History and Sonny Til

Here’s how my dissertation is going: I am currently up to my neck writing the chapter that is on African-American vocal harmony groups. This is the music that will later turn into what we now call doo-wop. It originated from religious sources, like the jubilee quartet tradition, as well as secular groups like the Mills Brothers. Since the period of my dissertation ends in 1954, I am mostly concerned with the early wave of this post-war music, groups like the Orioles and the Clovers. I highly recommend, by the way, Stanley Goosman’s fascinating ethnography of vocal harmony’s roots in urban Baltimore and Washington, DC.

I am running into one philosophical problem, however. That problem is history. History is very important to me. Musicologists have problems with historicizing their research subjects. I can understand this, in many respects. Music of the classical canon is, after all, a living performance tradition. Almost all of us grew up playing and listening to classical music, and when we analyze it, our corporeal interaction with classical music as a living art invariably comes into play. Our own pleasures and entanglements guide our analyses. We talk about “wanting resolution,” as if our own desire for a cadence is a transhistorical desire. We listen quietly, we objectify, we conduct in our heads, we make charts, we label chords. None of it is historicized. I often joke that the closest analogy to musicology in some ways is theology. Many interpret historical texts not to know more about history, but to know how to perform in their current lives.

That’s perfectly fine, as far as it goes. But since I consider myself first and foremost a historian, it doesn’t quite cut it for me. Sure, history is useful for the present. I also consider myself an activist, and I chose my dissertation topic, McCarthyism, for its current political relevance in addition to its historical and musical interest. But it is an important part of my intellectual politics that you take history, and historical people, as seriously as you can, and on their own terms. Many of my colleagues have responded to this issue by analyzing the body transhistorically, assuming that if their own body performs a work a certain way, we can safely presume that an earlier body did as well--a friend of mine likes to write about the heaving bosoms of women playing the piano in Regency England, and one imagines that today bosoms still more or less heave the same way. Other friends of mine have responded by attempting to shape their own physical engagement by using various historical techniques to re-shape their bodily engagement, as for instance taking a historical dance class does, or using historically-informed instruments. All of these techniques sound good to me.

With recorded pop music, however, there is much less corporeal engagement to draw upon. And although you would think that the existence of sound reproduction would make doing history easier, it actually serves to heighten historical difference. To whit: one of the centerpieces of the chapter is a long analysis of the Orioles 1953 hit “Crying in the Chapel.” It was this song that drew me to the repertoire in the first place, it’s a really fabulous track. I bought the Orioles greatest hits last spring, liked a few songs, and cheerfully assumed that they were a great group. Now that I have known their career and music more thoroughly, I still think that.

But I have a problem. Sonny Til, the lead singer, was by all accounts a sexy man. He drove the crowd wild. He supposedly had an amazingly expressive voice, and he knew how to work the stage like nobody else. Panties were flung. Unfortunately, I just can’t hear it. I listen to their tracks over and over again. And I just can’t find him sexy. “Crying in the Chapel,” yes, that is sexy. But that is a late number, when pop music is going through the great cataclysmic shift towards the condition it still lives in today. The Orioles first huge hit was “It’s Too Soon to Know,” from 1948. And man, it is boring. I just cannot hear the sex appeal at all. I try to listen to the song while staring at pictures of the Orioles, and I don't see it. Same with almost all of their music. Turns out that those few tracks I liked idly last spring were the exception, not the rule.

So obviously I am running into the problem of doing history. People are different. Historical people were especially different. It is impossible to accurately feel the same response that those crowds in West Baltimore felt upon hearing this song. This historical difference is always present, but sometimes it is less pronounced. My chapter on John Cage, for instance, was quite easy to historicize. I share many attributes with Cage: we’re both white men, from California, less than heterosexual, and have a taste for avant-garde pretensions. These similarities, plus the fact that I have been engaged with his music and his biography for almost a decade, created a situation where I felt like I could accurately predict Cage’s emotional response to issues—and archival research almost always proved me right.

Sonny Till has neither of these conveniences. I share very little biographical affinity with a black guy from a poor neighborhood of Baltimore—and I have not been engaged with his music for nearly as long. Taking another step back, I guess this is part of the problem of doing a dissertation that looks at a number of disparate genres. Although my tight chronological focus means that I know a tremendous amount of cultural and historical context that I can apply to all of this music, I can’t get to know every single historical subject in my dissertation as well as I would like. Maybe for the book.

The solution? Guess I'll find out. Keep listening to the music, I suppose, and trust all those sources that say Sonny Til was a sexy man. Try to figure out what exactly made him sexy. I need to look at fashion magazines from the period, and the archives of Baltimore's old black newspaper The Afro-American, and old hairstyles, and publicity photos. Listen to as many obscure Baltimore groups as possible to see how the Orioles were different. Dig up accounts of their performances--at what exact point in the song were the panties flung? And then use this all to try and listen to his music differently. We’ll see how it goes.