I've been teaching at West Virginia University's branch of Osher Life-Long Learning since the fall of 2013, usually one class in the fall session. I started with a two-part class about The Brill Building, based on the book Always Magic In The Air, The Bomp and Brilliance of The Brill Building, by Ken Emerson. He features seven sets of songwriters who worked in New York in the late fifties and early sixties, including Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Jerry Goffin, and Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield.
I've taught six-week classes about the history of Motown and the British invasion in the late sixties. My last class, this past fall, was called "The Beach Boys: Light and Dark." That one made me an emotional wreck. Even I didn't know how much "Dark" there was in their story. All of my classes have been well-received and reviewed. I have something of a following.
I normally don't teach in the winter, partly because classes are postponed if public schools are closed, which last winter was eighteen days out of thirty scheduled. This year they made the term four weeks instead of six so there could be time to make up missed classes before spring session starts. I decided to teach so I could be present during my election campaign. Today is the fourth week, and we have held every class on time. We lost classes early in the week last week and two weeks before that because of snow storms. They are being made up.
I have a book that lists the top 40 songs of every year from 1900 to 1999. The author, Joel Whitburn, has an obsession with pop music, which I suppose I can relate to. I picked 1960, and decided to cover Whitburn's biggest hits at a rate of ten each week. This has been great fun for me.
In 1960, I was in fifth and sixth grade. We had "Pre-teen Center" dances at Campfield Elementary School every Friday night during the school year. It started out being square dancing for kids, but the kids preferred pop music, so we did some square dancing and then danced to pop music. I usually danced with Margo King, who I think of as my first girlfriend, or Nanette Birmingham, who sat next to me in sixth grade. Two of the songs I remember were chart hits for Jimmy Jones, now nearly forgotten, in 1960. They were "Handy Man" (later covered by James Taylor) and "Good Timin.'" I also remember the fuss over Elvis returning from the Army. People in the class have their memories, too. One woman, originally from Philadelphia, had posters of local heroes Bobby Rydell and Fabian up in her room as a teenager.
One difference from my past classes is that I am only using YouTube to play music. It seems my vast collection of recorded music on vinyl, cassette and CD is officially obsolete. I don't download music or subscribe to streaming services, but everything you want to hear is on YouTube. (As I'm writing this, I'm listening to Radiohead's "In Rainbows" from 2008) on headphones attached to an antique portable CD player).
My students are mostly a bit older than I, and we all get a kick out of clips of artists, some looking terrified, lip-synching to their own records in front of a bunch of giggly girls and pompaded boys on Dick Clark's Beech-Nut Hour. The kids are all chewing Beech-Nut gum and wearing buttons that say "IFIC, short for "flavorific," how the gum is described.
Some of these artists look impossibly young, but Brenda Lee and Kathy Young were fifteen, Brian Hyland sixteen. Some of the artists were already famous, like Elvis Presley, some, like Brenda Lee, Connie Francis, Paul Anka, Chubby Checker and Roy Orbison were just getting started, some, like Dion, changed styles completely after 1960, others like Percy Faith, who had the biggest hit of the year with "Theme From A Summer Place" seemed old-fashioned for the times, yet kept going, doing the same thing, for many years.
I've learned about "The Nashville Sound," having a string orchestra and chorus behind a country music vocalist, a more "urban" sound than one would expect. I've also seen how the separate chart for "R&B" music was about to become obsolete, with crossover artists like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Ray Charles.
It's sad sometimes to watch videos of these young artists, knowing that some of them died in drug overdoses, or car accidents, or that, like all of us, are not the brash young people they were. This class has given us all a chance to go back to "those thrilling days of yesteryear" and remember who we were then, who we idolized, who we danced with, who was our crush, or even how our (mostly late) parents screamed "Turn that noise down!" at us.
I'm teaching a four-week class in April and May on the top hits of 1961.
No comments:
Post a Comment