Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in

1960s British Pop Alexandra M.

Apolloni
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Freedom Girls
 Freedom Girls
Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop

ALEX ANDRA M. APOLLONI

1
 3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Apolloni, Alexandra author.
Title: Freedom girls : voicing femininity in 1960s British pop / Alexandra Apolloni.
Description: [First.] | New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021028912 (print) | LCCN 2021028913 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190879907 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190879891 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190879921 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—Great Britain—1961–1970—History and criticism. |
Women singers—reat Britain. | Femininity in music. | Femininity in popular
culture—Great Britain—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC ML3492. A66 2021 (print) | LCC ML3492 (ebook) |
DDC 782.421640941/09046—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028912
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028913

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190879891.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
About the Companion Website xi

Introduction: Vocal M anners for M oderns 1

I. O R D IN A R Y , E X T R A O R D IN A R Y V O IC E S

1. C hart Chicks and G ear Girls: The Limits of M od Fem ininity 25

2. “A Girl in a M illion, Just Like a M illion”: Sandie Shaw and

O rd in ary G irlhood 49

3. Sounding Like Liverpool: Region, M emory, and

Cilia Blacks Accent 79

I I . T R A N S A T L A N T IC V O IC E S

4. England Meets Jamaica’s Lollipop Girl: Millie Small, Voice, and

M igration 111

5. Race, Self-Invention, and D usty Springfield’s Voice 139

III. SEX, V O I C E , A N D R O C K A N D R O L L

6. The Last R em aining Virgin in London: Lulu, W hiteness,

and Youth 169

7. Sex, Freedom , and M arianne Faithfull’s Voice in the

Afterlight o f the 1960s 195

8. R em em bering Rock and Roll with P. P. A rnold 225

Epilogue 255

Notes 261
Bibliography 291
Index 311
 Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the generous funding that made this book possible. The early
stages of this research were supported by fellowships from the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Musicology, UCLA Division
of Humanities, UCLA Graduate Division, UCLA Herb Alpert School of
Music, UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the University of California
Center for New Racial Studies, an Alvin H. Johnson AMS-​50 Fellowship
from the American Musicological Society (AMS), and the AMS Eugene
K. Wolf Travel Fund. Publication of this book was possible thanks to the AMS
75 PAYS Fund of the AMS, supported in part by the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I am very grateful to
the AMS for this support.
I am grateful above all to the singers whose performances inform this
work, and who continue to inspire me.
My mentors and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) shaped this project in countless ways. As my dissertation advisor,
Tamara Levitz gave me the freedom and encouragement to approach writing
and research with a storyteller’s ear; her influence on my thinking and on this
book is profound. Nina Eidsheim’s work has been a model for me of what
musicological scholarship can be, and her dedicated mentorship and guid-
ance on book publishing was crucial to bringing this project to life. Thank
you to Olivia Bloechl, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Bob Fink, Ray Knapp,
Elisabeth LeGuin Mitchell Morris, and Elizabeth Upton for creating spaces
for adventurous thinking about how and why performance matters. Working
with Rachel Lee, Jessica Cattelino, Sarah Haley, and Grace Hong at the UCLA
Center for the Study of Women radically shifted my understanding of gender,
race, and social justice. Thank you, too, to Kirsten Yri and Kevin Swinden
at Wilfrid Laurier University for their mentorship early on. The earliest
glimmers of this book were born in one of Kirsten’s seminars, and she guided
my first forays into answering some of questions that inform this book when
she supervised my undergraduate thesis on girls’ rock camps and voice.
I am fortunate to be part of a broad community of colleagues and writers
who sustain and support one another. Thank you to everyone who has
viii Acknowledgments

engaged with this work and helped me think through the thornier questions.
Thank you to my fellow UCLA musicology and ethnomusicology alumni,
particularly my generous and brilliant colleagues Sam Baltimore, Lindsay
Johnson, and Jill Rogers, who read early chapter drafts in our writing group,
as well as Natalia Bieletto, Pete Broadwell, Hyun Chang, Ben Court, Wade
Dean, Zarah Ersoff, Mike D’Errico, Ross Fenimore, K. Goldschmitt, Gillian
Gower, Alexandra Grabarchuk, Phil Gentry, Des Harmon, Peter Lawson,
Joanna Love, Ryan Koons, Andrea Moore, Tiffany Naiman, Melinda O’Brien,
Stephen Pennington, Gray Raulerson, Marcie Ray, Marianna Ritchey,
Alexandra Roedder, Arreanna Rostosky, Ryan Rowen, Brigita Sebald,
Lindsey Strand-​Polyak, Eric Wang, Morgan Woolsley, and Brian Wright.
Other writing group colleagues Zeynep Bulut, Stephanie Doktor, Sarah
Gerk, Rebecca Goeffrey-​Schwinden, Danielle Sirek, and Kristen Turner all
provided thoughtful and crucial feedback on early drafts of this material. My
colleagues from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, including Arielle
Bagood, Amanda Dominguez, Melissa Jamero, Kristina Nyden, Winter Rae
Schneider, Drew Westmoreland, and the many students who I worked with
and learned from were a constant and supportive cheering squad. Megan
Drury championed chapter four in its earlier incarnation as a journal ar-
ticle and provided crucial feedback on the entire manuscript. Thank you to
Darin DeWitt for being a generous writing partner, and to Nicole Eschen
for sharing my scholarly fascination with mid-​century pop culture. Saeromi
Kim helped me overcome countless roadblocks—​both writing-​related and
otherwise.
Annie Randall’s early and continuous support of this project has been in-
strumental: I am grateful for her wise and thoughtful feedback on proposals
and early chapter drafts, which has made this a stronger and more nuanced
book. My work has also been shaped profoundly by the scholarship those who
write and think about voice, gender, and music including, Norma Coates,
Sarah Dietsche, Sarah Dougher, Shana Goldin-​ Perschbacher, Elizabeth
Keenan, Lauron Kehrer, Robin James, Kimberly Mack, Elizabeth Lindau,
Katherine Meizel, Diane Pecknold, Laurie Stras, Victor Szabo, Sherrie
Tucker, Christi Jay Wells, Jacqueline Warwick, and many, many others. The
communities that come together around International Association for the
Study of Popular Music, US-​Branch, and the biannual Feminist Theory and
Music conferences have been a tremendous source of support and a true in-
tellectual home.
 Acknowledgments ix

This is a book about singing; I thank those with whom I’ve sung for shaping
my understanding of how voices work and what voices can do. Jeanette
Steeves and Jackie Hawley were my first voice teachers. They taught me how
to use and care for my voice, how to tell stories through song, and how to be
brave enough to take the stage. It was Jeanette’s encouragement that led me to
pursue music at the university level. At Wilfrid Laurier University, I studied
voice with Laura Pudwell and Marianne Bindig, two remarkable performer-​
teachers who gave me the space to take musical and intellectual risks. Thank
you to my fellow singers and friends from the A Capella Chamber Choir,
Angel City Chorale, and the Contemporary Choral Collective of Los Angeles.
Particular thanks to my favorite duet partner, Leith Harris.
Of the many friends and supporters who have cheered this book along,
I want to give special thanks to two in particular. Brenda Johnson-​Grau,
my creative collaborator, read drafts, listened to me talk through ideas, and
helped me clear my head through elaborate baking and crafting projects.
Tanya Doroslovac, my fellow writer, schemer, and adventurer, has always
emboldened me to be ambitious and creative.
This project would not have been possible without the support, enthu-
siasm, and patience of Norm Hirschy at Oxford University Press, and the
guidance and wisdom of librarians and archivists at the British Library, BBC
Written Archives Center, British Film Institute Special Collections, Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives, and the University of Waterloo’s
British women’s periodicals collection.
Thank you to Anita, Marzio, Kristen, and Juliana Apolloni for your endless
encouragement and support (and for cheering from the audience at many a
choir concert and voice recital). And last, but certainly not least, thank you to
Aaron Bittel, my sounding board, partner, and personal reference librarian,
for everything.
 About the Companion Website

www.oup.com/us/freedomgirls
Oxford has created a website to accompany Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity
in 1960s British Pop. Material that cannot be made available in a book, namely
audio examples, video examples, and links to web content, is provided here.
The reader is encouraged to consult this resource in conjunction the chapters.
Examples available online are indicated in the text with Oxford’s symbol .
 Introduction
Vocal Manners for Moderns

In February 1966, a girl returning home from the newsstand with her weekly
copy of Petticoat found something extra tucked into her magazine: a spe-
cial pull-​out booklet compiled by Petticoat’s editors, titled The Petticoat
Guide: What Every Girl Should Know. The booklet offered advice for young
women and included pieces on how to do your hair for a first date, what to
wear for a job interview, and how to deal with a breakup. Among these arti-
cles was an item titled “Voice Control,” which read: “We’ll take any amount
of trouble to see we look right, but how many of us give a thought to how we
sound? Yet it’s a fact that a good voice can do more than make us sound like a
different person. It can help us to be a different person. For instance, it could
mean that we get a better job. That we get the interview instead of being told
the job is filled, because our voice on the phone sounds like an adenoidal
penguin—​and who wants a receptionist like that?”1 Here, Petticoat’s editors
boldly claim that by changing the sounds of their voices their readers could
become different people. By adapting their bodies to create a different vocal
sound, readers could skirt class hierarchies to land coveted white-​collar jobs.
They could grant themselves class mobility. They could transform them-
selves from one kind of person into a person who was not just different but,
implicitly, better. The article “Voice Control” is thus as much about speaking
technique as it is about aspiration, hopes, and dreams.
The authors go on to outline what the right voice should—​and, more im-
portantly, should not—​sound like: “We’ve agreed we don’t want affected
speech—​either ‘posh’ or stagey. We don’t want falsetto trills, or phoney sexy
murmurs. We don’t want a different voice—​what we do want is a better ver-
sion of the one we have. A voice that is clear, well-​formed and attractive.
A controlled voice, in fact.”2 This well-​formed, attractive, controlled voice
sends a message about its speaker: that she, too is controlled and attractive.
And just as Petticoat has tips about hair, makeup, and clothes (for making

Freedom Girls. Alexandra M. Apolloni, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190879891.003.0001
2 Introduction

your body controlled and attractive) they also suggest a regimen of voice
exercises:

Let’s start with the pitch of your voice. Is yours squeaky high or gravelly low,
or all-​in-​the-​middle monotonous? Really shrill? Then you’ll never acquire
a captivating murmur without harming your throat. Try to get it down just
a little by making an AH sound. Go up and down the scale, seeing how low
you can get without cracking or straining in any way. See how high you can
get without squeaking, if you’re trying to raise a too-​low voice. Again, no
strain or effort please. When you get an Ah at a level that feels and sounds
right, keep sliding up and down the scale in a relaxed, gliding voice.3

According to Petticoat, through careful discipline and exercise a girl could

mobilize her voice the same way she might use makeup, clothes, and hair: to
make herself into a particular kind of young woman. Moreover, the emphasis
is on an effortless execution of an unaffected voice, suggesting that even
though voice control was motivated by the desire for upward mobility, it
was best to avoid sounding like you were modulating your voice with that
goal in mind. In other words, “Voice Control” and other texts like it imply
that the ideal young woman would not show signs of striving, signs that she
was trying to banish a regional or class-​marked accent, or signs that she was
trying to speak in a way that sounded more middle-​or upper-​class—​she
would instead achieve an acceptable public voice (not “affected,” “posh,” or
“stagey”) through careful private discipline. Furthermore, given Petticoat’s
largely white readership and the paucity of women of color in its pages and
on its editorial staff, it goes unsaid that this message about voice and fem-
ininity is specifically about what white upwardly mobile femininity should
sound like.
Other etiquette and behavior manuals of the period also called on young
women to pay attention to their voices. In Gilda Lund’s 1964 volume Manners
for Moderns, she exhorts girls to use correct grammar and avoid slang in their
speech, cautioning them about the sound of their words. Lund, author of sev-
eral volumes on etiquette and home economics produced for the educational
market, advises her readers not to affect “unnatural” accents or intonations
and to always use correct pronunciation: “Much precious individuality
would be lost, too, in any effort to mould such often delightful intonations as
Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Yorkshire, Somerset, etc. into one hybrid accent. One
can speak with the accent of one’s home town, however, without adopting
 Introduction 3

a sloppy, coarse or incorrect mode of pronounciation.”4 Here, Lund strikes

a balance between exhorting her young readers to conform to a particular
ideal and encouraging them to sound like themselves—​like genuine, unique
individuals. Her advice reveals a growing sense of the importance of regional
identity, even while advocating for discipline. In The Art of Growing Up, Lund
offers more explicit detail on the importance of unaffectedness:

Now, a few remarks about your speaking voice. This can be one of the most
attractive things about a woman, so do try not to “shriek with laughter, my
dear” or yell across the road to your friends. There is no need to be affected.
An imitation Mayfair accent, or a “refeened” way of speaking can be even
more irritating than a coarse voice. The thing to do is to get into the habit
of keeping your voice down—​low but clear is the ideal, and if you listen to
the voice of the film star you most admire, you’ll find that this is the way she
gets even the most dramatic parts over.5

Here, the ideal voice is clear and communicative, but never loud. This voice
is not inclined toward emotional or reactionary display (no shrieking with
laughter). And while this voice isn’t “coarse” (presumably meaning rough,
undisciplined, and implicitly low-​class), it’s not the product of an obvious at-
tempt at refinement. This voice, in effect, effortlessly shows that the speaker is
of the right social status to be socially and economically mobile.
These accounts of what constitutes the “right” voice are about voices in a
very literal, material sense. They’re about the sound made by the vibrations of
a young woman’s vocal folds, vibrations that are shaped by her posture, mus-
culature, lung capacity, and so on, as well as how she is accustomed, either
through unconscious habit or deliberate training, to using her body to pro-
duce sound. Her vocal sound then passes through the air and into the ears
of listeners, who then make assumptions, conclusions, and judgments about
the speaker and the way she uses her body, based on whatever it is they hear.
Lund and the editors of Petticoat write about voice as sound and about vocal
sound as a social, bodily, and relational phenomenon.
These examples may be about speech, but the questions they raise—​What
is an acceptable voice? Can the right voice transform someone’s life?—​
are equally fraught in the context of singing. This book looks at a set of
singers who began their careers when they were girls or young women in
the 1960s: Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, Millie Small, Dusty Springfield, Lulu,
Marianne Faithfull, and P. P. Arnold. The young women who read Petticoat
4 Introduction

were the same young women buying records by these singers, whose mu-
sical performances were informed by the same anxieties about voice and its
transformational power conjured by “Voice Control.” Their voices responded
to ideas about what it meant to be young women in the 1960s; their voices
reflected and contradicted assumptions about what girls and women could
achieve in the pop and rock world.

Voice as Sound, Voice as Expression, and

the Consequences of Vocal Discipline

These singers’ voices and stories were shaped by ideas about voice as sound,
voice as expression, and the capacity to be heard and to be recognized. This
use of “voice” is a recurring theme in feminist thought. Campaigns by fem-
inist organizations often call on us to “fight for women’s voices” or to help
“give voice” to marginalized people. For instance, the mission statement of
the Op-​Ed Project, an organization that provides training and resources to
help women break into the opinion pages of the news media, states that their
“vision is to create a sea change in our world’s conversation by empowering
a wave of new voices to join the important public conversations of our age,
to take our equal place as narrators of the world, and to encourage and refer
others to do the same.”6 A similar use of voice emerges in feminist scholarship
around questions of power. The notion of voice as expression of subjecthood
emerges when Gayatri Spivak asks if postcolonial scholars allow the subal-
tern to speak; when Patricia J. Williams shows how the American legal system
silences the voices of people of color; when Helene Cixous exhorts women to
find a voice through writing; and when Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Adriana
Cavarero, and others write of and critique the power of being able to nar-
rate and give an account of oneself. The use of “voice” to mean “expression”
is also a powerful thread in liberal, neoliberal, and libertarian discourse,
wherein concerns over freedom of speech or expression and freedom from
censorship are paramount. Music scholars, including Laurie Stras, Katherine
Meizel, Zeynep Bulut, and Nina Eidsheim, have revealed the relationship be-
tween voice as sound and voice as self-​expression. Some feminist theorists—​
including Cavarero and Annette Schlichter—​likewise make this connection.
In many feminist conversations about “having a voice,” though, we often
forget that voice is not only a metaphor for the expression of self but also
sonic, produced by singing, speaking, whispering, uttering, gendered bodies.
 Introduction 5

Even while they promise access to new modes of social mobility, discourses of
vocal discipline place limits on what our singing, speaking, whispering, uttering,
gendered bodies are allowed to do, and thus limit the potential for voice-​as-​
expression. Writings like Manners for Moderns and “Voice Control” reveal that
the way a person’s voice sounds determines their ability to “have a voice”; that
is, their ability to have the opportunity not only to express themselves but also
to be taken seriously and recognized. What Lund’s books, The Petticoat Guide,
and other similar publications promised their readers was this: by disciplining
the sound of their voices so they might sound like “a different person,” girls and
women could become upwardly mobile. They could become the kinds of people
who were worthy of being taken seriously and worthy of respect. By disciplining
the sounds of their voices, they could access the kind of social class position that
brought with it a social, discursive voice that people might listen to and respect.
Texts like Manners for Moderns and “Voice Control” are thus rife with ten-
sion: while they may reinforce notions of class-​marked respectability, they also
encourage young women to pursue the kind of independence that destabilized
the very notion of respectability. They ultimately imply, though, that indepen-
dence and the kind of expressive voice that comes with social power was only
available to those who worked hard to fit in.
Like all ideals, the disciplined voice is all but impossible to achieve. It places
responsibility on the speaker or singer: she must be sensitive to and correct the
faults that others might hear in her voice. This is a difficult task that borders
on the absurd. As Eidsheim argues, voices are not created by the vocalizer
alone: their sound and meaning is shaped by the listener’s perceptions and
biases, which the vocalizer cannot control.7 Furthermore, the discourse of
vocal discipline places the burden on vocalizers to do the work to change their
bodies—​bodies whose capacity to vocalize, as the clinical research on voice
reveals, is constantly in flux as bodies grow and change and progress through
childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Controlling one’s vocal sound is not
a simple task. Furthermore, the general scrutiny brought to bear on women’s
speaking voices was also directed at the remarkable singing voices of several
young women vocalists of the period. Meizel’s articulation of multivocality
provides an enormously helpful framework for understanding how singers
contend with this particular pressure: “Multivocal singers are often those who
must continuously identify and cross borders in their everyday lives—​singers
of color, singers who are immigrants, or singers navigating gender, ethnic,
even religious boundaries.”8 Meizel’s ethnography of transgender singers,
singers whose work crosses racially marked genre distinctions, singers
6 Introduction

contending with disability, and others who occupy liminal borderland spaces
reveals that those singers often employ multiple vocalities, or different uses
and soundings of voice, to navigate, embody, and resist the identities imposed
on them twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century cultures.
The singers in this book, like those in Meizel’s study, responded to the
gendered and racialized pressures and scrutiny that came with navigating
popular music careers and public notoriety by adapting and transforming
their sounds and the narratives of their selves. They sang, as Meizel puts it,
“with many voices,”9 adapting and transforming vocal sound and expres-
sion of self to respond to the ideas and anxieties about cultural belonging,
social mobility, and the nature of femininity, which listeners projected onto
their voices. Cilla Black’s vocal sound seemed to narrate her Liverpudlian
origins, leading her to pursue an image grounded in both difference and or-
dinariness. Lulu and Dusty Springfield vocalized a connection to African
American musical practices, and in so doing evoked questions of whiteness
and femininity. Millie Small’s voice engaged and assuaged white British anx-
ieties over migration and the rapidly diversifying racial makeup of England.
For Marianne Faithfull and Sandie Shaw, vocal performances of seemingly
ordinary, unaffected femininity resulted in illicit sex appeal. And singers
from the US, such as P. P. Arnold and the women of Motown, had to employ
distinct and often contradictory strategies to exert vocal agency in British
pop music culture. And just as the young readers of Petticoat and Manners
for Moderns were exhorted to speak in a way that was respectable but indi-
vidualistic, these singers skirted the lines of respectability, excitement, and
self-​expressivity when they sang and when they spoke.
It is this group of singers who are the focus of this volume. They were each
other’s contemporaries, but the realities of race and class meant that they
had to develop distinctive personae as girl singers and navigate vocal dis-
cipline using a diverse range of strategies. Being pop singers in the 1960s
meant walking a thin line. The pressure was on to appeal to audiences whose
taste for excitement had been stoked by the rise of the Beatles, the Rolling
Stones, and the rebellious ethos that their music encapsulated. However,
young women pursing entertainment careers were also urged to moderate
their voices to appeal to mainstream British audiences. For instance, Black’s
manager Brian Epstein unsuccessfully coached her to mask the sound of a
northern accent—​an accent that, ironically, was to become a crucial part
of Black’s performing persona. Small, meanwhile, took elocution lessons
when she moved to England in the hopes of tempering her Jamaican accent
to make British audiences more receptive. These circumstances show how
 Introduction 7

responsibility falls on the person who speaks or sings: if she isn’t deemed
worthy of respect, it’s a failure of her ability to embody and envoice a respect-
able identity, not of a social structure that fails to recognize her subjecthood
or of listeners whose own prejudices shape the way they hear race and class
in her voice. No amount of vocal training, for instance, could change the fact
that when Small sang, stereotypes of Jamaican exoticness, handed down and
reinforced through years of British colonialism, shaped how many listeners
interpreted her voice. In the music media of the period, Small’s voice was
thus frequently described as a sound of “exotic” Jamaica. Her case illustrates
just how an emphasis on individual responsibility conveniently ignores so-
cial inequality and the relational nature of vocal sound.
Adding to the challenge of vocal control was the fact that many of the
young women pursuing pop careers in the 1960s (and, today, for that matter)
were quite young indeed. Small was sixteen when she immigrated to the UK,
and Lulu was only fourteen when she recorded “Shout,” her breakout hit.
Faithfull, Black, and Shaw were still in their teens when they were topping
the charts. P. P. Arnold was slightly older—​eighteen—​when she first toured
Britain. And Springfield, the eldest of this bunch, was twenty-​two when her
first solo hit, “I Only Want to Be With You,” came out, but she had begun
her entertainment career several years earlier. The voices of these singers
displayed audible changes over the course of a few short years—​some cal-
culated, some the result of changing physiology. By the standards of many
vocal pedagogues, these were singers whose voices were still developing and
maturing at the time they were already pursuing professional careers. While
female-​bodied people don’t experience vocal changes that are as dramatic
as those experienced by those with male bodies, young women’s voices do
change before, during, and after puberty.
Voice instructor Lynn Gackle’s work on young cisgender women’s singing
voices is the definitive treatment of the topic. Gackle points to the age
window of approximately fourteen to eighteen as the time by which most
young cisgender women, having been through puberty and menarche, are
gradually beginning to experience some vocal stability, are better able to
maintain tonal consistency and volume, and sing with greater flexibility and
decreased breathiness than pubescent singers. But she is careful to point out
that these are voices that are still in flux and still very much subject to change,
voices whose capabilities can shift along with the shifts in physiology that
occur as young singers grow older. Gackle thus urges voice teachers to be
attentive to the kinds of physical changes that young singers typically experi-
ence between the ages of twelve and eighteen that can cause challenges, and
8 Introduction

to adapt their teaching practices accordingly. The changes that she identi-
fies can include laryngeal growth, resulting in changes to the shape, length,
and circumference of the vocal tract. These changes, in turn, cause changes
to the vocal range. While a young woman’s vocal range typically increases
by the end of adolescence (Gackle notes that the lower limit of a girl’s voice
falls by approximately one-​third, and upper limit rises slightly), she may ex-
perience decreased range during puberty with high notes, in particular, be-
coming challenging. In addition, the pitch where a singer’s chest voice ends
and head voice begins may move, and singers may experience breathy tone
due to what is sometimes called the “mutational triangle” or “glottal chink”—​
a gap that allows air to pass through the vocal tract due to incomplete clo-
sure of the glottis resulting from difficulty with muscular control.10 Meribeth
Dayme identifies hormonal changes as an additional source of difficulty, with
female reproductive cycles shaping changes in levels of fluid and swelling
in the vocal folds, potentially resulting in hoarseness or diminished power
and flexibility.11 Gackle and Dayme illustrate that, just as the voices of male-​
bodied individuals are assumed to change with maturity, so too do the voices
of female-​bodied singers.
While Gackle, Dayme, and other pedagogues have identified gendered
patterns in how young singers’ voices might change, the effects of hormonal
and physical change on bodies is not always predictable and varies from singer
to singer. Our enculturated ears, however, are quick to place singers in familiar
gendered categories. As a result, vocal sound is as much shaped by physiology
as it is by gendered approaches to vocal training and music production, which
take for granted both a binary between male and female voices and the expec-
tations that male and female singers will sing in particular ways. Work by and
about transgender singers has made this increasingly clear.12 For instance,
Meizel cites the work of transgender musician and scholar Xavia Publius, who
argues that grouping voices as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass is a practice that
responds not only to vocal register but also to gendered assumptions about
singers’ register and vocal capabilities that preclude the possibility of voices
that don’t fit neatly into gendered buckets.13 In response to these kinds of dy-
namics, Elena Krell offers the concept of transvocality as a listening frame-
work, arguing that, when listening from a perspective that accounts for trans
identities, “enculturated ways we hear gender, sex, and race in the voice are
opened, unsettled, and potentially reconfigured.”14 While none of the singers
discussed in this book identify as trans, Krell’s challenge to listen to voices
in a way that is attuned to the how they are shaped by encultured identity
 Introduction 9

expectations lets us hear how these cisgender voices are likewise shaped by
social expectations. For the girl and young woman singers of 1960s British
pop, those expectations were powerful. These singers began high-​pressure,
professional singing careers during what, given their ages, would place them
at the end of a time when vocal change was typical and when their sounds may
have been in flux. Gackle identifies vocal change as a major source of anxiety
for young singers.15 In addition, pop singers were expected to be musically
prolific and personable on and off camera. While less frequently classified as
sopranos, altos, or other voice categories used in Western operatic traditions,
they were nonetheless pigeonholed as “girl singers,” a label that came with
similar sets of expectations and limitations, both musical and otherwise,
which are explored in detail in the chapters that follow.
Given the difficult context in which singers worked, it is not surprising
that their voices sometimes sounded untrained, weak, or unstable. However,
as Stras and others have noted, those qualities were precisely the source
of their appeal. For instance, Stras describes the way Shirley Owens of the
Shirelles used her “teenage vocal vulnerability” to great effect, singing emo-
tionally fraught passages in the part of her voice where singing was the most
difficult.16 This value placed on vocal naturalism parallels emphasis on phys-
ical naturalism as a quality of feminine desirability. As the Daily Rave re-
ported, for girls in 1964–​1965, naturalism was in, particularly if it conveyed
femininity: “Stu James of the Mojos has definite ideas how the New Girl will
look. In one word—​girly! ‘Not very heavy on the make-​up, pale lipstick.
It doesn’t matter how much make-​up is worn, as long as it suits and is well
done. Hair will be straight and wild-​looking, but not messy. The overall ap-
pearance should be very sweet and nice, with frilly girlish clothes, nothing
too mannish and extreme. A girl will really look like a girl this year.’ ”17 These
themes and ideologies are not unique to 1960s. Woe to the pop singer today
who appears to be anything less than real and authentic. Moreover, ideas of
beauty and desirability as qualities that women must labor to achieve without
appearing to labor are key to how gender is both constructed and natural-
ized, in alignment with ideas about what constitutes an authentic voice.
Discipline in the service of supposed naturalism has long been charac-
teristic of vocal pedagogy practices. In the eighteenth century, controlled
messa di voce and careful placement emerged as signs of natural skill, de-
spite the significant training involved for successful execution.18 By the
twentieth century, breath control and support—​means of disciplining and
controlling the body to produce desired sounds—​were key concerns among
10 Introduction

vocal pedagogues.19 In addition to helping produce “natural” and unaffected

vocal timbre, good breathing and muscular support could also help achieve
consistency—​helping singers move smoothly from one vocal register to the
next without difficulty, achieve consistent results from one performance to
the next, and so on. Essentially, one of classical vocal training’s aims is to
help singers achieve a voice that is stable and consistent, whose sound is co-
hesive and without register breaks throughout a performance, and that thus
presents a stable and holistic identity.
English ideologies of vocal naturalism have ties to the early twentieth-​
century work of Cecil Sharp and others involved with the English folk-​song
revival, who had a distinctly nationalist interest in their approach to voice. As
Ceri Owen notes, Sharp and his contemporaries were preoccupied with “nat-
ural” voices and debated the ethics of educating singers on the physiology
of voice out of concern that it would result in cultivated sounds that would
detract from the ability of English working-​class singers to produce “natural”
sound. Simultaneously, though, Owen notes that Sharpe and his colleagues
valued (and construed as particularly “English”) a particular disciplined and
stable sound tied to English schools of elocution and pronunciation: “the
kind of voice encouraged was, as H. Travers Adams put it, ‘a vocal sound
possessing perfect firmness, solidity, depth, volume, penetration, power
and beauty—​a real honest, robust, enduring, seasoned voice.’ ”20 This sound,
which was characterized by stability, power, and honesty, was valued as the
unconsciously natural sound of the English speaker/​singer.
But while stability is the goal of many schools of vocal training, voices are
inherently unstable—​constantly shifting throughout the life course and de-
pendent on factors beyond a singer’s control, such as climate and acoustics,
particularly for younger singers. Even genres like pop, blues, jazz, and rock,
which have earned a reputation for being less disciplined, require enormous
control for singers to meet the technical standards of the genre. The “nat-
ural” voice of the English folk-​song revival was similarly one that required
stamina and skill to produce. But often the labor and skill required of singers
in these genres is undermined by descriptions of their singing as “natural.”
Here, again, Meizel’s notion of multivocality is helpful: one way in which
singers might perform multivocality is in navigating the conflicting pressure
to sound both natural and controlled. Furthermore, given the challenge of
“controlling” a voice, particularly for young singers, singers might, quite lit-
erally, be multivocal, with their sound and timbre varying from day to day,
from performance to performance, and even within a performance.
 Introduction 11

How did the young women pop singers of 1960s England envoice both dis-
cipline and resistance? How did their sonic and discursive voices define the
models of femininity and notions of British modernity that culminated in
the Swinging Sixties? And how did their vocalizations of diverse femininities
shape and get shaped by their listeners? The stories in this volume take up
these questions. They are stories of change and liminality: of young women
navigating changing definitions of girlhood, changing musical and cultural
conventions, and their own coming of age. The stories of the singers profiled
in this book and their contemporaries reveal that two different constructions
of voice—​voice as sound and voice as expression—​are deeply connected and
are used in the service of social hierarchies. The sounds of a person’s voice
can shape their access to social mobility and, consequently, their access to
power and discursive voice.

British Histories of Vocal Discipline

The history of vocal discipline in Britain, as documented by historians like

Lynda Mugglestone, linguists like John C. Wells, and other scholars, reveals
the connection between vocal sound, social mobility, and ideas about what
it is to be modern. By the eighteenth century, as Mugglestone argues, stereo-
types about what constituted “proper” and “improper” voices were well-​
established.21 Eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century English texts on accent
distinguished between “vulgar” and unrefined speech and the ideal “culti-
vated” speaker.22 Manuals for women exhorted upper class ladies to avoid
“provincial” accents and instead speak with accents that were “pure” and sig-
nified good breeding.23 This emphasis on purity and breeding implies that
the goal was a voice that did not sound as though it had been cultivated, but
rather as though its cultivation was organically and naturally acquired. The
ideal voice sounded naturally disciplined.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a new vogue for el-
ocution training, which became a primary concern for reformers seeking to
modernize education following World War I. In a polemic characteristic of
the period, George Sampson, a London headmaster, outlined his position
on the importance of teaching elocution. For Sampson, use of what he and
other pedagogues thought of as the “correct” dialect or pronunciation style
was vital to ensuring a sense of national unity that would propel that country
forward. “The country is torn by dialects,” he wrote, “if there is a unity called
12 Introduction

England, there is a unity called English.”24 This commonly used rhetoric

(which is in much the same vein as “Voice Control,”) implies that cultivating
“proper” voices and disciplining speech was also a means of producing
English citizens of sound mind and disciplined body. The work of husband-​
and-​wife speech clinicians Kate and Emil Behnke, and of their daughter Kate
Emil-​Behnke, writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
respectively, offer another case in point. Emil-​Behnke connected suppos-
edly improper speech to a general lack of physical discipline. She claimed
that many who suffer from poor diction and intonation also display “ten-
dency to flat foot, feet widely turned out, knock knees, bent knees, weakness
of the abdominal muscles . . . round backs, stretched, weak muscles at the
base of the back of the neck,” and so on.25 Here, Emil-​Behnke construes im-
proper speech as a symptom of a lack of physical discipline and implies that
correcting this problem is the responsibility of the speaker. Given that accent
and dialect are prominent markers of social standing and place of origin, the
rhetoric of these social reform-​minded educators demonstrates how voice
was treated as evidence of the validity of stereotypes associated with the poor,
the working class, people from rural areas, and others.
In contrast, speaking with the accent that would become known as
“Received Pronunciation” (RP) came to confer respectability and status.
Furthermore, since, in theory, RP could be learned through education and
discipline, the status it conferred was presumed to be earned and deserved.
RP emerged in the nineteenth century when, according to linguists Jan
Svartvik and Geoffrey Leech, it became the predominant prestige accent
among the ruling classes of Britain. Elite schools like Eton and Harrow
fostered this manner of speaking, and while its sound has evolved over the
years, RP retains an association with the wealthy elite and is sometimes
referred to as an Oxbridge or BBC accent. Svartvik and Leech note that,
unlike other accents that can signal both region and social status—​say, the
Devonshire accent spoken in the west of England or the Cockney accent
of East London—​RP is less tied to place and more firmly signifies class.26
Due to its prestige status, RP became the standard by which all other pro-
nunciation styles were evaluated, and the sound of RP remains a refer-
ence point in many classrooms in which English is taught as a foreign or
second language. When the accent of the elite becomes naturalized and
positioned as the standard—​as happened with RP—​regional accents take
on lower status and voice and speech become all the more efficacious for
policing class and identity.
 Introduction 13

The history of voice is also closely tied to the history of broadcasting,

which played a key role in normalizing or marginalizing particular vocal
timbres. Broadcasting played a particularly key role in the dissemination of
RP in the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1920s, BBC policies instituted
under Director-​General John Reith imposed pronunciation standards. Reith
felt strongly that using a “standard pronounciation” was advantageous. “Our
responsibilities in this matter are obvious,” he stated, “since in talking to so
vast a multitude, mistakes are likely to be promulgated to a much greater ex-
tent than before.”27 But broadcasting also played a role in disseminating di-
verse voices: performers with regional dialects and accents played a crucial
role in helping the BBC develop relationships with audiences across Britain.
Early on, these were typically limited to humorous spots that used regional
dialects for comic effect. But the use of diverse voices became a means cre-
ating identification. For instance, Christina L. Baade contrasts World War
II–​era BBC bandleaders Jack Payne and Geraldo, whose persona—​and
voices—​were quite distinct. While Payne envoiced respectable masculinity
through an accent that some criticized as pompous, Geraldo’s cockney ac-
cent made him more relatable to young audiences—​a desirable quality given
the BBC’s charge of boosting public morale.28 Following the war, represen-
tation of diverse accents and dialects continued. For instance, The Archers,
which debuted in 1951, has featured speakers with a variety of accents. By the
1960s, radio listeners were accustomed to the audible presence of voices like
those of the Beatles and Cilla Black, and cinema and TV audiences heard an
array of regional dialects. The realist films of the 1960s, including A Taste of
Honey (1961), Poor Cow (1967), Billy Liar (1963), and others were often set
in the North or featured working-​class characters, and actors like Michael
Caine achieved popular success both despite and because of distinctive re-
gional accents (in Caine’s case, Cockney). A new kind of class awareness,
which drew on regional and working-​class voices to speak back to the estab-
lishment, emerged across the popular media.
A key theme in this overview of some of the history of vocal disci-
pline is that the political meaning and social function of an accent or dia-
lect is not fixed. Depending on context, a regional accent that was once a
source of shame could become a source of pride or politicized class con-
sciousness. RP is sometimes prized but can also carry negative, elitist
connotations—​signaling posh and pretentious rather than “proper.”29 And
accents themselves shift: for instance, the RP spoken today by members of
the upper crust—​including the likes of the royal family—​is, according to
14 Introduction

some linguists, a more relaxed, more “modern” version of the accent of fifty
years ago.30 And, of course, individual speakers frequently moderate their
own accents. They may speak differently at work than at home, or they might
modulate their speech for different social interactions.
It may be that the unstable nature of speech and accent is why the pressure
to keep voices controlled—​and thus respectable—​is so fraught. The voice
training texts of the 1960s, like Manners for Moderns and “Voice Control,”
seem to want to control the uncontrollable and discipline young women’s
voices in response to shifting attitudes toward class and gender. These
texts echo long-​established moralistic views on voice and update them for
the late 1950s and 1960s, revealing that old, class-​marked notions of femi-
ninity now existed simultaneously and uneasily with ideas about modernity.
The very title of Manners for Moderns, for instance, implies that the advice
contained therein is etiquette for a new and modern age. Lund frames her
tips as both an update to older notions of good manners and an antidote to
what she perceives as a move away from class distinctions and respectable
behavior: “In our modern times, with the breakdown of many class barriers,
etiquette has become less snobbish and much less complicated than it was.”31
While Lund seems to welcome this turn, she remarks that “all over cities, it
seems that people are too tired and too rushed to be polite . . . it seems to us
that it is up to the young and strong to do their small part to stop this general
deterioration.”32 With these remarks, Lund both praises and expresses anx-
iety over the shifts in the social fabric occurring in England in the 1960s.

Voice and Swinging Sixties Modernity

Many cite 1966 as the unofficial beginning of the Swinging Sixties—​the year
a breathless profile of British pop culture appeared in Time magazine intro-
ducing the notion of “Swinging England” to the world—​but this book begins
with the push that started things a-​swinging, with cultural phenomena already
in progress.33 As early as 1963, the start of the swing had begun: it was the year
of Beatlemania, of Dusty Springfield’s first solo hit, and of Harold Wilson’s
“White Heat” speech. Wilson, then the Labour Party candidate for prime
minister, declared that Britain was poised to enter a new era “forged in the
white heat of this revolution.”34 Wilson’s revolution was social as well as tech-
nological: he argued that an embrace of modern, scientific ways of thinking
would complete Britain’s recovery from World War II, restore the country as
a global leader of industry, and eliminate class distinction. If the 1950s had
 Introduction 15

been an austere period of recovery from the ravages of war, the 1960s, Wilson
promised, would bring newness and change. Wilson won the election, nar-
rowly defeating Alec Douglas-​Home, the Conservative incumbent, by ap-
pealing to voters to welcome his New Britain and using campaign tactics that
Dominic Sandbrook describes as “the right mixture of working-​class tradi-
tionalism and slick, fashionable modernity.”35 Sandbrook also makes much of
Wilson’s voice, noting that his Yorkshire accent appealed to tradition-​minded
working-​class voters even while he ran on a platform of social change.36
The kinds of social changes that developed in the so-​called New Britain of
the 1960s reflected a similar tension between the traditional and the modern—​
particularly changes that impacted gender roles. The period ushered in what
many referred to (often, in the case of conservative-​minded critics, dispar-
agingly) as the “permissive society.” Laws and restrictions that shaped the
private lives and sexual freedoms of Britons began to loosen in favor of liberal-​
minded permissiveness. By 1967 abortion was legalized and homosexuality
decriminalized. However, these changes did not immediately effect everyone.
To wit: while the birth control pill and the diaphragm were both legalized at
the beginning of the decade, they remained difficult obtain and were almost
exclusively reserved for married women, and it wasn’t until the end of the
1960s that they started to become more widely available.37 And so, while the
1960s is often nostalgically memorialized as a period of great sexual liberation
and freedom, those changes were, in fact, slow to come. For the independent
city girls of the teen mags, sex still carried risks. Historian Elizabeth Wilson
points out that although access to reproductive choice increased, sex outside of
marriage did not; instead, more couples married very young.38 Furthermore,
as more and more nonwhite immigrants arrived in Britain from South Asia
and the Caribbean, there was pressure on white couples to have children out
of racist fear that the nonwhite immigrant population would outpace the na-
tive white population.39 Despite the so-​called permissiveness of New Britain,
sexual freedoms remained contained and tied to nationalistic concerns.
London was central to the modernist myths of the period. By the end of
the decade, parts of the city had developed reputations as centers for music,
fashion, and permissiveness dominated by the young. The April 1966 edi-
tion of the British magazine Rave exemplified how London was depicted
in youth-​oriented media of the period. The “Raver’s Pop Guide to London”
spotlighted the exciting sound of London pop and the look of London
fashion. It also offered practical tips on jobs and flats for those thinking of
moving to the metropolis (fig. I.1).40 The now-​famous 1966 Time profile told
of the quirky shops on Carnaby Street and King’s Road that pedaled hip and
16 Introduction

unusual clothes; clubs that played rock and roll all night; a scene presided
over by young creative types like fashion designer Mary Quant, photogra-
pher David Bailey, model Twiggy, and musical groups like the Rolling Stones;
and carefree girls in miniskirts and go-​go boots. Piri Halasz, who wrote the
Time profile, extends this ethos to vocal sound when she describes the young
people driving the culture: “Who are these men and women? Many of them
come from the Midlands, from Yorkshire, Manchester and Birmingham,
sporting their distinct regional accents like badges—​it is no longer neces-
sary to affect an Oxford accent to get ahead. Some of the new voices have
a cockney lilt . . . Others breeze in from the coal-​mining North Country.
There are bluff Yorkshiremen . . . And, of course, Liverpool also produced
the four ingenuous teen-​agers whose Mersey beat has circled the world.”41
While 1960s nostalgia would remember England’s swinginess as widespread,
the scene was exclusionary, and everyday life was less exciting than myth,
even for members of the cultural elite. In an interview given in the 1980s,
Cathy McGowan, who had hosted the era’s swingingest swinging TV show,
Ready Steady Go!, and appeared to be at the very center of the 1960s scene
asked “was there swinging going on? I wish I’d been there. Sounded fun.”42
For young people living outside of London, meanwhile, magazines and TV

Figure I.1 “A Raver’s Pop Guide to London,” from the April 1966 volume of
Rave, offered tips on finding jobs and flats and where to find the most up-​to-​date
fashion and music. © Future PLC. Used with permission.
 Introduction 17

shows like Ready Steady Go! perpetuated the myth and provided a sense of
connection to what was happening in the capital.
Self-​expression, freedom, and the liberation of young people were the core
values inherent in depictions of Swinging London. In her memoir of the pe-
riod, Jenny Diski writes that “after the war and the austerity years, the means
to control how you were seen were newly available to the young . . . many
more young people than ever before had, for various reasons, enough money
to pay for dramatic self-​definition.”43 For those with the means, buying into
music and fashion was a way of having a voice and articulating a kind of re-
bellion against the establishment. And in this context, young, independent
women and the sounds and presence of their voices became emblematic
of the new Britain. But, as the stories of singers like Marianne Faithfull,
Sandie Shaw, Millie Small, and others reveal, even at this moment of pos-
sibility, young women’s voices (sonic, discursive, and otherwise) were still
undermined by sexism and heteronormativity. For all the potential prom-
ised to and explored by young women in the 1960s, and for all the rhetoric
of freedom and self-​expression that emerged in countercultural movements,
gendered power continued to set boundaries on vocality and expression.
The singers in this book, working in the public eye and within a notori-
ously sexist music industry, envoiced potential and possibility despite all the
factors working against them. They sounded out spaces of possibility through
singing, despite working from positions within a music industry that granted
little agency to girls and women.

About this Book

This book investigates how the sounds of girl and young woman singers’
voices in 1960s Britain came to both embody and resist aspirational models of
femininity. Media produced for young women in the 1960s reveals how such
conflict-​ridden notions of girlhood and womanhood emerged and circulated.
Print media for girls—​including publications like Petticoat, Mirabelle, Honey,
and Jackie—​purported to speak directly to the modern young girl’s unique
needs and concerns and offer a telling articulation of the many contradic-
tory notions of what it meant to be a young woman. Moreover, many of these
magazines and papers featured pop singers in profiles, interviews, and ad-
vice columns. These publications are thus a crucial source for understanding
how singers were positioned as role models for young women and reveal
18 Introduction

how their discursive voices were framed. In addition to publications aimed

primarily at young women, I also survey representations of girl singers and
descriptions of their sonic voices in the music press, including such titles as
Fabulous 208, New Musical Express, Record Mirror, Melody Maker, and Disc.
Sources from the popular media offer only a limited representation of the
lives and experiences of young women. Even while publications like Honey
and Fabulous included young women in prominent roles on their writing
and editorial staffs, they were published by large publishing houses beholden
to corporate interests and were predominantly led by men.44 With that in
mind, this work contrasts depictions of singers from the popular press with
their own narration of stories and memories of the 1960s, as documented
in memoirs and interviews from a range of historical and contemporary
sources. In addition, I use sources from the BBC Written Archives, the
British Film Institute Special Collections, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Library and Archives, including contracts, shooting scripts, correspond-
ence, and other documentation pertaining to singers’ performances for
broadcast, which provide insight on the labor conditions of young women
in the entertainment industry. These collections document how singers de-
veloped their sound and image in collaboration with producers, arrangers,
managers, and others.
This story unfolds across eight chapters organized into three thematic
sections. The chapters in part 1, “Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices,” offer
a critical take on how voices come to be understood or construed as
ordinary—​or not. In so doing, these chapters reveal the construction of
whiteness through voice and performance. At the heart of these chapters
are two questions: how do the singers in question exceed the line between
the ordinary and the extraordinary and how do listeners police that line?
Moreover, how are the sounds of “ordinary” voices informed by histor-
ically specific notions of whiteness and modernity? Chapter 1, “Chart
Chicks and Gear Girls,” provides historical background and considers
the cultural position of young women’s voices as shaped by music con-
sumption. Unlike the other chapters in the book, which each focus on a
particular singer, this opening chapter is broader in focus, drawing on
examples from girls’ and young women’s magazines, etiquette manuals,
and the music press to show how a particular ideal of what it meant to be a
girl emerged at this moment. This ideal ultimately dictated what it meant
to sound like a girl and informed how the music industry portrayed girl
singers and addressed girl fans.
 Introduction 19

Chapter 2 focuses on Sandie Shaw, the suburban girl who went on to in-
ternational acclaim as a recording artist and winner of the 1967 Eurovision
song contest. Commentators claimed that Shaw looked and sounded like an
ordinary teenage girl, and that her ability to do this so deftly is what made her
a star. But Shaw also cultivated a self-​consciously quirky image, performing
barefoot and adopting a cool and artistic affect, which resonated with young
women determined to develop their own unique identities. As one writer
put it, Shaw was “a girl in a million, because she’s a girl like a million.”45
Chapter 3 examines the vocality of Cilla Black. Like Shaw, Black evoked
ordinariness, but she was a different breed of girl-​next-​door. Compared to
Shaw’s performance of teenage disaffection, Black was notably chipper and
plucky. Moreover, Black played up her roots and her Liverpudlian accent.
While her regional origins were a source of cultural capital during the height
of Beatlemania, Black’s voice, musical repertoire, and goofy persona—​which
evoked the working-​class performers of an earlier age—​also complicated her
position in hip, swinging London.
Dusty Springfield and Millie Small, the singers at the heart of part 2,
“Transatlantic Voices,” had to contend with reception that positioned them
as different from the “ordinary” Britishnesses discussed in part 1. This dif-
ference is chiefly to do with the ways in which listeners understood their
vocal sounds as racially marked and rooted in Black musical practices, in
contrast to the purportedly “white”-​sounding voices of some of their peers.
At the heart of both chapters is the history of transatlantic Black migration
and musical exchange. Chapter 4 tells the story of the early career of Millie
Small, the teenage dynamo from Jamaica, whose “My Boy Lollipop” was one
of the first pop songs with an explicitly Jamaican musical influence to top
the pop charts in Britain and the US. Small’s voice—​which was piercing and
youthful—​defied convention, and reception of her voice demonstrates the
limitations imposed on young Black women in Swinging London. Chapter 5
takes the 1964 “Sounds of Motown” episode of the TV program Ready Steady
Go! as a starting point for addressing the political potential of musical
alliances among Black women and white women. The show brought together
Dusty Springfield and acts from the Motown roster—​most notably Martha
and the Vandellas. Telling the story of this collaborative performance via the
British reception of Martha Reeves’s and Springfield’s voices illuminates how
it functioned as a moment of political possibility, despite the consistent dis-
avowal of the political power of young women’s voices and the often racist
machinations of the music industry. However, this story also evokes the
20 Introduction

problem of appropriation and power that emerges when a white singer like
Springfield sings with a voice that many listeners of the period described as
sounding “Black.” Through discussions of the album Dusty in Memphis, the
chapter also explores thorny questions around the ethics of vocal expres-
sion, particularly regarding how whiteness grants power and vocal authority
within the music industry.
Part 3, “Sex, Voice, and Rock and Roll,” addresses often troubling questions
of sexual agency. As recent police investigations have revealed, the sexual ex-
ploitation and abuse of young women and men was rampant in the British
entertainment industry of the 1960s. Given this history, it is crucial to ask
how the sexualization of the vocal sounds of pop singers worked in concert
with discourses of sexual freedom to enable exploitation even while young
women were experiencing new levels of sexual agency. Chapter 6 examines
this dynamic via the reception of Lulu’s singing voice. Lulu, like Springfield,
was a white singer who listeners often described as having a “Black”-​
sounding voice. She was fourteen when she had her first hit with a cover of
the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” and her youth was a talking point in much of the
discussion of her early career. Meanwhile, her gospel-​and soul-​influenced
singing and her performances in films like To Sir With Love and Gonks Go
Beat conjured stereotypes and assumptions about Blackness and sexuality.
In that context, media coverage emphasized Lulu’s respectability by insisting
on her youth and virginity. Paradoxically, this emphasis on her purity only
served to further sexualize her by adding a layer of illicit appeal. While much
has been written about how rock and roll stirred anxiety over miscegenation
in the US during the 1950s and 1960s, there has been less investigation into
related phenomena in the British context. The reception of Lulu’s voice shows
how musical practices in Britain reflected different but related anxieties over
race, purity, and British girlhood. Chapter 7 shows how Marianne Faithfull’s
voice likewise shaped and was shaped by perceptions of her sexuality due to
her connection to the Rolling Stones. Faithfull’s career trajectory reveals the
way in which sexual objectification and misogyny precluded women from
experiencing the kind of countercultural freedom espoused in rock cul-
ture at the time. The shifts in Faithfull’s vocal performances over time rep-
resent a response to this dynamic, as well as a rejoinder to both ageism and
sexism in rock. The final chapter focuses on American singer P. P. Arnold,
who has spent much of her career in England and was closely affiliated with
the Rolling Stones. I examine her practice of narrating and telling stories of
the 1960s during her recent performances and consider how this narration
 Introduction 21

vocalizes an authoritative claim on memories of the 1960s and reframes ac-

cepted mythologies around rock and sex. Faithfull’s and Arnold’s stories offer
opportunities to reflect on the memorialization of the 1960s and the con-
tinuing effect of ’60s musical discourse on contemporary performance; their
position toward the end of the volume is thus deliberate.
This book does not pretend to be exhaustive: a number of singers are not
covered here, including Petula Clark, Kathy Kirby, Jackie Trent, Inez Foxx,
Julie Driscoll, Francoise Hardy, the Vernons Girls, and the Breakaways.
Clark’s “Downtown” is a key song of the period: it captured a mood of possi-
bility tied to modern city life. Clark was, however, a star who spanned gen-
erations, having begun her career as a child star in the 1940s. The singers
I do profile offer a way to see the interplay of voice and identity in different
ways. I hope this book starts conversations that continue in future scholar-
ship and that we can continue expanding our histories of pop and rock to
account for the incredibly diverse ways that women and girls participate in
music-​making.
Until recently, the vocal labor of singers (and, in particular, young women
singers) has been neglected in popular music scholarship and criticism.
To place singers at the forefront of music history remains a feminist act, a
way of spotlighting an often-​feminized form of labor that is often marginal-
ized when other musical practices—​songwriting, composition, production,
guitar virtuosity, and so on—​are given primacy in popular music histori-
ography. Attending to vocal work—​whether through the sound of singing
or through the daily vocal discipline highlighted by “Voice Control”—​also
shows how deeply ideas about gender, race, sexuality, and class shape how
we use our bodies and how others perceive us via the sounds of our voices.
Whether soft, loud, rhetorical, or silent, voices matter.
 1
Chart Chicks and Gear Girls
The Limits of Mod Femininity

“The disc charts cannot stand many girls, no matter how gorgeous they look,”
claimed legendary Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1964.1 His attitude was
fairly typical: in the early to mid-​1960s, if you were to ask a British pop pro-
moter what they thought of a young woman’s chart prospects, you would have
been unlikely to get an optimistic response. Despite these attitudes, young
women were making a substantial impact on the pop charts. The period be-
tween 1964 and 1969 saw singers including Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield,
Lulu, Millie Small, Sandie Shaw, and Marianne Faithfull achieve substantial
chart success. The week of January 24, 1965, for instance, saw Cilla Black,
Sandie Shaw, Twinkle, and American imports The Shangri-​Las all reach
the top ten of Radio London’s Fab 40 Countdown.2 These performers were
building on the legacy of soloists like Petula Clark, Shirley Bassey, Alma
Cogan, and Helen Shapiro and groups like the Beverley Sisters and the Kaye
Sisters, all of whom had achieved wide appeal in the years leading up to the
Swinging Sixties. Promoters seemed to forget or even deny their successes,
and the reason for this comes down to widely held, heteronormative
assumptions about young women’s sexual, romantic, and professional desires
and priorities. These assumptions informed how the music industry treated
young women as performers and as consumers, ultimately disciplining their
musical and expressive voices.
A 1962 Disc magazine roundtable on the topic of girl singers is a case
in point. The respondents seem unconcernedly resigned to a gender-​
imbalanced pop chart—​and they don’t consider their own potential com-
plicity in perpetuating the disparity. “Normally the girls don’t have any sort
of fan following and so the record has to get away on merit alone. After a time
they develop a following, of course, but rarely enough to guarantee records
getting into the charts. They need a lot of pushing,” claimed promoter Alan
Freeman.3 Oriole Records A&R man John Schroeder blamed a lack of appro-
priate material:

Freedom Girls. Alexandra M. Apolloni, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190879891.003.0002
26 Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices

I don’t think there’s a trend toward girl singers. It’s really that the material
available is not suitable for girls to sing. No British girl stood much chance
during the rock craze. In fact, only about two in the world did—​Connie
Francis and Brenda Lee. But now, when we are living in times of world in-
security, the ballad is coming back to popularity. It always does in times of
stress. And girls can get over the feeling and emotion of a ballad just as well
as a boy can. More girls? I think so, provided they get the right songs. But
they’ll never dominate the charts, ever.4

Schroeder argues that rock’s popularity makes chart success difficult for girls
because, in his estimation, women can only sing romantic ballads, with few
exceptions. These remarks reveal that some record executives were only ca-
pable of conceiving of women performers whose output fit easily within es-
tablished gender-​essentialist norms.
In addition, the notion espoused by Epstein—​that the charts could only
handle one female performer at a time—​speaks to an assumption that women
and girls were one another’s competitors. As Epstein explained: “Cilla [Black]
was the last Liverpool artiste I secured and she is, of course, the only girl. This
is not accidental; for I was finding it difficult, in the first case, to select talent
from so much in the beat city, and, in the second case, I didn’t care to dilute
the special connection I wanted to give Cilla by managing a girl-​competitor.
The disc charts cannot stand many girls, no matter how gorgeous they look.”5
In Epstein’s mind, while the charts could support many male acts, there was
only space for a few girls. He construes female performers more as novelty
acts who lacked a dedicated audience and may not offer enough of a return
for a record label to take a leap. And while Epstein was not heterosexual, this
adherence to the notion that girls could only be one another’s competitors
reveals that assumptions of heteronormativity run deep.
This assumption stems, in part, from an erroneous understanding of why
people—​and especially young women—​choose to listen to particular artists.
In 1964, Peter Jones described the “new wave” of girl singers and finally ac-
knowledged their popular appeal: “Not so long ago, it was dead simple. With a
distinct lack of gallantry, the experts of pop music laid down the ruling: ‘Girls
are useless. Girls buy most of the records, therefore they won’t buy discs by
girls. While girls may be very nice to look at, the fans do not regard them as
being worth the money to listen to.’ Ungallant, yes, and right now it’s inaccu-
rate, too! For the girls are having an extremely fair share of chart success.”6
Jones invoked a piece of what seems to have been conventional wisdom
 Chart Chicks and Gear Girls 27

in commentary on girl singers. Girls, the thinking went, were attracted to

young men, and were thus only interested in listening to songs by potential
boyfriends. Other young women represented a potential threat (they were,
to borrow from Epstein, potential “girl competitors”), and girl consumers
would not buy their records. Of course, this attitude does not reflect how
audiences actually experience and use music. For instance, as Annie Randall
points out in her ethnography of Dusty Springfield fans, fans looked to the
singer as an ally, a friend, and a role model.7 The notion that girls only lis-
tened to music by boys because they were only sexually attracted to boys not
only ignores a host of other kinds of relationships and identities that girls
may have experienced but also set limits on the opportunities for vocal ex-
pression available to girls and women who sang or played music.
Thus, while young women would emerge as trendsetters in fashion and
media, and while their power as consumers of music held considerable sway
over the entertainment industry, their potential influence as performers and
creators was routinely dismissed. The remarks of the record industry insiders
quoted here reveal that this oversight stems from assumptions about young
women’s interest in heterosexual romance. In addition to normalizing gender
roles and the assumption that women and girls were interested in pursuing a
life trajectory that would take them from children to young women to wives,
heteronormative discourse influenced the opportunities that people with
power (educators, policymakers, business leaders, and, in this case, music
industry insiders) made available to young women. Heteronormativity thus
worked to discipline voices, quite literally in this case, as it resulted in the
sounds of fewer women singers on the airwaves, further naturalizing the as-
sumption that girl and woman singers were less popular with audiences and
thus less able to hold their own in the pop world.
The examples given here come from the music press, but these same
narratives about what young women wanted were also present in magazines,
comics, and other media produced for young women and girls. Often,
somewhat ironically, these narratives were published alongside articles
and interviews that depicted a moment when new opportunities for self-​
determination were available for young women, suggesting a tension be-
tween the traditional and the new. Likewise, representations of women pop
stars in media of the period exhibit a preoccupation with traditional gender
roles, but often acknowledge that those roles were shifting and hint at dif-
ferent possibilities. And while the often-​idealized media depictions of young
women may not have accurately reflected the lived experiences of most girls,
28 Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices

they were a tool and a resource that young women drew on when forming
their understanding of their position in the world. They helped to naturalize
and reproduce a set of expectations about what young women were and
weren’t like and what they were and weren’t interested in, while occasionally
flirting with minor subversion. While they may not advocate vocal discipline
as explicitly as elocution textbooks and etiquette manuals do, stories about
romance, about independent girls in the city, and about young women and
music all exert their own kind of voice control.
This chapter connects representations of (predominantly white) girls
and young women in media created for them and attitudes toward young
women as consumers and creators of music to sketch out the contours of
the world in which the voices of 1960s pop singers would reverberate. It
was a world in which individual freedom—​a primary concern of rock and
roll culture—​was often at odds with the pressure to be part of a musical
and cultural community or scene, and a world in which the pressure to be
unique was at odds with the pressure to be respectable. I start with a dive
into the world of girls’ magazines and newspapers, whose stories of young
women seeking independence were about nothing less than the capacity
of girls to have access to voice and self-​expression. Then, I show that the
relentless heteronormativity that limited girls’ options in these fictional
and factual accounts manifested equally powerfully in music industry
attitudes toward young women as consumers and producers of music.
Finally, I reflect on how this dynamic shaped opportunities for girl and
young woman singers. While each of the chapters that follow deals with
one particular vocalist, here I take a step back and attend to the popular
media more broadly. The history I unfold here will echo across the indi-
vidual stories that follow.

Kathy’s Crowd: Social Mobility, Voice, and the

Problem of Independence

Kathy came to London in 1966. She moved into a tiny flat with three other
girls, where they decorated and painted and tried to learn to coexist in close
quarters, not always successfully. Kathy took a job at an advertising agency
but was more interested in modeling or show business. She found, though,
that working at the agency was a good way to meet photographers and find
modeling jobs. She dated men she met at work, men who were sometimes
 Chart Chicks and Gear Girls 29

older and more sophisticated than she was; but she put up a convincing
front and never let on when they intimidated her. They often told her that
she looked like actress Julie Christie did in the film Darling, and when she
took in her long straight hair and carefully made-​up eyes in the mirror, she
had to agree. Kathy made friends with the boys who lived in the flat upstairs.
They were the first Black men she’d ever met, and they invited her to parties
where they listened to old blues records and talked about the best places on
the Portobello Road for finding old ’78s. In the city, Kathy made friends and
she made enemies, she launched a career, and she became a quintessential
example of the new kind of young womanhood that the Swinging Sixties
ushered in. London was Kathy’s playground, but it’s also where she learned
how to grow up.
Kathy wasn’t real. “Kathy” was the fictional protagonist of the serial
“Kathy’s Crowd,” which appeared weekly in the pages of Petticoat, a lifestyle
and fashion magazine for young women.8 The kind of story told in “Kathy’s
Crowd,” of young women off to make it big in Swinging London, wasn’t
unique to Petticoat. Many other magazines, including Boyfriend, Mirabelle,
Trend, Honey, Fabulous, and Jackie all regularly ran similar stories, often
in comic-​strip form, featuring teenage girls who looked suspiciously adult
and sophisticated for their purported ages. Just like Helen Gurley Brown’s
Sex and the Single Girl (1964) and the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970) in the
US, these stories of independent, career-​minded young women focus on
the newfound career opportunities, freedoms, and challenges girls found in
cities, but they exhibit a spirit of social and technological modernization that
was distinct to Britain at the time. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1963 calls
for a New Britain to be forged in the “white heat” of technological revolu-
tion may have referred to scientific and industrial progress, but they speak to
a larger impulse toward modernization. Modern young women—​pursuing
careers, exerting choice, experiencing the world—​were as emblematic of this
revolution as were shiny, new technologies. In this spirit, media for young
women often portrayed the city as a mythical place of opportunity where you
could find anything you wanted: clothes, records, jobs, friends, boyfriends.
Such narratives weren’t isolated to print media. Films like The Girl With the
Green Eyes (1964) and The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965) featured young
women bound for the city; a storyline parodied in the satirical film Smashing
Time (1967).9 Still, as Tracey Loughran notes, the image of the young, newly
employed woman living solo in her bed-​sitting room was a relatively prosaic
symbol of freedom that spoke to “the inability of younger people to choose
30 Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices

their own ways of life but also to the limits of imagination under certain
conditions.”10
Employment statistics reveal that some young women were pursuing
careers and opportunity. The highest numbers of “economically active”
women (i.e., women in employment or seeking work) were concentrated
in southeast England, near or in London.11 Many women were entering the
workforce in their teenage years, although the number of girls under the age
of sixteen pursuing employment actually decreased throughout the 1960s—​a
result of more widespread access to educational opportunity. By the 1960s,
young women were staying in school longer and had more opportunities to
attend university. Stephanie Spencer notes that by the mid-​1960s, the age
at which women were making decisions about their careers could be any-
where from as young as fifteen (the minimum school-​leaving age) to as old
as twenty-​one or twenty-​two for those who went on to higher education.12
As Table 1.1 shows, more than 214,000 young women entered employment
at age fifteen in 1950, and by 1968 that number had decreased to 154,900, as
more young women delayed entering the workforce. The number of young
women entering the workforce slightly later, at age sixteen or seventeen,

Table 1.1 Number of Young Persons in Great Britain Entering Employment

by Age and Gender, in Thousands

Year Boys, age Girls, age Boys, age Girls, age Boys, age Girls, age
15 15 16 16 17 17

1950 225.2 214.2 37 35.8 11 13.5

1955 214.1 202.6 36.4 33.4 9.1 12.1
1960 219.8 204.1 51.4 42.6 15 14.8
1961 237.9 227.1 49 41.8 15.6 16
1962 270 261.9 50.7 43.7 15.3 15.7
1963 212.6 199.2 71.3 61.5 20 19.8
1964 218.5 207.2 69.7 59.8 26.6 26.5
1965 201.2 188.4 66.9 56.6 23.3 23.6
1966 185.7 176.1 64.2 53.8 20.3 21.8
1967 167.2 159.7 66.4 53.9 19.3 21
1968 164.7 154.9 70.2 55.8 20.9 21.8
1969 158.8 149.4 74.4 57.5 20.9 22

Source: Data from British Labor Statistics Historical Abstract 1886–​1968, Table 158, p. 304; and
Department of Employment, British Labor Statistics Yearbook 1969 (London: Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1971), Table 104, p. 208.
 Chart Chicks and Gear Girls 31

increased somewhat over the course of the decade, but the majority of young
women continued to enter employment at around the minimum school-​
leaving age of fifteen. The type of employment varied, but statistics reveal
that young women were more likely than young men to enter employment in
clerical fields, giving truth to the stereotype of the young woman working as
a secretary or in the steno pool. For instance, in 1964, 114,900 young women
were employed as clerical workers, compared with 34,000 young men.13
Career-​related media flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, although the
target demographic shifted as young women delayed their entry into the
workforce. Spencer documents the rise of the “career novel” in the 1950s.
With titles such as Sheila Burton, Dental Assistant (1956), Social Work for
Jill (1954), Margaret Lang Fashion Buyer (1956), and Sally Dances (1956),
they focused on the experience of finding a first job and presented careers as
adventures—​but adventures to be undertaken seriously. Spencer notes that
the novels tended to be prescriptive regarding self-​presentation and beha-
vior, emphasizing a neat appearance, and assumed girls would eventually go
on to a life of domesticity and motherhood. These novels flourished from the
mid-​1950s through the early 1960s, by which point some girls and women
were staying in school longer and publishers found that the greater age range
among career choosers was more difficult to approach as a target market.14
Magazines, which could adapt more quickly to changing trends, continued to
run career-​related content. Some publications ran how-​to guides on moving
to the city on your own: one 1963 Honey piece, for instance, was called “How
to Leave Home and Like It.”15 These appeared alongside fashion and beauty
features, advice columns, and profiles of girl singers that also exhibited an
aspirational narrative. Print media offered prescriptive guidelines, often with
explicit instructions and descriptions of how to be a modern young woman
alongside fictional narratives of women pursuing their goals. These media
were guidebooks: they taught girls how they might become a Kathy, or a
Cilla, Sandie, Lulu, or Dusty.
Magazines and papers produced for young women during the 1960s
varied in terms of print quality, publication frequency, and target audi-
ence. Fan Carter notes that the 1950s saw the launch of a number of inex-
pensive, weekly titles—​Valentine, Mirabelle, and Marylin among them—​that
featured romance comic strips, drew an aspirational if working-​class audi-
ence, and continued publishing into the 1960s.16 Honey, launched in 1960 by
Fleetway, was the first title specifically designed for the “single girl” market.
As a monthly publication, it was more expensive, more colorful, and printed
32 Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices

on higher-​quality paper than the newsprint weeklies, physically manifesting

class aspiration. Honey developed a distinctive editorial and visual style
that addressed readers as “confident, independent, and demanding young
women,” which other publications sought to emulate.17 Petticoat, a weekly
publication established by Honey editor Audrey Slaughter, was an extension
of this style, while Boyfriend, Rave, Fabulous, and other titles combined the
“get-​ahead” femininity of Honey with an explicit focus on music.
Print depictions of young women showed them endeavoring to find their
voices and their selves, evoking a sense of possibility and hope. However,
they also illustrated—​and, in some cases, even reinforced—​limits on the ex-
pressive potential of young women. Magazines like Honey and Petticoat, for
instance, were hardly revolutionary texts, and while they included women
in leadership roles on their editorial teams, they were still beholden to large
publishing firms whose interests lay less in amplifying young women’s voices
than in selling papers and advertisements.18 Just as conversations about vocal
discipline were about aspiring to social mobility and maintaining the status
quo, there’s a conservative thread that runs through popular depictions of
modern 1960s young women: they depict young women experiencing
freedom, but only up to a point. They rarely stray far from accepted gender
norms. For instance, in a 1963 Honey article, Stephen Higginson offered an
effusive description of the experience of traveling by tube through Waterloo
Station into a new, futuristic kind of work environment—​one might call it
the office of the “white heat” revolution:

Just think! If you go by tubetrain to work, you can travel for miles on the
underground, then go up the escalators from Waterloo Station which feed
right into the jaws of the Shell building. There, you can eat, shop, have
your hair done and stay on for some social activity until late in the eve-
ning . . . Wendy Hare [says], “I’ve been here sixteen months and enjoy it.
The whole place is clean and efficient, and I like the attitude to work. You
are encouraged to get through what you have to do, and then sit and read
a magazine in the armchairs provided. You get through much quicker and
don’t try to spin the work out just to fill the time.”

Higginson goes on to predict that the workplaces of the future will be techno-
logical utopias—​complete with modern conveniences for the young working
woman: “A world of speeding lifts, modern equipment, air-​conditioning,
central heating, and instant social life. A world where you don’t even have
 Chart Chicks and Gear Girls 33

to switch the light on, where there are no windows to open, and where the
kitchen-​staff has its own showers—​‘specially designed so as not to disar-
range the hair.’ This is the way things are moving, girls. I only hope you like
it!”19 Higginson’s future is designed for the young woman who is modern
and independent, but never so modern as to disrupt the gendered status
quo. The city offers her the chance to be independent. It provides modern
tools through which she might maintain an appropriately feminine image
(magical showers that won’t “disarrange the hair,” anyone?) and be a good
consumer who goes out to eat and shop, tempering the threat to traditional
gender roles that career girls represented. The vocal discipline advocated
in girls’ magazines and comportment manuals is a similar kind of modern
tool: by controlling the sounds of their voices, young women could access
jobs and money and ostensibly the freedom and opportunity to have voices
as subjects in modern Britain.
Representations of young women in 1960s popular British media often
depict a striving for autonomy, but such quests for self-​determination and
freedom of choice and expression—​in a word, quests for voice—​are often
couched in conflict. For instance, Boyfriend’s serial “The Freedom Girls”
(tagline: “Got that independent feeling? Want to be on your own? Then you
are one of . . . the Freedom Girls”) introduced readers to a fitful young nar-
rator itching to leave home. She says: “It was something I simply had to do
or burst at the seams. The first problem, however, was finding someone to
share a flat with, and although I asked some of my friends, most of them were
chicken about leaving home.”20 A girl bursts at the seams to escape while her
peers feel reticent and even fearful at the prospect. She envisions breaking
with tradition, staking out on her own, becoming a self-​actualized grown-​
up; she sees her friends as choosing to remain dependent and perhaps even
childlike. And while our intrepid narrator initially relishes her freedom, she
soon changes her tune. She finds herself juggling two jobs, as a Dictaphone
operator and a model, and longing to return to the parental nest. “You learn
how much your parents have done to give you luxuries that seem like nothing
until you have to go without them,” she sighs.21 When her boyfriend, Steve,
proposes to her in the final installment of the series, she gladly accepts and
her story abruptly ends. Ironically, the saga of our independent freedom girl
only seems to matter as an antecedent that leads to that most desirable femi-
nine role, wifehood. This kind of narrative arc is common in these stories: ei-
ther girls’ dependence on others (typically boys, bosses, parents, and other
authority figures) is a prerequisite for the limited independence they enjoy in
34 Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices

other areas of their lives, or autonomy is a temporary, liminal state—​a transi-

tion period between being a child and being a wife.
The example of “The Freedom Girls” illustrates that the girls striving for
voice in these stories are always white and always heterosexual. The ease with
which characters like the protagonist of “The Freedom Girls” find glamorous
jobs and housing reflects a degree of social mobility that young women of
color would not likely have experienced. In particular, finding housing was a
challenge for many people of color in Britain, as white landlords would often
refuse to rent to nonwhite tenants.22 Furthermore, these magazines implic-
itly address a specifically white audience. A 1967 Petticoat article about race
and discrimination makes it clear that the editors assume that their readers
are white.23 Author Ruth Miller addresses her readers as though they are
white like her: “For the majority of us whites . . . the ‘in’ thing is not to have or
to condone any colour prejudice whatever, to invite lonely African students
home for the holidays, not to comment if a friend’s new friend is African or
West Indian.”24 Miller frames racial tolerance as a sign of being modern and
hip, even while assuming that her audience includes no Black readers. She
goes on to interview a number of young, Black women, including nurses,
students, and secretaries, who speak about instances in which race has im-
pacted their working lives. One woman, Verna McKenzie, who works for the
BBC, describes the challenges that many of her friends faced: “Everybody at
work is marvelous. I spend most of my lunch hours with the girls I work with,
and we go to each others’ parties. If I didn’t have lots of West Indian friends
who can’t find decent digs, and can’t find the sort of work they’re qualified for,
I might forget there is a colour problem.”25 This rare example of a teen mag
covering race-​related issues exposes the exclusion that many women of color
encountered, even while it assumes that they aren’t part of the readership.
In addition to assuming whiteness, teen mags assumed heterosexuality.
For instance, throughout the course of its months-​long run, “The Freedom
Girls” follows the protagonist through romance to the logical conclusion of
marriage. The story happily and uncritically ends there, implying that being
a wife is the heroine’s ultimate destiny. In many stories, girl characters are
preoccupied with being alone, with the potential of losing love, and, along
with it, their sense of self. Other stories also insist on heteronormativity in
the way they present relationships among girls. The characters often ap-
pear isolated from or in antagonistic relationships with other girls. For in-
stance, in the story “Steam Radio,” from the June 1968 edition of Mirabelle,
two roommates, Sarah and Deb, are placed in direct competition with one
 Chart Chicks and Gear Girls 35

another. Narrator Sarah is thrilled to discover that the boy Deb had her eye
on actually had his eye on Sarah all along. Angela McRobbie describes this
recurring trope as “romantic individualism”: a focus on independent, indi-
vidual girls looking for heterosexual love that ignores relationships that girls
have with people in their lives outside of romance—​particularly, friendships
with other girls.26 This individualism isolates and precludes friendship and
solidarity—​never mind love and romance—​between girls.
These are ultimately stories about the conditions under which young
women had access to voice. These stories represent voices in a very lit-
eral way: girls are often the narrators; their voices (discursive, if not sonic)
are depicted by words on the page. In illustrated, comic-​style stories, the
protagonists’ thoughts—​ their inner voices and selves—​ are pictured in
floating thought balloons and drive the action forward. In these stories,
girls are shown giving an account of their selves and giving voice to their
experiences. But the voices represented reflect a limited range of possibilities
and experiences, and their uniformity implies that other kinds of experiences
of growing up, of being a young woman, are somehow not normal. While
readers would have used and responded to these stories in myriad individual
ways, their narratives suggest a certain way of being a girl that might, in turn,
shape readers’ inner voices. Political philosopher Wendy Brown’s concept of
“compulsory discursivity” is useful here. Brown argues that, in the feminist
preoccupation with helping marginalized people find voice or participate in
discourse, we ignore both the potential power of silence and the way making
people speak and participate in discourse subjects their speech and voice to
regulation.27 The carefully uniform accounts of self that the characters of
teen magazines provide are regulated voices: speaking, but only in ways that
remind readers of how a “normal” girl should think and be.
Paradoxically, even while the teen magazines insist on a fairly uniform ex-
perience of feminine girlhood, they also imply that each of their readers is a
unique individual. In a Boyfriend article called “The Age of the Moody and
How to Be a Girl in It,” the author describes a desire to be different and a fear
of being just like everyone else: “It’s the freedom to be yourself, know your-
self, and go which ever way you want to go. Whether the way you want to go
is to the top, or only to coffee bars to stand by the juke box . . . It’s about being
sure of what you don’t know about. Dazzled by what you can’t see. Frightened
maybe by the future. Snatching a time of being different because you realize
you’ll probably end up just the same as everyone else, anyway.”28 “The Age of
the Moody” valorizes the independent, creative young woman and presents
36 Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices

her particular kind of emotional state in conflicted but almost exhilarated

terms before ultimately ending on a note of subdued resignation. For all the
promise that came from being a young woman in the 1960s, for all the new
opportunities available, the only fate that remained was ending up just the
same as everyone else: traditional gender roles remained in place.
For some, this story may have rung true. For instance, in her memoir,
model and 1960s It girl Pattie Boyd tells a story that mirrors those of the fic-
tional Kathies of the teen mags. “London belonged to the young” and “old
class structures were breaking down.”29 Boyd tells of working at the Elizabeth
Arden cosmetic counter in London, where a chance meeting with Celia
Hammond, an editor for Honey, led to Boyd’s first modeling job. Boyd then
pounded the pavement looking for more work: “Finding an agency was
easy; finding a job was the hard part. Every day I would go out with a list of
photographers’ names and addresses and trudge around with my portfolio,
hoping they would like what they saw.”30 Despite these difficulties, her story
of the early days of her career is told with nostalgic glee. She had to work
hard, yes. She was short on cash, yes. But still, it was so much fun:

I moved into a flat in Stanhope Gardens with four other models. . . . It was
girly and disorganized. There were people coming and going at all hours,
boys turning up to take us out—​and leaving broken hearts—​everyone bor-
rowing everyone else’s clothes, so nothing was ever where you thought it
was and no system for cleaning or shopping . . . I was earning three pounds
an hour but often the money didn’t come through for weeks, and with rent
to pay I didn’t have a lot to spare—​particularly if I’d treated myself to a nice
pair of shoes, my weakness.31

Boyd, whose continuing celebrity stems from her 1960s icon status, has a
vested interest in reproducing the nostalgic myth of the 1960s—​so it’s not
surprising that her account glorifies this time. Likewise, her descriptions of
what it was like to do photo shoots emphasize a newly discovered sense of
physical freedom and self-​expression: “Limbs hadn’t been seen before, ex-
cept on the beach. Miniskirts were revolutionary. Women had been covered
up in sensible tweeds and twin sets. Suddenly they were flaunting them-
selves. . . . You could wear what you wanted, do what you wanted, express
yourself in the way that felt right—​and in the ‘in’ parts of London, such
as Chelsea and Notting Hill, no one turned a hair.”32 This almost clichéd
 Chart Chicks and Gear Girls 37

depiction of Swinging London highlights the sense of possibility and op-

portunity that some experienced. It also forgets what went before. There had
been previous eras in which some women, like Boyd, experienced a physical
sense of emancipation—​the 1920s, for instance—​but many of the memoirists
writing of the 1960s depict that feeling as something new and revolutionary
that emerged around them. And, indeed, for them it may well have felt brand
new, given the way that it contrasted so sharply from the ethos of postwar
austerity that had marked the 1950s. Boyd and many of her contemporaries
have portrayed the time when they grew up as a time when their voices were
unprecedentedly free. As Boyd proclaims: “As long as you were young, beau-
tiful, and creative, the world was your oyster.”33
Stories like Boyd’s were satirized in the 1967 film Smashing Time. With a
script by musician and art critic George Melly, Smashing Time starred Rita
Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave as Brenda and Yvonne, two northern girls
seeking fortune in London. Brenda and Yvonne arrive in the capital and rap-
idly experience a whirlwind trip through fame and fortune, full of surreal and
slapstick mishaps involving musicians, photographers, models, and other
beautiful young types, before ultimately deciding that fame is not worth the
trouble and heading home. Notably, Yvonne becomes an overnight pop sen-
sation with a song titled “I’m So Young,” with lyrics that admit, “I can’t sing,
but I’m young!” A pop production team adjusts the recording of Yvonne’s
shrieking vocals until it sounds like singing, and the track becomes an instant
hit. This suggestive moment in the film neatly captures several assumptions
held about young women in the entertainment industry, namely that their
appeal was driven by a craze for youth, that their talent was manufactured,
and that their fame (like the pop culture milieu in which they moved) would
be short-​lived.
And what if, unlike Pattie Boyd and her friends, you weren’t young, beau-
tiful, and creative? And even if you were, was your freedom of voice truly
unimpeded or without consequence? The memoirs of celebrities like Boyd
often portray exceptional circumstances as though they were commonplace,
and the stories about young women found in 1960s media likewise portray
those exceptional circumstances as the norm. In reality, young women’s
experiences of the 1960s were extremely varied.
To live a freewheeling city life depended on social status and economic
circumstance. Boyd’s mother and stepfather never gave much thought to
the idea that she would grow up to do anything but marry, and so her job
38 Ordinary, Extraordinary Voices

at Elizabeth Arden was initially a stopover between school and wifehood.

Other middle-​class girls, though, were expected to go on to pursue an edu-
cation. For instance, novelist Maggie Gee, who was born in 1948 and came
of age in the 1960s, earned a scholarship to Oxford, and rather than living
a glamorous city life went off to university at seventeen. A grammar school
graduate, she was, by her own admission, extremely naive about sexuality
and alienated from the mythic world of independent career girls. While Boyd
found bodily freedom when she became a model and grew into young adult-
hood, Gee’s memoirs imply that the pressures of middle-​class respectability
seemed to work to strip existing freedoms away as she left childhood. When
she was thirteen, she and her best friend would spend hours running out-
side, completely unbounded by social expectations. “We had turned into the
horses we used to dream of, we were animals, we could run forever . . . we
had no limit.” This sense of freedom of physical expression and ownership
over one’s body was not permanent or stable. As Gee notes “as we age, such
moments come less often. At its worst, the body becomes something to forget
or to carry, something best ignored, something to transcend.”34
For Gee, the awareness that her physical freedom was not absolute came
when others exerted control over her mobility. She writes of her father phys-
ically assaulting her when she returned a few minutes past curfew from
an outing with some teenage boys. “Don’t you have any self-​respect?” he
demanded of her. But Gee notes that while her father demanded that she ex-
hibit “self-​respect,” he had no respect for her. His concern was for how her
behavior would reflect on the family. He “did not see I was a separate person
and had a right to be respected. . . . One thing daughters need from their
fathers is respect for their sexual selves.”35 This anecdote reveals how the ac-
cess to mobility that young women supposedly enjoyed in the 1960s was not
universal—​that expectations of respectability precluded the kind of freedom
that is often taken for granted in accounts of the era.
Furthermore, young women who did experience sexual freedom where
often stigmatized. Marianne Faithfull’s story, explored in detail in ­chapter 7, is a
case in point. Beginning in about 1964, Faithfull presented herself in interviews
as uninhibited and unafraid of expressing her opinions. She didn’t hide her
disintegrating marriage and subsequent affair with Mick Jagger. But when
she was found by police at Keith Richards’s country estate and implicated in
a drug investigation, she was torn apart in the press. While it is unsurprising
for the relatively conservative news media to take such a stance, little ef-
fort was made by the music press to come to her defense. The Stones, on the
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of In quest of the perfect
book
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
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eBook.

Title: In quest of the perfect book

Reminiscences & reflections of a bookman

Author: William Dana Orcutt

Release date: September 14, 2023 [eBook #71634]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1926

Credits: Terry Jeffress, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN QUEST

OF THE PERFECT BOOK ***
IN QUEST OF THE PERFECT
BOOK
A book is a portion of the eternal
mind caught in its progress through
the world stamped in an instant, and
preserved for eternity.
—Lord Houghton (1809–1885)
QUEEN MARY’S PSALTER, English, 14th Century
The Last Judgement
(Brit. Mus. Royal MS. 2B vii, 11 × 7 inches)
IN QUEST OF THE PERFECT BOOK

REMINISCENCES
& REFLECTIONS
OF A BOOKMAN

WILLIAM DANA ORCUTT

PUBLISHED · MCMXXVI · BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY
 Copyright, 1926, by Little, Brown
and Company · All rights reserved
·.·
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1926
·.·
Reprinted October, 1926
Reprinted November, 1926
THE AUTHOR is indebted to the Atlantic Monthly for permission to
reprint as the first chapter of this volume an essay which originally
appeared in that magazine; to the Christian Science Monitor for
permission to use, in quite different form, certain material which has
been drawn upon in literary editorials written by him for its columns;
to Alban Dobson, Esq., G. Bernard Shaw, Esq., Henry James, Esq.,
Mrs. Anne Cobden-Sanderson, and others, for permission to print
personal letters and photographs.
 To ITALY
That great Country whose Master-Spirits
in Art, Typography, and Literature
have contributed most toward
THE PERFECT BOOK
this Volume is Dedicated
 FOREWORD TO THE THIRD
EDITION
Years ago, I prepared what seemed to me a splendid Foreword to my first
novel, and was much chagrined when I was urged to leave it out. At the time,
the comment that came with the advice seemed a bit brutal: “A Foreword is an
admission on the part of an author that he has failed to tell his story, or is an
insult to the intelligence of his readers.” Since then my own feelings have come
in such complete accord that the request of my publishers for a Foreword to
this Third Edition comes as a surprise. But, after all, this is not my story, but
the story of the Book, so, as recorder, I must recognize my responsibility. I
have claimed that this story was Romance, but since writing it, Romance has
allied itself to Drama, for the Gutenberg Bible, a copy of which sold in
February for a record price of $120,000, in September achieved the
stupendous value of $305,000! Surely the Book has come into its own!
After devoting a lifetime to printing as an art, I have naturally been
gratified to discover that so large and friendly an army of readers exists to
whom books mean something more than paper and type and binders’ boards.
To many of my readers, the ideas advanced in this volume apparently have
been novel, but appealing: “I have been over the books in my library,” writes
one, “and find many that now take on new significance.” Another says, “I feel
that I have missed much, all these years, in not knowing how fascinating the
story of the Book itself really is.” Then there are those who are good enough
to say that the story of my adventures has helped to place the art of printing
where it rightfully belongs.
Some of my reviewers and some correspondents seem seriously to think
that I believe the Quest to be ended. Think of the tragedy of having so alluring
an adventure become an accomplished fact,—even granting that it were
possible! Where is the Perfect Book to be found? In the words of the author
or in the heart of the reader? In the design of a type or in the skill of the
typographer or the binder? In the charm of the paper or in the beauty of the
illumination or illustration? It must, of course, be in the harmonious
combination of all of these, but the words of an author which find a place in
one reader’s heart fail to interest another; the design of a type that is
appropriate to one book is not equally expressive in all.
The word perfection has no place in our language except as an incentive. To
search for it is an absorbing adventure, for it quickens our senses to perceive
much that would otherwise be lost. If perfection could become commonplace,
the Quest would end,—and God pity the world! Until then each of us will
define the Perfect Book in his own words, each of us will seek it in his own
way.
A writer may be born who combines the wisdom of Solomon, the power
of analysis of Henry James, the understanding of Plato, the philosophy of
Emerson, and the style of Montaigne. This manuscript may be transformed
into a book by a printer who can look beyond his cases of type, and interpret
what Aldus, and Jenson, and Etienne, and Plantin saw, with the artistic
temperament of William Morris and the restraint of Cobden-Sanderson. There
may be a binding that represents the apotheosis of Italian, French, and English
elegance. A reader may be developed through the evolution of the ages
competent to appreciate the contents and the physical format of such a volume,
“for what we really seek is a comparison of experiences.”
Until then the Quest will continue, going constantly onward and upward.
Its lure will keep us from slipping back upon false satisfaction and a placid but
—shall I say?—a dangerous contemplation of the humanistic idyll.
William Dana Orcutt
 CONTENTS

I. IN QUEST OF THE PERFECT BOOK 1

Gutenberg
Aldus Manutius
Guido Biagi
Ceriani
Pope Pius XI
Sir Sidney Colvin
II. THE KINGDOM OF BOOKS 35
Eugene Field
John Wilson
Mary Baker Eddy
Bernard Shaw
III. FRIENDS THROUGH TYPE 73
Horace Fletcher
Henry James
William James
Theodore Roosevelt
T. J. Cobden-Sanderson
IV. THE LURE OF ILLUMINATION 109
Byzantine Psalter
Lindisfarne Gospels
Alcuin Bible
Golden Gospels of St. Médard
Psalter of St. Louis
Queen Mary’s Psalter
Bedford Book of Hours
 Grimani Breviary
Antiquities of the Jews
Hours of Francesco d’Antonio
Hours of Anne of Brittany
V. FRIENDS THROUGH THE PEN 151
Maurice Hewlett
Austin Dobson
Richard Garnett
Mark Twain
Charles Eliot Norton
William Dean Howells
VI. TRIUMPHS OF TYPOGRAPHY 191
The Beginnings. Germany—The Gutenberg Bible
Supremacy of Italy
Nicolas Jenson: Augustinus: De Civitate Dei
Aldus Manutius: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Supremacy of France
Robert Étienne: The Royal Greeks
Supremacy of the Netherlands
Christophe Plantin: The Biblia Polyglotta
The Elzevirs: Terence
Supremacy of England
John Baskerville: Virgil
Supremacy of France (second)
The Didots: Racine
Supremacy of England (second)
William Morris: The Kelmscott Chaucer
Cobden-Sanderson: The Doves Bible
VII. THE SPELL of the LAURENZIANA 271
INDEX 301
 ILLUSTRATIONS

English Illumination, 14th Century. From Queen Mary’s Psalter, Brit.

Mus. Royal MS. 2B vii (in colors and gold) Frontis.
John Gutenberg. From Engraving by Alphonse Descaves.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris page 6
Aldus Manutius. From Engraving at the British Museum 10
Dott. Comm. Guido Biagi. Seated at one of the plutei in the
Laurenziana Library, Florence (1906) 14
Hand-written Humanistic Characters. From Sinibaldi’s Virgil, 1485.
Laurenziana Library, Florence 16
Specimen Page of proposed Edition of Dante. To be printed by
Bertieri, of Milan, in Humanistic Type 19
Jenson’s Roman Type. From Cicero: Rhetorica, Venice, 1470 22
Emery Walker’s Doves Type. From Paradise Regained, London, 1905 23
Autograph Letter from Charles Eliot Norton 31
Illuminated Page of Petrarch’s Triumphs. Set in Humanistic Type
designed by the Author 32
Autograph Page of Eugene Field Manuscript. From Second Book of
Verse, New York, 1892 39
Autograph Verse in Field’s own Copy of Trumpet and Drum 41
John Wilson in 1891. Master-Printer 42
Page of Horace Fletcher Manuscript 77
Giambattista Bodoni. From Engraving at the Bibliothèque Nationale,
Paris 78
The Bodoni Letter compared with the Didot Letter 81
Horace Fletcher in 1915 82
Autograph Letter from Henry James to Horace Fletcher 87
Mirror Title. From Augustinus: Opera. 1485. Laurenziana Library,
Florence 94
T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. From Etching by Alphonse Legros, 1893 96
Carved Ivory Binding, Jeweled with Rubies and Turquoises. From
Psalter (12th Century). Brit. Mus. Eger. MS. 1139 112
Byzantine Illumination (11th Century). Psalter in Greek. Brit. Mus.
Add. MS. 19352 118
Celtic Illumination (8th Century). Lindisfarne Gospels. Brit. Mus.
Cotton MS. Nero D. iv 124
Carolingian Handwriting (9th Century). Alcuin Bible. Brit. Mus. Add.
MS. 10546 126
Carolingian Illumination (9th Century). Golden Gospels of St. Médard.
Bibl. Nat. MS. Lat. 8850 128
Gothic Illumination (13th Century). Miniature Page from the Psalter of
St. Louis. Bibl. Nat. MS. Lat. 10525 130
Gothic Illumination (13th Century). Text Page from the Psalter of St.
Louis. Bibl. Nat. MS. Lat. 10525 132
English Illumination (14th Century). Queen Mary’s Psalter. Brit. Mus.
Royal MS. 2B. vii 134
French Illumination (15th Century). Bedford Book of Hours. Brit. Mus.
Add. MS. 18850 136
French Renaissance Illumination (15th Century). Antiquities of the Jews.
Bibl. Nat. MS. Français 247 138
Flemish Illumination (15th Century). Miniature Page from the
Grimani Breviary. Bibl. S. Marco, Venice 142
Flemish Illumination (15th Century). Text Page from the Grimani
Breviary. Bibl. S. Marco, Venice 144
Italian Illumination (15th Century). Book of Hours, by Francesco 146
d’Antonio. R. Lau. Bibl. Ashb. 1874
French Illumination (16th Century). Miniature from Hours of Anne of
Brittany. Bibl. Nat. MS. Lat. 9474 148
French Illumination (16th Century). Text Page from Hours of Anne of
Brittany. Bibl. Nat. MS. Lat. 9474 150
Order for Payment of 1050 livres tournois to Jean Bourdichon for the
Hours of Anne of Brittany, 1508 152
Autograph Letter from Maurice Hewlett 161
Autograph Poem by Austin Dobson 167
Mark Twain. At the Villa di Quarto, Florence, 1904. From a Snap-
shot 170
Autograph Letter from Mark Twain. With Snap-shot of Villa di
Quarto 172
Autograph Letter from William Dean Howells 185
Part of a Page from the Vellum Copy of the Gutenberg Bible.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 195
Rubricator’s Mark at end of First Volume of a Defective Copy of the
Gutenberg Bible, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 196
Rubricator’s Mark at end of Second Volume of a Defective Copy of
the Gutenberg Bible, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 197
Gutenberg, Fust, Coster, Aldus Manutius, Froben. From Engraving
by Jacob Houbraken (1698–1780) 198
John Fust. From an Old Engraving 199
Device and Explicit of Nicolas Jenson 203
Jenson’s Gothic Type. From Augustinus: De Civitate Dei, Venice, 1475 205
Device of Aldus Manutius 208
Grolier in the Printing Office of Aldus. After Painting by François
Flameng. Through Courtesy the Grolier Club, New York City 208
Text Page from Aldus’ Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, 1499 211

Illustrated Page from Aldus’ Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Venice, 1499 212

Grolier Binding. Castiglione: Cortegiano. Aldine Press, 1518.
Laurenziana Library, Florence 212
Grolier Binding. Capella: L’Anthropologia. Aldine Press, 1533.
Laurenziana Library, Florence 214
Robert Étienne. From Engraving by Étienne Johandier Desrochers
(c. 1661–1741) 217
Title Page showing Étienne’s Royal Greeks, Paris, 1550 220
Text Page Showing Étienne’s Roman Face 222
Text Page showing Étienne’s Royal Greeks, from Novum Jesu Christi D.
N. Testamentum, Paris, 1550 222
Christophe Plantin. From Engraving by Edme de Boulonois (c. 1550) 225
Title Page of Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta, Antwerp, 1568 228
Page of Preface of Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta, Antwerp, 1568 229
Text Pages of Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta, Antwerp, 1568 230
Second Page of Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta, Antwerp, 1568 232
Device of Christophe Plantin 236
Title Page of Elzevir’s Terence, Leyden, 1635 241
Text Pages of Elzevir’s Terence, Leyden, 1635 242
John Baskerville 244
Title Page of Baskerville’s Virgil, Birmingham, 1757 247
Text Page of Baskerville’s Virgil, Birmingham, 1757 249
Engraving from Didot’s Racine, Paris, 1801. By Prud’hon 253
Title Page of Didot’s Racine, Paris, 1801 253
Opening Page of Didot’s Racine, Paris, 1801 255