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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue “White Woman” as Jazz
Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947)
by Sherrie Tucker Katrina and the New Jazz Orthodoxy by Salim Washington Dusty Springfield and the Motown Invasion by Annie J. Randall Review: Searching for Robert Johnson by Nathan W. Pearson Review: From Paris to Peoria by Nancy Newman |
Dusty Springfield and the
Motown Invasion by Annie J. Randall
Martha Reeves and Dusty
Springfield in the rehearsal for
"Sounds of Motown" television special, April 1965 While the
Beatles were cutting a swath across America and conquering the US pop charts
during the mid-1960s British Invasion, another important musical phenomenon
was taking place across the Atlantic—the Motown Invasion of
Britain. While American teenagers were
avidly consuming the Beatles’ records, British teenagers were
discovering Berry Gordy’s Motown Revue and forming a fan base for a
genre now known as “British Soul.” This devotion to black American artists
such as Tina Turner, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin influenced the careers
of British artists including Lulu, Tom Jones, and Annie Lennox. The first and perhaps best-known British
artist in this long line of “blue-eyed soul” vocalists was the
late Dusty Springfield (1939-1999). Springfield was the most important figure in facilitating the
Motown Invasion. In addition to covering many Motown hits
herself, she gave the Supremes,
Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, and many other groups their first
television exposure in the UK. The
Motown stars’ appearance on Springfield’s television special The
Sounds of Motown in 1965 was as significant as the Beatles’ landmark
1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which catapulted them into the
commercial stratosphere. The Sounds of Motown was conceived and hosted by
Springfield for the express purpose of igniting the careers of the Detroit
singers in European markets. Through Springfield’s advocacy, these
Detroit artists were transported into the Europop spotlight.1 During The Sounds of Motown, audiences in Britain and
across the globe were able to see the singers performing live the songs they
had been hearing on their radios—songs such as “Dancin’ in
the Streets” by Martha and the Vandellas, “Stop in the Name of Love” by
the Supremes, and “Just My Imagination” by Smokey Robinson and
the Miracles. The show allowed British
and BBC audiences to view an image of African Americans who modeled a hopeful
postcolonial vision for the African diaspora.
“Detroit” represented the social and political attainment
of black, middle-class urbanites, a vision that stood in stark contrast to
other contemporary images of African Americans beamed around the world: television footage of black civil rights
protesters in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia as they were assaulted by
police, harassed by White Citizens Councils, and stalked by the Ku Klux
Klan. This jarring contrast between the images projected on Sounds
of Motown and those broadcast on the evening news is key to understanding
the reception and lasting importance of the Motown Invasion and, indeed, the
reception of their advocate, Dusty Springfield, in both the UK and the
US. The widely reported racial
violence triggered by the civil rights movement was the ever-present backdrop
for the Detroit musicians: their April 1965 UK television appearance with
Springfield followed the landmark events of 1964’s “Freedom
Summer” and preceded America’s urban riots of 1965 by only a few
months. And while Springfield and the
Motown artists scrupulously avoided attaching any political significance to
their TV special, no one could have missed the message of solidarity it
conveyed, following on the heels of Springfield’s
front-page deportation from South Africa for her refusal in December 1964 to
entertain segregated audiences.2 If the images of Sounds of Motown
embodied a rejection of racism and apartheid for an international audience,
then the sounds of Reeves, Springfield, and the other Detroit acts singing
together enacted the same. This was
the first time Springfield’s fans saw their idol in the presence of the
singers that she herself idolized, whose sound she emulated in her own
performances, and whose cultural background she acknowledged as a principal
source of her vocal style. Their
musical alliance can be understood as demonstrating an idealized racial
harmony during a time of horrific racial disharmony through
Springfield’s own persona as the “White Queen of Soul,”
which bound together seemingly incongruent racial elements.3 Springfield acquired the title “White Queen of
Soul” as a result of her many hit cover versions of songs by African
American artists such as the Shirelles, Inez and Charlie Foxx, and Baby
Washington.4 Her first album, A
Girl Called Dusty (1964), was dominated by such covers. Springfield had internalized the
then-current black pop sound so thoroughly that many listeners in the US who
had only heard her songs on the radio but had never seen her assumed that she
was an African American.5 Springfield’s covers of songs by African American
singers ranged from close copies of the original versions to clever
reworkings. Springfield faithfully
copied the interpretations of black female artists—her covers of The
Shirelles’ “Mama Said [There’d be Days Like This]”
and the Velvelettes’ “Needle in a Haystack” are similar to
the originals in most respects—but showed no comparable fealty to
interpretations of black male singers.
For example, her cover of Garnett Mimms’s “It Was Easier
to Hurt Her” omits the gratuitous, spoken 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 just don’t go down
that way”), and then shapes the song from an emotional position that is
more complex and conflicted than Mimms’s. Springfield insisted that her white British
session musicians copy precisely the instrumental playing styles of black
American musicians. She even paid for her backing band, The Echoes, to hear
concerts by James Brown and the Famous Flames to facilitate the exact
reproduction of the sound of Brown’s band on her recordings.6 Though A Girl Called Dusty includes remakes of
songs by white US singers such as Lesley Gore and Gene Pitney, Springfield
made no attempt to copy their singing styles.
Springfield’s “You Don’t Own Me” bears little
vocal resemblance to Gore’s perfect rendition of a New Jersey
teenager’s first petulant attempt to establish social and sexual
autonomy. Similarly, her cover of
Pitney’s “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” a song in which a
man runs off with a new girlfriend, adopts a humorous, protofeminist stance
as the protagonist who dumps her Tulsa boyfriend for a man she has just met
at a truck stop. To the delight of her
teenaged female fans, Springfield succeeded in regendering such songs and
turning the usual male-female dynamic on its head.7 One wonders how
audiences might have read the pattern of Springfield’s preferences,
including her reverence for vocal interpretations of African American female
artists and instrumental styles of African American male artists, and her
willingness to invert power relationships in songs by black and white
American male singers.8 In all of its racial and gendered complexity, the
reception of US pop in Britain during the mid-1960s was a phenomenon of
considerable significance both within the confines of pop music and within
the broader sphere of pop culture. The Motown Invasion reflected and
contributed to the evolving shifts in
social and political power relationships that marked this period in the US
and Britain. The lasting cultural
impact of this transatlantic moment and its extraordinarily rich music are
undoubtedly as important as the endlessly analyzed social phenomena
associated with the Beatles and the British Invasion. —Annie
J. Randall Bucknell
University Notes 1 Martha Reeves and Mark Bego, Dancing in
the Streets: Confessions of a Motown Diva (Hyperion, 1994), 124. Vicki Wickham, producer of the show, gives
an account of Dusty’s role in the creation of “Sounds of
Motown” in Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham, Dancing With Demons,
The Authorized Biography of Dusty Springfield (St. Martin’s Press,
2000), 69. 2 The much publicized expulsion of
Britain’s top female singer from South Africa occupied the front pages of
UK newspapers for days. Springfield received support from members of
Parliament and from Prime Minister Harold Wilson. As a result of Springfield’s stance,
most British singers touring South Africa after this incident also refused to
entertain segregated audiences. See
Lucy O’Brien, Dusty: The Queen Bee of Pop (Pan Books,
1999), 64-77. 3 Britain too was plagued by racism as a
result of large-scale immigration from its former colonies in the Caribbean
and Asia. 4 The origin of the phrase “White Queen
of Soul” is unknown, though the British pop singer Cliff Richard is
credited with first using the expression “white negress” in
reference to Springfield sometime in the mid-’60s. See O’Brien, Dusty:
Queen Bee of Pop, 61. 5 Martha Reeves was
among those who had made this assumption and had even wondered why Berry
Gordy had not yet signed such a talented black singer to the Motown label. Quoted in
O’Brien, Dusty: Queen Bee of Pop, 59. 6 According to Derek Wadsworth, trombonist and
arranger for The Echoes, Springfield was obsessed with getting the right
instrumental sound, and demanded countless takes during extremely expensive
recording sessions until she was satisfied with the sound. Interview with
Wadsworth by the author (June 2004). 7 Journalist Ray Coleman wrote in a 21
November 1964 article for Melody Maker that “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.’”
Quoted in The Dusty Springfield Bulletin (March 1997), 10. 8 Paul Howes traces the origins of all of
Springfield’s known recordings, including foreign language releases, in
The Complete Dusty Springfield (Reynolds and Hearn, 2001) while Patricia
Juliana Smith examines Springfield’s “resignified” cover
versions in “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”: The Camp
Masquerades of Dusty Springfield,” in The Queer Sixties, ed.
Patricia Juliana Smith (Routledge, 1999), 105-126. ISAM home Who we
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