July 11, 2023: AmericanStudying Summer Jams: Summertime Blues

[Now that we’rereally in the dog days of summer, a series on AmericanStudies contexts for someof our most enduring summertime songs. Add your responses or other summertimefavorites for a crowd-sourced weekend bbq—I mean, post. Okay, both!]

On what a summerclassic reveals about the voices of youth.

I listened to alot of early rock and roll growing up (something about having a couple babyboomers for parents during the era that first defined the concept of“classic rock” and produced countless “Best of the1950s” type collections, I suppose), and few songs stood out to me morethan Eddie Cochran’s “SummertimeBlues” (1958). I don’t know that any single song better expresses the clashof youthful dreams and adult realities on which so much of rock and roll and popularmusic more generally have been built, and I definitely believe that Cochran andhis co-writer (and manager) Jerry Capehearthit upon the perfect way to literally give voice to those dueling perspectives:in the repeated device through which the speaker’s teenage desires areresponded to and shot down by the deep voices of authority figures, from hisboss to his father to his senator.

Coincidentally,Cochran himself died veryyoung, at the age of 21, in an April 1960 car accident while on tour inEngland. Cochran’s death came just over a year after thetragic plane crash that took the lives of three other prominent young rockand rollers, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. There’s obviouslyno direct relationship between these two accidents, nor would I argue thatthese artists’ youthful deaths were the cause of their popularity (all fourwere already popular prior to the accidents). But on the other hand, I thinkthere’s something iconic, mythic even, about rock and rollers dying young—or about,more exactly, ournarratives and images of such figures—and I believe it’d be difficult toseparate those myths from the idealistic and anti-authoritarian attitudescaptured in Cochran’s biggest hit. That is, it feels throughout “SummertimeBlues” as if the speaker’s youthful enthusiasm is consistently being destroyedby those cold adult responses—and melodramatic as it might sound, the loss ofchildhood dreams can certainly be allegorized through the deaths of the kindsof pop icons who so often symbolize youth.

Yet of coursemost young people continue to live in, and thus impact, the world far aftertheir youthful dreams have ended (“Life goes on long after the thrill of livingis gone,” to quote anotheryouthful anthem), and in a subtle, unexpected way Cochran’s song  reflects that human and historical reality aswell. When Cochran’s speaker tries to take his problem to more officialauthorities, he is rejected by his senator for a political reason: “I’d like tohelp you, son, but you’re too young to vote” is the reply. In 1958, when“Summertime Blues” was released, the national legal voting age was 21, and so the20 year old Cochran could not vote; but over the next decade a potentsocial and legal movement to lower the voting age would emerge, in conjunctionwith the decade’s many other youth and activist movements, and in 1971Congress passed and the states ratified the26th Amendment, which did indeed lower the eligible age forvoting to 18. Being able to vote certainly doesn’t eliminate all the otherproblems of teenage life and its conflicts with adult authority—but it doesremind us that neither the gap nor the border between youth and adulthood arequite as fixed or as absolute as our myths might suggest.

Next summer jamtomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts onthis song? Other summertime favorites you’d share?