Review: The Shirelles - Sing To Trumpets And Strings (1961)

Tracks: 1) Mama Said; 2) What A Sweet Thing That Was; 3) It’s Mine; 4) I Saw A Tear; 5) I Don’t Want To Cry; 6) Rainbow Valley; 7) My Willow Tree; 8) The First One; 9) What’s Mine Is Yours; 10) Without A Word Of Complaint; 11) I’ll Do The Same Thing Too; 12) Blue Holiday.

REVIEW

"Mama said there’ll be days like this, there’ll be days like this my Mama said". I guess this is the only lyrical line people will remember from ‘Mama Said’ (like any hard-working pop song, it hammers it inside your head with diligent repetition), thereby forming the inevitable association with, uh, those particular days that really usually require a young girl to take some coaching from Mama. Of course, Luther Dixon’s and Willie Denson’s lyrics would not want to cope directly with such a delicate physiological subject, so they made all those verses about a girl’s first crush and everything — but regardless of how you want to interpret it, ‘Mama Said’ does a pretty good job of capturing that wonderful-or-weird moment when one crosses the threshold from one stage of life into another.

As is often the matter with great commercial pop songs, it’s pretty darn difficult to pinpoint what makes this one such a particular standout — but clearly, not the verses or the bridge, all of which feel just like regular flows of a body of water before the chorus picks you up and chucks you down a gentle, but head-spinning waterfall. Amusingly, the only respect in which it fails a little bit is that the 20-year old Shirley Owens, with her deep and powerful voice, is not the most natural person in the world to be conveying that primal feeling of wonder ’n’ terror — nor, of course, would be the 24-year old Dusty Springfield, who would open her debut album with a cover of that very same song in 1964, sounding more like «Mama» than «Daughter» herself. (Perhaps the closest the song ever came to getting the right type of singer for it was in 2009, when it was revived by the 13-year old Dionne Bromfield, a young retro-soul enthusiast and protegée of Amy Winehouse — alas, by that time the Sixties’ flavor of the song had rendered it unrevivable for the new millennium). But that’s something we’ll probably have to live with the same way we’ll always have to live with the understanding that it’ll never be possible to film Nabokov’s Lolita in strict accordance with the author’s original vision.

Okay, so not quite the same way. There’s definitely a nuance or two.

But in any case, ‘Mama Said’ was yet another well-deserved smash hit for the Shirelles, opening 1961 for them on a note full of hope and promise — unfortunately, a note that would be unable to resolve into a perfect musical phrase. Several months later, Mama Greenberg’s Scepter Records amassed the right budget to let the girls complete a second LP, but its very title already suggested that things maybe weren’t heading quite into the right direction. Honestly, The Shirelles Sing To Trumpets And Strings does not ring the same bell as would, say, The Shirelles Sing To Their Generation or The Shirelles Sing To All The Young Girls In Need Of A Guiding Light. I mean, I do love trumpets and strings as much as the next guy (on second thought, I probably love trumpets and strings much more than the next guy), but art is supposed to only be efficient when there’s a back-and-forth communicative process going on, and how much feedback are you going to get from trumpets and strings? They’re not even plugged in, for God’s sake!

Seriously, though, most of the other eleven songs that constitute this LP are tasteful and decent and listenable, but three listens have not been enough to make any of them suddenly reveal themselves as emotional shockers on the level of ‘Mama Said’. It’s solid, generic, and highly derivative contemporary pop, most of it written by Dixon, Denson, and Van McCoy (of the much later ‘The Hustle’ fame) and classifiable as love songs hovering between teen-crush stuff and slightly more mature ballads of attachment (or detachment). Nothing as rocking as ‘Boys’, or as musically surprising as ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’, or as lyrically shocking as ‘Tonight’s The Night’, or even as gratingly annoying as ‘Tonight At The Prom’.

The proverbial strings, not included on ‘Mama Said’ (although there are trumpets on that one), break in with tremendous strength on the second song, ‘What A Sweet Thing That Was’ — another offering from Goffin and King which, however, has none of the depth or subtlety of ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’. Let’s face it, we always tend to remember more sharply those songs that ask questions instead of those that give answers, and ‘What A Sweet Thing That Was’ is basically like the Holly­wood happy ending to ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, and its a cappella hookline just doesn’t resonate as intensely as the anxiously hanging question of the previous song. It’s just too happy-dippy for a band like the Shirelles, and although it is possible that somebody like Phil Spector could have done a much more striking job with those strings, there’s a damn good reason why everybody in the world would go on to cover ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, but this song just got lost deep in the well of history.

Shirley Owens’ only contribution is even more disappointing: ‘I Saw A Tear’ is a good old-fashioned doo-wop ballad that feels more 1954 than 1961 — more «adult» than ‘I Met Him On A Sunday’, for sure, but much less creative and sincere. It is almost as if the song’s only function here is to answer the burning question: «Why did these girls have to rely so much on professional songwriters if they started out by writing their songs on their own?» — well, this is why. At least something like Denson’s ‘It’s Mine’ has a nice steady beat to it that makes you want to jiggle along. It’s pretty formulaic for 1961, but it does sound like it was written in 1961: the Shirelles’ songwriters had a good sense of what was square and what wasn’t, unlike the Shirelles themselves, who, apparently, needed to be told what was not square — and then they’d somehow get around to not sounding like they were square.

Still, not even the expert songwriters can save the album from sounding way too monotonous. For all of its deficiencies, Tonight’s The Night tried out many different directions; the sophomore effort puts barriers on a lot of them, stifling the group’s development — a telling sign of how the merciless «pop machine» used to grind down its victims even back in the old innocent days, let alone the hellish calculation gears of today, with most of the victims lacking that unique combination of talent, confidence, and guts to make their own stand. Again, though, the good news is that the «predators» sincerely cared about things such as groove, melody, and production, and, as ‘Mama Said’ clearly shows, could — at least occasionally — strike gold on their own. Thus, ready yourselves for some good, tasteful vibes, the fresh ’n’ trendy sound of the earli(est) Sixties, and, uh, a lot of copy-paste rewrites of hooks from various pop and R&B hits of the day.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Shirelles