Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
This is another tongue-in-cheek commentary, the back story if you like, in the occasional entries under this headline going back to the primordial youth time of the 1950s with its bags full of classic rock songs for the ages. Now many music and social critics have done yeomen’s service giving us the meaning of various folk songs, folk protest songs in particular, from around this period. You know they have essentially beaten us over the head with stuff like the meaning of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind as a clarion call for now aging baby-boomers back then and a warning (not heeded) that a new world was a-bornin’, or trying to be. Or better, The Times They Are A-Changin’with plaintive plea for those in charge to get hip, or stand aside. (They did neither.) And we have been fighting about a forty year rearguard action to this very day trying to live down those experiences, and trying to get new generations to blow their own wind, change their own times, and sing their own plainsong in a similar way.
Like I said the critics have had a field day (and long and prosperous academic and journalistic careers as well) with that kind stuff, fluff stuff really. The hard stuff, the really hard stuff that fell below their collective radars, was the non-folk, non-protest, non-deep meaning (so they thought) stuff, the daily fare of popular radio back in the day. A song like today’s selection, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? A song that had every red-blooded American (and who knows maybe world teen) wondering their own wondering about the fate of the song’s narrator. About what happened that night (and the next morning) that caused her to pose the question in that particular way. Yes, that is the hard stuff of social commentary, the stuff of popular dreams, and the stuff that is being tackled head on in this series- Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night. Read on.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Lyrics
Artist: Carole King
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow
Tonight you're mine completely,
You give your love so sweetly,
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes,
But will you love me tomorrow?
Is this a lasting treasure,
Or just a moment's pleasure,
Can I believe the magic of your sighs,
Will you still love me tomorrow?
Tonight with words unspoken,
You said that I'm the only one,
But will my heart be broken,
When the night (When the night)
Meets the morning sun.
I'd like to know that your love,
Is love I can be sure of,
So tell me now and I won't ask again,
Will you still love me tomorrow?
Will you still love me tomorrow?
*****
Christ, finally a teen-oriented set of lyrics that you can sink your teeth into. A teen angst, teen alienation, and teen love question that was uppermost in all our minds, one way or the other, sex. Yah, I don’t know about you but I was getting kind of tired, and Billie, William James Bradley, my old schoolboy friend, elementary schoolboy friend from the Olde Saco projects days (that was public housing up in Olde Saco, Maine) was fed up was too, of these outlandish side issue things being asked in the teen-oriented lyrics of the day. Like the whereabouts of Eddie, his intentions, his financial condition, his ability to write and so on in The Teen Queens’ Eddie My Love. Betty, or whatever your name is, you made a mistake, you gave into Eddie with his big, fast two-toned Chevy down at the beach that summer night way to fast and now you are in trouble, he is long gone John, and you had better forget about him ever coming back, ever writing, or ever being within one hundred miles of your town any time soon. Sorry, but move on with your life. On this one Billie and I are in full agreement.
Or how about this one. The dumb cluck bimbo, as old Billie called her, in Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel who didn’t have enough sense to know that Mr. Right, Mr. High School Right, had given her some cheapjack class ring (which, moreover, had made the rounds on the fingers of a couple of other girls shortly before, when she went running back to the car, a car stuck, by the way, on some lonesome railroad track, with the train bearing down as far as we know in the story looking for the gimcrack. Needless to say said bimbo did not make it. Or how about the forlorn lover, almost like in some Greek mythical tragedy, in Jody Reynolds’ Endless Sleep who after some spat (probably drive-in movie or bowling and she wanted bowling) decided that life was not worth living and went down to the sea, our homeland the sea, and was ready to desecrate that space by ending it all and then giving a siren call to her lover boy to join her. A joint suicide pact. Even Billie, uncharacteristically sympathetic as he was to her plight, had to balk at that one.
No today we are in pure teen angst territory, straight up with no goofing around, and rightly so. Back in those days (and apparently today too from the headlines) what we did not know, most of us anyway, about sex, about the “birds and the bees,” about babies and where they came from, and how to protect against having them in unwanted situation, would have filled volumes. Still, we were crazy, most of us anyway, to know more about sex, and do something about it. Whatever that something was. Come on now, it was natural, natural as hell to think about it, to want to do it, and if the stars were aligned right to “do it.” Of course as the lyrics here indicate there was a price to be paid. See kids, meaning about anyone from thirteen to eighteen (maybe older even) were NOT supposed to “do it,” “do the do” I mean, and I guess if you listened to parents, teachers or preachers, not even to think about it. But here is the dilemma in this story. Teens did it, and were anxious about that fact, for lots of reasons.
Obviously the most pressing question in 1960, the time of this song and the time just before the news of “the pill” got out (what “the pill” was you know, or should know, so I won’t go on about that) was getting pregnant, girls getting pregnant. So the disinformation, no information, no talk to your parents about it because they are afraid to talk it about information, getting what you know on the streets information, really disinformation all over, was part of it. But, and I think this is what the lyrics really speak to, it was as much about reputation, a girl’s reputation, about a girl’s good name, and about whether a girl was “easy.” See guys could be stud-of-the-week and, maybe mother, his mother, wouldn’t like it but everybody under eighteen saw you as cool. But gals were either virgins, known far and wide as such and don’t even bother messing with them, or willing but not wanting to be seen as “easy” held themselves back. And, while I do not know about other neighborhoods although I suspect the same was true, our mainly Irish and French-Canadian Roman Catholic mill worker working-class neighborhood, made a very big issue out of the two, at least parents and gossip held forth that way.
Still when you, girl you here, went out on a date, a serious date, maybe to a dance, maybe to some party, maybe just down to the seashore and everything is all right to “pet,” or whatever, this question, this teen question of questions, always came up when the lights went down low. How many "no's" are there in the universe? And then some night some rainy night maybe, or maybe after that last dance and you held each other close, or maybe, you have a shot of booze, or, I don’t know, maybe you just felt like it because it was a warm spring evening and you were young, and life was just fine that day, or maybe your guy asked you to go steady, or some solid, teen solid thing like that, you said, “let’s see what it is all about.”
And your guy, your ever-loving’ guy, your ever-loving’ horny guy was more than willing to take you for the ride. But then, in the afterglow, you had your doubts, especially in the wee morning hours when you knew you were going to get hell for being out so late. And maybe that cold break of day got you to thinking about what the girls in the "lav" Monday morning before school would say, or what your guy will tell his friends, his snickering friends, and you get the nervous doubts about your course. Yah, this song speaks to that whole pre-sexual revolution generation, and maybe not so far off for teens today. Ms. King and friends certainly asked the right question, that’s for damn sure.
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