Emily Sieu Liebowitz
The best and most memorable songs are those that cannot be sung or covered by anyone else. The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” the first single from Motown to reach the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, is one of them. Gladys Horton’s beautiful, plaintive delivery grabs you from first to last (“There must be some word today / from my boyfriend who’s so far away / please, Mr. Postman, look and see / if there’s a letter, a letter for me”).
But it might have been otherwise: Georgia Dobbins, who conceived and wrote “Please Mr. Postman” with Brian Holland (of Holland-Dozier-Holland fame), William Garrett (whose contribution was the title), Robert Bateman, and Freddie Gorman (an ex-postman himself), might have carried the lead were it not for her father’s iron fist.
“When it came time for the contract, I presented it to my dad and he hit the roof,” Dobbins recalls. “He asked my mother, ‘How long has this girl been singing!’ My dad did not know I could sing.... They didn’t know anything but going to work and going to church on Sunday morning.... When my dad wouldn’t sign the contract, it was just like somebody had snatched the rug from up under me.... You’ve got your little dress and your shoes laid out, and you’re ready to go to the party, but Daddy said, ‘No, you ain’t going.’ I stayed in seclusion for about a year. I didn’t even come outside. I was so hurt. I felt … robbed.”
Dobbins’s tragedy in no way detracts from Horton’s brilliance, yet I will never again hear the song, her song, without thinking of her teenage agony. But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups, edited by Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz, deepens one’s enjoyment of all such hits. (A trivial complaint—the book makes no mention of the young Marvin Gaye playing the drums on “Please Mr. Postman.”)
A combination of plodding white backup singers (“readers”: “legitimate background singers that could read music, but sometimes they were very square sounding,” per Neil Sedaka) and an institutional, racist refusal to play Black artists on the radio had left an opening for the girls.
“A lot of the White stations wouldn’t play that music,” observes Jay Siegel of the Tokens (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” which was recorded as “Wimoweh” in 1951). “They would play Pat Boone singing ‘Tutti Frutti,’ not Little Richard, and Pat Boone singing ‘Tutti Frutti’ could make you … uh, nauseous, you know? Don’t tell Pat I said that, okay?” (I listened to Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti” so you don’t have to.)
How did the girl groups form and, what’s more, achieve their sensational harmonies? The old-fashioned way: through family, school, or, commonly, the neighborhood street corner. “Different doo-wop groups singing on different corners, street corners,” sound engineer Brooks Arthur remembers, “all that stuff you hear, it was actually true.” (The songwriter Jeff Barry, meanwhile, describes doo-wop as “what you made when you didn’t have money for instruments.”) Trudy McCartney of the Clickettes harmonized with the Chords (“Sh-Boom”), who lived on her block in the Bronx, from her upstairs window. The Bobettes’ “Mr. Lee” was initially based on their elementary-school teacher.
Their names? The Chantels were inspired by the rival school of two of its members, Saint Frances de Chantel. (“Well, it’s French and it’s a nice flair.”) The Clickettes? They had signed with Dice Records and “dice clicked when you threw them.” The Cookies became the Raelettes after Ray Charles asked them to back him up. An executive at Capitol Records named the Blossoms because “we looked like blossoming flowers.”
Nothing, however, beats the Ronettes: Ro for Ronnie, ne for Nedra, es for Estelle. The formula was as convenient for Ronnie as it was for her future husband, Phil Spector, whose label at the time of their discovery was Philles Records: for Phil, and Les for Lester Still.
The Cookies became the Raelettes after Ray Charles asked them to back him up. An executive at Capitol Records named the Blossoms because “we looked like blossoming flowers.”
Lyrics about love and heartache were interpreted by innocents. “I was singing about the kind of love I didn’t know,” says Arlene Smith of the Chantels. “I loved my parents.” La La Brooks of the Crystals was 15 and had not been kissed at the time of “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Then He Kissed Me”: “I never paid attention to the lyrics. I didn’t connect as well with the lyrics, because I was so worried about making sure I’m so on point music-wise.”
The girls were warned to avoid the Contours (“Do You Love Me”). “After all that warning about stay away from The Contours, somebody always hooked up with one of the girls sooner or later,” Rosalind Ashford of the Vandellas recounts, “and ended up three or four girls married [them].”
Naïve reflections are rendered poignant by bigotry and the sleaziness that blighted the girls’ tours and management. For an engagement in Connecticut, the Clickettes’ manager, Zell Sanders, passed them off as the Shirelles—without telling them.
We glimpse payola and the investigations into its unsavory workings. George Goldner, an inveterate gambler and “the number one lobbyist,” is remembered for his style (“Looked great in a cardigan sweater, and in a suit, and in a Lincoln Continental—he always had all three”), instinct (“[he] had the soul, temperament, and [mind] of [a] twelve-year-old [girl]. And those are the people that buy pop records”), and vices. According to the Chantels’ Smith, “there was a standing joke that if you wanted to see The Chantels’ money, go to the racetrack.”
I learned something new in most chapters of But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? Carole King had the melody to the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” play on her doorbell in South Orange, New Jersey, once the song made her rich. The Marvelettes turned down “Where Did Our Love Go.” Cher sang backup on the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” and Jimi Hendrix was the group’s guitarist on the road.
Success was fleeting and poorly paid. “It was disgusting,” laments Lillian Walker of the Exciters. “We never actually started getting royalties until The Big Chill.” (The equivalent breakthrough for the Bobettes came with the use of “Mr. Lee” in Stand By Me.)
But when it was good, it was good. Holland captures the dizzying whirl of 60s hitmaking: “We cut three [Supremes] songs in one session, and all three of them went to number one. It was ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On,’ ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ … I can’t think of the other one.”
Max Carter is vice-chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s in New York