“A Teenager in Love”: How Black Adolescents Became “Teenagers” in Rock and Roll Music, 1956-1960

ABSTRACT

The image of teenagers in the 1950s has permeated popular culture for decades. Within public historical memory, these kids seem perpetually carefree, dancing to jukebox tunes, sharing sodas with dates, and driving shiny new cars. But these teenagers are almost always depicted as white, even though a burgeoning African-American middle class meant that black kids also helped to shape this new teenage identity. This article looks at how the new signifier of “teenager” in rock and roll music applied to both black and white youth during the late 1950s, even as racial segregation and discrimination produced different interpretations.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil rights
• popular culture
• race
• rock and roll music
• teenagers
• youth culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on the development of white and black middle classes, please see Katznelson and Mitchell. For more on the construction of American suburbs, see Freund; Self; Sugrue, Sweet Land and Origins.

2. Denial of black childhood and adolescent experiences originated on southern plantations, where enslaved children were forced to work at young ages to profit slave owners, and where young girls were in danger of sexual assault even before they entered puberty. For more, see Cahn.

3. Advertisements examined in issues of Jet from 1951 to 1960 and Ebony from 1959–1960.

4. Between 1948 and 1963, Billboard’s “Best Sellers in Stores” charts were divided into Popular, Rhythm and Blues, and Country and Western categories, but what they really measured were the demographics of consumers who purchased these records. When a record became a “crossover” hit, that meant that it sold among black and white consumer groups, not that it necessarily possessed different musicological attributes. For more, see Chapple and Garofalo 237 and Phillips.

5. By 1951, the average age of marriage was 22.6 for men and 20.4 for women, down roughly 3 to 4 points from the 1930s and 1940s.

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Beth Fowler

Beth Fowler received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at Wayne State University, and currently works as a Senior Lecturer in the Irvin D. Reid Honors College teaching classes in American studies, urban studies, and American government. Her research interests include popular culture and consumerism, the US civil rights movement, youth culture, urban history, gender and sexuality, and twentieth-century US and African-American history. She is working on a manuscript which examines how rock-and-roll music, a racially-integrated cultural form that achieved popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, reinforced support for desegregation movements among black and white teenagers, while simultaneously crafting contemporary racial liberalism which obscures the racist structures that reproduce injustice.