A story spread online over the past few days saying that Shirley Owens, frontwoman of the Shirelles, had died. I was saddened when it reached me yesterday and struck by one of those inexplicable coincidences that occur often in our lives: A couple of days ago, cleaning up my study, I came across a CD of the Shirelles’ Greatest Hits. Yesterday morning, I listened to several of their hits on headphones through Apple Music. It is disappointing to find that they are not available in Dolby Atmos.
When, a few hours later, I heard that Ms.y Owens had died, I decided to write about how much these Jersey Girls have influenced my life and the time I “danced” and “sang” (two talents that I do not possess) with them. More about that at the end of this essay.
This morning, I found out, as was the case with Mark Twain in 1897, the report of Shirley Owens’ “death was an exaggeration.” In fact, it was an internet hoax.
I’m glad to learn that she is still with us, but I’ll go ahead with the piece I had been sketching out in my head (which again is topped by headphones with Shirelles music playing).
NOTE: This is my first essay here on music. As I say in the “about” section on my Substack page, you’ll find here commentaries on, as Dickens wrote in "Our Mutual Friend," “things warious”—whatever may interest me at a given time: social issues, politics, culture (music, film, television, etc.), language, economics, literature, art, philosophy, religion, travel, science, everyday life, the environment, education, sports, photography … the past, present and future. I’ll include humorous and satirical pieces from time to time, along with occasional snippets from my work-in-progress books.
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The group of four high school girls—Shirley Owens, Doris Coley, Addie “Micki” Harris, and Beverly Lee—was formed to participate in a talent show in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1957. They were among the first of the “girl groups” that would become so popular in the early 1960s.
I was a Jersey boy myself just coming of musical age and, although I didn’t know they were from New Jersey, the Shirelles became my first favorite group. A few years later, those Jersey Boys, the Four Seasons, nudged the Shirelles out of the top spot among my musical favorites. And, in 1964, the mesmerizing voice of Diana Ross provided a different answer to the question of “Where Did [My] Love Go?”
When “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” soared to Number 1 (the first of the coming wave of girl group hits to top the charts) in 1960, I was enthralled. I knew all the words, as I soon did with “Dedicated to the One I Love” and “Tonight’s the Night,” and, according to my friends, I was less bad at singing them than I was with other songs.
Historian Susan J. Douglas explains persuasively in her 1994 book, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, the Shirelles and some (certainly not all!) of the girl groups were paving the way for the coming resurrection of feminism by providing “girl talks” about some of the more vexing questions teenage girls were facing, particularly concerning their sexual desires, which society and their parents told them they shouldn’t have. This “girl talk” function is most powerfully evident in “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”:
Tonight your mine, completely You give your soul so sweetly Tonight the light of love is in your eyes But will you still love me tomorrow?
The song was written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and the proto-feminist message is presumably coming from the former.
The musical girl talk continued in male voices with British accents. The Beatles, as I discuss in my latest book, The Times They Were a-Changin’ – 1964: The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, the Beatles loved the music of the girl groups. The band’s producer, George Martin, sold them by saying they “sound like a male Shirelles,” and in some of their early songs the Fab Four were not only speaking with girls in a “girl talk” way, but to guys for girls in an “us” sort of way. In “She Loves You,” they are almost speaking as attorneys for a girl plaintiff who has been wronged, saying to the accused, I think it’s only fair … Apologize to her.
I continued to love the Shirelles and sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I saw a small sign in a building at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where I teach, advertising an appearance by the Shirelles at a nearby high school. It was hard to believe it was accurate, but it was a chance I wasn’t going to miss. My wife, Anne, and I, along with a few friends, went to the high school auditorium. The group had come full circle, back to performing in a high school auditorium as they had in the talent show when they first appeared together. But this time there had been almost no publicity for the event and there was what surely was a smaller attendance—perhaps forty people, at least half of whom had only learned of the event through me—than there had been at Passaic High School in 1957.
We waited. And waited. Finally, word came that their van had broken down in the Florida Panhandle or southern Alabama coming from their last gig, but they were still coming.
Over the next two hours, more and more of the sparse crowd gave up and left. I was not going to give up on seeing my favorite group from my teenage years. By the time the Shirelles arrived, there about six or eight of us still there.
It was extremely sad for them, but great for us. They performed and we performed with them, dancing with them and singing along. Shirley was very impressed that I knew all the lyrics.
It was a night I’ll never forget.