”121 I would suggest that the female tribute performers who do Dusty are performing the same kind of parodic distancing from an image of femininity; the image still holds power over women, but camp performance allows them, like Dusty, to exert power over it—if only for the short time that they are onstage. The exhilaration of the idea of a woman producing herself as Dusty seemed to account for the wildly enthusiastic audience reaction to Karen Noble’s performance in Leatherhead, United Kingdom, in 2006 (see figure 4.7). In a two-hour performance that included elements of Dusty’s biography (slides of Dusty in various stages of her life, accompanied by a spoken narrative), interspersed with performances of her hits (accompanied by a small live band over a recorded orchestral backing track), audience members “went barmy” and by the end were all standing, clapping, and singing along. Some members of the audience left their seats to dance directly in front of the stage. In a very real sense, most tangibly in the biographical elements of the show, Noble is not only a caretaker of Dusty’s legacy but also a shaper of it. By telling the story in a particular way while singing the songs with plentiful, well-executed vocal Dustyisms, she performs several key elements of the Dusty phenomenon. Karen, like Howard and Jayne, wants to convey the element of Dusty’s transformation and self-invention in her shows and, like Howard, sings in her own voice. As she puts it, “Dusty really came from this plain Jane background, she didn’t stand out when you see photographs of her at school, she was just one of a group of people and from that she just suddenly became this, she just transformed her life and that’s just what she did, and I just love it—and I think, wow, what a character.” Karen also wants to convey Dusty’s all-consuming dedication to making music and admires the tough professionalism with which she pursued her career. As an accomplished musician herself, classically trained as a singer at Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music, Noble observes that Dusty’s claim to a fully professional career was unusual for female pop singers of the 1960s and acknowledges that “arguably, she’s opened the doors for artists like myself to get where we are today.” One of the reasons Noble undertook the tribute show eight years ago (around the year 2000), along with the extensive research, practice, and collaboration it required, was to portray Dusty as the “great musician” Karen believes her to have been. She says, She was a great musician and that’s something that’s kind of glossed over— the fact is, she was a proper musician whereas the others weren’t musicians, which is patently obvious. . . . Dusty deserves the recognition that she possibly hasn’t had. I think it’s such a shame when we go on about Cilla Black,

Dusty as Discourse

Fig. 4.7. Concert flyer for Karen Noble’s Dusty tribute show, 2006 (Karen Noble)

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods

Lulu, Sandie Shaw, and those sort of people. . . . Dusty was on her own as far as I’m concerned. She was the only one from that era, to my mind, who was a musician. . . . I like to think that I do justice to her and I’m not trying to be her; I’m just trying to keep that name going.

While Karen has kept Dusty’s name going through live performances of the kind that I saw in Leatherhead, she has also performed as Dusty on British national television. For a segment on the chat show Open House hosted by England’s venerable Gloria Hunniford, Noble was invited to sing “I Only Want to Be with You” on a segment that was taped shortly after the sensationalistic release of Dancing with Demons in Britain. Looking on were Vicki Wickham and Penny Valentine, who, as Hunniford’s guests, were there to promote their book. The contrast between the book’s contribution to Dusty’s legacy and Karen’s could not have been starker; about the book, Karen said, “I didn’t like it. As far as I’m concerned this is not what she’s all about.” For Karen, Dusty was all about self-invention, musicality, and professionalism— a view that seems to be shared by the growing number of Dusty tribute artists worldwide. The thriving international industry of female Dusty tribute artists and the long tradition of male Dusty drag performance make up a vital aspect of Dusty’s legacy. As in the case of Dusty’s contemporaries who have also spawned a worldwide following of impersonators—Elvis and Judy Garland, of course, come to mind—this development points to the singularity of the singers’ live performance and audiences’ desire to preserve it through what might be called live reperformance. Though music historians and critics do not typically pay much attention to impersonators, tribute artists, or drag performers, I would conclude from my interviews with Howard, Jayne, and Karen that they should pay attention; such work constitutes a performed discourse that adds a long-absent dimension to traditional discourses of musical accomplishment and cultural iconicity.122 A final dimension of Dusty’s legacy discourse concerns the matter of musical influence. Journalists in both the United Kingdom and the United States have begun to write about Dusty’s obvious influence on the current field of British female pop-soul singers that includes Joss Stone, Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Kate Nash, Adele, among others.123 Lucy O’Brien, Dusty’s first biographer, wrote in February 2008, “A new wave of Britgirl performers are taking over the scene. . . . In the same way that Dusty & Co cut a swathe through Sixties pop with resonant tunes and a hip mod sensibility, young women like Adele, Welsh belter Duffy, and Kate Nash have a uniquely soulful style.” And of multiple Grammy-winning Amy Winehouse, O’Brien observed, “Like one of her idols, Dusty Springfield, [she] is an instinctive artist with a sense of history. What set Dusty apart was her attention to detail. . . .

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Forty years later Winehouse, likewise, has an arranger’s ear, a huge knowledge of rare soul artists, and . . . works a song ‘a hundred times over.’” 124 In addition to their soulful style, the current generation’s accepted status as professional musicians, as Karen Noble remarked, can also be traced back to the pioneering achievements of the beehived, mascaraed 1960s icon. And though they have taken over elements of Dusty’s sound and professionalism, the current crop of singers has cultivated its own visual style and catalogue of gestures; when, however, they choose to conjure elements of Dusty’s 1960s look, they do so in strokes of richly ironic reference—indeed, what Dusty herself was doing. Ending the chapter with this observation of a distinct, female genealogy in Britpop will, I hope, lead to recognition among fans, critics, and scholars of an even longer lineage of female singers in the development of transatlantic pop: one that links Dusty and her own pre-1960s influences with the momentous migration of soul and its all-important gospel presence across the Atlantic to Europe in the mid-1960s. And ending the book with a multivoiced chapter that views Dusty as the subject of many complex discourses leaves readers to consider a seeming contradiction: between Dusty’s consistent undermining of conventional authenticity markers, and her fans’ equally consistent perception of emotional authenticity beneath the postmodern surface and within, it goes without saying, Dusty’s sound.

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APPENDIX A Major Record Releases and Events, 1961–1970

The following is intended only as a quick guide to the main events and record releases mentioned in this book. Each single’s highest chart position is given in parentheses according to rankings provided by New Musical Express (U.K.) and Billboard (U.S.). This information is taken from Paul Howes’s revised and expanded edition of The Complete Dusty Springfield (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2007), in which a full listing of Dusty’s appearances and record releases throughout her forty-year career can be found. From 1961 to 1963, Dusty was a member of the beloved British folk trio, the Springfields. The group enjoyed several top forty U.K. hits and one U.S. hit, Reynolds and Rhodes’s “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” in 1962 (20). 1963: While on tour in the United States with the Springfields, Dusty heard for the first time the Exciters’ “Tell Him” and Dionne Warwick’s “Don’t Make Me Over” and later cited this as a musical epiphany. In mid-1963, the Springfields announced their breakup, and Dusty began her solo career immediately thereafter. October 1963: First post-Springfields appearance on Ready, Steady, Go! November 1963: Release of first U.K. hit single as a soloist, Ivor Raymonde and Mike Hawker’s “I Only Want to Be with You” (4). December 1963: The U.S. release of “I Only Want to Be with You” (12). January through March 1964: Nightclub and theater appearances throughout England and Scotland reintroduce Dusty to British public as a solo act. U.K. and U.S. release of Raymonde and Hawker’s “Stay Awhile” (13, 38). April 1964: U.K. release of first album, A Girl Called Dusty. April–May 1964: First U.S. television appearances included performances on The Steve Allen Show, American Bandstand, and The Ed Sullivan Show.

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods May 1964: U.S. release of Bacharach and David’s “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” (6). June 1964: U.S. release of album Stay Awhile—I Only Want to Be with You; U.K. release of Bacharach and David’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself ” (3). August 1964: U.S. release of Kaye and Springer’s “All Cried Out” (41). September 1964: U.S. television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show; live performances at the Brooklyn Fox theater under the auspices of New York DJ Murray the K (the show included many Motown Revue acts, the Ronettes, Millie, and others). October 1964: U.K. release of Tom Springfield and Clive Westlake’s “Losing You” (10). November 1964: Release of second U.S. album, Dusty. December 1964: Dusty’s South African tour was terminated when local authorities refused to honor the clause in her contract that would have allowed her to perform in front of racially integrated audiences. Prime Minister Harold Wilson and several members of Parliament issued statements supporting her stand against apartheid laws. New Musical Express readers voted Dusty second place in the World Female Singer category; Brenda Lee took first place. January 1965: Dusty competed in Italy’s annual San Remo Song Festival singing Simoni, Coppola, and Bindi’s “Di fronte all’amore” and Pallavicini, Amurri, and Pisano’s “Tu che ne sai.” February 1965: U.K. release of Hawker and Raymonde’s “Your Hurtin’ Kinda Love” (26); U.S. release of Springfield and Westlake’s “Losing You” (91). March 1965: U.S. release of album OoooooWeeee!!! April 1965: U.K. release of Dusty in New York (EP); Ready, Steady, Go!’s landmark special edition, Sounds of Motown, was broadcast in the United Kingdom. The show featured the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, accompanied by the Earl Van Dyke Six. June 1965: Release of Kaye and Verdi’s “In the Middle of Nowhere” in the United Kingdom (5) and United States (108). This was the first of Dusty’s many recordings to feature Madeline Bell, Doris Troy, and Lesley Duncan as backing singers. August 1965: U.K. release of Dusty’s French-language recordings (EP), Mademoiselle Dusty. September 1965: Release of Goffin and King’s “Some of Your Lovin’ ” in the United Kingdom (11) and United States (did not enter chart). October–November 1965: Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty album released in the United Kingdom; Dusty appeared on a number of U.S. television shows, including Hullabaloo, Where the Action Is, and Shivaree; performed on the Royal Variety Show for Queen Elizabeth II. December 1965: New Musical Express readers awarded Dusty first place in both the World Female Singer and British Female Singer categories.

Major Record Releases and Events, 1961–1970

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January 1966: U.K. release of Kaye and Verdi’s “Little by Little” (16). March 1966: Donaggio and Pallavicini’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (“Io che non vivo senza te”) with English lyrics by Wickham and Napier-Bell released in the United Kingdom (1). May 1966: U.S. release of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (4). Dusty recorded the first of six television shows under the title Dusty for BBC1 and began a fouryear run on British television. The 1966 shows were broadcast weekly from August 18 to September 22. The series continued in 1967 with another six shows, broadcast from August 15 to September 19. In 1968 ATV carried Dusty’s third series under the title It Must Be Dusty; seven shows were broadcast from May 8 to June 19. In 1969 Dusty returned to BBC1 with her fourth series, Decidedly Dusty; its eight shows ran from September 9 to October 28. Dusty’s television programs were broadcast throughout the United Kingdom and were also seen worldwide in Commonwealth countries. From 1964 to 1970, Dusty was a frequent guest on countless other British television shows, in addition to hosting her own series each year, 1966–1969. During this period, she was also a constant presence on British radio; in addition to the considerable airtime her records received, she appeared as a regular guest on national interview and call-in shows. These radio programs included Saturday Club, Beat Show, Easy Beat, Parade of the Pops, Top Gear, Pop Inn, Scene and Heard, and Pete’s People. June 1966: You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me album released in the United States. July 1966: Goffin and King’s “Goin’ Back” released in United Kingdom (11). September 1966: Westlake and Weisman’s “All I See Is You” released in the United Kingdom (8) and United States (20). October 1966: Golden Hits album released in the United Kingdom and United States. November 1966: Dusty appeared on the same bill with Buddy Rich and his band at New York’s Basin Street East nightclub. December 1966: For a second year, Dusty was voted top World Female Singer and top British Female Singer by readers of New Musical Express. February–March 1967: Release of Barkan and Millrose’s “I’ll Try Anything” in the United Kingdom (17) and United States (40). May–June 1967: Three-week engagement at London’s foremost nightclub, Talk of the Town; Melfa, Tommasi, and Morina’s “Give Me Time” (originally “L’amore se ne va,” with English lyrics by Peter Callendar) released in the United Kingdom (17); “Give Me Time” and Bacharach and David’s “Look of Love” released in the United States (76, 22). September–October 1967: Ragovoy and Shuman’s “What’s It Gonna Be?” released in the United Kingdom (nonentry) and United States (49); Where Am I Going album released in the United Kingdom; special edition of Australian television program Brian Henderson’s Bandstand with Dusty as special guest. November 1967: Look of Love album released in United States; for third year, Dusty

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods declared top World Female Singer by readers of New Musical Express, while Lulu declared top British Female Singer. December 1967: Appearances on U.S. television shows such as The Dating Game, The Joey Bishop Show, and The Red Skelton Hour. January–February 1968: Appearances on U.S. television include The Merv Griffin Show and The Jonathan Winters Show. June 1968: Westlake’s “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” released in the United Kingdom (6). August 1968: “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” released in the United States (122). September–October 1968: Dusty in the United States to record Dusty in Memphis; appeared in San Francisco’s Mr. D’s nightclub for three weeks; recorded television special in Amsterdam for broadcast in Holland. U.K. release of Westlake’s “I Will Come to You” (nonentry). November 1968: Release of Hurley and Wilkins’s “Son of a Preacher Man” in the United States (10) and United Kingdom (10); performance of “Son of a Preacher Man” on The Ed Sullivan Show and appearances on U.S. talk shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, and Mike Douglas; Dusty . . . Definitely album released in the United States. January–February 1969: Dusty in Memphis album released in the United States, along with two singles from the album, Goffin and King’s “Don’t Forget About Me” (64) and Hinton and Fritts’s “Breakfast in Bed” (91). March–April 1969: Two more singles from Dusty in Memphis released in the United States, Newman’s “I Don’t Want to Hear It Anymore” (105) and Bergman, Bergman, and Legrand’s “Windmills of Your Mind” (31); Dusty in Memphis album released in the United Kingdom. July 1969: Appearances on two television specials in Europe: Holland’s Dit Is Dusty and France’s For Me . . . Formidable. August–October 1969: Release of three singles: Bacharach and David’s “In the Land of Make Believe” in the United States (113), Record and Sanders’s “Am I the Same Girl” in the United Kingdom (25), and Gamble, Bell and Butler’s “A Brand New Me” in the United States (24). November 1969: “A Brand New Me” released in the United Kingdom (nonentry). December 1969: Television special Dusty Springfield broadcast in Germany. January 1970: Second U.S.-produced album on the Atlantic record label released in the United States, A Brand New Me. April 1970: Release of Bell, Creed, Gamble, and Huff’s “I Wanna Be a Free Girl” in the United States (105); From Dusty . . . With Love album released in the United Kingdom. September 1970: Cavaliere and Brigati’s “How Can I Be Sure?” released in the United Kingdom (nonentry).

Major Record Releases and Events, 1961–1970

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AFTER THE SIXTIES From the early 1970s until 1988, Dusty lived mainly in California but also in Toronto and Amsterdam for brief periods. Her post-1960s career was fraught with personal and professional problems: Efforts to record and release albums were frequently thwarted by the financial and organizational turmoil of the international music industry (as is well documented, during this period smaller labels were swallowed up by bigger ones who were, in turn, taken over by multinational companies) and Dusty’s own drinking, drug abuse, and increasingly erratic behavior further compromised her commercial viability. Though she released several albums in these years and made at least three comeback attempts, none was a success. The albums were Cameo (1973), Longing (recorded in 1974, selected tracks released only posthumously in 2001), It Begins Again (1978), Living Without Your Love (1979), and White Heat (1982). Dusty returned to the U.K. and U.S. Top Ten charts in 1987 with her Pet Shop Boys collaboration, “What Have I Done to Deserve This.” She followed this with two more hits in 1989, “Nothing Has Been Proved” and “In Private.” In 1989, Dusty moved back to England and sustained her comeback with an album of new material, Reputation (1990). The comeback received an enormous boost in 1994 from Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, whose soundtrack featured Dusty’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and introduced her 1960s music to a new generation. The recording of Dusty’s final album, A Very Fine Love (1995), was interrupted by early symptoms of what was later diagnosed as breast cancer, a disease that took her life in March 1999 at the age of fifty-nine.

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APPENDIX B Index of People

Bacharach, Burt. U.S. composer of many 1960s and 1970s hits in collaboration with lyricist Hal David. Strongly associated with Dionne Warwick in the United States and Dusty in the United Kingdom. Composer of Dusty’s second U.S. hit, “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” In Dusty’s last years, it was rumored that she and Bacharach were to collaborate on an album. Bell, Madeline. American singer from Newark, New Jersey. U.K. resident since 1964. Female soloist in Alex Bradford’s gospel choir of the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of Dusty’s close personal friends and favorite backing singers, who also established a following as a soloist. Bell joined British rock band Blue Mink in 1969 and, in addition to singing on numerous British television and radio advertisements, has released several solo albums. She continues to perform, principally in Europe. Very popular with British soul clubs, Bell has been called the Queen of Northern Dance Soul. Bell, Simon. Session singer from Scotland and one of Dusty’s personal friends. Closely associated with Doris Troy and Madeline Bell’s style of backing vocals, Simon Bell appeared with Dusty as backing singer on several occasions. Billings, Vic. Manager of Dusty’s solo career in the 1960s. Donaggio, Pino. Italian singer and songwriter, popular in Europe throughout the 1960s. Cowriter with Vito Pallavicini of “Io che no vivo senza te,” which was to become Dusty’s biggest hit, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” in its English version. Duncan, Lesley. British singer/songwriter who sang backing vocal on many of Dusty’s 1960s recordings.

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods Epstein, Brian. Manager of the Beatles until his death in the late 1960s. Also managed Cilla Black and at one time wanted to manage Dusty. Franz, John. British record producer for Philips (U.K.). Important figure in the discovery and promotion of the Springfields and listed as producer of most of Dusty’s 1960s U.K. records, although she later claimed production credit and considered Franz an ally in the recording studio. Garner, Kay. British session singer who provided backing vocals for some of Dusty’s recordings and live shows after mid-1968. King, Carole. U.S. songwriter, singer, and pianist who, with her husband and cowriter, Gerry Goffin, was among the celebrated Brill Building group that created many of the 1960s’ most famous songs. After the 1960s, King established a solo career as singer/songwriter with the best-selling album Tapestry, and others. One of Dusty’s favorite songwriters, who wrote “Goin’ Back” and four of the eleven songs on Dusty in Memphis. Lana Sisters. British vocal harmony trio with whom Dusty sang in the late 1950s. Napier-Bell, Simon. British manager of, among others, the Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Wham. Author of candid memoir of his life in the British music industry, Black Vinyl, White Powder (2002). Friend of Vicki Wickham and Dusty, coauthor of lyrics for “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” and “Don’t Speak of Love,” both collaborations with Wickham. Perry, Fred. Lighting specialist and stage director for many of Dusty’s live performances from the 1960s through the 1980s. Personal friend of Dusty since her days with the Lana Sisters in the late 1950s. Moved to California, where he reestablished contact with Dusty. Pope, Carole. Canada-based singer and songwriter with the band Rough Trade in 1980s, later a solo performer. Shared a house in Toronto with Dusty in the early 1980s. Devotes a chapter of her book, Anti Diva: An Autobiography (2000), to their relationship. One of the first openly lesbian rock singers and a strong musical influence on Dusty’s White Heat album. Raymonde, Ivor. Composer of Dusty’s first solo hit, “I Only Want to Be with You.” Also provided orchestral arrangements and acted as musical director for several of Dusty’s 1960s recordings. He had also worked with the Springfields. Raymonde was musical director for every Springfields U.K. recording and all but one of Dusty’s solo recordings from late 1963 to mid-1966. Reece, Douggie. Member of Dusty’s backing band, the Echoes, and a personal friend. Rhodes (née Barnett), Pat. Dusty’s personal assistant in the 1960s and lifelong friend. On the occasions when Dusty returned to the United Kingdom for performances (after her early 1970s move to Los Angeles), Rhodes resumed her role as personal assistant. Springfield, Tom. Singer and songwriter of many U.K. and U.S. hits, including “Georgy Girl,” Dusty’s “Losing You,” and “Summer Is Over.” After the breakup of

Index of People

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the Springfields in 1963, Tom was associated with the Seekers and worked primarily as a composer and arranger, occasionally performing with his sister on television. Unlike others in Dusty’s inner circle, he has declined interviews for the dozens of television and radio documentaries that have been made about his sister since her death in 1999. The Springfields. Folk trio composed of Dusty, Tom Springfield, and Tim Feild (later replaced by Mike Hurst). Toured and recorded together from 1961 to 1963. Stredder, Maggie. British session singer who occasionally provided backing vocals on Dusty’s television shows. Originally a member of the Vernon Girls, which spawned other British female vocal harmony groups such as The Ladybirds (in which Stredder sang) and the Breakaways. Tanega, Norma. U.S. singer, songwriter, guitarist, and percussionist from California. Released novelty hit and eponymous album, “Walking My Cat Named Dog,” in the mid-1960s and later lived with Dusty in London in the late 1960s. Recorded an album of her own songs for Philips (U.K.) in the late 1960s, I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile, but left England before its promotion and was unable to build on her earlier chart success. Reestablished contact with Dusty upon her move to California and was a lifelong friend. Has recorded several albums and continues to perform with the group Hybrid Vigor in California. Tanega is also a painter who continues to exhibit her work. Troy, Doris. U.S. gospel-trained singer from New York who cowrote and recorded “Just One Look” in 1963 (under the name Doris Payne) before moving to London, where she became a sought-after soloist and backing singer. One of Dusty’s backing singers on her mid-1960s recordings. Revered in the United Kingdom among soul clubs. Valentine, Penny. British journalist who wrote principally for women’s and pop music–oriented newspapers. Wrote for Disc and Music Echo, Record Mirror, Sounds, and Time Out in the United Kingdom and also for Creem in the United States. Wrote many articles on Dusty in the 1960s and in 2000 coauthored the biography Dancing with Demons with Vicki Wickham. Wadsworth, Derek. British trombonist, composer, and arranger. Played with Dusty’s backing band, the Echoes, and provided arrangements. Westlake, Clive. Welsh songwriter who composed several of Dusty’s 1960s hits, including the beloved “All I See Is You.” Wexler, Jerry. U.S. producer and part of the Atlantic Records team (along with Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd) who produced Dusty in Memphis. Worked with the most prominent soul singers of the 1960s, such as Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett. Also associated with Stax Records, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and the “southern” approach to record production that favored group composition and arranging via focused improvisation. Wickham, Vicki. British manager of acts such as Morrissey and LaBelle, who managed Dusty in the late 1980s and 1990s. In the 1960s, she was part of the pro-

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Dusty! Queen of the Postmods duction team for the pioneering television program Ready, Steady, Go! Aimed at mod teenagers, the innovative live show was responsible for giving Dusty, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others their early exposure on British television and also for introducing U.S. soul music to the British public. With Simon Napier-Bell, she wrote the lyrics for “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” and “Don’t Speak of Love.” Coauthored Dancing with Demons with Penny Valentine (2000) and was one of Dusty’s close friends.

Notes

Introduction 1. See the cover of the EP Mademoiselle Dusty (Philips, 1965). 2. After each presentation (in Cleveland; Rome, Italy; Houston; Lewisburg, New York; Toronto; and Los Angeles in the years 2004 to 2008), several audience members expressed a series of disconnects concerning Dusty: They knew, for instance, “I Only Want to Be with You” but had no idea that Dusty was its singer, or they recognized her beehived image but could not connect her face with her name or her name with her country. 3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988); Andreas Huyssen, “Mapping the Postmodern,” in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 105–156. 4. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1996); David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Become White (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 5. Portia Maultsby, “Soul,” in African American Music: An Introduction, ed. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby (New York: Routledge, 2006), 271–291; Charles I. Nero, “Langston Hughes and the Black Female Gospel Voice in the American Musical,” in Black Women and Music: More Than the Blues, ed. Eileen M. Hayes and Linda Williams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 72–89; Teresa Reed, The Holy

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

Notes to Pages 8–10 Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); Herman S. Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Patrick E. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). William Emboden, Sarah Bernhardt (New York: Macmillan, 1975); Henry Siddons, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action. Adapted to the English Drama, from Work on the Subject by M. Engel (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1822). Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987). Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Harris M. Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). Patricia Juliana Smith, “ ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’: The Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 105–126; Adele Patrick, “Defiantly Dusty: A (Re) Figuring of ‘Feminine Excess,’ ” Feminist Media Studies 1:3 (2001): 361–378; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991). Fabio Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Self—A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Pamela Robertson, “Mae West’s Maids: Race, ‘Authenticity,’ and the Discourse of Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 393–408; CaroleAnne Tyler, “Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss, 32–70; Steven Schact and Lisa Underwood, eds., The Drag Queen Anthology: The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators (New York: Haworth, 2004); Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, Drag Queens at the  Cabaret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See Marion Guck’s “A Woman’s (Theoretical) Work,” Perspectives of New Music 32:1 (1994): 28–43, and “Music Loving, Or the Relationship with the Piece,” Journal of Musicology 15:3 (1997): 343–352. Harris Berger’s work on phenomenology and musical experience, Stance, also explores the notion of musical intersubjectivity (forthcoming, Wesleyan University Press). LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967); Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Georgina Born, “Afterword: Music Policy, Aesthetic and Social Difference,” in Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, ed. Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd, and Graeme Turner (London: Routledge, 1993), 266–288.

Notes to Pages 10–11

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14. George Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 131–162. 15. Ola Stockfelt, “Cars, Buildings and Soundscapes,” in Soundscapes: Essays on Vroom and Moo, ed. Helmi Järviluoma (Tampere, Finland: Department of Folk Traditions, University of Tampere and Institute of Rhythm Music, Seinajoki, 1994), 19–38. 16. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, 1986); Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979); Jacqueline Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the s (New York: Routledge, 2007); Tia de Nora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 17. Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002); Cornel Sandvoss, Fans (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005); Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Cultures (London: Routledge, 1992); David VanLeer, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York: Routledge, 1995). 18. Schomburg and Performing Arts Libraries of New York Public Library; British Library, Periodicals Division, London; Detroit Public Library. 19. Music papers such as New Musical Express, Disc and Music Echo, Melody Maker, and Record Mirror; the tabloids Daily Mail, The Sun, and News of the World; magazines targeting specific groups such as for a general African American readership Jet, Sepia, and Ebony; “fanzines” aimed at U.S. teens like Tiger Beat; and “the women’s pages” of daily newspapers. Another rich source of such material was the Dusty Springfield Bulletin, in which countless newspaper articles, mainly from British and American sources, have been reprinted. 20. Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers, eds., Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap (New York: Delta, 1995); Steve Jones, ed., Pop Music and the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 21. Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Fuss, Inside/Out, 259–288; Kris Kirk, A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk’s Greatest Hits (Brighton, UK: Millivres, 1999); John Gill, Queer Noises (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995); Sherri Tucker, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 293–310. 22. Mavis Bayton, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Gillian Gaar, She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock and Roll (Seattle: Seal, 1992); Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2000); Lisa L. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 23. Jameson, Postmodernism, 15–16.

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Notes to Page 13

Chapter 1 1. These debacles ranged from cat-and-mouse games with the press concerning her sexual orientation to periodic articles on the consequences, both personal and professional, of the singer’s politics and “difficult” personality. See Lucy O’Brien’s Dusty: A Biography of Dusty Springfield (London: Pan/Macmillan, 2000). 2. This recording followed Dusty’s earlier breakthrough collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” of 1987, which reached the number two position on U.K. and U.S. top ten charts and remained in the charts for nine and eighteen weeks, respectively. Chart information taken from Paul Howes, The Complete Dusty Springfield (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2007), 255–256. 3. Predictably, all of the unmentionable topics resurfaced in the years following the singer’s death, as evidenced in dozens of potboiler headlines such as “Dusty, Troubled Diva: Hollywood to film soul legend’s life of drink, drugs, and lesbian sex.” Sunday Express (London), May 1, 2005. The most sensational treatment of Springfield’s sexuality, alcoholism, and drug abuse appeared just one year after Dusty’s death: Dancing with Demons: An Authorized Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), written by a journalist who had followed Springfield’s career since the 1960s, Penny Valentine, and Vicki Wickham, Springfield’s longtime personal friend and, later, manager. It is important to note that the term “authorized” (implying the cooperation of the subject) is misleading: The text was authorized only by the executors of Dusty’s estate and authorization was given before the book was written. No claim has been made that the executors approved, reviewed, or checked the contents of Dancing with Demons, and the book has been widely criticized for its many inaccuracies. See Simon Bell’s commentary on the book on his Web site, Dusty Devotedly, http://www.simonbell.com/NEWSARCHIVE.html (accessed June 15, 2008). 4. Television interviews from the period 1989 to 1991 (on “chat shows” such as Sunday, Sunday, Night Network, and Aspel with interviewers Gloria Hunniford, Annabel Giles, and Michael Aspel, respectively) share these characteristics. Dusty was promoting various singles, as well as her comeback album, Reputation, at this time (released in June 1990). 5. A small number of serious studies have appeared since then and have explored the more complicated aspects of the singer’s life and career. These include Lucy O’Brien’s biography (2000) and Patricia Juliana Smith’s essay, “‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’: The Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 105–126. O’Brien, a respected pop music journalist, takes a traditional biographical approach; Smith considers the singer’s appearance and musical identity from a queer perspective. Adele Patrick (2001) challenges Smith’s and others’ interpretations in “Defiantly Dusty: A (Re)Figuring of ‘Feminine Excess,’ ” Feminist Media Studies 1:3 (2001): 361–378. Paul Howes’s The Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), containing annotated entries on all of Springfield’s U.K. and U.S. recordings, live performances, and radio and televi-

Notes to Pages 14–18

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

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sion appearances, is unsurpassed as a comprehensive sourcebook for Springfield’s career. Classical music, of course, also traffics in signs, though there are surprisingly few serious studies of the connections between the Western European art tradition’s musical and visual codes. A notable exception is Richard Leppert’s Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). O’Brien, Biography, 17. Melody Maker, November 21, 1964. Martha Reeves’s memoir of Motown in the 1960s documents Berry Gordy’s efforts to transform the Detroit girl groups into “ladies” via extensive etiquette training, in addition to careful supervision of the groups’ choreography, makeup, hair, and attire, both on and off stage. Reeves credits Maxine Powell, Cholly Atkins, and Maurice King for shaping these aspects of the Vandellas’ image. In Martha Reeves and Mark Bego, Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 109–111. Lulu is quoted in the video documentary Full Circle (Taragon, 1997). Dusty stated, “If the truth were known, I think I’m basically a drag queen myself!” Interview with Kris Kirk in Gay Times, September 1985. Reprinted in A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk’s Greatest Hits (Brighton, UK: Millivres, 1999). Philip Core, quoted in Andrew Ross’s “Uses of Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Self—A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 317. See Elaine Budd’s Your Hairdo (New York: Scholastic, 1966). Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963); Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971). A musical analogue to this send-up of Aryan self-importance is Dusty’s outrageously camp “Don’t Speak of Love” (with text by Vicki Wickham and Simon Napier-Bell), sung to the tune of Richard Wagner’s “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from the opera Tannhäuser. Though first recorded in 1968, “Don’t Speak of Love” was not released until 1996, at which time it was included on the compilation CD Something Special (Mercury 528 818–2). Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 89. Dusty’s longtime friend and musical associate, Madeline Bell, put it this way: “Britain suddenly had a soul singer . . . when you say ‘soul singer,’ you don’t mean that the person is black, you just mean that the person sings from there [the heart]. That’s what a soul singer is; soul singers don’t really have a color.” Full Circle (Taragon [video], 1997). Dusty used the word bent during an interview with Ray Connelly (London Evening Standard, September 5, 1970) to characterize the rumors that were then circulating about her sexual orientation. It was during this interview that Dusty effectively

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18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

Notes to Pages 19–22 outed herself as bisexual. O’Brien gives an account of the interview in Dusty: A Biography, 138. The origin of the term “White Queen of Soul” is unknown, although Richard’s “White Negress” began to circulate as early as April 6, 1963, when Norman Jopling quoted it in the headline of his Record Mirror newspaper article. Though it is unlikely that Richard was a reader of the journal Dissent, the source of the term may have been Norman Mailer’s article, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent 4 (Summer 1957): 276–293. Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 265. Simon Bell, Dusty’s longtime friend and musical associate, commented that young fans in the 1960s like himself regarded Dusty as a “leader of a gang that you were part of.” Interview with the author, July 2004. Dusty’s contemporaries, the Beatles, also covered such songs; their first U.S. album (Introducing . . . the Beatles, Vee-Jay, 1964), for example, included a Shirelles cover, “Baby It’s You,” and a cover of the Cookies’ hit, “Chains.” Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 201–244. O’Brien, Dusty: A Biography, 15–16. Valentine and Wickham shed tantalizing light on Dusty’s access to her father’s eclectic music collection in Dancing with Demons, 25. The singer herself also describes her father’s influence in the video documentary, Full Circle (Taragon, 1997). I am indebted to Christina Baade for sharing her extensive research on jazz reception in Britain from ca. 1920 to ca. 1950 (especially on Radio Rhythm Club broadcasts and the music newspaper Melody Maker, both favorites of jazz fans like Dusty’s father). Baade’s work was especially useful in helping to imagine what sorts of music circulated in the O’Brien household during Dusty’s youth and how it may have been received. Valentine and Wickham discuss Dusty’s first recordings (early Tin Pan Alley classics, “I Love a Piano,” “Pretty Baby,” and “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam”) in Dancing with Demons, 25. These recordings, made in Dusty’s early teens, have been transferred to CD and appear on The Legend of Dusty Springfield (Philips 522 254–2) and Simply Dusty (Mercury 546 730–2). Another stunning example of this vocal feature is found on Dusty’s less well-known recording of “Di fronte all’amore” [In the Face of Love]. Recorded in 1965, it was first released in Italy, Argentina, and Australia. The song achieved international distribution only in 1996, when it appeared on the compilation CD Something Special (Mercury 528 818–2). See note 25. O’Brien, Dusty: A Biography, 15–16. This visit to the United States was among Dusty’s last tours with the popular folk group the Springfields. Their song “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” was a Top Forty hit in the United States in 1962 and was the centerpiece of the Springfields’ 1963 American tour.

Notes to Pages 22–25

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30. Dusty made these comments and used this expression during the radio program My Top Ten, BBC Radio 1, August 5, 1989. 31. Paul Gilroy states that outsiders can participate in musical blackness via the “inner secrets and ethnic rules” of African American music that “can be taught and learned.” In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 109. 32. Full Circle (Taragon, 1997). 33. Ibid. 34. In his landmark studies of African American literature, Gates identifies a distinctive, centuries-old process of troping—creative additions to ancestral stories and songs— as the product of African American communities’ social and historical relationship to dominant U.S. culture. By adding his or her own meanings to communal texts (signifying), the storyteller or singer expresses individual identity but also performs acts of group identity and solidarity. As formulated by Gates, the parentheses around the final g mark an effort to recognize and preserve the concept’s connection to vernacular culture, to ensure that its folk origins are not obscured or erased through “correction” to standard English. See Henry Louis Gates’s seminal definition of the black rhetorical practice of signifyin(g) in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 49. See also Samuel L. Floyd’s adaptation of Gates’s theories to music in The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 6–7. 35. The works of Eileen Southern, Portia Maultsby, Guthrie Ramsey, and George Lewis are also centrally important in tracing the genealogy of sounds and musical practices that are commonly referred to, simply, as “black.” See Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia Maultsby, eds., African American Music: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004); George Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 131–162; and Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 36. In the age of digital music, the troping continues wherever “beats” are generated. See Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). 37. From an article titled “Dusty: Pop Probe” by Ray Coleman in Melody Maker, November 21, 1964. 38. Many of the two movements’ objectives were the same: to secure “one man, one vote” voting rights, to prevent discrimination in education and public housing, and to address police brutality. 39. Du Bois wrote, “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls

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40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

Notes to Pages 25–30 of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Bantam, 1989), 3 [first published in 1903]. The concept, if not the exact term “double consciousness,” has been used by Irish writers like W. B. Yeats to describe similar conflict between their own warring Irish and English identities. See George Bornstein, “Afro-Celtic Connections: From Frederick Douglass to The Commitments,” in Literary Influence and AfricanAmerican Writers, ed. Tracy Mishkin (New York: Garland, 1996), 171–188. I am grateful to Linden Lewis, Glyne Griffith, and John Rickard for their insights on this topic. Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery (New York: Random House, 2002), 49. In a 1983 interview, Dusty recalled that Max Bygraves and Derek Nimmo, wellknown British variety performers, “publicly criticized me as a troublemaker” after her 1964 expulsion from South Africa for refusing to sing in front of segregated audiences. Gay Times, September 1983. Interview with Ray Connelly, London Evening Standard, September 5, 1970. See O’Brien, Dusty: A Biography, 46; and Valentine and Wickham, Dancing with Demons, 109. Grant Olwage, “Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical Colonialism,” in Music, Power, and Politics, ed. Annie J. Randall (New York: Routledge, 2005), 25–46. Full Circle (Taragon, 1997). These innovations included seemingly small, though musically significant, techniques such as plucking the electric bass with bare thumb or fingers instead of a plectrum, playing a simple upstroke afterbeat on rhythm guitar, or extending the range of percussion sounds to include accents like the clinking of a lightbulb. Dusty probably first heard these sounds in the Funk Brothers’ instrumental backing on Motown records. I am grateful to Derek Wadsworth for this information. Interview with the author, July 2004. From London music producer Mike Ross-Trevor, I learned that young sound engineers and producers in the 1960s (including Ross-Trevor himself) studied Dusty’s records and tried to emulate their unusually polished, multilayered sound—the creation of which was no small feat considering the limitations of the era’s four-track magnetic tape-recording equipment. Interview with the author, July 2004. As quoted in Adam Sweeting’s “The Invention of Dusty Springfield,” The Independent, March 26, 2006. Roland Barthes articulates the concept of the “grain” of the voice in his The Grain of the Voice: Interviews –, translated by Linda Coverdale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). One need only compare the recording with Reece (as performed live on BBC radio, July 5, 1965) and the recording that appeared on the 1964 album A Girl Called Dusty to hear this. The performance with Reece can be heard on Dusty: The BBC Sessions (Zone X002) and also on The Complete BBC Sessions (Mercury 984 3562).

Notes to Pages 30–38

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52. Dusty Springfield Bulletin 57 (2005): 4. 53. “Go Ahead On” is included in the 1998 compilation CD Simply Dusty (Mercury 546 730–2). 54. See, for instance, the performance of “Gonna Build a Mountain” on the DVD Dusty at the BBC (London: Universal, 2007). 55. Unlike “Needle in a Haystack” and “Go Ahead On,” Dusty did not record this song, although it was in her mid-1960s repertoire for TV and live performances. 56. Madeline Bell, a native of Newark, New Jersey, and veteran of Professor Alex Bradford’s gospel choir, made her singing debut in London as a member of the hit musical Black Nativity in 1962. She maintains an active performing career in Europe, now appearing mainly as a soloist. 57. She adopted the pseudonym Gladys Thong for these forays into nonsolo singing. See complete discography for Gladys Thong in Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 486–488. 58. Roland Barthes, Grain of the Voice. 59. Cilla Black’s recording of this song was released just months before Dusty’s in 1965. The accompaniment is nearly identical on both. Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 149–150. 60. For further analysis of the significance of vocal damage, see Laurie Stras, “The Organ of the Soul: Voice, Damage, and Affect,” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Music and Disability, ed. Joseph Straus and Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2006). 61. Full Circle (Taragon, 1997).

Chapter 2 1. Dusty’s first U.S. album appeared in 1964 under the title Stay Awhile—I Only Want to Be with You (Mercury Wing SRW 16353). 2. These include, for example, “Warten und Hoffen” and “Stupido, Stupido” (the 1964 German and Italian versions of “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ”), “Auf dich nur wart ich’immerzu” (1964 German version of “I Only Want to Be with You”) and “Reste encore un instant” (1964 French version of “Stay Awhile”). See Continental Dusty, a CD compilation of Dusty’s foreign language recordings (ZONE X003). 3. Darden attributes Charles’s “I Got a Woman” to Bradford in Robert Darden, People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), 266. 4. Originally recorded in 1960 by Columbia Records, Shakin’ the Rafters was reissued in 1991 by Sony Music Entertainment. 5. Robert Darden, People Get Ready! 263. 6. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts holds Black Nativity’s original script, score, photographs from the debut performance, and other documentation of early performances, including the European tour of 1963. 7. Charles I. Nero, “Langston Hughes and the Black Female Gospel Voice in the Amer-

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

Notes to Pages 38–42 ican Musical,” in Black Women and Music: More Than the Blues, ed. Eileen M. Hayes and Linda Williams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 79. This was intended to replace classical choral arrangements of gospel music, which Hughes thought lacked authenticity. Quoted in Nero, “Langston Hughes,” 79. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 82, 87 (italics added). Darden, People Get Ready, 267. Madeline Bell in interview with the author, July 28–29, 2007. The documentary was broadcast in Britain on Christmas Day, 1962. British jazz musician Chris Barber saw the show more than a dozen times and later recorded an album with Alex Bradford in 1963, Alex Bradford/Chris Barber: Pop Gospel Live in London (JOY 187). Berry Gordy recounts in his autobiography that he chose a drawing of a mailbox rather than a photograph of the Marvelettes for the album cover of “Please Mr. Postman” to increase sales among whites who might otherwise pass up an album with a cover picture of black singers. Gordy treated early album covers of records by Mary Wells, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and the Isley Brothers similarly. Martha Reeves’s and Ruth Brown’s autobiographies contain vivid stories of racist violence while they were touring. See Berry Gordy, To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown. An Autobiography (New York: Warner, 1994) as excerpted in David Brackett, ed., The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 149; Martha Reeves and Mark Bego, Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva (New York: Hyperion, 1994); and Ruth Brown with Andrew Yule, Miss Rhythm (New York: Donald Fine, 1996). This entry appeared in an item titled “Yesterday in Negro History,” Jet, April 1965. Untitled item, Jet, April 1965. “White Stars Refuse to Share Stage with Me—Belafonte,” Jet, September 1965. An incident at London’s Aldwych Theatre, similar to the Nat King Cole incident previously mentioned, was reported by Jet under the title “Racist Trio Interrupt Baldwin Play with Shouts.” The interrupted play was James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie. Jet, May 1965. Darden, People Get Ready! 266. “Bias Not as Bad in England as in US—Mary Wells.” Jet, May 1965. Charles used the word soul in the titles of two 1958 albums, Soul Brother and Soul Meeting (both with Milt Jackson for Atlantic Records), again in the title of his 1961 album Genius + Soul = Jazz (ABC Records), and once more in his 1963 Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul (ABC Records). Theodore Jones, “Harlem’s Heart Beats Message on 125th St.,” New York Times, February 8, 1964. Nathan L. Grant, “The Frustrated Project of Soul in the Drama of Ed Bullins,” in

Notes to Pages 42–43

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

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Language, Rhythm, and Sound: Black Popular Cultures into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 91. See Reebee Garafalo, “Black Popular Music: Crossing Over or Going Under?” in Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions, ed. Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg, John Shepherd, and Graeme Turner (London: Routledge, 1993), 231–248; Herman S. Gray, “The Politics of Representation in Network Television,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 439–461. See also David Brackett, “The Politics and Practice of ‘Crossover’ in American Popular Music 1963 to 1965, Musical Quarterly 78:4 (1994), 774–797. Unfortunately, Gordy continued the pattern of artist exploitation as indicated by the string of lawsuits brought against him for unpaid royalties. See Gerald Posner, Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power (New York: Random House, 2005). Ruth Brown, Miss Rhythm, 76. Ibid. Ibid. Warwick said this in an interview for the documentary Full Circle: The Life and Music of Dusty Springfield, originally made for BBC TV (Taragon Video, 1997). Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” entered the U.S. charts in January 1964; Cilla Black’s cover version entered the British charts only weeks later in February 1964. Dave Godin, quoted in Sharon Davis, Motown: The History (London: Guinness, 1988), 39. Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman cite the 1948 legal case of “A Little Bird Told Me,” a recording by Paula Watson that had been covered closely by Evelyn Knight. Watson’s independent label, Supreme, claimed in the lawsuit that Knight’s label, the much larger Decca Records, “had stolen aspects of the original recording, including its arrangement, texture, and vocal style. Although Evelyn Knight had indeed copied Paula Watson’s singing precisely—to the degree that it fooled musical experts brought in as witnesses—the judge ultimately decided in favor of the larger company, ruling that musical arrangements were not copyrighted property and therefore not under legal protection . . . individual interpretations or arrangements of a given song could not be protested under the law.” The decision “opened the floodgates for cover versions during the 50s, for better or worse.” In American Popular Music from Minstrelsy to MTV (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 196–197. Langston Hughes, “Highway Robbery Across the Color Line in Rhythm and Blues,” Chicago Defender (July 2, 1955), 9. Billboard archivist Joel Whitburn explains the industry’s rationale: “The pop and R&B charts were so similar by late 1963 that Billboard discontinued the R&B chart. Motown met the British invasion of the American radio waves in 1964 and consistently kept its stable of Detroit artists at the top of the charts—Marvin Gaye, The



35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

Notes to Pages 43–46 Supremes, The Temptations.” In Top R&B Singles – (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, 2000), v. Brackett, “Politics and Practice of ‘Crossover.’ ” Taken from a column written for Esquire, April 1969. In Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), 82. In recognition of the degree to which soul had saturated the pop music markets, Billboard instituted a new “Hot Soul Singles” chart in 1973, thus institutionalizing, belatedly, a presence that had sounded across U.S. and European airwaves for the previous decade. Portia Maultsby in “Soul,” in African American Music: An Introduction, ed. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby (New York: Routledge, 2006), 273. Billboard, in its new category of 1982, “Hot Black Singles,” used the term black in its chart designations for the first time. Whitburn, Top R&B Singles –, vii. Langston Hughes’s 1966 speech quoted in Suzanne Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173. Richard Barnes, Mods! (London: Plexus, 1979); Francesco Gazzara, Mods: La rivolta dello stile (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1997); Paolo Hewitt, ed., The Soul Stylists: Six Decades of Modernism—from Mods to Casuals (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000); Terry Rawlings, Mod: A Very British Phenomenon, Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstance (London: Omnibus, 2000); Terry Rawlings, The British Beat – (London: Omnibus, 2002). Paul Robeson was also a lawyer, athlete, and political activist who was later a target of Senator McCarthy’s infamous House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. In the original lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” (by Oscar Hammerstein II to music by Jerome Kern, from the musical Show Boat [1927]) Robeson’s character, Joe, sings, “Tote that barge! / Lift that bale! / Git a little drunk / An’ you land in jail.” In recitals, Robeson altered the lyrics to: “Tote that barge / And lift dat bale!/ You show a little grit and / You lands in jail.” He changed a later passage from “Ah gits weary / An’ sick of tryin’ / Ah’m tired of livin’ / An skeered of dyin’ / But Ol’ Man River / He jes’ keeps rolling along!” to “But I keeps laffin’/ Instead of cryin’ / I must keep fightin’ / Until I’m dyin’ / And Ol’ Man River / He’ll just keep rollin’ along!” When heard within the context of his political speeches, Robeson’s alterations were understood to join together the civil rights and workers’ rights movements. In 1958 Robeson’s visit to Britain included a series of televised concerts, an appearance at the Welsh miners’ music festival (National Eisteddfod), a Royal Albert Hall recital, a benefit concert in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and two concerts in Birmingham. Dick Hebdige quoted in Paolo Hewitt, The Sharper Word: A Mod Anthology (London: Helter Skelter, 1999), 95–96. Phil Smee, “former mod,” quoted in Paolo Hewitt, Soul Stylists, 80. Dave Godin, quoted in Sharon Davis, Chinwaggin’: The Classic Soul Interviews (New Romney, UK: Bank House, 2006), 16.

Notes to Pages 46–50

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47. Ibid. 48. During Bell’s promotion of her album This Is One Girl (1976), she gave an interview in which she described the heady pace of her London career: “I’ve done session with practically every other singer in England. I was doing three sessions a day, seven days a week. I’ve done four sessions a day: 10–1, 2–5, 7–10, then from 11 on. We did a Billy Preston album, when he was on Apple Records, produced by George Harrison. We started at 12 midnight—I’d been working all day—and we finished at 7:30 in the morning. I had one session the next day at 10 o’clock, so I went right through, a day and a half without sleep. And now I just stay up all night, I’m so used to it.” Interview by Yvonne Fitzner, publication unknown, 1976. 49. Darden, People Get Ready! 62–64. 50. Madeline Bell can be seen singing in the foreground of the crowd in Dave Clark’s version of “Everybody Get Together.” The video is accessible on YouTube. 51. Vicki Wickham, correspondence with author, October 24, 2007. Wickham wrote: “She would hear the orchestration in her head and work with an arranger to put it on paper for the musicians to follow.” 52. “Go Ahead On” and “I’m Gonna Leave You” were both written at the behest of Dusty’s producer, John Franz, who sought appropriate B-sides for Dusty’s upcoming singles of July and September 1966, “Goin’ Back” and “All I See Is You.” Composing their own B-side song meant greater profits for Dusty and Madeline because they would pocket composers’ royalties in addition to their fees as performers. Philips encouraged the practice of composing original songs for B-sides because it would not have to pay royalties for preexisting songs or engage bureaucracy in seeking permission from composers. 53. Paul Howes, The Complete Dusty Springfield, rev. and expanded ed. (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2007), 148–149. 54. Maultsby, “Soul,” 281. 55. Several of Dusty’s 1960s fans in Britain, independent of one another, described their experiences of Springfield’s live performances this way. Interviews conducted in 2004 through 2007. 56. For example, Madeline can be seen among the backing singers on Dusty’s September 8, 1966 television performance of “Gonna Build a Mountain” and during Dusty’s performance of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” at the Wembley Poll winners concert. See these clips on Dusty Springfield Live at the BBC [DVD] (Universal, 2007) and Full Circle [videotape] (Taragon, 1997), respectively. 57. Peter Burton, quoted in Hewitt, Sharper Word, 100–102. 58. After Bell’s A-Poppin’ (Philips, 1967) and Doin’ Things (Philips, 1969), Bell continued to release albums, among them a unique collaboration with Led Zeppelin’s bassist John Paul Jones, Coming Atcha (Victor, 1972), and This Is One Girl (Pye, 1976). Her CDs include Madeline (Four Corners, 1993), Yes I Can (Balileo, 1997), Blessed (Balileo, 2001), Soulmates (Balileo, 2003), and Blue Christmas (Balileo, 2004). On all of these records, Bell is the featured soloist but also cowriter on many of the songs. On

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59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

Notes to Pages 50–57 her most recent releases, a Dutch jazz-pop ensemble led by Frits Landesbergen accompanies her. Dwight Conquergood, quoted in Patrick E. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 208. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 44. For a comprehensive listing of Dusty’s hundreds of U.K. television and radio appearances, see Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 395–412. Howes also includes a list of Dusty’s U.S. radio and television appearances, 413–419. George Melly, quoted in Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 113. Ibid. Paolo Hewitt, Soul Stylists, 82. Richard Williams, ‘The Birth of Cool,” Guardian, February 13, 2006. Gillian Gaar, She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll (Seattle: Seal, 1992), 59–60. The Big Chill (1983) and Pulp Fiction (1994) are just two well-known examples. See, for instance, the four-CD box set Heaven Must Have Sent You: The Holland/ Dozier/Holland Story (Hip-O Records, 2005) and the DVD Standing in the Shadows of Motown (Lions Gate, 2002). The Vandellas also sang backup for Dusty, offstage, for the performance of “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” Davis, Motown: The History, 38. The acts varied from day to day, depending on the performers’ availability. “The Motown Invasion,” Radio 2, April 5, 2005. In an interview with Sharon Davis, Dusty recalled her brief encounter with the American singer: “It’s not much fun having a glass of whisky thrown in your face by Nina Simone who called me a honky.” Davis, Chinwaggin’, 270. This is evident in many of Dusty’s interviews. She speaks about it at length in the documentary Full Circle (Taragon Video, 1997). Clayton Riley, “If Aretha’s Around, Who Needs Janis?” New York Times, March 8, 1970. Quoted in Davis, Motown: The History, 38. Ibid. Gordy, To Be Loved, 222. Hewitt, Soul Stylists, 117. Full Circle (Taragon Video, 1997). It is one of pop music history’s most repeated stories that Sullivan’s cameraman was instructed in advance to train the camera strictly above Presley’s waist. Hewitt, Soul Stylists, 117. See Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), for full listing of original A- and B-

Notes to Pages 57–65

83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103. 104.

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side 7-inch singles releases in the United Kingdom, 451–453, and in the United States, 471–473. “Go Ahead On” was included as a bonus track on the 1999 rerelease of Ooooooweeee!!!. “If It Hadn’t Been for You” first appeared in the United States as a bonus track on the CD rerelease of Stay Awhile—I Only Want to Be with You, also in 1999. Howes’s complete Gladys Thong discography includes Dusty’s work as backing singer for several of her contemporaries, including Elton John, Anne Murray, Doris Troy, and Lesley Duncan. Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 486–488. A close literal translation of the full Italian title is “I, who cannot live without you for even an hour.” For Simon Napier-Bell’s recollection of his collaboration with Wickham, see Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield, 275–277. British Hit Singles and Albums (London: Guinness World Records, 2005), 70. Several of Blue Mink’s performances can be viewed on YouTube, including “Our World” and “Good Morning Freedom.” While Bell has recorded mainly with Frits Landesbergen’s ensemble, she has also appeared in concert with Netherlands Metropole Orchestra and the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw. Dusty in Memphis (documentary), BBC Radio 2, hosted by Paul Sexton, broadcast on November 14, 2006. Ibid. Paul Sexton, ibid. Stanley Booth, Dusty in Memphis album cover notes, 1968. Ibid. See Warren Zanes, Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis, Thirty Three and a Third Series (New York: Continuum: 2003). Booth, Dusty in Memphis album cover notes, 1968. Jerry Wexler, in an interview for Full Circle (Taragon Video, 1997). Dusty in Memphis (documentary). Zanes, Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis, 42. Aretha Franklin uses this term repeatedly in her autobiography as a metaphor for inspired, in-the-moment singing. Aretha Franklin and David Ritz, From These Roots (New York: Villard, 1999). An example of a partially improvised live performance is Dusty’s “Mockingbird” duet with Jimi Hendrix. The occasion was Hendrix’s 1968 guest appearance on Dusty’s weekly television series, It Must Be Dusty (ATV). An amateur videotape of the duet can be seen on YouTube. Vicki Wickham, correspondence with the author, October 24, 2007. Numerous testimonies to Dowd’s importance as a sound engineer are included on the DVD documentary Tom Dowd and the Language of Music (Palm Pictures, 2004). Quoted in Dowd’s memoir of the album’s creation, included in the liner notes for the CD rerelease of Dusty in Memphis (Mercury, 2002).

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Notes to Pages 66–72

105. Dusty in Memphis (documentary). Dusty’s comments were taken from earlier interviews and used in this broadcast posthumously. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Tom Dowd, liner notes for the CD rerelease of Dusty in Memphis. 109. Quoted in Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield, second edition, 226. 110. Stanley Booth, Dusty in Memphis album cover notes, 1968. 111. Maultsby, “Soul,” 277. 112. A distinct difference between “hard” soul and “sweet” soul surfaced in various reviews of the middle to late 1960s, the latter associated with the Supremes’ crossover hits and the former associated with James Brown, principally. 113. Maultsby, “Soul,” 277. 114. Vicki Wickham, Dusty in Memphis (documentary). 115. Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 170. 116. As is well known and well documented, riots broke out in several major U.S. cities following Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations in 1968. 117. The only exception was “Windmills of Your Mind,” which had attained a following due to its use in the soundtrack (Noel Harrison’s version, not Dusty’s) of the Academy Award–nominated film, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). 118. Correspondence with author, April 22, 2007. 119. Dan Penn, quoted in Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 248.

Chapter 3 1. “Rockism,” a useful term with uncertain origin, is used in articles such as Kelefa Sanneh’s “The Rap Against Rockism” (New York Times, November 14, 2004) and Douglas Wolk’s “Thinking About Rockism” (Seattle Weekly, May 4, 2005) to describe a shared perspective among many music critics and scholars that privileges “rock” over “pop” and ascribes artistic, historic worthiness to the former while deeming the latter merely superficial. 2. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 3. Ibid., 14. 4. MM A! A! A! (Paris, 1817) quoted in ibid., 61–62, 64. Such conventions were predicated on the “plastic figurability of emotion, its shaping as a visible and almost tactile entity” and included a repertory of devices such as the rolling of eyes, gnashing of teeth, heavy sighs, striking the boards with one’s heels, and the development of an artificial diction of hissed s and rolled r sounds along with broad arm gestures and head poses. Ibid., 46.

Notes to Pages 72–76

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5. Brooks has called melodrama’s modern incarnation a “mode of excess” or an “aesthetic of excess” that has been shapeshifting ever since Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1770) sought “emotional expressivity through mixture of spoken soliloquy, pantomime, and orchestral accompaniment.” Ibid., 14. 6. See Christine Gledhill’s introduction to Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987). R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet (2005) is among the first Internet expressions of the genre. 7. Eric Bentley describes melodrama as representing “the theatrical impulse itself: the impulse toward dramatization, heightening, expression, acting out . . . an eternal type of theatre, stretching from Euripides to Edward Albee.” Quoted in Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, xi. 8. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 68. 9. Such gestures produce “meanings which cannot be generated from the language code.” Ibid., 72. 10. Essays in Christine Gledhill’s Home Is Where the Heart Is address this genre and its social contexts. 11. See Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio  – (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996). Maria Callas, for instance, granted interviews with Bernard Gavoty in 1965 and Lord Harewood in 1968 for broadcast on French and British television, respectively. In the United States, soprano Beverly Sills appeared on numerous television chat shows throughout the 1970s. 12. Dusty had said numerous times in interviews that she had originally wanted to become an actress and had hopes of branching out into film acting in the 1970s. 13. As Vicki Wickham commented, “Dusty put the capital ‘D’ in Diva.” Live at the Royal Albert Hall [DVD] (Eagle Vision, 2005). 14. The principle of extreme compression had already become standard practice among screenwriters and directors who transferred melodramatic novels to film. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” In Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 43–69. 15. See Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis’s anthology, An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1998). See also Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 16. Released on Aretha Franklin’s CD Here We Go Again (Arista, 1998). 17. Three minutes became the industry norm because early records could hold no more than four minutes per side. 18. See Jean Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Wye Allenbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

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Notes to Pages 76–80

19. Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2001). 20. Donaggio attended the conservatories of Venice and Milan and was trained as a violinist. Burt Bacharach trained at McGill University (Montreal) and the Mannes School of Music (New York), studying composition with Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinu. Michel Legrand attended the Paris Conservatory and studied with Nadia Boulanger. Ivor Raymonde was trained at London’s Trinity College of Music. 21. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 202. 22. “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (Stay Awhile—I Only Want to Be with You [Mercury, 1999]), “I Wish I Never Loved You” (Classics and Collectibles [Universal, 2004]), “Summer Is Over” (Classics and Collectibles [Universal, 2004]), “Di fronte all’amore” (Something Special [Mercury, 1996]), “Tu Che Ne Sai” (Something Special [Mercury, 1996]), “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (Simply Dusty [Mercury, 2000]), “All I See Is You” (Classics and Collectibles [Universal, 2004]), “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten (Classics and Collectibles [Universal, 2004]), “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life” (Classics and Collectibles [Universal, 2004]). 23. See Peter Doyle’s Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music – (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005) for a detailed discussion of the relationship between recording techniques and the affective properties of “acoustically imagined space.” 24. See Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 54. 25. I should add here that shorter, simpler introductions were substituted in live performance and in the published piano-vocal scores that were sold to the public. In the case of Dusty’s live radio appearances, it would have been prohibitively expensive to engage a full orchestra; hence, the extravagant orchestral introductions of the recordings were scaled down for performance by Dusty’s band, the Echoes (with four to six players), or omitted altogether. Dusty did, however, on several occasions engage extra horn players and a string section for her live club performances in England at her own expense. In the case of the published piano-vocal versions, no attempt was made by the publishers to transcribe and reduce the idiomatic orchestral flourishes that are found on the records. Saving space on the page and sparing the player from unnecessary fumbling with tricky rhythms, inner voices, and octave doublings were probably the reasons for this. The opening musical passages to which I refer here are found on Dusty’s single and album recordings of these songs (noted previously) but were also heard on her mimed television performances in which the recorded instrumental backing track was used instead of a live ensemble. The point of this digression is to emphasize the importance of orchestral affect in the creation of a complete melodramatic event for the listener. The richest experience of these songs then is found in their recorded versions with orchestral arrangements. Although live versions were certainly melodramatic, the absence of the orchestra removed a critical channel of musical saturation and thus reduced

Notes to Pages 83–99

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

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considerably the songs’ emotional intensity. Readers are invited to compare studio and “live” versions of “All I See Is You” (Classics and Collectibles [Universal, 2004] and Good Times [ZONE, X003]), “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” (Classics and Collectibles [Universal, 2004] and Good Times [ZONE, X003]), and “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (Simply Dusty [Mercury, 2000] and the The BBC Sessions [Zone, X002]). A 1987 interview reprinted in Dusty Springfield Bulletin, November 1998. Though Westlake was the song’s principal composer, he based “All I See Is You” on a melody fragment by Ben Weisman. Thomas Elsaesser, regarding Vincente Minelli’s directorial signature. See Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury,” in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 52–53. MM A! A! A! (Paris 1817) quoted in Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 61–62. “Everything’s Coming Up Dusty Again,” Melody Maker, March 26, 1977. Ibid. Interview with Kris Kirk, “Going Back: Dusty Springfield,” Gay Times, September 1985. Reprinted in A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk’s Greatest Hits (Brighton, UK: Millivres, 1999), 46. The pictures are drawn from Henry Siddons’s acting treatise, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, a translation and adaptation of Johann Jacob Engel’s Ideen zu einer Mimik (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1822), William Emboden’s Sarah Bernhardt (New York: Macmillan, 1975), and Dusty Springfield Live at the BBC (Universal, 2007). The song is included on most compilation CDs of Springfield’s music, such as Simply Dusty (Mercury, 2000). A video recording of this performance can also be found on Reflections (White Star, 2003). It is also available on YouTube. The timings given here correspond to the Universal (2007) version. In the many fan interviews I conducted, Dusty’s physical gestures always came up spontaneously in the conversation. Several fans were able to demonstrate the gestures expertly. Donaggio’s performance of “Come Sinfonia” is available on YouTube. Wickham confirms that she and Simon Napier-Bell had both Dusty’s private life and her public persona in mind as they devised the English lyrics. Camille Paglia in an interview for ITV1’s South Bank Show (U.K.), April 2006. “Everything’s Coming Up Dusty Again,” Melody Maker, March 26, 1977. Several fans spoke of their emotional response to this repertoire, and some disclosed that they were unable to listen to certain songs at times because of the song’s ability to provoke painful memories and unleash extreme emotions. Paul Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 131. Dusty attended such performances at London’s Black Cap pub and reportedly reveled in these portrayals. She especially enjoyed the impersonation of Danny LaRue (England’s most famous female impersonator).

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Notes to Pages 102–116

Chapter 4 1. Increasing numbers of scholars from various fields, including music, have turned their attention to fan studies—cultural studies, sociology, psychology, English literature, philosophy—a development with rich implications for popular music historians. Among the most recent are Tia De Nora, After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Cultures (London: Routledge, 1992); Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002); Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds., Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Cornel Sandvoss, Fans (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2005). 2. Interviews with Carole, Moira, Edward, and Nancy took place in the years 2004 to 2007. 3. Let’s Talk Dusty is the most recent Dusty Web site to provide a forum for fans. Earlier Web sites have also served this purpose but are primarily archival in nature. Each provides a rich repository of information about Dusty—articles, interviews, reviews—and related material, such as links to merchandise and news of upcoming documentaries, tributes, and fan meetings. See note 12. 4. Before forming the Springfields, Tom and Tim had performed as a duo, the Kensington Squares. 5. Record Mirror, one of the first publications to offer color illustrations, was another favorite source of pictures and information. 6. See Lucy O’Brien’s account of the incident in Dusty: A Biography of Dusty Springfield (London: Pan/Macmillan, 2000), 101–103. 7. Moira recalled that she had far exceeded the length of this with a 163-page letter to Betsy in Illinois; the two were competing to write the longest letter. It is probably safe to assume that Moira’s 163-page letter won. 8. For a full listing of Dusty’s U.K. and U.S. television appearances, see Paul Howes, The Complete Dusty Springfield, rev. and expanded ed. (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2007), 395–416. 9. Edward had also been in the audience for one of Dusty’s 1960s performances on the Ed Sullivan Show. After the show, she greeted him backstage, asking excitedly, “Did you see the Muppets?” (a puppet act that preceded her). 10. The Bulletin’s sole editor and publisher since 1995, Paul Howes, has been closely involved in most commercial and noncommercial reissues of Dusty’s music and the conversion of her 1960s television footage to DVD. Mercury, Universal, and the BBC have benefited from his expertise and research in their latest effort to find, restore, and issue on DVD Dusty’s early television series, Dusty Springfield: Live at the BBC (2007). The Dusty Springfield Bulletin has also produced CDs of Dusty’s music under its own label, marketed exclusively to the Bulletin’s subscribers, with proceeds going to Dusty’s

Notes to Pages 117–120

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.



favored charity, the Royal Marsden Hospital Charity. These include previously unreleased material such as Dusty’s recording of “Midnight Sounds” by Norma Tanega, rarities like Continental Dusty (a compilation of Dusty’s foreign language recordings), Dusty at the BBC (radio broadcasts from the 1960s), and Good Times (the audio portion of some of Dusty’s television programs). The importance of Howes’s publication in reconstituting an international fan community after Dusty’s long absence is inestimable, likewise, its quiet persistence in convincing the copyright holders of Dusty’s early television and radio work to issue or reissue it commercially. Dusty Day is an annual event that takes place on or near Dusty’s birth date, 16 April. Though Dusty Day events have been held sporadically in Australia and the United States, it has been held every year in England since 2000, first in Henley, the location of Dusty’s grave, and more recently in Ealing, Dusty’s childhood home. The daylong event draws fans worldwide to participate in auctions of Dusty memorabilia, enjoy performances by Dusty’s longtime friends such as Madeline Bell, Simon Bell, and Kay Garner, and view rare videotapes of Dusty’s performances. Various charity fund-raising activities take place also, with all proceeds donated to the Marsden. The principal archival Dusty Web sites are A Girl Called Dusty, created by Grant Whittingham (http://www.dustyspringfield.nu, accessed 3/15/08), Woman of Repute, created by Michael Bayly (http://www.cpinternet.com/~mbayly/, accessed 3/15/08), and Devotedly Dusty, created by Simon Bell (http://www.simonbell.com/ Dustydevotedly.html, accessed 3/15/08). Let’s Talk Dusty! is the latest Internet forum to attract large numbers of Dusty fans (http://www.dustyspringfield.info, accessed 3/15/08). Other sites include Dusty Springfield Network (http://www.dusty-springfield.com/, accessed 3/15/08) and Dustyville (http://www.dustyville.net, accessed 3/15/08). Nancy also remembers the Springfields’ “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” which had been a hit in the United States in 1962. Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham, Dancing with Demons: The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 218–219. While wedding ceremonies of the kind described in Dancing with Demons held great symbolic and political meaning for the participants, they were not recognized as legal unions in the United States in 1983. In 1988, Dusty mentioned in an interview with Gay Times’s Kris Kirk that she had twice been the victim of domestic violence, though she did not reveal the name or gender of the perpetrator. Dancing with Demons fills in these blanks. The interview was reprinted in Kirk’s A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk’s Greatest Hits (Brighton, UK: Millivres, 1999), 44–51. Definitely Dusty, 1999. Paul Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 7. Lennox’s poem appears in full as part of the four-CD set Simply . . . Dusty (Universal, Mercury Records), 2000. “If I remember, the song I heard on the radio that day was “Some of Your Lovin’.”

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21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Notes to Pages 120–126 Wexler said this on Dusty in Memphis (documentary), BBC Radio 2, hosted by Paul Sexton, broadcast on November 14, 2006. See Blossom Dearie’s album, That’s Just the Way I Want to Be (Fontana, 1970). Both Petula Clark and B. J. Thomas offer their professional and personal opinions of Dusty’s singing capabilities on the DVD Dusty Springfield Reflections (White Star, 2003). Dusty Springfield Live at the BBC [DVD] (Universal, 2007). Definitely Dusty, 1999. Vicki Wickham, correspondence with author, October 24, 2007. Dusty in Memphis (documentary), BBC Radio 2, hosted by Paul Sexton, broadcast on November 14, 2006. Definitely Dusty, 1999. Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham also address Dusty’s managerial problems in Dancing with Demons, 130. Dusty’s performance of Barry Manilow’s “Sandra” on the Dinah Shore Show (April 24, 1978) indicates the direction her career may have been going by the late 1970s. Dusty might have been able to build on White Heat’s positive reviews in the British press, but the album’s availability only as an import and its lack of promotion made this impossible. Had the Stringfellow disaster not happened and had White Heat been more visible, British audiences might have accepted Dusty as a Carole Pope type of rock chick, though the radical departure from her 1960s persona would have startled many. Pope’s influence on Dusty was strong, both professionally (Dusty acknowledged Pope in the liner notes of White Heat) and personally. Pope devotes a chapter of her autobiography to her relationship with Dusty, focusing mainly on the time they lived together in Toronto before White Heat’s 1982 release. See Carole Pope, Anti-Diva: An Autobiography (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2000). Simon Bell, remembering the first of Dusty’s Drury Lane concerts (April 1979) in an interview for the television documentary Living Famously, produced and directed by Mark Hill (executive producer) and Paul Tucker, (camera/director), for BBC2, January 2003. Definitely Dusty, 1999. Living Famously, 2003. Definitely Dusty, 1999. Paul Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 76. Dancing with Demons, 109–110. Definitely Dusty, 1999. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Valentine and Wickham’s account of an aspect of Dusty’s interaction with audiences: Dancing with Demons, 135, 226–227. Evening News Friday, April 20, 1979. Cathy Couzens, Daily Star, May 18, 1979.

Notes to Pages 126–130

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43. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, 1986), 150–153. 44. Ibid., 152. 45. Simon Bell, interview with author, June 2004. 46. Living Famously, 2003. 47. Madeline Bell, interview with author, July 28–29, 2007. 48. Edward James (formerly Edward) used this term in my interviews with him. 49. Rob Hoerburger, “Dusty Rides Again,” New York Times Magazine, October 29, 1995. 50. For instance, the back cover of Philips’s U.S. release of the album Dusty Springfield, the Look of Love (1967) includes the following comment: “Dusty came from the middle class. She once said that she considered her middle class background her greatest handicap in starting out in the profession of displaying her feelings . . . that is, of singing.” 51. Angela McRobbie examines the notion of “the real me” in Postmodernism and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 63–64, 71–73. 52. Interview on Radio City, August 19, 1985, transcribed in Dusty Springfield Bulletin, March 2002. 53. Sara Oliver, “I Just Want to Die as Mary O’Brien,” Mail on Sunday, January 24, 1999. 54. Definitely Dusty, 1999. 55. Ibid. 56. Norma Tanega, interview with author, September 2004. 57. Definitely Dusty, 1999. 58. Living Famously, 2003. 59. See Fred Perry’s memoir in Dusty Springfield Bulletin (November 2007), 10. 60. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967). First published in Partisan Review 31:4 (Fall 1964): 515–530. 61. David Skan, “Dusty Confesses: I have always wanted fame . . . I have always wanted to be noticed,” Record Mirror, September 26, 1970. 62. Dusty’s interview with Andrew Simpson appears in “Back from the Middle of Nowhere,” Woman magazine, October 21, 1985. 63. This is from the second of four articles written by Dusty for a News of the World series, August 23, 1964. 64. Susan Fast has written about Led Zeppelin’s borrowing of blues, North African, and eastern musics in her Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85–112. See also Jonathan Bellman, “Indian Resonances in the British Invasion, 1965–1968,” in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 292–306; and Ellie M. Hisama, “Post-Colonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie and John Zorn,” in Popular Music 12:2 (1993): 94. 65. Dusty Full Circle: The Life and Music of Dusty Springfield, originally made for BBC TV (Taragon Video, 1997). In an interview with Sharon Davis, Dusty said, “I was

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

Notes to Pages 130–135 swiping things left, right, and center to record, wasn’t I? . . . I’d slavishly copy them because we hadn’t caught on to them in this country so I could get away with it.” Sharon Davis, Chinwaggin’: The Classic Soul Interviews (New Romney, UK: Bank House, 2006), 270. “Dusty Springfield,” interview with Andrew Simpson in Woman. Full Circle (1997). “White ‘Soul Brother’ Says He Takes Advice from James Brown,” Jet, November 1965. Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 92. LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 205– 206. Rather than compare black and white singers, Charles E. Brown, writing for Jet magazine in 1966, compared black performers with one another—Motown’s two bestselling girl groups, the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas—and observed emerging differences in the relative amounts of soul in their performances: “The Supremes have ‘toned down’ their driving sound and replaced it with material reminiscent of the Andrews Sisters and other white groups. . . . The most apparent thing about Martha Reeves and her group is their stirring–strictly “soul” sound. And their audiences are predominantly Negro.” “Martha and the Vandellas, No. 2 Female Vocal Group, on Rise,” Jet, April 1966. “Lady Soul: Singing It Like It Is,” Time, June 1969. Clayton Riley, “If Aretha’s Around, Who Needs Janis?” New York Times, March 8, 1970. Quoted in Michelle Kort, “The Secret Life of Dusty Springfield,” The Advocate, April 27, 1999. Holly Kruse, “Abandoning the Absolute: Transcendence and Gender in Popular Music Discourse,” in Pop Music and the Press, ed. Steve Jones (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 134. Kembrew McLeod, “Between Rock and a Hard Place: Gender and Rock Criticism,” in Jones, Pop Music and the Press, 94. Mark Fenster, “Consumers’ Guides: The Political Economy of the Music Press and the Democracy of Critical Discourse,” in Jones, Pop Music and the Press, 88. Ibid., 89. In the United Kingdom, this included New Musical Express’s Terry Manning, Tony Bromley, and Alan Smith; Record Mirror’s David Griffiths; the Evening Standard’s Ray Connelly; Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth; Disc and Music Echo’s Phil Symes, and Record Mirror’s Steve Peacock, and in the United States, Rob Hoerburger and Burt Korall of the New York Times, the Washington Post’s Kevin Scott, Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong Torres, and the Los Angeles Free Press’s Chris van Ness. Observer Sunday supplement, October 1968. John Gill, Queer Noises (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995), 6. This is taken from the third of four articles written by Dusty for a News of the World series, August 30, 1964.

Notes to Pages 135–139

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83. Maureen Cleave, “What’s Wrong with Me—by Miss Springfield,” Evening Standard, June 1964. 84. Vicki Wickham, correspondence with author, October 24, 2007. 85. Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, ed. Carole R. McCann and SeungKyung Kim (New York: Routledge, 2003), 350. 86. Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 271–272. 87. Cathy Couzens, “If You Want to Know the Truth, Says Dusty Springfield, Ask Those Who Go to Bed with Me,” Daily Star, May 18, 1979. 88. Dusty’s U.K. television and radio interviewers included Dave Lee Travis, John Stapleton, Anne Nightingale, Tony Myatt, Allan Andrews, Janet Street-Porter, Terry Wogan, Michael Aspel, Barry Humphries (as Dame Edna Everage), Cathy McGowan, Gloria Hunniford, Jools Holland, Clive Anderson, and Des O’Connor. In the United States, Dusty appeared on the talk shows of Mike Douglas, John Davidson, Dinah Shore, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, and Johnny Carson. For a complete listing of U.K. and U.S. radio and television appearances, see Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007), 395–415. 89. Dusty cited this kind of press hounding as one of the reasons for her move to the United States in the 1970s. In an interview with Kris Kirk, she said, “It’s yellow journalism, something you learn to live with. The U.K. and Australian press are the hardest to deal with, they get much more personal than the Americans. . . . That was the one reason why I didn’t want to stay here, there was no privacy. I had everything coming at me.” See Kris Kirk, A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk’s Greatest Hits (Brighton, UK: Millivres, 1999), 44–51. 90. “Howard” was the fictitious boyfriend Dusty mentioned in interviews with the U.K. press around the time of Living Without Your Love’s release in 1979. Valentine and Wickham, Dancing with Demons (2000), 194. 91. Judith Butler, quoted in Fuss, Inside/Out, 13–14. 92. Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” in McCann and Kim, Feminist Theory Reader, 254. 93. Such tropes predate the 1960s and can be traced at least as far back to Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness and its sensationalistic reception at the time of its publication (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928). 94. Women in the Shadows (1959) and I Am a Woman (1959) are two of the five novels known collectively as the Beebo Brinker Chronicles by Ann Bannon. All published in New York by Gold Medal Press between 1957 and 1962, the other three are Odd Girl Out (1957), Journey to a Woman (1960), and Beebo Brinker (1962). Bannon’s books, now considered classics of the lesbian pulp genre, have been reissued twice since their first editions. Naiad Press (Kansas City, MO) reissued the books in 1983, followed by Cleis Press (San Francisco) in 2001. 95. Holly Finn, Financial Times, September 2, 2000; Barbara Ellen, Observer, Septem-

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96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102.

103. 104.

105. 106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

Notes to Pages 139–145 ber 3, 2000; Sophie Gilbert, Mail on Sunday, August 27, 2000; Adam Sweeting, Sunday Times, August 20, 2000; Eric Griffiths, Evening Standard, September 4, 2000. Richard Smith, in the Introduction to Kris Kirk’s A Boy Called Mary, 7. Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory,” in McCann and Kim, Feminist Theory Reader, 334–352. Pictures of Dusty’s wedding accompanied the article “The Day Dusty Vowed: I Only Want to Be with You,” Daily Mail, August 4, 2006. See Lucy O’Brien, Dusty (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1989 [rev. and expanded ed., 2000]); David Evans, Scissors and Paste: A Collage of Dusty Springfield (London: Britannia, 1995); Edward Leeson, A Life in Music (London: Robson, 2001); Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham, Dancing with Demons (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000); Paul Howes, Complete Dusty Springfield (2007); Warren Zane, Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis (New York: Continuum, 2003); Jeanette Lynes, It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems (Calgary, Canada: Freehand, 2008). Among the most recent is Kirsten Holly Smith’s Stay Forever: The Life and Music of Dusty Springfield, produced in Los Angeles in February 2008. Fabio Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Self—A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 7. Wickham also confirmed the deliberate campness of Dusty’s “Don’t Speak of Love,” for which Wickham and Simon Napier-Bell had provided lyrics. Vicki Wickham in correspondence with the author (October 24, 2007). Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening (London: Methuen, 1954) 124–126, quoted in Cleto, Camp, 7. Cleto, Camp, 7. Patricia Juliana Smith, “‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’: The Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 105–126. While Cleto mentions centuries-old gay cultures, he points out that Oscar Wilde’s trial is the starting point of the contemporary gay male sensibility. Isherwood, World in the Evening, 124, quoted in Cleto, Camp, 28. Fabio Cleto writes, “We can register a constant presence in Romance and Germanic languages, of a lexical nexus that can be traced to the Indo-European root *kamp, and finding its common trait in the ambiguous, bent, twisted, deviated, eccentrical, and inverted. In other words, camp and queer are cognate terms,” in Camp, 30. Ibid., 15. Caryl Flinn, “The Deaths of Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 449–454. Christopher Isherwood, quoted in Cleto, Camp, 28. Carole-Anne Tyler, “Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Fuss, Inside/ Out, 33–34. Kris Kirk and Ed Heath, Men in Frocks (London: GMP, 1984). See also Jill Gardiner, From the Closet to the Screen: Women at the Gateways Club, – (London: Pandora, 2003), and for a longer historical view, Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2000). Kirk, along with his partner, Ed

Notes to Pages 145–153

113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122.

123. 124.

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Heath, would have been the ideal historians of what might be called “the Dusty era” in drag performance; they had unparalleled access to the British drag community and access to Dusty herself. It is to Kirk that Dusty made the often-quoted remark “I think I’m a drag queen myself,” and to whom she revealed her love of attending drag performances. Kirk and Heath would have been uniquely positioned to provide local context for her provocative statement. Howard Lifsey, interview with the author, September 27, 2006. Camp would appear to be a strong aesthetic link between Dusty and her late 1980s collaborators, the Pet Shop Boys. Can it be purely coincidental that “West End Girls” and the sophisticated camp sensibility behind it managed to lure Dusty out of retirement at a time when, according to Vicki Wickham, previous attempts to launch yet another comeback attempt had failed? Dusty in the 1960s and Tenant and Lowe from the 1980s to the present are instances of a recurrent, distinctly camp strain in British pop that is worthy of serious historical study. Gatherin’ Dust (Pig Hut Records, 2003); Down “the Dusty” Road (Pig Hut Records, 2004); “Specks of Dust” (Pig Hut Records, 2005). A good part of our day-long interview was spent discussing Dustyisms, both in Dusty’s and Howard’s performances. Jayne County, with Rupert Smith, Man Enough to Be a Woman (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999). Deviation (Royalty Records, 1995). Yet another example of this was the triumph of Dusty tribute artist Katy Setterfield on Britain’s The One and Only television program (2008). Fans voting by phone chose Setterfield over a number of competitors in an elimination contest that lasted several weeks. Pamela Robertson, “Mae West’s Maids: Race, ‘Authenticity,’ and the Discourse of Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 267. Ibid., 277. Exceptions to this include Susan Fast, whose plenary address to the International Association for the Study of Popular Music–US and Canada initiated scholarly discussion of the phenomenon of female tribute bands—Lez Zeppelin, Thund/terstruck, Cheap Chick, and Iron Maidens. Her address, titled “On Limits, Peripheries, Edges, and Popular Music” was delivered in Boston, April 27, 2007. A book-length study of the tribute phenomenon is Shane Holman, ed., Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture (London: Open University Press, 2006). Francesca Brittan has written about female Elvis impersonators in “Women Who ‘Do Elvis’: Authenticity, Masculinity and Masquerade,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18:2 (August 2006): 167–190. Given her recent album of Dusty covers, Just a Little Lovin’ (Lost Highway, 2008), American Shelby Lynn would also be added to this list of Dusty-influenced singers. Lucy O’Brien, “Girls Just Wanna Have Total Control,” Telegraph, February 17, 2008.

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Index

AABA BA, 87 AABA, 48, 84, 97 AB AB AB, 88 ABC Theatre, 104, 106 acceleration/deceleration, 76 Adele, 152 advertising, 76 aesthetic of excess, 72 affect, 11, 29, 48, 66, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 98, 126 affect, instrumental, 75, 76, 87 affective plan, 88 agency, 10, 25 AIDS, 136, 145 “Ain’t Gonna Cry Anymore,” 57 Alabama White Citizen’s Council, 40 Alex Bradford Singers, 37, 38 “All I See Is You,” 48, 72, 73, 77, 80, 83, 85 Allan, Elkan, 53 Allen, Peter, 115 alpha female, 31 Alston, Shirley, 6 amplified piano, 81 Amurri, Antonio, 72 anacrusis, 76 antigroove, 84 “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” 20, 30, 42, 71, 77, 78, 88, 89

apartheid, 25, 35, 40, 110, 111 Argent, Rod, 20 aria, operatic, 7, 75 Armed Forces Radio, 22 Arnold, P. P., 6, 36 arrangements, 27, 30, 62, 63, 64, 118 arrangers, 10, 11, 48, 62, 63, 64, 141 Ashford, Nick, 115 “At My Front Door,” 20 Atlantic Records, 37, 54, 59, 60, 68, 120 atonality, 77 attack, 29, 76, 79, 144 audiences, 8, 11, 24, 39, 41, 50, 53, 54, 55, 61, 72, 74, 76, 86, 96, 102, 106, 110, 113, 114, 122–126, 130, 145, 147, 148, 149, 152 Australia, 140, 149 authenticity, 18, 31, 39, 49, 153 authenticity markers, 153 authorial concept, 10 authoritarianism, 25 authorship, 3, 10, 43 baby boomer, 134 “Baby Don’t You Know,” 57 “Baby Love,” 54 Bacharach, Burt, 8, 30, 50, 72, 75, 76, 88, 113, 124, 141





Index

Back, Les, 51 backing singers, 27, 30, 31, 32, 35, 47, 48, 67, 141, 144 Baker, Josephine, 38 ballads, 7, 74, 90, 122 Bannon, Ann, 138, 139 Baraka, Amiri, 10, 132 Barber, Chris, 40 Bardot, Brigitte, 16 Barnett, Pat, 105, 109 Basin Street East, 106 Bay City Rollers, 120 Bayton, Mavis, 11 BBC, 22, 31, 89, 93, 94, 96, 97, 122, 127, 129, 139, 144 BBC Radio 2, 63 BBC Third Programme, 73 Beastie Boys, 75 Beat Show, 109 “Beat the Clock,” 57 Beatlemania, 45, 46, 55 Beatles, 3, 7, 23, 45, 46, 54, 55, 56, 108, 112, 120, 132, 133 beauty contest, 110 beehive, 4, 6, 17, 18, 108, 139, 153 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 25 Belafonte, Harry, 41, 174 Bell, Madeline, 6, 10, 24, 27, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 44, 46, 70, 105, 106, 127, 141, 148 Bell’s A-Poppin’, 50, 57 belting, 22, 144 Bennett, Tony, 20, 21 Berger, Harris, 9 Bergman, Alan, 72 Bergman, Marilyn, 72 Bernhardt, Sarah, 91–95 Bernstein, Marcel, 134 Berry, Chuck, 36, 131, 132 Bette Davis Discourse, 74 Billboard, 43, 68 Billings, Vic, 35, 161 Bindi, Umberto, 72, 96 biographers, 8, 101, 113 biography, 125, 127, 139, 140, 141, 150 Birmingham, Alabama, 40 bisexuality, 25, 118 Bishop, Joey, 114 Black, Cilla, 20, 21, 24, 42, 86, 135, 150

Black Nativity: A Gospel Song-Play, 37–41 Black Power, 43, 55, 68 black press, 40, 131, 133 Black Pride, 43, 68 black sound, 6, 18, 22 blackface minstrelsy, 132 blackness, 6, 45, 68, 69, 132, 144, 145 Blackpool, 104, 106, 111 Blue Mink, 36, 58, 59 blues, 21, 22, 25, 36, 44, 71, 122 body camp, 143 body language, 59 Bolan, Marc, 105, 162 Bolton, 105, 107 Boone, Pat, 20, 114 Booth, Stanley, 60–63, 68 Born, Georgina, 10 Borza, Peppi, 105, 106, 113 bouffant, 4 boundaries, 22, 28, 25, 31, 50, 123 Boyer, Horace, 51 boys, 16, 103, 115, 144 Boyzone, 59 Brackett, David, 43 Bradford, Alex, 38 brass, 79, 80 Brian Poole and the Tremoloes, 43, 55 Bricusse, Leslie, 31 Brill Building, 114 “Bring Him Back,” 144–145 British Invasion, 37, 120, 131, 132 British Musician’s Union, 63 Britpop, 3, 7, 10, 13, 18, 36, 45, 47, 48, 59, 67, 141, 146, 153 Britpopisms, 7, 47 broken personality motif, 129 Bronx, 69, 114 Brooklyn Fox, 23, 51, 53 Brooks, Peter, 96 Brown, James, 27, 41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 62, 68, 131, 132 Brown, Maxine, 21 Brown, Ruth, 25, 42, 44, 51 Butler, Judith, 137 cabaret, 41, 114 Cabaret Club, 46 cadence, 85, 86, 87, 89 Calhoun, Cheshire, 135

Index California, 98, 99, 108, 116, 130, 131 call-and-response, 30, 31, 32, 47, 48, 67, 83 Callas, Maria, 74 Cambridge, Godfrey, 132 camp, 3, 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 18, 118, 127, 129, 139, 140–150 “Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield,” 142 cancer, 138 career girl, 103, 135 Carole, 103–109, 113, 115–117 Carroll, Tamsin, 149 Castaway’s Club, 105 Catacombs Club, 147 category, 67, 121–123, 138 catharsis, 84 Catholicism, 135 cats, 138 CBGB, 149 Chantels, 27 “chantoosies,” 66 Charles, Ray, 20, 42, 51 chest voice, 22, 66, 67, 86, 87, 89, 98 Chicago, 4, 5 Chicago, South Side, 131 Children’s Hour, 138 chorus, 76, 79, 80 Chrisman, Gene, 64 Christgau, Robert, 44 chromaticism, 77 civil rights, 7, 24, 41, 68 Clapton, Eric, 36 Clark, Petula, 24, 120, 121, 135, 141 class, 3, 6, 15, 16, 21, 24, 44, 45, 74, 113, 128, 129, 130–133, 141, 143 Cleave, Maureen, 135 Cleto, Fabio, 142, 143 clichés, 76, 99 climax, 30, 31, 48, 75, 83, 88, 121, 126 “Climb Every Mountain,” 50 Cline, Patsy, 141 Cochran, Wayne, 131 Cocker, Joe, 36, 48 code, musical, 77 Cogbill, Tommy, 64 Cole, Nat King, 40 Coleman, Ray, 16, 90, 171 Collier, Mitty, 21, 42 colonial privilege, 18, 130



Colony Records, 22, 114 “Come Sinfonia,” 96 comeback, 116, 125–127, 146 Commitments, The, 51 Commonwealth, 3, 35, 102, 157 community, 4, 9, 116–118 composition, Eurological and Afrological, 10 compression, 8, 75, 77, 81–83, 88, 89, 98, 181 conceit, 77, 84, 86, 87 Confidential, 136 consciousness black, 43, 44 British, 54 class, 44 double, 24 false, 17 consumption, 8, 11, 76, 129 Contours, 43, 52, 55 control freak, 64 convent, 3, 4, 22, 138 conventions, 25, 45, 57, 72, 73, 119, 140 Cook, Roger, 58 Cooke, Sam, 6, 41, 148 Coppola, Mario, 72 copyright, 43 Costello, Elvis, 33, 35, 141 Cotton Club, 38 Council, Jim, 121 countermelodies, 78 counterpoint, 81, 89, 92, 149 country (music), 122 County, Jayne, 146, 148 County, Wayne, 146, 149 Couzens, Cathy, 134, 136, 137 cover versions, 18, 20, 21, 24, 28, 43 Crawford, Joan, 73 credibility, 3, 49, 50, 133 criticism, popular music, 11, 134 crossover, 41, 43, 44, 68 Crouch, Sheena, 149 cultural products, 11, 21 cultural theory, 5, 9 Culture Club, 59 culture African American, 21, 69 high and low, 75 Mod, 50



Index

Curtis, Chris, 113 cymbals, 79 Daily Mail, 138 Daily Star, 134 dance music, 83 “Dancing in the Street,” 54 Dancing with Demons, 117, 134, 138–140, 152 danse grotesque, 9, 128 Darden, Robert, 38, 39, 47, 51 Darwen’s Cranberry Fold Inn, 107 Dave Clark Five, 36, 113 David, Hal, 72 Davis, Bette, 73, 74 Davis, Sharon, 51 Dean, Jimmy, 114 Dearie, Blossom, 120–121 Dee, Kiki, 124, 125, 141 Definitely Dusty, 142 demo tape, 63, 66 Deneuve, Catherine, 16 Detroit, 54, 133 Detroit News, 133 Deviation, 149 Devotedly Dusty, 117 “Di fronte all’amore,” 72, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 97 diatonic chord progressions, 76 difference, racial, 18, 145 Disc and Music Echo, 104, 114 discontinuities, 133, 144, 145 discourse audience, 74 of authenticity, 18 Bette Davis, 74 Dusty/Mary, 129, 143 fan, 96 of fascination, 21 identity, 9, 127ff. legacy, 140ff. mother, 9, 101 of nonsexuality, 138 postmodern, 123 press, 11 rock and pop, 134 self-discovery, 102ff. soul, 44, 133 transatlantic pop, 54 virtuosity, 119ff.

discussion boards, 117 disjunctures, postmodern, 18 diva, opera, 73 “Do Re Mi,” 20, “Doin’ Things,” 50, 57 “Doin’ Things Together With You,” 57 dominant key area, 87 Donaggio, Pino, 72, 75, 76, 88, 96 Doncaster, 146 Doncaster Dome, 147 “Don’t Make Me Over,” 22 “Don’t Speak of Love,” 144, 145 “Don’t You Know,” 57 “Doodlin’,” 21, 127 doo-wop, 37 Dorian sixth, 78 Dorsey, Lee, 20 Dovells, 52 Dowd, Tom, 61, 62, 64, 65 Down the Dusty Road, 146 downbeat, 79 drag, 9, 10, 16, 99, 102, 117, 141, 143, 145–148, 152 drama queen, 97 Dreamgirls, 51 drug abuse, 118 drum, 29, 78, 79 Drury Lane, 125, 126 dualities, 147 Du Bois, W. E. B., 24 Duffy, 152 Duncan, Lesley, 27, 31, 47, 48 Dustifying, 28, 30 Dusty Day, 118, 140 Dusty in Memphis, 7, 37, 53, 60–73, 108, 117, 123, 140 Dusty Springfield Bulletin, 19, 26, 102, 116, 140 Dusty Springfield International, 116 Dustyisms, 148, 150 Dustyworld, 104, 108 Dyer, Richard, 6, 126 dynamics, 33, 121 dynamics of repression, 71 Ealing, 15 Ealing Studios, 45 Early, Gerald, 51 East Anglia Soul Club, 56

Index Ebony, 133 Ed Sullivan Show, 42, 54, 56, 114 editing, 63 Edward, 102, 103, 106, 109–116 Eileen, 104, 105 El Dorados, 20 Elizabeth II, Queen, 140 Ellison, Lorraine, 22 Emmons, Bobby, 64 emotion circuit of, 74, 125 commodification of, 75–77 plastic figurability of, 96 theatricalized, 92 emotional authenticity, 153 emotional content, 75, 97, 127, 153 emotional continuum, 82 emotional scripts, 82 Emperor Rosko, 107 ensemble vocalizing, 38 epiphany, musical, 22 epiphany, vocal, 61 Epstein, Brian, 140 essentialism, 18, 132 establishing shot, 77, 80, 99 Evening Standard, 135 Everett, Betty, 21 Everett, Lee, 128, 141, 142, 143, 146 “Everybody Get Together,” 48 Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty, 17, 20, 21 Exciters, 22 expectations, musical, 80, 88, 89 expressions, facial, 96 Fab, 104 fade, 48, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89 fakeness, 16 false climax, 87 Famous Flames, 27 fan activities, 104, 108, 109, 112, 115 base, 16, 44, 116 club, 52, 102, 109, 114 forums, 102 policing, 108, 116, 124 studies, 184n1 Fanon, Frantz, 44 fans, 9, 13, 15, 40, 74, 102, 113, 114, 117, 120, 126, 131



Fast, Susan, 9 feeling, 11, 24, 32, 76, 90, 97, 112, 118, 124, 126 female camp, 10, 149 female gospel voice, 3, 37, 39, 69 feminine display, 4 femininity, 16, 25, 149 Fenster, Mark, 134 figure, musical, 29, 78, 79 “Fingertips, Pt. II,” 54 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 21 Fitzgerald, Ella, 25, 32 Flanagan and Allan, 122 Flanders and Swan, 122 Flatbush Avenue, 51 Fleet Street, 111 Flinn, Caryl, 143 Floyd, Samuel, 6 folk, 10, 15, 22, 24, 38, 103, 122 form, musical, 76, 83, 87, 88 forward motion, 29, 81 Four Jacks and a Jill, 37 Four Tops, 37 four-track recording, 65 Fox, Samantha, 120 Foxes, the, 138 Foxx, Charlie and Inez, 20, 28 frame, musical, 78 Frankenberg, Ruth, 6 Franklin, Aretha, 6, 21, 60, 75, 148 Franz, John, 27, 48 Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 106 French horn, 79 Friedan, Betty, 17 Funk Brothers, 27, 43 Gaar, Gillian, 51 Gamble and Huff, 42 Garland, Judy, 32, 41, 126, 152 Garner, Kay, 27, 47 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 6, 24 Gatherin’ Dust, 146 gay ghetto, 142 Gay Pride parades, 146 Gaye, Marvin, 48, 51, 52, 131 gender, 6, 10, 11, 14, 18, 22, 25, 28, 29, 130, 133, 134, 141, 143, 145–149 genre, 3, 7, 8, 10, 36, 46, 58, 67, 71–73, 84, 89, 90, 96, 99, 121–124, 143 George, Nelson, 7, 10, 51, 131



Index

Georgia, 146 Gerry and the Pacemakers, 131, 132 gestural literalness, 92 gesture/emotion equivalencies, 92 gestures, orchestral, 86 Gibbs, Georgia, 42 Gilberto, Astrud, 6, 148 Gill, John, 11, 134 Girl Called Dusty, A, 20 Girl Called Dusty, A (Web site), 17 girl groups, 16, 29, 31, 71 girl power, 16 glissandi, 80 Glovertones, 37 “Go Ahead On,” 31, 47, 48, 57 goal notes, 80, 81 Godin, Dave, 43, 45, 46 Godspell, 39 “Gonna Build a Mountain,” 31 Good Morning Britain, 138 good thief, 53, 133 Goons, 122 Gordy, Berry, 16, 42, 51, 53, 54 Gore, Lesley, 20, 131 Gorham Hotel, 115 gospel, 36, 37–41, 43, 47–50 bodily dimension of, 49 presence, 7 sound, 7 -trained singers, 6, 10, 24 gospelisms, 47, 49, 59 gowns, 3, 31, 49, 148 grain, 28, 32 Gray, Herman, 7, 68 Greater Abyssinian Baptist Church, 38, 40 Greek Theater, 115 Greenaway, Roger, 58 Greer, Germaine, 17 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 25 Griffin, Merv, 114 groove, 48, 65, 83, 84 guiro, 78 guitar, 30, 48, 78 Guralnick, Peter, 51 Haley, Bill, 20 Hall, Adelaide, 38 Halliday, Johnny, 36 hard soul, 68

Harlem, 38, 42, 52 harmony, static, 78 harp, 81 Hayward, Susan, 74 “He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss,” 29 head voice, 22, 33, 86, 87, 89 “Heartbeat,” 50, 127 “Heat Wave,” 54 heavy beat, 83 hell-raiser, 25 Hendrix, Margie, 21 Henley-upon-Thames, 117 heterosexual, 134–137, 149 heterosexual “we,” 135 heterosexuality, 140 Hewitt, Paolo, 50, 54, 55 “Hey John,” 121 hierarchies phallogocentric, 145 social, 134, 145 high/low binary, 142 border, 75 distinctions, 7 divide, 144 hip-hopera, 73 Hirshey, Gerri, 51 Hitching, Francis, 53 “Hold It,” 57 Holiday, Billie, 25, 32, 141 Holland, 59 Holland-Dozier-Holland, 29, 141 home key, 87 homophobic society, 126 Honey, 17 honky, 53, 68 hook, 48, 83, 144 hooks, bell, 132 “Hound Dog,” 20 Howes, Paul, 20, 29, 30, 35, 124 Hudson, Rock, 136 Hughes, Langston, 10, 38, 39, 43, 44 Hulabaloo, 114 Hunniford, Gloria, 152 hybrid, 8, 10, 37, 47 hysteria, 88 I Am Woman, 139 “I Can’t Hear You,” 21

Index “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten,” 72, 77, 80, 81, 86, 87, 121, 147 “I Didn’t Want to Have to Do It,” 57 “I Had a Talk with My Man,” 21 “I Only Want to Be with You,” 3, 35, 52, 152 “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” 120 I Want to Live, 73 “I Wish I Never Loved You,” 72, 77, 78, 87 icon, 3, 13, 15, 33, 35, 55, 75, 123, 148 iconic look, 3, 141 identity, 3, 9, 10, 11, 24, 28, 45, 50, 55, 101, 103, 122, 123, 128–130, 131, 133, 138 “If It Don’t Work Out,” 20 “If It Hadn’t Been for You,” 57 I’ll Cry Tomorrow, 73 “I’ll Try Anything,” 57 “I’m Coming Home Again,” 124–126 “I’m Gonna Leave You,” 47, 48, 57 “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” 57 “I’m in Love with Dusty Springfield,” 147, 149 improvisation, 38, 64 “In the Middle of Nowhere,” 35, 127 injury, 99 instrumental effects, 65 instrumentalists, 10, 43, 56, 62, 64, 141 instrumentation, 48, 144 intensities, 11 Internet, 55, 73, 102, 103, 116, 117, 138 intersubjective bond, 10 introduction, musical, 77–79, 82, 84, 97, 98 “Io che non vivo (senza te),” 57, 84, 96 Ipanema beach, 110 Isherwood, Christopher, 143 “It Ain’t All Honey and It Ain’t All Jam,” 122, 127 It Begins Again, 116 “It Was Easier to Hurt Him,” 21, 28 It Won’t Hurt If You Smile, 121 Italy, 3, 96 “I’ve Been Wrong Before,” 20, 21 Jackson, Vikki, 104 Jameson, Fredric, 11 Jan and Dean, 131 Jay and the Americans, 52 jazz, 9, 14, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 40, 106, 122



Jesus Christ Superstar, 39 Jet, 41, 131, 133 Jim Crow, 40 John, Elton, 32, 125, 141 “Johnny Get Angry,” 29 Johnson, Patrick, 7 Jones, Gloria, 6, 36, 50 Jones, John Paul, 36 Jones, LeRoi, 132 Jones, Theodore, 42 Jones, Tom, 27, 131 Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, 39 journalists, 9, 11, 21, 101, 102, 127, 128, 131–135, 137, 138, 152 journey of exteriorization, 83 “Just One Look,” 41 “Just the Way I Want to Be,” 121 Kallen, Kitty, 20 Kane, Eden, 113 Kaye, Danny, 41 Kelly, Gene, 41 Kennedy, Robert, 7 Killing of Sister George, 138 kinetic activity, 49 King & Queen, 45 King, B. B., 36 King, Carole, 6, 17, 115, 148 King Jr., Rev. Martin Luther, 7, 68 Kirk, Kris, 11, 90, 145 Knight, Marie, 20 Knight, Peter, 48 Kruse, Holly, 134 “La Bamba,” 21 labor, vocal and gestural, 77 Lana Sisters, 22, 38 LaPlace, Maria, 74 Las Vegas, 123 lead sheet, 63 Leatherhead, 150, 152 Led Zeppelin, 9 Lee, Brenda, 111 Lee, Peggy, 6, 25, 32, 123, 148 legacy, 8, 9, 101, 140, 141, 145–147, 150, 152 Legrand, Michel, 72, 76, 86, 88 Lennon, John, 36, 48, 121 Lennox, Annie, 120, 141



Index

lesbian pulp fiction, 138 lesbians, 118, 136 Let’s Talk Dusty, 103, 117, 118 Le Verne, Lori, 146–148 Lewis, George, 10 Leyton, John, 113 Lifsey, Howard, 146–147 Lincoln, Abby, 25 lineage, 153 lip synching, 148 Little Anthony and the Imperials, 52 “Little by Little,” 57 Little Richard, 36, 51, 131 Liverpool, 105, 113 Liverpool Empire, 105 Living Famously, 129 Living Without Your Love, 136 logic, musical, 77, 82 Long Island, 52, 120 Los Angeles, 115 “Lucky Lips,” 16, 24, 27, 135, 141, 152 Lulu, 16, 24, 27, 135, 141, 152 Lynne, Shelby, 141 Macon, 131 Madame X, 73 Makeba, Miriam, 41 makeout music, 71, 83 makeup, 4, 5, 13, 15, 16, 17, 105, 148 “Mama Said,” 20 “Mambo Baby,” 42 Manchester, 46, 103–107, 109, 110, 114, 150 Manchester Evening News, 110 Manilow, Barry, 98 Mardin, Arif, 61, 62, 64, 65 markets, 35, 36, 40, 42, 54, 59, 75, 123 mass media, 59, 73, 76, 133 Maultsby, Portia, 7, 44, 49, 51, 68 Mayer, Richard, 136 McCartney, Paul, 141 McGuire Sisters, 38 McLeod, Kembrew, 134 Meek, Joe, 63, 140 melodic embellishment, 28 melodrama acting conventions of, 72 characters in, 72 emotional release of, 74 heroine in, 73–74, 79, 80, 84, 98, 99

performance style of, 8, 72 plots in, 73 three-minute, 74, 81, 82–83, 89 tropes in, 82 villains in, 74 melodramatic arc, 81, 83, 87, 88, 97, 98 melodramatic graph, 88 Melody Maker, 16, 104 “Melting Pot,” 59 Memphis, 41, 59, 61–64 Memphis Cats, 60, 61, 62–65 Men in Frocks, 145 mental landscapes, 82 Metropolitan Opera of New York, 73 Meyer, Richard, 11 “Mickey’s Monkey,” 56 middle eight, 48, 84, 85 Mildred Pierce, 73 Millie, 52, 53 Mimms, Garnett, 21, 28, 29, 42, 148 Mina, 6, 96 miners, 44, 45, 110 miniskirts, 4 minor chord, 78, 79, 81, 121 mixing, 30, 62, 63 “Mockingbird,” 20, 28, 29, 127 mod revolution, 6, 14 modal shifts, 86, 87 mode, 76, 78, 85, 86 Mods, 44, 45, 46, 70 modulation, 76, 83–87, 97, 99 Moira, 102–116 moment of first hearing, 119–121 Mommie Dearest, 129 monstrous martyrdoms, 139 “Mood I’m In, The,” 122 Moore, Gary, 122 motions, arm and hand, 73, 96 Motown, 3, 7, 13, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 35, 37, 42, 43, 51, 53, 54–57, 62, 67, 70, 122, 133 Mouskouri, Nana, 41 Movie/T.V. Secrets, 136 Moyet, Alison, 141 Murray, Anne, 32 Murray the K, 51, 52 Muscle Shoals, 43, 62, 63, 69 music hall, 10, 73, 122 musical devices, associations with, 75–77 musical present, 78

Index musical space, 78 musicology, 5 “My Colouring Book,” 20 “My Girl,” 54 “My Guy,” 41 “My Lagan Love,” 122 Nancy, 103, 116–119 Napier-Bell, Simon, 57, 72, 96, 144 Nash, Kate, 152 nation, 18, 50, 133, 141, 143 Neal, Mark Anthony, 51 negative social reality, 136 Négritude, 132 Nero, Charles, 7, 39 “Nessun dorma,” 75 New Musical Express, 104, 114, 124 New York, 4, 11, 38, 39, 42, 52, 59, 62, 64, 65, 103, 106, 109, 110, 113, 115, 149 New York Times, 42, 133 Newark, 37, 38, 40 Newbeats, 52 Newell, Norman, 40, 41 Newley, Anthony, 31 Newman, Randy, 32 News of the World, 135 newspapers, 42, 50, 104, 106, 110, 111, 112 Nice, the, 36 nightclub, 66, 106, 114, 116, 123 “No Stranger Am I,” 121 Noble, Karen, 149–153 nonrelationships, 136, 138 nostalgia, 13, 55, 123 note reading, 25, 27 “Nothing,” 20 “Nothing Has Been Proved,” 13 Novak, Kim, 16 novel, Victorian, 7, 73 Now, Voyager, 73 “Nowhere to Run,” 122 Number One World Singer, 111 Oberman, Tina, 149 O’Brien, Lucy, 134, 152 O’Brien, Mary, 15, 128 Observer, 134 octaves, 79, 81 “Oh No! Not My Baby,” 21 “Oh What a Dream,” 42

“Ol’ Man River,” 45 Open House, 152 orchestral texture, 87 orchestras, 76, 98, 99 Order of the British Empire, 140 Other, 21 “Over the Rainbow,” 126 overtones, 80 “Packin’ Up,” 21, 127 Page, Patti, 42 Pallavicini, Vito, 72, 96 pantomime, 73, 92 Parliament, 111 pastiche, 5, 11, 71, 96 pathology, 129 pathos, 127 Patrick, Adele, 10 pen pal, 102, 103, 104, 109, 114 percussion, 79, 81 Persian Room, 115 personality disorder, 128 Philips, 20, 21, 27, 57, 62, 115, 130 piano, 75, 79, 80, 81, 121, 123 “Picture Me Gone,” 57 Pink Floyd, 36 Pisano, Francesco, 72 Pitney, Gene, 20 Plaza Hotel, 115 “Please, Please, Please,” 131 point of view shot, 82 political dialogue, 138 pop, transatlantic, 36, 54, 120, 153 pop, urban, 19 pop aria, 3, 7, 8, 10, 71–99, 122, 124 pop culture, 13, 55, 141, 145 pop folk, 38 pop star, 9, 35, 73, 75, 101, 110, 135, 137 pop time, 80 Pope, Carole, 141, 148 pop-gospel, 28 Pork, 149 poses, 8, 91, 92, 96 postmodern construction, 148 postmodern identity, 3, 101 postmodern pastiche, 5, 96 “Power to the People,” 48 presence, cultural, 43 presence, sonic, 45





Index

Presley, Elvis, 20, 55, 58, 97, 131 press, 9, 13, 15, 107, 113, 127, 128, 133, 136, 137, 140 PRI, 42 privilege, colonial, 18, 130 producers, 10, 11, 14, 29, 42, 55, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 98, 123, 129, 139, 141 production control, 62 professionalism, 150, 152, 153 promiscuity, 25, 118 protagonist, 29, 32, 66, 81, 86, 87, 96, 97 Proud Valley, 45 psychological orientation, 117 pub song, 124 Puccini, Giacomo, 75 punk, 147, 149 Queen of Northern Dance Soul, 55 Queen of Soul, 75 queer challenge, 141 queer sensibility, 142 “Quiet Please There’s a Lady Onstage,” 124 quoting, practice of, 5, 6 R&B, 25, 43, 44, 48, 50, 57, 60, 68, 69, 175, 176, 205. See also rhythm and blues race, 6, 14, 18, 28, 41, 44, 50, 53, 110, 128, 133, 134, 141, 143 racial identity, 131, 133 Radio Luxembourg, 104 range, lower, 66 Raygun, 134 Ready, Steady, Go! 50, 51, 53, 55 real me, 128, 130, 187 reception, audience, 10, 74 reception communities, 11, 55, 96, 101 record executives, 116 Record Mirror, 26, 110 recording studio, 10, 27, 47, 48, 61–64, 67, 130 red tops, 138 Redding, Otis, 45, 50 Reece, Douggie, 28 Reed, Teresa, 7 Reeves, Martha, 6, 23, 24, 51–55, 129, 133, 141, 148 and the Vandellas, 18, 23, 26, 52, 56 regime of invisibility, 6, 40, 52

register emotional, 57 highest, 80, 86 low, 38 male vocal, 29 middle, 81 upper, 66, 86 vocal, 28, 84, 97 repeated chords, 81 reperformance, 152 Resse, Della, 114 return of the repressed, 73, 77, 84, 88, 97 Rhodes, Lisa, 11 Rhodes, Pat (née Barnett), 105, 123, 141 rhythm and blues, 44, 71 rhythmic displacement, 88, 89 Rich, Buddy, 106 Richard, Cliff, 19, 42 Righteous Brothers, 49, 131 ring shout, 56 Roberts, Bruce, 98 Robertson, Pamela, 149 Robeson, Paul, 45 Robinson, Smokey, 23, 131 rock and roll, 43, 55 rock chick, 123 rock journalism, 134 rock liberation, 71 rock torch song, 58 rockist narrative, 71 Roediger, David, 6 Rolling Stone, 60, 134, 140 Rolling Stones, 36, 131 Ronettes, 18, 51, 52, 104 Royal Northern College of Music, 150 samba, 10, 122 San Remo Song Festival, 57, 96 Sandie, 105 Santa Monica, 131 Saturday Club, 20 saxophone, 76, 81 “Say It Loud (I’m Black and Proud),” 68 scholars, 11, 119, 141, 142, 146 score, 10, 27, 59, 75, 144 scrapbooks, 19, 26, 104 Searchers, 113 segregation, racial, 18, 40, 43 self-cutting, 118

Index self-discovery, 101–102, 117 self-invention, 9, 10, 74, 101, 102 self-transformation, 15 Sepia, 133 sermonphones, 47 session musician, 27, 130 Setterfield, Katy, 149 seventh harmonies, 80, 121 Sexton, Paul, 63 sexual orientation, 6, 106, 114, 117, 128, 133, 136, 138, 139 sexuality, bent, 18 “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” 20 Shangri-Las, 52 Shaw, Sandie, 152 Shirelles, 20, 27, 29, 170 Shivaree, 114 “Shop Around,” 54 shouting, 22, 39 signifiers, 18, 76 signifyin(g), 6, 24, 25 signs, 76, 81, 145, 148 musical, 9, 14, 76, 77, 80, 81, 90 nineteenth-century, 80 orchestral, 79, 87, 89 visual, 14, 128 silence, 76, 79, 80, 85 silent film, 76, 92 “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” 113 Simone, Nina, 25, 53 Simoni, Silvana, 72 Simply...Dusty, 120 Simpson, Valerie, 115 Sinatra, Frank, 141 Small Faces, 36 “Small Town Girl,” 57 Smith, Bessie, 22, 25 Smith, Patricia Juliana, 10 Smith, Richard, 139 Smith, Suzanne, 44 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 23, 131 snare drum, 78, 79 soap operas, 73 social binaries, 142, 143 social formations, 55 soft voice, 66 “Some of Your Lovin’,” 57 “Sometimes Like Butterflies,” 98 “Son of a Preacher Man,” 3, 65, 67, 69, 70



song structure, 32, 74, 82, 83, 89 songwriters, 48, 115, 144 Sontag, Susan, 129 Sorry Wrong Number, 73 soul, transatlantic, 10, 37, 46, 50, 57, 59, 62, 67, 68, 69, 114 soul clubs, 55, 70, 161, 163 soul mentality, 7, 43 “Soul Time,” 57 Soulmania, 45 sound engineering, 65 Sounds of Motown, 23, 51, 53–55, 133 South Africa, 18, 25, 26, 35, 53, 110, 111 speaking voice, 130 Specks of Dust, 147 spectacles of feeling, 124 spectator, 142–143 Spector, Phil, 16, 29, 63 Spector, Ronnie, 51 Spin, 134 spirituals, 21, 45 split personality, 129 Springfields, the, 15, 22, 38, 102, 103, 109, 113, 120 “St. Louis Blues,” 22 stage presence, 25, 33, 141 Standing in the Shadows of Motown, 51 Stanwyck, Barbara, 74 Stapleton, Wendy, 149 Star, 134, 136 “Stay Awhile,” 52 “Stay with Me,” 22 Stella Dallas, 73 Stewart, Sandy, 20 “stigmata of perfectibility,” 63 Stockfelt, Ola, 11 Stone, Joss, 141, 152 Stonewall, 146 strategic essentialism, 132 Stredder, Maggie, 31 Stringfellow, Peter, 98, 116, 123 strings, 48, 62, 65, 76, 79, 81, 87, 144 Stuart, Jeb, 41 subculture, 46, 55, 132 subject position, 48, 67, 133, 134, 135 subjectivity, 11, 145 suicide, 118, 127, 140 Summer, Donna, 98 “Summer Is Over,” 72, 77, 78, 79, 87



Index

Supremes, the, 20, 23, 29, 52, 53, 54, 68, 131 “Sweet Georgie Fame,” 121 “Sweet Lover No More,” 122 swinging London, 55 synthesizers, 98, 99 synthpop, 98 tabloids, 107 Talley, Nedra, 52 tambourine, 29, 144 T.A.M.I. Show, 131, 132 Tamla Motown, 37, 54, 70 Tamla Motown Appreciation Society, 55 Tanega, Norma, 113, 121, 125, 129, 135, 141 Tapestry, 17 teenagers, 14, 16, 30, 55, 103, 105 “Tell Him,” 22 temperament, 75, 96, 132 tempo, 67, 76 Temptations, 23, 52, 54 Tennant, Neil, 125 texture, orchestral, 87 Thank Your Lucky Stars, 106 “That’s How Heartaches Are Made,” 21 theatricality, 8, 16, 71 theorists, cultural, 9, 143 theory, music, 8 Thomas, Carla, 45 Thong, Gladys, 32, 57 Thornton, Big Mama, 20, 25 Three Tenors, 75 timbre, 6, 32, 80, 87, 126 Time, 132 timpani, 30, 79, 85, 89 Tin Pan Alley, 111 tonal bridge, 84 tonal scheme, 85 tonic, 79 “Too Close to Heaven, 38 Top Forty, 43, 52, 57, 68, 75 Top of the Pops, 20, 104, 111 Tourists, 120 traditions, cultural, 38 traditions, historical, 18 traditions, musical, 22, 23, 24, 25, 69, 72 tragic lesbian stereotype, 138 transformation, 83, 86, 88, 147, 148, 150 transgendered person, 146, 148 trashography, 117

tremolo, 81 tribute artists, 9, 141, 146, 152 tropes, 28, 71, 82, 138, 139 troping, 25 troublemaker, 25 Troy, Doris, 6, 10, 24, 27, 31, 35, 36, 41, 47 trumpet, 78, 79, 80, 87, 131 “Tu che ne sai,” 72, 77, 79, 82, 88 Turandot, 75 Turner, Joe, 20 Turner, Lana, 74 Turner, Tina, 25, 51 “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” 20, 127 Tyler, Carole-Anne, 145 underground, 44, 50, 54 “Uptight (Everything Is Alright),” 50 Vale, Charlotte, 74 Valens, Ritchie, 21 Valentine, Penny, 118, 125, 134, 138, 140, 152 Van Dyke, Earl, 56 Velvelettes, 27, 30 Verdon, Gwen, 6, 148 verse-refrain, 83 vibrato, 32, 47, 120 Villa, Claudio, 96 Vitti, Monica, 16 vocal affect, 124 vocal attack, 29 vocal blackface, 23 vocal breaking point, 84 vocal brink, 86 vocal brinksmanship, 90 vocal collapse, 84 vocal crack, 87 vocal failure, 99 vocal harmony, 22 vocal noise, 32 vocal peril, 85 vocal quality, 87, 119, 141 vocal tags, 148 vocal technique, 61, 98 vocal tension, 85 voice records, 66 vulnerability, 61, 125, 130 Wadsworth, Derek, 27, 28, 62 Wagner, Richard, 144

Index wall of sound, 29 “waning of affect,” 11 Ward, Brian, 51 Warhol, Andy, 149 Warwick, Dionne, 20, 22, 30, 42, 141 Washington, Baby, 6, 21, 42, 148 Waters, Muddy, 36, 72 “Way You Do the Things You Do, The,” 54 Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, 149 web of quotation, 148 Web sites, 116, 117, 140 wedding pictures, 140 Weisman, Ben, 72 Wells, Mary, 41 Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, 40 Westlake, Clive, 8, 72, 75, 80, 85, 86, 88 Wexler, Jerry, 60–66, 119, 120, 141 “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” 72, 77, 81, 83, 86, 87 “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” 116 “What the World Needs Now,” 50 “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” 20, 29 “Where Did Our Love Go?” 54 White, Mattie, 38 White Heat, 123 white negress, 19, 131, 132 white press, 131, 133 White Queen of Soul, 18 white soul, 7, 60, 68, 69, 131–132, 139 Whitely, Sheila, 11



whiteness, 6, 25, 144 “Who Can I Turn To?” 20, 21 Wickham, Vicki, 50, 53, 57, 60, 64, 66, 72, 96, 118, 125, 134, 135, 140, 141–144, 149, 152 wigs, 3, 15, 18, 19, 148 wilderness years, 109, 116 Wilkinson, Emma, 149 “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” 20, 29 Williams, Marion, 38 Williams, Richard, 50 Willis, Chuck, 42 Winehouse, Amy, 152, 153 WINS 1010, 51 “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” 20, 35, 52, 53, 56, 117, 127 “With a Little Help from My Friends,” 48 Wittig, Monique, 138 Woman of Repute, 117 Women in the Shadows, 139 women’s films, 7, 8 Wonder, Stevie, 6, 50, 53 “Won’t Be Long,” 21 Wood, Bobby, 64 work, cultural, 123 “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” 3, 7, 37, 48, 49, 56–60, 71, 72, 77, 79, 80, 84, 89, 90–97, 139 “You Don’t Own Me,” 20 “You Lost the Sweetest Boy,” 56 Young, Reggie, 64 “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” 54