Songs about Boys: Black Girl Groups, Pleasure Cultures, and the Race of Romance

Abstract In the decades after World War II, Black teenage girls cultivated a musical pleasure culture grounded in the tropes of heteronormative romance. Although most scholarship on the “girl group sound” focuses on the impact of the most famous groups on their (white) girl listeners, I center Black girl singers themselves to ask: what did girl group songs mean for the Black girls who created them? I assess documentary evidence from local newspapers, yearbooks, popular magazines, and sound recordings of girls’ original songs alongside interviews with former girl group members to argue that Black girls’ often-dismissed interest in romance in fact constitutes an important stronghold of homosociality and joy. Furthermore, I suggest that Black girl groups’ highly feminine music, entanglement with white-owned production machines, and white, suburban girl audience tend to obscure them in conventional histories of Black American music. By expanding my analysis beyond the most famous groups, focusing on original songs, and resituating them as part of a larger culture created by and for Black girls, I show that girls’ love songs remain crucial records of Black life even when they are not aesthetically innovative or legibly “political.” When one considers Black girls’ songs without only positioning them in relation to a white ear, a record of Black girls’ joy becomes audible.