[With another
autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first
month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments,
please!]
On what a
seemingly random 50s song can tell us about that era in music—and how we
remember it.
The story of “See You in September”
(1959) reads like many others in American pop music history, if certainly sped
up from the normal timeline. New York City songwriters Sid Wayne and Sherman
Edwards (the latter best known, many years down the road, as the composer of
both the lyrics and music for 1776)
collaborated to write the song in a single June 1959 day. It was shopped to
producers that same day, and by that evening the
Pittsburgh-based vocal group The Tempos had agreed to record the song. The group
flew in the next day, the recording sessions were finished within the next few
days, and the song was released soon thereafter; it hit the charts (becoming by
most measures the biggest hit for both Wayne and The Tempos) but peaked that
summer at #23 on the
Billboard Hot 100. It seemed
destined to remain a mid-level, soon-forgotten hit in a very busy era in
American popular music.
And then came
the covers, and more covers, and a few more covers for good measure. Between 1959
and 1966, “See You” was covered by no fewer than ten artists and groups,
including doo-wop artists
The Quotations, Hong Kong pop group Teddy Robin and the Playboys,
and covers in French (by singer Olivier
Despax) and Spanish (by two different artists, Marta Baizán and
Kinita). None of those were the most famous or successful cover, which was
released in 1966 by The
Happenings and reached #3 on the Billboard
chart. The covers didn’t end there—the 70s included versions by Julie Budd and Debby Boone, among other
artists—but without quite the voluminous quantity of the 60s collection. And I
would argue that this laundry list of 60s covers reveals just how ubiquitous
that trend was in the early era of rock ‘n roll, how much indeed the period’s
music comprised not a group of distinct songs and performers so much as an interconnected,
often cross-pollinating world of influences and inspirations. Seen in that
light, “See You” is a very exemplary pop song indeed.
You don’t have
to take my work for it, as one of the most nostalgic examinations of late 50s
and early 60s music and culture, George Lucas’ film American Graffiti (1973), uses The Tempos’ original
version of “See You in September” on its
soundtrack. Played (as most of the film’s songs are) by legendary DJ
Wolfman Jack, the song is featured in this sequence, as
protagonist Richard Dreyfuss contemplates the next stage of his life and says
goodbye to his current one. It’s easy, when you listen to a dozen or more
versions of the same song (as I did while writing this post), to lose sight
entirely of its meanings, both literal and what it might mean for young people
hearing it in that formative era of American popular music. But as it does with
so many aspects of culture and society, American
Graffiti effortlessly reminds us of such meanings, reflecting the role that
music (among other cultural and social elements, especially cars) plays
in the lives and communities of young Americans. In that way, any and every
song, including “See You in September,” becomes both a window into the world of
its production and a vehicle for remembering and reliving that world.
Next September
text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?
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