Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- The Shirelles “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"

A YouTube film clip of The Shirelles performing their classic Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?


 


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?


*****


 


 


 

Hey all, this is Bart Webber from the old neighborhood, the old cranberry bogs neighborhood of Carver down in Southeastern, Massachusetts, the world capital of that berry in the old days , the Acre neighborhood to be exact when all the “boggers” lived from time immemorial as they say. This is another one of those tongue-in-cheek commentaries that I have been running around thinking about lately as retirement looms directly ahead, retirement from the printing business that I started back in the 1960s and which I am now getting ready to turn over to my youngest son (the other two older boys are both computer whizzes and could give a tinker’s damn about the soon to be dinosaur extinct old-time Guttenberg press print according to them), the back story if you like, in the occasional sketches I have been producing of late going back to the primordial youth time of the mid to late 1950s with its bags full of classic, now classic then just rock and roll, rock songs for the ages.

 

Of course, any such efforts on my part to see how the cultural jail-break took root  down in the Acre have to include the views of one Billie Bradley, William James Bradley, the schoolboy mad-hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in our “the projects” Acre neighborhood. Yah, in those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days when after searing failures to be the next best thing after Elvis (really after Bo Diddley but in hard white enclave and consciously Northern-style racist bog country that would turn out to be a non-starter, no, would turn out to be hazardous to one’s health never mind one’s future) and the next dance-master general of the new rock dispensation he turned to the life of petty and subsequently hard crime, every kid, including his best friend, a guy named Peter Paul Markin, whom we all called just Markin back then but who would later be called the “Scribe” for obvious reasons, to hear what he had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every one that we would recognize as our own. Yeah those were the days when like a poet I read once in high school, and English or is it British poet, said to be “young was very heaven.” (He, oh yeah, now I remember, Wordsworth, the Lakes poet, who was referring to his view of the French Revolution in the days before it got serious and blood was being let on all sides)    

 

Billie and Markin (and on occasion me when they were having a dispute like whether Elvis’ sneer was fake, stuff like that) personally spent many, many hours mainly up in his tiny bedroom, his rock heaven bedroom, walls plastered with posters of Elvis, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry and of every new teen heartthrob singer, heartthrob to the girls that is, around, every new record Billie could get his hands on, by hook or by crook ( a euphemism for the “five finger discount,” you know the “clip” that every guy, and some saucy girls, took at the rite of passage in the Acre when they had their “wanting habits” on and no dough to pay for the stuff), and neatly folded piles of clothing, also gathered by that same hook or by crook (“clipping” clothes a whole separate art form in itself and rated higher than merely grabbing some foolish cheapjack overpriced anyway rings to give away to some girl who could have given a fuck about some such cheapjack trinket), appropriate to the king hell king of the schoolboy rock scene, the elementary school rock scene between about 1956 to 1960. Much of that time was spent discussing the “meaning” of various songs, especially their sexual implications, ah, their mystery of girls-finding-out-about worthiness. (What we didn’t know, even Billie, about the whole sex thing could fill volumes but we like our older brothers, and sisters too, learned what little we did know, and a lot of that was wrong we learned on the streets like everybody else. It certainly wasn’t from prudish parents or heaven forbid the priests at Sacred Heart, the main church servicing the Acre.)   

 

Although in early 1959 Markin’s family was beginning to start the process of moving out of the projects to a run-down shack of a house in Muddy Bottom even lower on the neighborhood scale that the Acre if you could believe that the only virtue, a small one being that they would “own,” along with the bank, their own house. More importantly, Markin had begun to move away from Billie’s orbit, his new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe, after figuring out that the life of petty crime was much harder to deal with that reading books to find out two million facts which he had settled into one summer after a few run-ins with the law over a couple of “clips,” he would still wander back to the old neighborhood until mid-1960 just to hear Billie’s take on whatever music was interesting him at the time.

 

These commentaries, these Billie commentaries, are Markin’s recollections of his and Billie’s conversations on the song lyrics in this series. But Markin was not relying on memory alone. During this period he would use his father’s tape recorder, by today’s standard his big old reel to reel monstrosity of a tape recorder, to record Billie’s covers of the then current hit songs (for those who have not read previously of Billie’s “heroics” he was a pretty good budding rock singer at the time) and their conversations of those song meanings that we fretted about for hours.

 

About twenty years ago long after Markin had gone face down in his own hail of bullets down in Mexico after a dope deal he was either trying to broker with some mal hombres from some budding cartel or, more likely, giving the residual “wanting habits” that haunted us all for many years whether we liked books or not stealing the “product” I was helping his late mother clear out the attic of that shack of a house over on Muddy Bottom in order to sell it  after Mr. Markin had passed away I found those tapes among the possessions Markin had left behind. Mrs. Markin having no earthly use for them passed them on to me as thanks for my help in cleaning the place up. I, painstakingly, have had those reels transcribed so that many of these commentaries will be the actual words (somewhat edited, of course) that appear in these sketches. That said, Billie, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make us laugh to boot. Wherever you are Billie, in jail or in jail-break I’m still pulling for you. Got it.

 

Here’s what Billie had to say about the lyrics to the classic girl sex dilemma song Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow that we all went wild over but which baffled a bunch of twelve and thirteen year old boys who were trying to figure out what that girl was worried about. Yeah, that’s the way it was:

 


 


 


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.