#lewisohn cough up the citation for that one

[get-back-homeward]

This one record effectively launched the “girl-group sound”—R&B with beat, rhythm, melody and harmony—and no musical force beyond rock and roll was ever as crucial to the Beatles’ development. The Shirelles were four 19-year-old black girls from Passaic High School in New Jersey who came under the wing of Florence Greenberg, the mother of one of their school friends; Greenberg owned her own independent record label, Scepter, based ten miles from Passaic, in New York City. The tapestry of the American music business was already enhanced beyond measure by the creative partnership of blacks and Jews, and a bright new chapter opened with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the greatest teenage love song of the period and the first record by a black female group to top the US charts. Greenberg ran Scepter Records from an office at 1650 Broadway and West 51st Street. Her choice as Scepter’s in-house producer was Luther Dixon, 29, a black singer-songwriter-arranger; “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” was written by a composer partnership new to those who studied record labels: the husband-and-wife pairing of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, 21 and 18, words and music respectively. They numbered among an array of talented young songwriting teams who arrived each day at the same building to work for the publishing company Aldon Music. Each pairing, and a piano, were squeezed into neighboring cubicles in a modern Tin Pan Alley scenario—a Teen Pan Alley. Almost all the songs that lit up the first half of the twentieth century were written in similar circumstances twenty-three blocks south of here—tunes for musicals, films, dance fads and hits; now they were being written for seven-inch vinyl discs and the teenagers who bought them.

At 1650 Broadway, and in offices at the Brill Building across and farther down Broadway at 1619, it seemed everyone was the child or grandchild of European Jews.† There was Goffin and King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield, writing songs for producers like Phil Spector and Jerry Wexler. Sedaka sang the numbers he and Greenfield wrote, but otherwise the pairings created a host of classy compositions for different performers. Often these were black girl-groups, urban teenagers who’d honed their voices and harmonies by singing gospel music in church. And they were girls singing to girls, a revolutionary departure in pop music.

Gender didn’t stop the Beatles (or other Liverpool groups) singing these numbers—a good song was a good song and that was enough for them. John grabbed “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and Paul and George took the backing vocals, and while there’s no recording of them doing it, several say it had extraordinary power and tenderness, like another “To Know Her Is to Love Her.” To the Beatles, to John and Paul especially, the composer credit Goffin-King would become nothing less than trademark of quality, sufficient in itself to make them listen to or buy a record, and rarely were they disappointed.

Then they flipped the record over and discovered the B-side, a song called “Boys.” This wasn’t Goffin and King’s work but almost entirely the creation of Luther Dixon, who cowrote, arranged and produced. Dixon was the creator of the Shirelles sound that the Beatles loved—another name for them to sleuth on record labels. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” works beautifully with strings, “Boys” is big-beat R&B, the backing singers up front. That’s how the Beatles did it. John sang lead and Paul and George gave full support, the two of them leaning in toward the microphone, laughing and harmonizing bop-shoo-op-abop-bop-shoo-op into each other’s faces, or sometimes, on appropriate occasions, bobwooler-abob-bobwooler. If they realized it was a girls’ song about boys, it didn’t matter. While several Liverpool groups did “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” the Beatles were one of only three to sing “Boys.” King-Size Taylor and the Dominoes did it, and so did Rory Storm and the Hurricanes: it became the latest specialty number in Ringo’s popular nightly Starrtime! spot—and he didn’t change the gender either.

—Tune In, Ch. 18 (January to March 1961)

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow | The Shirelles (1960)