Do you remember the Bobettes, the Chantels, the Shirelles? Maybe the Chordettes, and the Clickettes – popular girl groups of the 1960s? Yes! I don’t, this was way before my time. I guess I might have heard my Mom singing some of the most popular songs of the time – “Mr. Lee”, “Have Mercy Baby”, “Lover’s Prayer/Grateful”, just to name a few.
For the most part, these girl groups are long forgotten, but authors Laura Flam and Emily Sieu Liebowitz were adamant that the legacies should not die, so they wrote a book about them.
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This is no ordinary book, though. in But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ’60S GIRL GROUPS, Flam and Liebowitz interviewed more than 100 people, including Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Joel, Johnny Mathis, Neil Sedaka, Paul Shaffer, Otis Williams, Darlene Love, Mary Wilson, Martha Reeves, and other members of the girl groups over four years, and the book was born!
Released on September 5, 2023 and published by Hachette Books, the book gives an enlightening and empowering account of stories from remaining members of the groups themselves in the hopes of preserving some of the history.
Both Flam and Liebowitz have been huge fans of the music since they can remember and have been going to shows for years.
Utilizing some already-written biographies of some group members, Flam and Liebowitz delved into what the music critics were saying to get an understanding of what was happening at the time.
One of the biggest surprises in doing their research was how young some of the girls were when they started. Some were as young as 12 years old, still in elementary school. They were on stage at The Apollo and touring the US South in the 50s and 60s. Can you imagine what they were dealing with? Nothing that any teenager at that age teenager should be expected to deal with – segregation, exploitation, and racism, just to mention a few of the ills that came with the territory.
Commenting on how important these young artists were to the time, Flam said, “That was just another way in which these women were such pioneers and one of the other reasons that we really wanted to write the book is that we know them for these songs end, and we love the songs, but there is also all of this really important history in terms of feminism in terms of the civil rights movement that these young artists that were out there desegregating audiences and introducing Black music to white teenagers and doing really important work in the history of the country, in history in general.”
The book follows the Beginnings of the Girl Group Sound: The 1950s through to 1970 and the present.
The Introduction reads – “The girl group sound is a genre of rock and roll that got its start in the mid-fifties and carried on until the mid-sixties. This oral history presents an account of the people who sang, wrote, created, and popularized this generation-defining genre…even when remembered, the genre as a whole is often dismissed. Some think of the songs as silly, frivolous…”
“We hope that people get a sense of the fact that every group is comprised of individual people and the people will read about some of the groundbreaking things that the women did.”
But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ’60S GIRL GROUPS is available wherever you purchase your books.
