Hello again, my dear friends! Welcome to yet another episode of Cooking High! Some of you may be just joining me for a first time and some of you have been with me a whole year. Yes, Cooking High turned 1 year on March 7th an oh, how happy I am to be around! I guess this is a time to look back, reflect on what I have done and decide if it is worth the time and energy. Well, what I HOPE I have done is give you an hour of good music, possibly good read, and a cool cover art once in a while. I hope you have heard a song you liked or you’ve never heard before. I hope you have read something that has moved you or made you think positively. I hope the music, imagery, and words have taken you to places in your memory and imagination long forgotten or newly found. And I hope you are happy to share your time with me as I am with you.
This anniversary episode is inspired by the sound and cultural phenomenon of girl groups from the 1950s and 60s. Black girls rule! It is dedicated to my mother Miglena, who used to rock a 60’s hairdo and a mini skirt like no other, and to the Hancock Street Ladies – Shannon Washington, Theresa Johnson, Danyell Rascoe, Shannon Pridgen, and Yolanda Daniels. Ashaki and Miasha, although you are not in Brooklyn anymore, my heart is with you! These girls are my sisters. I got nothing but love for them!
In the beginning of the 20th century African American music put its foot on the door of the fast industrializing music business and changed the world forever. In the late 50s, after the phenomenal success of jazz many indie labels were putting out new performers and creating new sounds like Stax , Blue Note, Motown, and Atlantic Records.
Among the earliest acts categorized as a "girl group" are The Chantels, whose 1958 hit “Maybe” had many of the qualities of what would become the classic girl-group sound: looser harmonies mixing elements of pop and rhythm and blues, an identifiable lead vocal within a harmony arrangement, and subject matter centered around young love. The girl group genre was closely associated with the Wall of Sound technique of recording developed by producer Phil Spector. He created a dense, layered, and reverberant sound that reproduced well on AM radio and jukeboxes by having a number of electric and acoustic guitarists perform the same parts in unison, musical arrangements for large groups of and various orchestral musicians and then recording the sound in an “echo chamber.”
The short lived but prominent genre swept Europe, Africa and Asia, and what was later called British Invasion started simply as covers of black music pressed on wax 5-6 years or more in the US. These days the songs are considered naïve and