Crash course
Teen Angel launched a musical genre
Six decades ago, a mournful song dominated rock ‘ n’ roll radio play. It told the story of a young couple who escape their car after it stalls on railroad tracks, only to have the girl run back for the class ring the boy gave her and die when a train slams into the vehicle.
Teen Angel became the first teen- tragedy song to reach No. 1 on the charts and paved the way for a distinct, though short- lived, musical genre about youths dying in car or motorcycle wrecks.
It was an unsettling tune for an unsettling time in music history. Teen Angel topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart on Feb. 8, 1960, almost exactly a year after music pioneers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson Jr., a.k.a. the Big Bopper, died in a plane crash in snowy Iowa on Feb. 3, 1959.
But its release also came at a unique social moment, as teen culture began to coalesce. Record company executives were looking for the next Elvis Presley. They wanted songs that would resonate, according to John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Rochester in New York and author of What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History.
Teen Angel and similar hits zeroed in on the intensity of first love and embodied the “teenage idealization of death and romance,” Covach said. “In most cases, the death that occurs ... is either proof of fidelity and love, or it’s a consequence of love and fidelity.”
The same year that singer Mark Dinning became briefly famous for Teen Angel, Ray Peterson lamented another loss in Tell Laura I Love Her. His was the story of a boy who enters a stock car race hoping to win money to buy his girlfriend, Laura, a wedding ring, with predictably heartbreaking results. And before 1960 ended, Marilyn Michaels recorded an “answer song” called Tell Tommy I Miss Him. All reflected the real life car- crash deaths of teen idol James Dean in 1955 and singer Eddie Cochran in 1960.
Other early rock ‘ n’ roll songs focused on more bubbly aspects of teenagers’ life — dances, high school and cars — because that’s what the target audience was interested in, noted Jack Hamilton, an assistant professor of American studies and media studies at the University of Virginia. Those tunes were upbeat — from Let’s Twist Again by Chubby Checker (1961) to The Beach Boys’ Be True to Your School ( 1963) to Maybellene by Chuck Berry (1955).
The tragedy genre aimed to elicit a different response.
“It was a way for rock ‘ n’ roll to move toward more serious issues, but a lot of the songs are so sentimental and maudlin,” said Hamilton, the author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. “They’re not all that emotionally complex.”
Perhaps that also reflected the times, before John F. Kennedy’s assassination and fights over the Vietnam War and civil rights. The teens listening were baby boomers, “the first coddled generation of kids,” Covach noted. Their GI fathers had come home from the Second World War and tried to construct a safe bubble around their children.
The genre peaked in 1964 with the trifecta of Last Kiss by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, Dead Man’s Curve by Jan and Dean, and Leader of the Pack by The ShangriLas. Yet Teen Angel had a particular staying power. Various artists covered the song, including Sha Na Na, which performed it at Woodstock in 1969. The song also popped up in a 1973 comingof-age film that itself became a classic.
In American Graffiti, however, every teen survives.