[Now that we’re really in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for some of our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertime favorites for a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]
On what a summer
classic reveals about the voices of youth.
I listened to a
lot of early rock and roll growing up (something about having a couple baby
boomers for parents during the era that first defined the concept of
“classic rock” and produced countless “Best of the
1950s” type collections, I suppose), and few songs stood out to me more
than Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime
Blues” (1958). I don’t know that any single song better expresses the clash
of youthful dreams and adult realities on which so much of rock and roll and popular
music more generally have been built, and I definitely believe that Cochran and
his co-writer (and manager) Jerry Capeheart
hit upon the perfect way to literally give voice to those dueling perspectives:
in the repeated device through which the speaker’s teenage desires are
responded to and shot down by the deep voices of authority figures, from his
boss to his father to his senator.
Coincidentally,
Cochran himself died very
young, at the age of 21, in an April 1960 car accident while on tour in
England. Cochran’s death came just over a year after the
tragic plane crash that took the lives of three other prominent young rock
and rollers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. There’s obviously
no direct relationship between these two accidents, nor would I argue that
these artists’ youthful deaths were the cause of their popularity (all four
were already popular prior to the accidents). But on the other hand, I think
there’s something iconic, mythic even, about rock and rollers dying young—or about,
more exactly, our
narratives and images of such figures—and I believe it’d be difficult to
separate those myths from the idealistic and anti-authoritarian attitudes
captured in Cochran’s biggest hit. That is, it feels throughout “Summertime
Blues” as if the speaker’s youthful enthusiasm is consistently being destroyed
by those cold adult responses—and melodramatic as it might sound, the loss of
childhood dreams can certainly be allegorized through the deaths of the kinds
of pop icons who so often symbolize youth.
Yet of course
most young people continue to live in, and thus impact, the world far after
their youthful dreams have ended (“Life goes on long after the thrill of living
is gone,” to quote another
youthful anthem), and in a subtle, unexpected way Cochran’s song reflects that human and historical reality as
well. When Cochran’s speaker tries to take his problem to more official
authorities, he is rejected by his senator for a political reason: “I’d like to
help you, son, but you’re too young to vote” is the reply. In 1958, when
“Summertime Blues” was released, the national legal voting age was 21, and so the
20 year old Cochran could not vote; but over the next decade a potent
social and legal movement to lower the voting age would emerge, in conjunction
with the decade’s many other youth and activist movements, and in 1971
Congress passed and the states ratified the
26th Amendment, which did indeed lower the eligible age for
voting to 18. Being able to vote certainly doesn’t eliminate all the other
problems of teenage life and its conflicts with adult authority—but it does
remind us that neither the gap nor the border between youth and adulthood are
quite as fixed or as absolute as our myths might suggest.
Next summer jam
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this song? Other summertime favorites you’d share?
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