1960: Will You Love Me Tomorrow, by The Shirelles.
"Things were pretty sleepy on the American music scene in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Popular radio was sort of at a stand-still and filled with empty pleasantries. It was years before The Beatles, The Who or The Rolling Stones would breathe new life and excitement into it." Bob Dylan
There is a myth that’s widely held about the era before The Beatles. The myth says that rock ’n’ roll had been tamed by the start of the sixties. Elvis was in the army for two years from 1958, the same year Jerry Lee Lewis’s career was sideswiped by the controversy surrounding his marriage to Myra, his 13-year-old first cousin once removed (and that was before it emerged he was still married to his first wife when he married Myra). Pop had gone to sleep, as Dylan suggested. All that was left were whitebread singers singing novelty tunes.
It’s not true, of course. Or at least not totally true. Yes, some of the fire of the mid-fifties had faded. But something new was on the rise instead. The first years of the 1960s belonged to the girl groups. And it started with The Shirelles.
Almost. In fact it started when songwriting duo Gerry Goffin and Carole King came up with Will You Love Me Tomorrow, a song that was to kickstart what was to follow.
Musically it is a soft-focus affair. King and Goffin were, along with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, rebooting the traditional American song for teenagers who’d been listening to doowop, R&B and rock ’n ’roll. The results can now sound a little whitebread too. And in this case King’s tune is pretty, musically sophisticated and maybe ever so slightly twee.
But the lyrics ... The lyrics are incendiary.
Incendiary, at least, if you were a teenage girl back in the pre-pill era. This is a song about sexual desire and sexual insecurity. Shirley Owens, who sang lead, is voicing the worries of every teenage girl who is being pressurised by her boyfriend. And it’s not that she’s averse to the idea. She’s just worried what it will mean if she does. As she sings at one point: “Is this a lasting treasure/ Or just a moment’s pleasure.” That’s a sentiment that is just as meaningful as Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall a few years down the line.
Will You Love Me Tomorrow is full of fear and desire. And how could it be otherwise? When she was 17 in 1959 Carole King became pregnant herself. Goffin did still love her the next day, and for many days after (or until he had his head turned by drugs and, if Ken Emerson’s book All is Magic in the Air, a history of the Brill Building era, the disorientating shock of hearing Dylan). They married that August and King dropped out of college. They’d lived the song.
A friend of mine the other day told me he only liked “serious” artists. I don’t know. I think finding yourself pregnant and unmarried in the late fifties must have been pretty serious. The female experience is all too often downgraded in pop music, as in so much else. For a brief period at the start of the 1960s that wasn’t the case. When The Shirelles hit number one in January 1961, the first ever by a group of black women, a pattern was started.
The Shirelles would make better records. If I’m honest I actually prefer their 1962 hit Baby It’s You. But Will You Love Me Tomorrow helped expand what pop music could talk about.
Here come the 1960s.
Other Contenders
Only the Lonely, Roy Orbison
Shop Around, The Miracles
At Last, Etta James
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Edith Piaf
Best selling UK single in 1960
Cathy’s Clown, the Everly Brothers
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