Flavor and Soul by John Gennari

Author:John Gennari [Gennari, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226428321
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-02-09T07:00:00+00:00

Crossover Dreams and Delusions

In One Nation under a Groove: Motown and American Culture (1995), Gerald Early argues that Motown, which became the paradigm of racial and cultural “crossover” in the 1960s, initiated its cross-racialism by modeling the figure of the Italian pop ballad singer. Between 1961 and 1965, at the same time that Felix Cavaliere—soon of the Rascals—was fantasizing about being a black soul singer, Marvin Gaye cut four “ballads and standards” Motown albums for which the obvious touchstones were Nat King Cole, Sinatra, and above all Perry Como, whose casual dress Gaye imitated in this period.53 These were also breakout years for Dion DiMucci, a former Bronx street gang member, a dark-haired tough with a love for the vocal group harmonizing of black R&B groups like the Orioles, the Ravens, the Flamingos, the Wrens, the Cadillacs, and the Teenagers. Dion and the Belmonts (Carlo Mastrangelo, Fred Milano, Angelo D’Alea) were one of a slew of Italian-led New York groups (Nino and the Ebbtides, Vito and the Salutations, Johnny Maestro and the Crests, the Capris, the Elegants) performing in the style that was later dubbed “Italo-doo-wop,” or simply “doo-wop.” Drawing on the traditions of barbershop a cappella, gospel falsetto, jazz scatting, and jump blues, doo-wop groups sang simple love ballads and upbeat numbers energized by nonsense syllable vocal riffing in the tenor, baritone, and bass registers. The Belmonts and their confreres combined the romance and elegance of standards-centered pop with a grit and moxie born of hardscrabble urban working-class youth experience. Doo-wop resonated organically out of the New York City soundscape; the songs literally were created on street corners and subways, in apartment vestibules and public school hallways and bathrooms—any space with warm acoustics and social intimacy.54

Simone Cinotto proffers the beguiling suggestion that Sal, the Italian pizza patriarch in Do the Right Thing, “must have been a teenager in Brooklyn in the golden age of Italian doo wop, a fan of the music and/or a singer himself.”55 Cinotto argues that doo-wop was quintessentially a neighborhood culture, a music whose sites of production and lyrical evocations together made it redolent of place and community. Yet because of personal connections between the musicians, and because this music, in recorded form via radio and phonograph, crossed racial and cultural lines of consumption, these black and Italian evocations of place and community crossed from each neighborhood over into the other, generating a sense of shared culture. “Sal loves Bed-Stuy and his black regulars,” Cinotto says, and part of the reason may be that he came from a generation of New York Italians who, in the early years of rock and roll, made and shared a popular culture together with New York African Americans, even if they were also squaring off against each other in youth gangs.

When Jonathan Rieder lived in Canarsie in the 1970s, he could still behold a “houseproud neighborhood” where “the residents see themselves as the plain, doughty backbone of America—cabbies and teachers, merchants and craftsmen, salesmen and police—who stoically bear their burdens, raise their families, and serve the country.

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