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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!): mutual desirability and musical structure in the buddy group
Barbara Bradby
Popular Music / Volume 21 / Issue 01 / January 2002, pp 63 - 91
DOI: 10.1017/S0261143002002040, Published online: 09 April 2002
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143002002040
How to cite this article:
Barbara Bradby (2002). Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!): mutual desirability and musical structure in the buddy group. Popular Music,
21, pp 63-91 doi:10.1017/S0261143002002040
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Popular Music (2002) Volume 21/1. Copyright 2002 Cambridge University Press, pp. 63–91.
DOI:10.1017/S0261143002002040 Printed in the United Kingdom
Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!): mutual
desirability and musical
structure in the buddy group
BARBARA BRADBY
Abstract
If rock’n’roll represented new, sexualised gender identities for the teenagers of the late 1950s, why
(and how) were such identities constructed through the multiple voices of the group? In Buddy
Holly’s ‘Oh, Boy!’ the chorus plays a prominent supportive role in relation to the lead singer; but its
continual echoing of the singer’s ‘Oh boy!’ allows also for a literal hearing of cries of mutual desire
and admiration between two men. This representation of the ‘buddy group’ has continuities with other
group, or dual representations of male identity, where mutual, male selves and desires are constructed
around an imagined, comforting woman. The presence of traces of the maternal body (Kristeva’s
‘semiotic’ sphere) is audible in ‘Oh, Boy!’ through the chorus’s separation of rhythm and melody, and
in particular, its use of ‘children’s rhythms’, consistent with those analysed by the musicologist Con-
stantin Brailoiu as a cross-cultural phenomenon. In ‘Oh, Boy!’ children’s rhythms are reworked in a
dialogue between singer and chorus, and between guitar and chorus in the instrumental break, in
such a way that after the break the singer is able to resolve the rhythmic tensions introduced in the
first half of the song and get ‘everything right’. The new symbolic identity of male adolescent indepen-
dence is audibly structured by the semiotic, so reversing the surface hearing of the song as involving
the subordination of the chorus to lead singer in the consensual hierarchy of ‘buddy’ relations. The
relationship of Buddy Holly to Bo Diddley adds a further dimension to this structure, where ostensible
equality cannot mask the uncomfortable social hierarchy of the white rock star and black mentor, and
where an appeal to the other as ‘boy’ would evoke not the buddy group, but slavery.
Prologue: ‘(I’ll Remember) In the Still of the Nite’
There is a scene in the film Dead Ringers – David Cronenberg’s 1988 horror fantasy
about identical twin obstetricians – where the downward spiral of mutual destruc-
tion by the two men is temporarily arrested. To the comforting ‘Shoo-be-doos’ of
‘In the Still of the Nite’,
1
the brothers both dance in a slow ‘smooch’ with their
mutual lover, encircling the woman from in front and behind, each in harmony
with the other around her body as buffer. This scene interrupts the narrative in
which the twins turn the gruesome instruments of seventeenth and eighteenth-
century obstetric science away from women and on to each other, hystericising and
eventually killing themselves. The fact that the two men are both played by the
same actor (Jeremy Irons) emphasises the film’s thesis of the disastrous
(non-)splitting of a male subject that is nevertheless divided against itself and so,
ultimately, self-destructive. Without women’s bodies as a buffer, this re-telling of
the myth of the original ‘Siamese’ twins shows male destructiveness as part of a
63
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Barbara Bradby64
failure to separate from the other, and the mutual dependence of master and slave
becomes a mutual suicide.
The dancing scene fascinated me when I first saw and heard it in the cinema
in 1989, because ‘In the Still of the Nite’ was one of a sample of ‘doo wop’ songs I
had been working on as part of a project to compare ‘girl-group’ music with various
forms of male group singing. The film’s dramatisation seemed to bear out my hear-
ing of male group singing as predominantly consensual and harmonious, as com-
pared with the open conflict often found between girl-group voices (Bradby 1990).
In this case, the visual depiction, as in the song, presents a classic model of male
harmony achieved through a mutual and nostalgic focus onto a comforting woman.
Nostalgia is achieved simply by playing this song, which is a ‘symbol of the 50s’
(Warner 1992, p. 189), in a 1980s film. But the song is also itself nostalgic: ‘I remem-
ber that night in May’, sings the lead singer; and the chorus intones ‘I re-mem-ber,
I re-mem-ber’ on the beats which the lead weaves around (see Figure 1). These dual
voices of the vocal group represent the male subject of the ‘I’ as split in two, albeit
harmoniously. And the chorus’s part is at once the memory of an ‘other’ male
self, and the ‘response’ of the woman we conventionally hear this love song as
addressing.
This verbal nostalgia for the past of a love affair is overlaid in the song by a
deeper nostalgia for infancy. The rocking 12/8 rhythm and the pre-verbal ‘shoo-
doo, shoo-be-doo’ of the chorus connote the lullaby and the ‘shh’ sounds that are
used to ‘hush’ crying babies. In the context of this conventional male–female love
song, such sounds connote the comforting voice of the mother rocking her son to
sleep.
2
The song also enacts this nostalgia in its repetition of the verses. In verse
one, the lead voice narrates a past event: ‘In the still of the night, I held you tight’;
while in the musical repeat of this verse after the contrasting ‘I remember’ verse,
he expresses a future/present wish: ‘So before the light, Hold me again with all of
your might’ (italics added). The desire of the song is therefore not only nostalgic –
expressed as the desire for a repetition of a past experience – but also passive (‘hold
me’). This suggests that the discourse of male, heterosexual desire is being modelled
directly on the imagined (past, passive) rocking of the boy baby in the arms of his
mother. But at the same time, this relationship is that of a man to his male peers,
as the chorus provides the steadying beat, and ‘rocks’ the lead voice along in the
musical performance. In a parallel way, the film scene that enacted the song showed
a (split) man’s nostalgic desire for a comforting woman to be at once his desire for
his male other.
The film scene therefore encouraged me. My own analysis of group songs had
worked to separate out relationships between voices in songs as ones of dialogue
and polyphony, representative of divisions and conflicts in the gendered selves
projected by the song lyrics. However, such an analysis had to work against an
apparent readiness that we all show as listeners to construct polyphonous singing
in rock/pop music into ‘the voice’ of a unitary, singing subject. The desire to hear
the song as a conversation between ‘singer’ and audience often obscures a percep-
tion of the song as itself conducting an internal dialogue between different voices.
In this context, the film enactment of ‘In the Still of the Nite’ seemed to show that
my analysis was not just some deep structure that no one ever actually heard. And
perhaps asking people to talk about music was not the best way to find out what
it meant to them. The film scene showed that there are other ways in which people
can ‘talk about’ or act out what music means to them. It confirmed for me the
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 65
importance of analysing the relationship between different voices in a song as being
at once a musical and a verbal feature of performance. And it confirmed these as
gendered processes, and ones where sexuality and gender are often deeply entwined.
Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!)
How conscious are we, for instance, unless we are listening for it, that each time
Buddy Holly sings ‘Oh boy’ in his classic song of that title,
3
his words are immedi-
ately echoed by his male backing group? What is actually sung, is not simply ‘Oh
boy’, but ‘Oh boy, OH BOY’ (where lower and upper case represent the voices of
lead singer and chorus, respectively). And if we do hear these separate voices, do
we then dismiss them as a nowadays irrelevant effect of a dated musical arrange-
ment, as if the music could somehow be divorced from the song itself?
4
If, instead,
we hear these ‘Oh boy’s as echoing cries of mutual male desire, then they have
much in common with the mutual exchanges of ‘I remember’ between the voices
of ‘In the Still of the Nite’. There is a basic continuity in gender structure between
the two songs, in the way two male voices address simultaneously each other and
a woman.
Yet between the doo-wop song and Buddy Holly’s rock ’n’ roll, there is a shift
to the modern representation of the ‘buddy group’, with its connotations of mascu-
line youth, fun, whiteness, egalitarianism, and independence from women.
5
Musi-
cally, the pitch of the voices rises (youth), and the rhythm loses all trace of the
triplet beats of the slow 12/8, adopting the rapid 4/4 that has fossilised as the
rock beat ever since (white masculinity). The melodic phrasing changes from the
langorous sostenuto of the Five Satins to Holly’s punctuated singing, which Laing
has argued represents a creative break with ‘sentimentality’ (Laing 1971, p. 68).
Indeed, the use of religious discourse in the ballad (‘and I pray to keep your pre-
cious love’) makes it an obvious candidate for the description of (barely) secularised
Madonna-worship that Laing saw as typical of the ballad tradition and the Western,
Christian universe with which rock and roll made a radical break (Laing 1969,
pp. 57–60). However, what I am concerned with in this paper is to question the
characteristics of egalitarianism and non-reliance on women that are implied in this
notion of the ‘buddy group’ and upon which much classic rock feeds. In doing so, I
shall draw more on the continuities between the two songs than their fairly obvious
differences.
In particular, the musical role of the chorus is very similar in both songs. Like
that of ‘In the Still of the Nite’, the chorus in ‘Oh, Boy!’ keeps time for the singer,
providing the on-beat which the lead can work round or against. In both songs, the
only words the chorus sings are echoes of the singer’s words; otherwise they sing
nonsense syllables, connoting the pre-verbal sphere of infancy. In both songs, the
chorus accompanies the lead instrument in the ‘instrumental break’ (the sax in the
one case, the guitar in the other), singing rhythmic nonsense syllables (‘doo bop
doo bah’ and ‘dum de dum dum’, respectively).
As we have seen, through this singer–chorus relationship, the ballad works
not only as a representation of heterosexual love but also of relationships between
men. If it is true that Buddy Holly breaks with the nostalgic and sentimental vener-
ation of an idealised ‘mother’, there are implications for both women and men. One
implication, I would suggest, is that if the female object of Holly’s sexual desire is
‘hardly there at all’, as Jonathan Cott aptly said of ‘Peggy Sue’ (Cott 1981, p. 79),
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Barbara Bradby68
then the singer’s invitation to his male audience to join in his sexual fantasising is
also a sexual invitation to them. In fact, the opening verse of ‘Peggy Sue’ is not
addressed to her at all, but invites another man/boy to know Peggy Sue (‘If you
knew Peggy Sue’), and through her, to know the singer and his sexual lack (‘then
you’d know why I feel blue’) (Bradby and Torode 1984). A similar structure of
sharing sexual desire with another man is found in ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’,
where the song resolves the tension of ‘another fella took you’ by proclaiming, ‘I’m
gonna love you too’ (Bradby and Torode 1982).
In ‘Oh, Boy!’, the woman is similarly ‘hardly there’. The second person ‘you’
in the opening lines of the song (‘You don’t know what you’ve been missing’) is no
doubt conventionally heard as addressed to a woman or girl. But this hearing sits
uneasily with the third person reference to ‘my baby’ in the triumphant last line of
verse 3 (‘I’m gonna see my baby tonight’) where the singer is telling his audience
about her (see Figure 2). And we may then note that the opening address is more
immediately disrupted by the way the lines run on into the words ‘Oh boy’, if
heard literally as a vocative ‘call’ to a boy. In this case, these opening lines can
equally well be heard as addressed to the audience of male adolescents (missing
out on the experiences that the lead singer has had). The echoing ‘Oh boy, OH
BOY’ dialogue that goes on between the two male voices throughout the song then
suggests, at a literal level, a sexual invitation and its reciprocation between two
boys.
However, to be ‘hardly there’, is not the same as not being there at all, and
this paper in part analyses the place of this notional woman in the sexuality of the
buddy group. Only a year and a half separates the releases of ‘In the Still of the
Nite’ (March 1956) and ‘Oh, Boy!’ (October 1957); yet the first represents ‘the fifties’
of sentimentality and sexual repression, while the second looks forward to the
‘sexual liberation’ of the 1960s. It has often been claimed that the 1960s saw a sexual
revolution on male terms, and it is clear that the place of women as objects or
subjects of sexual liberation is still up for debate today. Our brief comparison of the
two songs has already suggested that the ‘fifties’ ballad included a kind of respect
for womanhood/motherhood as a form of subjectivity that has disappeared in the
rock ’n’ roll song, which can offer only masculinisation (becoming one of the boys)
or objectification (being his baby) to its female audience. Indeed, we might add that
the ballad is hardly innocent of sexuality, but seems to offer a more sensuous,
female-oriented sexuality than that of the rock ’n’ roll song, which seems impover-
ished by comparison. But a further difference between the sexualities of the two
songs is that the Five Satins’ ballad addresses an adult, ‘after sex’ situation, whereas
Holly’s song addresses those who have not yet had sex.
6
No wonder, then, that the
sexual address of rock music has proved so controversial to parents, since it is here
framed as an invitation to the as-yet-innocent (and hence, potentially, younger and
younger children) by the ‘just experienced’. Little wonder, also, that the discourse
of rock has proved to be a crucial rite of passage for several generations now, since
in this way, it addresses precisely the moment of initiation into adult sexuality.
This paper attempts both to expose the masculinisation of sexuality in ‘Oh,
Boy!’ – i.e. to bring out the extent to which women are apparently rendered redun-
dant in the framing of ‘sexual liberation’ – but also to deconstruct it. In other words,
I question the practical disappearance of women (Cott 1981) or the ‘silencing of a
female discourse’ in Holly’s construction of sexuality (Bradby and Torode 1984). If,
as we have already seen, there is a literal hearing of ‘Oh, Boy!’ as addressed exclus-
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 69
[Verse 1] 1. All my love, all my kissin’,
2. You don’t know what you’ve been missin’,
3. Oh boy, OH BOY, When you’re with me,
4. Oh boy, OH BOY, The world could see that
5. You were meant for
AAAH . . .
6. me . . .
AAAH . . .
[Verse 2] 1. All my life, I’ve been h waitin’,
2. Tonight there’ll be no hesitatin’,
3. Oh boy, OH BOY, When you’re with me,
4. Oh boy, OH BOY, The world could see that
5. You were meant for
AAAH . . .
6. me . . .
AAAH . . .
[Verse 3– 7. Stars appear and the shadows are fallin’,
Middle 8] AAAH . . .
8. You can hear my heart a callin’.
AAAH . . .
9. A little bit of lovin’ makes everythin’ h right
AAAH . .
10. And I’m gonna see my baby tonight
AAAH . . .
[Verse 4] 1. All my love [etc. as Verse 1]
[scream and guitar lead into break]
[Break] 1. DUM-DE-DUM-DUM . . . OH BOY
2. DUM-DE-DUM-DUM . . . OH BOY
3. AAAH . . .
4. AAAH . . .
5. AAAH . . .
6. AAAH . . .
oooh . . .
[Verse 5] 1. All my love [etc. as Verse 1]
[Verse 6] 1. All my life [etc. as Verse 2]
[Verse 7] 7. Stars appear and the shadows are fallin’,
8. You can hear my heart a callin’,
9. A little bit of lovin’ makes everythin’ right
10. And I’m gonna see my baby tonight
[Verse 8] 1. All my love [etc. as Verse 1]
Figure 2. ‘Oh, Boy!’ lyrics (lower case =lead singer; upper case =chorus).
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Barbara Bradby70
ively to a male audience, in the next sections I explore what other voices can be
heard in the internal dialogue conducted by and in the song.
Post-structuralism, I love you (or, The sound of the other voice)
The frequent complaint at popular music conferences and elsewhere that ‘no one
talks about the music’ can be understood as a symptom of frustration both with
readings of popular music which ultimately treat lyrics as poems (whether for liter-
ary or political analysis), and with a musicology that too often seems to submerge
the specificity of pop music into a general semiology of (Western) music. It seems
to me vital to consider post-1950s rock and pop as song, i.e. as the interaction of
words and music, if we are to begin to understand the social significance of the
music as articulating new modes of sexuality. To rephrase a question set by Frith
(1988), we should not be asking ‘why do songs have words?’, but ‘why do we dance
to songs?’. For the point has frequently been made that rock is dance music (ergo
nobody listens to the lyrics), but just as important is the fact that rock broke down
a previous distinction between (fast) dance music as instrumental (with the vocal
as an intermittent, subordinate ‘instrument’), and romantic, listening music as pre-
eminently vocal (and used for ‘slow’ dancing).
Now that an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock and pop lyrics has become a
male skill that is paraded on competitive TV game shows (such as ‘Never Mind the
Buzzcocks’ in the UK) it may seem strange to remind readers that for decades men
were ‘in denial’ about the lyrics of rock music. Lyrics were something ‘for the girls’,
hence disregarded by those who really understood what the music was about. What
really mattered, from this point of view, was ‘rhythm’, often just meaning a heavy
4/4 beat. I shall argue that claims for rock as a serious genre on grounds of its
rhythm make much more sense if we consider the rhythm of the lyrics – by which
I mean always the conjunction of words and music – and the ways in which lyrical
rhythms work with, around and against this basic 4/4 beat.
Now post-structuralist theory, notably in the work of Barthes and Kristeva,
has made much of the musical characteristics of language in general. Kristeva’s
concept of ‘the semiotic’ is sometimes thought of as just another name for Lacan’s
‘imaginary’, but her concept in fact gives the distinction between the ‘symbolic’ and
‘imaginary’ aspects of language a radical twist (Lacan 1977; Kristeva 1980). Simply
viewed as ‘image’, the imaginary traces of a pre-verbal one-ness with the mother
can never be verbalised, except through the ‘symbolic’ language, on which they are
dependent. But Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ is a material aspect of language, bound up with
musical features that continually recall the rhythms and melodies of pre-verbal
communication with the mother. As that material side of language which escapes
representation in the symbolic, patriarchal order of linguistic exchange, the semiotic
sphere is, for Kristeva, pre-gendered, but also replete with a desire which is differ-
ent from that which can be inscribed in that order. And from this follows her pro-
posal for a post-feminist utopia, where desire and difference would flow freely,
outside of the need to order sexuality as difference from, arising out of binary modes
of thinking (Kristeva 1982).
This utopian thought easily slides over into what Lawrence Grossberg calls
the ‘ironic nihilism’ or ‘authentic inauthenticity’ of postmodern culture, within
whose logic, ‘one celebrates a difference knowing that its status depends on nothing
but its being celebrated’ (Grossberg 1988, p. 326). In Baudrillard’s TV world, once
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 71
the ‘reality’ that used to be the guarantor of both truth and falsity of appearances
can itself be simulated, the whole system of signs becomes a ‘gigantic simulacrum,
never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrup-
ted circuit without reference’ (Baudrillard 1988, p. 170). If we are to interrupt this
circuit and reclaim the concept of the semiotic as a material one, then we must insist
that, as such, it is open to empirical investigation. Kristeva herself makes reference
to the possibility of systematic empirical description, using ‘modern phono-
acoustics’, of the ‘semiotic operations (rhythm, intonation)’ in the pre-linguistic
‘vocalisations’ of small babies and in the discourse of psychotics (Kristeva 1980, pp.
133–4). However, even in her analyses of specific texts, she is more interested in the
theoretical relationship of rhythm to language, than in any recognisably musical
analysis of rhythm in a text (ibid., pp. 175 ff.). And nowhere does she empirically
consider song as a space where language and music meet and interact.
Nevertheless, there seem good grounds for doing just this. Apart from those
already mentioned, ‘polyphony’ (‘many voices’) is a musical concept which plays
an important part in Kristeva’s analysis of the avant-garde, or ‘transgressive’ novel
(ibid., pp. 64–91). Rock/pop song offers a multiplicity of ways in which words can
be arranged between different voices. And as this music defined itself around a
central discourse of sexuality, the discursive effects of ‘polyphony’ can be shown to
be important in the development of that discourse (cf. Bradby 1990).
In (mis)appropriating the concept of ‘the semiotic’ for song analysis, then, I
take two empirical points of departure. Instead of starting from the voice of the
lead singer, so often assumed to be the only and fullest purveyor of meaning in a
song, I start from the other voice, that of the chorus. And instead of assuming that
music gives meaning to words by enhancing the musical features of speech, I start
from rhythm in the song as a material semiotic that produces meaning by the differ-
ences it sets up from the spoken rhythms of speech. It is as if the musical ‘setting’
makes explicit the semiotic as an aspect of language separate from the symbolic,
foregrounds it, and explores the differences.
Buddy Holly’s chorus: the wordless beat and the beatless word
In his detailed study of Buddy Holly, published in 1971, Dave Laing wrote of Hol-
ly’s backing groups:
In contrast with the ingenuity of gospel choirs and the black vocal groups of the ‘50s, mem-
bers of these white groups all sang the same part and were firmly subordinated to the name
singer out in front. Their roles were limited: in most cases they either acted as part of the
rhythm section and sang wordless syllables (‘dum-de-dum’ or ‘ba-ba-ba’), or took their place
with the singer, echoing key phrases from his singing. (Laing 1971, pp. 51–2)
Laing concludes that although there are occasions on The Crickets’ records
where the vocal group sings two or three of its own words,
Holly’s backing groups sound least archaic when they make noises rather than sing words
(. . .). They sound best when the rather opulent mellowness of their singing is cut short. In
‘Not Fade Away’, for instance, (. . .) their clipped ‘ba-ba-ba’ syllables are sung in time with
the distinctive Bo Diddley riff beaten out by Jerry Allison on drums. (ibid., p. 52)
Within his general thesis on their subordination to the lead singer, Laing there-
fore identifies three roles for the chorus: as ‘echo’ of the singer’s words, as conveyor
of a (non-verbal) ‘opulent mellowness’, and as a rhythmic backing, singing clipped,
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Barbara Bradby72
wordless syllables. Each of these roles is clearly present in the chorus’s part in ‘Oh,
Boy!’, and each corresponds to one of the three phrases the chorus sings:
OH BOY, sung as a direct echo of the lead singer, each time he sings, ‘Oh boy’
(i.e. in lines 3 and 4 of verses 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 – henceforth referred
to as ‘the main verse’).
AAAH, comparatively undifferentiated rhythmically, as the voices simply
slide to new harmonies where required, without closing the vowel
sound. This occurs always as a background accompaniment (to the
lead voice on the last line of each verse and all through verse 3,
and to the lead guitar on the last four ‘lines’ of the instrumental
break), and corresponds to Laing’s ‘opulent mellowness’. I prefer
to call this open, vowel singing, a beatless word.
DUM DE DUM DUM,
put together with the phrase ‘OH BOY’, and sung over the first two
lines of the instrumental break. This corresponds to Laing’s role of
‘rhythm section’, and we may note that the complete rhythmic pat-
tern, ‘DUM DE DUM DUM (rest) OH BOY’ is close to Bo Diddley’s
characteristic rhythm mentioned by Laing in this connection. I have
called this rhythmic function that of the wordless beat.
Now clearly, these three roles of the chorus place it in a linguistic sphere
which is subordinate to that of the lead singer, with his fully articulate command
of language. Indeed, the chorus’s part can be seen as a stylised deconstruction of
‘baby talk’, which is used by adults and babies/small children alike in the period
prior to ‘learning to talk’, or mastering language as a symbolic system of communi-
cation. The isolation of one semiotic aspect of language, such as melody or rhythm,
is characteristic of ‘baby-talk’, as is the use of echoing between the voices of adult
and child. ‘Aah’, for instance, is a ‘word’ that passes between mother and baby (in
my experience as young as three months) as a kind of verbal transformation of the
smile that is the earliest reciprocal communication. This ‘Aah’ has no rhythm of its
own, but is simply a vowel sound pronounced with a sliding, falling pitch, so
constituting a kind of ‘melody’. Within adult talk, or the symbolic sphere of lan-
guage, ‘Aah’ lives on, as an interjection whose meanings include the expression of
delight and of understanding that it conveys in ‘baby-talk’.
If the ‘beatless word’ isolates melody as one ‘semiotic’ aspect of language and
builds it into a system of communication, rhythm forms a complementary semiotic,
which can again be isolated from actual words, as ‘wordless beats’, or what are
often called ‘nonsense syllables’. But these wordless rhythms are more complex
than the pure vowel of the ‘beatless word’. ‘Dum de dum dum’ is neither, linguisti-
cally speaking, pure consonants, nor musically speaking, pure rhythm: as music, it
has its own melody, and as language, it has vowels. What is more, the repetition
of the vowels is fundamental to the possibility of rhyme, which is here found in its
simplest form as syllabic repetition, whether ‘dum’ is thought of as representing a
whole word, as in ‘Tom, Tom, the piper’s son’, or as part of one, as in ‘Hum-pty
Dum-pty (sat on a wall)’.
Of course, the syllables ‘dum’ and ‘de’ are well chosen for the enunciation of
a pattern that approximates pure rhythm by the chorus, since they are conven-
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 73
tionally used in adult conversation to communicate the rhythm of a piece of music.
They already have, as it were, a symbolic meaning as standing in for beats of music.
But this is also to beg the question of what rhythm they are standing in for here,
or from the semiotic point of view, what is their material rhythm.
Children’s rhythms: an empirical semiotic
In order to answer this question, and to establish more clearly the link between this
kind of rhythmic pattern and the language rhythms enjoyed by children, I shall
briefly review here the work of the Roumanian musicologist, Constantin Brailoiu
(1984), on the topic of ‘children’s rhythms’. This fascinating essay establishes clearly
the existence of ‘children’s rhythms’ as an ‘autonomous system’, i.e. as one which
does not obey the laws of ‘classical’ rhythm (Brailoiu 1984, p. 206). Perhaps even
more striking is the ‘autonomy’ of this rhythmic system from the languages of the
many different cultures in which Brailoiu located it. He documents the identity of
the system across nineteen countries of Europe, and also includes examples from
virtually identical systems among the Eskimo, as well as from Senegal and the
Sudan. This is ‘all the more remarkable’, he comments,
since in the interior construction of children’s rhythms, the placing of accents is fixed,
whereas languages practice multiple accentuations (the Hungarians fall heavily on the first
syllable of words, the Turks on the last, etc.). (Brailoiu 1984, p. 208)
The fundamental point that Brailoiu makes about this system is that it is built
up from the combination of single units of duration (‘beats’) into pairs, each unit
being the rhythmic equivalent of one short syllable. These units are then linked two
by two to make up ‘a series worth eight’ which is the nearest it is possible to get to
a definition, since as few as four syllables may fill the line ‘on condition that in the
scansion or in the song, they make eight short durations’ (e.g. ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum’, as
in giant’s talk), and since less than eight units may actually be filled by syllables,
provided the empty units are ‘counted’ in the series (e.g. ‘Hickory, dickory, dock
[ ], The mouse ran up the clock [ ]) (ibid., p. 209).
The temptation for one trained in classical music theory is to amalgamate
these binary couplets into more complex rhythmic systems, so that the primary
units (which Brailoiu notates as quavers), become instead ‘fractions of imaginary
crotchets, thus, sub-units, and the investigation starts with a false idea’ (ibid.,p.
208). The simplest way to demonstrate this ‘autonomy’ of the system both from the
rhythmic system of classical music, and from the metric system of European poetry,
is to look at some examples, using Brailoiu’s conventions.
7
In the following, for
instance,
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Barbara Bradby74
the accentuation of the last syllable (‘men’) of ‘gentlemen’ is at odds with spoken
accentuation, and so with the convention of ‘poetry’. And if the two lines were to
be put into 2/4 bars, according to classical music conventions, then the final syllable
‘men’ would fall on a weak, unaccented beat. As it is, the system makes it quite
clear to us that the accent on ‘men’ is equal to those on ‘she’, ‘eggs’ and ‘gen-’ in
the same line. The same can be said about the accentuation on the last syllables of
‘ro - ses’ and ‘po - seys’ in the following:
8
These examples also illustrate the practice of ‘partitioning’, which is a funda-
mental principle of variation in the system. The eight ‘beats’ of the line are par-
titioned into two, three or four sections which form autonomous sub-units and
which are grouped together through rhyme, word repetition, assonance, the agree-
ment of words which differ only in their ending (e.g. ‘Tweedledum and
Tweedledee’) or ‘a succession of parts of phrases with the same construction and
accentuation’ (ibid., p. 210). This last can be as the partitioning into three of:
or as the partitioning into two of:
(where ‘|’ indicates a partition, and ‘:’ indicates the boundaries between groups of
syllables taking up two units where there is no partition. In the two examples
quoted earlier, ‘||’ indicates that the consonance is with the following, not the pre-
vious line).
Brailoiu’s accomplishment is to show not only how the rules for the variation
of the system are identical across so many different linguistic cultures, but also how
they are compatible with the system’s ‘strict symmetry’ (ibid., p. 238). He shows,
for instance, the rules according to which syllables grouped by three can be incor-
porated into the binary structure, and how the insertion of anacruses (upbeats) is
compatible with the logic of the system as always starting on a downbeat.
The relevance of Brailoiu’s uncovering of this cross-cultural system for us here
is that he shows how rhythm can form a system which is autonomous of any par-
ticular language, but not of language-in-general. And yet we know that in our own
culture, and presumably in the others from which his examples are drawn, these
rhymes form an everyday part of children’s language-learning experience, and for
adult speakers, are a well-known way of pleasing a child, and gaining his/her
attention for language learning. So Brailoiu’s system does in fact document empiri-
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 75
cally a way in which the semiotic aspect of language shapes the way in which the
child enters the ‘symbolic’ sphere.
The rhythms of ‘Oh, Boy!’
Returning to rock music, various commentators have noticed the use of ‘baby talk’
and of nursery rhyme forms within rock music generally (Bradby and Torode 1982),
and in the music of Buddy Holly in particular (Cott 1981, p. 78; Bradby and Torode
1984). However, Cott’s explanation of the appeal of such rhythms, albeit ‘trans-
formed and revitalised’ by Holly, as lying in the ‘childlike . . . insouciance’ of the
singer, seems inadequate to account for the felt sexuality of rock music. On the
other hand, Bradby and Torode’s psychoanalytic theory of rock discourse as the
reworking of the lullaby language of the mother by the male adolescent remains
too general and speculative. Brailoiu’s formal description of children’s rhymes as a
rhythmic system permits a more rigorous analysis of what Holly does with and to
these rhythms, which can hopefully lead to more insightful explanations of why
they should be appealing in adolescent music.
Figure 3 sets out the rhythms of the song ‘Oh, Boy!’ in a synchronic arrange-
ment where it is possible to observe small changes in the ‘same’ line between differ-
ent verses, etc.
9
While I have transcribed the song in the conventions of the 4/4
time signature of ‘classical’ rhythm, the rhyming system of the first two lines is
immediately reminiscent of Brailoiu’s analysis of ‘partitioning’ in children’s
rhythms. If we ignore for the moment the ‘syncopated’ anticipation of the beat on the words
‘you’ve been missing’, the lines could be written as:
The partitioning of the first line into two consonant groups of 4 units each can
be summarised as 4 +4 (like the first line of ‘Pease pudding hot’). The rhyming of
the second line with the first can then be represented as (4 +4) +8.
10
As a rhyming
pattern this is identical, for instance, to:
Pull my finger, | pull my thumb,
I’ll tell a p’liceman what you’ve done
(Opie and Opie 1959, p. 61)
or:
Calling all cars, | calling all stations,
Hitler’s lost his combinations
(Ibid., p. 102)
These examples illustrate the use of the (4 +4) +8 rhyming system in chil-
dren’s practice, and the second one is very close also to the detail of the rhythm in
Holly’s lines. A clear parallel to Holly’s contraction of the rhythm at the end of the
lines can be found in the children’s rhyme:
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Barbara Bradby76
The contraction of ‘seven’ and ‘heaven’ into the space occupied by one short unit
in this example parallels that of ‘kissing’ and ‘missing’ in ‘Oh, Boy!’. Brailoiu notes
that when a line is ‘partitioned’ in two, if the first half is ‘catalectic’ (i.e. ends on an
accented unit plus a rest of equivalent duration), then the second half tends to be
too. The contraction of the two-syllable words, therefore, enables this rule of sym-
metry between the two halves of the ‘partitioned’ first line to be observed in both
the nursery rhyme and in ‘Oh, Boy!’.
11
This analysis has shown how close the opening two lines of ‘Oh, Boy!’ are to
‘children’s rhythms’, but there is a crucial difference, already noted, in the introduc-
tion of syncopation on the words ‘you’ve been (missing)’, the rhythm of which is
here transcribed according to ‘classical’ conventions in 4/4 bars:
This irruption of syncopation into what otherwise resembles children’s rhythm is
therefore clearly structured as a mark of the passage out of childhood into adulthood,
or adolescence. The effect is all the more striking if we take into account the verbal
meaning of the phrase on which the syncopation enters the song. ‘You’ve been
missing’ is a succinct expression of an interpersonal absence or lack, and in the
‘adult’ mode of excitement introduced by the syncopation, we easily understand a
sexual lack of some sort. But the ‘you’ addressed at the beginning of the line is still
innocent of sexual desire (‘you don’t know . . .’), and is therefore approached
through children’s rhythm. The interaction of verbal and rhythmic meaning already
in the first two lines enacts a transition from innocence to desire.
The syncopation continues and is heightened by the intrusion of both syllables
of the title phrase ‘Oh boy’ into the hypothetical ‘space’ (according to the rules of
‘children’s rhythms’) at the end of this same line. This first ‘Oh boy’ is both hur-
ried – the syllables fall on consecutive quavers – and syncopated – the word ‘boy’
falls on the second half of beat 4, anticipating the first beat of the next bar. The
emphasis thereby placed on ‘boy’ both parallels the normal emphasis of ‘Oh boy’
as a spoken exclamation, as well as, internally to the song, paralleling the emphasis
on ‘you’ve’ in the corresponding beat of the previous bar.
The chorus then immediately echoes the phrase, ‘Oh boy’, but with a crucial
rhythmic difference. The chorus (upper case) irons out the lead singer’s syncopation
and sings both syllables on the beat (lines 2–3):
The effect of the occurrence of both syllables on crotchet beats is at once to recall
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 77
the steadying impulse of children’s rhythms, and to evoke a more ‘measured’ enun-
ciation of the phrase in speech (Oh, boy).
The lead singer continues with the phrase ‘When you’re with me’, where the
word ‘you’ is sung on the beat, so, through the verbal meaning (the presence of
‘you’), setting up another opposition to the syncopation of ‘you’ve (been nh missin’)
in the previous line. The intervening ‘dialogue’ with the chorus, however, has estab-
lished a possible internal (‘diegetic’) reference for ‘you’ as addressed to the chorus
itself. ‘You’ were ‘missing’ in line 2, causing nervous syncopation in the singer’s
rhythm, but ‘your’ (i.e. the chorus’s) echoing response to the singer’s ‘Oh boy’ call,
means that ‘you’ are ‘with me’ by line 3.
At the surface level of the meaning of this song as a ‘love song’, these phrases
simply summon up the absence and presence of ‘you’, whether understood exter-
nally or internally to the song. But the diegetic reading does suggest a further,
self-referential level of meaning, in that ‘missing’ and being ‘with me’ are part of the
discourse of rhythm in musical interaction. Syncopation is a form of (intentionally)
‘missing’ the beat, while for you to be ‘with me’ means for you to be in time with
me.
12
This reading is confirmed by the continuation of the lead singer’s part in line
3. The syllables ‘me’, ‘oh’ and ‘boy’ all occur on syncopated off-beats, but their
separation as crotchets gives a strong impression of ‘steadying’ as compared with
the first enunciation of ‘Oh boy’ by the lead. In this way, the rhythm of ‘you’re with
me, oh boy’ is mid-way between the hurried, emphatic syncopation of ‘you’ve been
nh missin, oh boy’ and the chorus’s rock-steady ‘OH BOY’. The effect is that of the
lead singer imitating, or being steadied up by, the chorus’s enunciation of ‘OH
BOY’ on crotchets. In terms of the meaning of the words, he is now much closer to
being rhythmically ‘with’ the chorus’ (lines 3–4):
In this sequence of four ‘Oh boy’s it is the presence of the chorus’s rhythm
that enables the singer to overcome his nervous, hurried syncopation and get the
rhythm (more or less) ‘right’. The meaning of ‘you’re with me’, then, cannot be
reduced to the chorus following the lead singer, as is suggested by describing the
dialogue as ‘echo’, but also includes a steadying effect of the chorus on the lead,
discernible only through analysing the interplay of rhythm and language – in other
words, the semiotic level.
So far, this analysis of rhythm does confirm Cott’s description of Holly’s
‘childlike insouciance’, by detecting ‘children’s rhythms’, but it also uncovers
another rhythm (syncopation), which seems to lead out of the child’s sphere, and
to be in some ways contradictory to it. While ‘children’s rhythms’ impose a strict
order that distorts what appears by contrast as the ‘free’ rhythm of speech, the
syncopated rhythms are closer to those of (adult) speech. This distinction becomes
clearer if we look at verse 3, which (together with its repeat at verse 7) is the con-
trasting verse musically in the song. The first two lines of this verse evoke cliche
´d
‘poetry’, the conventional rhythms of which must follow speech rather than domi-
nating it as in ‘children’s rhythms’. Syncopation is here introduced on the first
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Barbara Bradby80
words, allowing ‘appear’ and ‘shadows’ to sound as spoken, while the prolongation
of ‘and’ sounds like a nervous pause:
This imitation of nervous speech is heightened in the missed beats of the following
line, where the first beat is entirely silent, and both ‘my’ and ‘heart’ very slightly
anticipate the beat:
However, the third line reintroduces what is unmistakably ‘children’s rhythm’, only
to be interrupted by the syncopation on the first syllable of ‘everything’:
Disregarding this syncopation for the moment, the best way to transcribe this
line as ‘children’s rhythm’ seems to be to divide it in half, making two, eight-beat
lines:
The rhythm is then identical to the nursery-rhyme line(s), ‘In a yellow petticoat
And a green gown’ (with the addition of the first anacrusis), and virtually identical
to ‘The king was in his counting-house, Counting out (his) money’.
In Holly’s line, this patter of children’s rhythm is interrupted by the synco-
pated first syllable of ‘e-verything’, which occupies what should be the empty beat
after ‘makes’. Once again, we can analyse the rhythm and accentuation of ‘every-
thing’ as marking an intrusion of speech rhythms into the musical structure of chil-
dren’s rhythms. The same could be said about the last line of verse 3, where the
syncopation of ‘to-night’ corresponds to spoken accentuation and rhythm, and
intrudes into an otherwise ‘on-beat’ line (see Figure 3, line 10).
However, if we turn to the repetition of this verse in the second half of the
song (sung by lead alone without the chorus, see Figure 2), we find a slight change
in the rhythm of the third line (i.e. line 9 of Figure 3), which becomes significant in
the light of this analysis. For here, the children’s rhythm is maintained throughout the
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 81
line, only the exaggerated accentuation of the ‘s’ of ‘makes’ remaining as a trace of
the syncopation the first time around:
Again, here, the song makes a meta-statement about rhythm, since making
‘everything right’ can be understood as getting it in time, getting the rhythm right.
Indeed, rhythm becomes a complicated metaphor for sexuality in the song, a meta-
phor set up through the dual working of verbal and rhythmic meaning. If we ask
what has allowed the singer to get the rhythm ‘right’ the second time around,
then the answer the song gives is ‘a little bit of lovin’’, verbally connoting sex, but
rhythmically evoking childhood.
We are still entitled to ask what has enabled this rhythmic resolution of the
tensions of the first time around, and to unravel this question we must turn to the
musical development that takes place between the two repetitions of verse 3, i.e. to
the ‘instrumental break’, which is not simply a guitar break, since the voices of the
chorus also figure prominently.
Voices and rhythm in the instrumental break
The break in ‘Oh, Boy!’ can be seen as an economical working-out, at the rhythmic
level, of the relationship between key phrases that we have already encountered.
As Laing observes, Holly’s work in guitar breaks ‘reiterates something that has
gone before, rather than introduces something new into the song’ (Laing 1971, p.
52). But because what we are looking at is a song, rhythmic sequences are first set
out in conjunction with words: when these same rhythmic sequences are played on
their own, they recall the words to which they were set. Bradby and Torode (1984)
have argued that through this process of recollection, an instrumental break can
create ‘imaginary lyrics’.
The phrases so recalled in the break in ‘Oh, Boy!’ are set out along a numerical
grid indicating beats of the bar in Figure 4. (The musical notation of the rhythms
can be found in Figure 3.) In this break, not only the playing of the lead guitar, but
also the ‘wordless beats’ of the chorus, recall rhythms from the verses of the song.
If we focus first on the part of the chorus in the break, we find that the three phrases
of its part in the whole song are here all present: ‘DUM DE DUM DUM’, ‘OH BOY’
and ‘AAAH’. As has already been pointed out, ‘dum de dum dum’ is a conven-
tional indication that one is tapping out the rhythm of another phrase: it stands in
for a musical phrase. If we ask what it is standing in for here, then the answer must
be the words ‘you’re with me oh’ as sung by the lead in the main verse. Firstly, the
rhythms are almost identical: the chorus here sings .while the lead in the
verses sings on these four words. The small difference of the additional
half-beat taken by the chorus on ‘you’re’ amounts once again to the chorus’s ‘iron-
ing out’ of Holly’s syncopations by making them appear as ‘anticipations’ of main
beats, an effect already observed in the analysis of the main verse. Secondly, the
placing of ‘DUM DE DUM DUM’ in relation to the chorus’s ‘OH BOY’ in the break
exactly parallels the placing of the lead’s ‘you’re with me oh’ in the bar before the
chorus’s identical ‘OH BOY’ in the main verse.
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Barbara Bradby82
Beats: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
line 1: lit- tle bit of lo- vin makes A lit- tle bit of lov- in makes A
DUM DE DUM DUM <........> OH BOY
[YOU’RE WITH ME OH <........> OH BOY]
line 2: lit- tle bit of lo- vin makes A lit- tle bit of lov- in makes A
DUM DE DUM DUM <........> OH BOY
[YOU’RE WITH ME OH <........> OH BOY]
line 3: You don’t know (what) you’ve been nhmiss (in) A
AAAH – – – – – – – – – –––– –
line 4: lit- tle bit of lo- vin makes ev- ery- thing right And
AAAH – – – – – – – – – –––– –
line 5: <........> (no ) -vin makes ev – ery thing (right And) A
ap- pear And
AAAH – – – – – – – – – –––– –
line 6: lit- tle bit of lo- vin makes eve- ry thing right
AAAH – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Figure 4. ‘Imaginary lyrics’ of the instrumental break in ‘Oh, Boy!’ (lower case =‘imaginary lyrics’
of guitar solo; upper case =chorus; [ ] indicates the ‘imaginary lyrics’ behind chorus’s actual lyrics
in this break; <. . .> indicates a rest; ( ) indicates that rhythm of ‘imaginary lyric’ is marginally
changed from actual lyric).
This use of ‘DUM DE DUM DUM’ in the break to recall the lyric ‘You’re with
me’ of the main verse sets up an association between the material beat of the chorus
and the presence of ‘you’. Having thereby established itself as the material beat
indicative of ‘your’ presence, the chorus’s part in the break goes on to a reminder
of its earlier ‘correction’ of the singer’s beat, its ‘OH BOY’. The blank beat, or rest,
between the last ‘DUM’ and the ‘OH’ is graphically placed so as to omit any
reference to the beat occupied by the singer’s word ‘boy’ in the rhythm of this
line. This means that we are reminded only of the chorus’s steadying influence,
and not of the ambivalence of the singer’s rhythm on the words ‘oh boy’. And
we can also remind ourselves here that the whole rhythmic phrase so formed
(DUM DE DUM DUM . . . OH BOY) evokes Bo Diddley’s beat, a point to which
we shall return.
The guitar lead that accompanies the chorus during these first two lines is
decidedly ‘restrained’, and in fact taps out four 8-beat ‘lines’ of the most basic
‘children’s rhythm’, corresponding to the words from the verses, ‘A lit-tle bit of
lo-vin’ makes’, repeated four times over. The fact that both the chorus and the guitar
parts are here on monotones both foregrounds rhythm and creates the impression of
restraint.
If the chorus’s ‘imaginary lyrics’ on these first two lines bring it the closest to
an actual subject position that it gets in the song, this ‘person’ disappears from line
3 onwards in the break, as the chorus retires into the background on the ‘beatless
word’ ‘AAAH’. The guitar takes the lead here, launching out on a new melody to
the syncopated rhythm of the line, ‘You don’t know what you’ve been nh missin’’
(the syncopation is slightly greater than in the verse, as the beat corresponding to
the word ‘what’ is also brought back by the guitar onto an anticipatory off-beat).
This means that the absence of the chorus’s beat (as it abandons ‘DUM DE DUM
DUM’ and relapses into the prolonged ‘AAAH’) is here associated with the absence
of you (‘you’ve been missing’). This provides striking confirmation (by opposition)
of the connection between the material beat of the chorus and the presence of ‘you’
in lines 1 and 2 of the break, analysed above.
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 83
At line 4 of the break, the guitarist regains an on-beat rhythm, and in fact here
completes the lines of ‘children’s rhythm’ begun in the first two lines. The full
rhythmic sequence of the words ‘A little bit of lovin’ makes Everything right’ here
appears for the first time in the song entirely on the beat, i.e. to the correct ‘children’s
rhythm’. The work of the guitar has set up the association which the voice will take
up after the break, allowing the singer to make ‘everything right’.
However, the on-beat rhythm is contested yet again at line 5, where the guitar
syncopation is heightened even further, an exaggerated emphasis on an off-beat
crotchet recalling the ‘no’ of ‘Tonight there’ll be no hesitatin’’, and the subsequent
off-beat quavers recalling the first, syncopated version of ‘makes everything right’.
However, these tensions achieve a resolution in the final line of the break, where
the ‘correct’, on-beat rhythm of ‘A little bit of lovin’ makes everything right’ is
repeated from line 4. The rhythms here sound ‘dotted’, which is, of course, a
common variation in ‘children’s rhythms’, and which merely exaggerates,
(parodies?) the on-beat emphasis.
It is within this break, therefore, that the conflict of rhythms in the song is at
its most intense. This conflict is worked out in relation to key rhythmic phrases
from the song, all of which had previously emerged as important in the analysis of
the song’s rhythm:
‘You don’t know what you’ve been nh missin’’, which introduced the hurried, off-beat
rhythm of ‘you’, followed by the hurried, off-beat ‘Oh boy’;
‘You’re with me, oh boy’, which restored the rhythm, placing ‘you’ on the beat, then steady-
ing ‘Oh boy’ onto crotchet lengths;
‘A little bit of lovin’ makes everything right’, the line whose syncopations before the break
are virtually ironed out in its repetition after it.
The break therefore presents the drama of the song reduced to its most skeletal
structure. The on-beat rhythms of ‘your’ presence and ‘a little bit of lovin’ (lines 1–
2) are disturbed by the syncopated beats of ‘your’ absence (line 3). But the continu-
ation by the guitarist of ‘a little bit of lovin’’ goes on to ‘make everything right’
(line 4), the latter part of this line occurring here for the first time on the beat. A
setback occurs with the negative ‘no’ (line 5): the regular beat of ‘a little bit of lovin’’
is lost, and ‘makes everything right’ is thrown right off the beat, but the emphatic
restatement of the whole phrase ‘A little bit of lovin’ makes everything right’ (line
6) restores the on-beat rhythm and closes the break.
This analysis of the rhythmic ‘work’ of the break allows us to see the structure
of the whole song as involving a process of ‘exposition’ (first four verses), ‘develop-
ment’ (instrumental break), and ‘recapitulation’ (repeat of exposition, but with ten-
sions resolved). In the exposition, the singer’s statement ‘a little bit of lovin’ makes
everything right’ was symbolically coherent, but materially empty, since we do not
yet know what is a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way for the line to sound. By the time of its
repetition at verse 7, the statement has gained a material meaning, since we now
know that the singer ‘makes everything right’ when he sings this phrase on the
beat. With hindsight, we can see that the first way of singing it was rhythmically
‘wrong’ so that the sound of the words contradicted their symbolic meaning. And
the analysis has shown that it is in the ‘development’ process in the break that the
‘right’ rhythm is introduced, gaining force by its juxtaposition with ‘wrong’, highly
syncopated versions.
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Barbara Bradby84
Mutual desirability and musical structure
This analysis of the development of rhythmic differences in ‘Oh, Boy!’ and of the
way these differences are played out between the different voices enables us to see
how the song enacts a return to the semiotic as the way in which the adolescent
acquires a new, sexual identity. This return reverses the usual priority of symbolic
over semiotic, and of lead singer over chorus. In the empirical wealth of ‘children’s
rhythms’, the song finds resources with which to undo and rework the fixing of
gender identity in the symbolic sphere. The play of difference between children’s
rhythms and adult speech creates tension in the song, but what emerges is a restruc-
turing of speech by children’s rhythms. The symbolic is audibly structured by the
semiotic.
It is the role of the chorus to continually bring in and recall these children’s
rhythms, the crucial characteristic of which here is their ‘on-beat’ nature, as opposed
to the fluidity of speech and syncopation. The first such on-beat occurrence in the
song is the chorus’s first ‘Oh boy’, and the most elaborate version of this is the
chorus’s ‘Dum-de-dum-dum, Oh boy’ during the ‘instrumental break’. The chorus
alternates from these ‘wordless beats’ of ‘children’s rhythms’ back to its entirely
supportive ‘beatless word’ – the mirroring ‘Aaah’ of baby talk. In this way the
chorus audibly represents the de- and re-composition of adult speech into its semi-
otic elements of rhythm and melody. But it also represents and evokes childhood –
even babyhood – and thereby also the sphere of the mother, so giving substance to
Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic sphere as the material traces of the mother’s body
within language. If the chorus plays a maternal role to the adolescent male singer
in this way, it is striking that its supportive ‘Aaah’ disappears in verse 7, the repeat
of verse 3, where ‘Aaah’ had been prominent before the break. The fact that the
lead here sings the middle eight verse on his own – the verse that envisages the
transition from day to night and from innocence to ‘loving’ – suggests a narrative
development away from dependence on the chorus/mother and towards the inde-
pendence imagined in adult masculinity.
Questions remain about the gender address of this song, and about the buddy
group structure that is the internal context that the song provides for itself, fixed in
the recorded performance. In a sense, the detailed analysis just confirms the initial
‘hunch’ that ‘Oh boy’ and its echo by the chorus represent cries of mutual admir-
ation and desire on the part of two male voices. But there is more to be said. Firstly,
we must return to the ambivalence of this ‘literal’ interpretation with the conven-
tional hearing of the song as addressed to a woman/girl, (confirmed but also dis-
rupted by the reference to ‘my baby’ at the end of verse 3). When the words ‘Oh
boy’ first appear, they are heard as a continuation of the first two lines, ‘All my
love, etc.’, and therefore as a narcissistic expression of wonder on the part of the
singer at his abilities in loving and kissing. This is compatible with a hearing of
‘You don’t know what you’ve been missing’ (line 2) as addressed either to a poten-
tial female recipient of the loving, or to a male innocent, whom Holly exhorts to
become a lover of women himself. Both of these ‘hearings’ are, of course, conven-
tional heterosexual ones. But it is the male address of the second one that lays the
ground for the ‘literal’ hearing of the chorus’s ‘OH BOY!’ echo as introducing mutu-
ality of admiration/desire on the part of the two ‘boys’. Of course, this ‘literal’
homosexual address is immediately contradicted by the conventional hearing of
‘When you’re with me’ as addressed to a woman. (And yet again our expectations
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 85
are confounded, as this line continues directly on into the vocative address to the
‘boy’: ‘When you’re with me, oh boy’.)
This sliding of the gender address between various possible sexualities may
be seen as a radical ambivalence, or simply as a maximisation of possible audiences
for the song as commodity. Another way of putting this is that Buddy Holly’s song
‘works’ on a different level from most ‘transgressive novels’ or avant-garde films.
It communicates its sexual meaning(s) seductively and economically, and conse-
quently had – probably still has – a mass audience. But from a feminist point of
view, this takes me back to that film scene I started from. Both the song and the
film seem to show male narcissism as constructing a male ‘other’ as audience, even
when ostensibly addressing/desiring a woman. Once this elementary ‘buddy
group’ is constructed, the intervening woman becomes at best irrelevant. What film
critics have written about as the structural exclusion of the female spectator here
has a correlate in song (Taylor and Laing 1979). But it should not be thought of as
having the status of a necessary truth. On the contrary, we must deconstruct the
buddy group to show the male audience as a construction.
Our analysis has shown that this ‘masculinisation’ of sexuality in ‘Oh, Boy!’
is both more evident and more illusory than conventional hearings suggest. The
masculinisation of the audience is achieved only through the recall and elaboration
of ‘children’s rhythms’ and ‘baby talk’, directly evocative of the maternal sphere of
early language and interaction. While the adult, or adolescent, sexuality of rock ’n’
roll is achieved in some sense in opposition to this maternal sphere, it is not achieved
without it. The chorus in this prototypical ‘boy-group’ song, while far from the
articulacy and conflict of that in ‘girl-group’ music,
14
is also far from being a mere
‘echo’. And as with the girl-group choruses, much of the strength of the boy-group
chorus seems to derive from its appropriation/representation of the semiotic,
maternal elements of language. The difference is that the boy-group chorus never
challenges the lead singer: rather than the egalitarian rivalry of the girl-group dia-
logue, the boy-group portrays a consensual hierarchy.
Secondly, there is the question of the differences that the analysis has estab-
lished between the two voices in the buddy group, and the nature of the relation-
ship between them. Hodge and Kress have argued that there is a necessary ambiv-
alence between the vertical relationships of ‘power’ and horizontal ones of
‘solidarity’, in representations of gender within patriarchy (Hodge and Kress 1988,
pp. 52–68). So, we could argue, the two voices show solidarity in the apparent egali-
tarianism of their ‘Oh boy’ echoes, but we can also find power in the verbal domi-
nance of the singer over the chorus, a power that typically obscures the material
work of the chorus in correcting the singer’s rhythm. We could also find a sem-
blance of ‘solidarity’ in the singer’s address of the desired ‘you’ with children’s
rhythms, especially in the line, ‘A little bit of loving makes everything right’. It is
as if, having represented her as ‘baby’, he then descends to her level to talk to and
please her. His return to adult speech (e.g. with syncopated ‘everything’) is like an
involuntary expression of male desire/power. On the other hand, the ‘power’ that
we have discovered in the chorus’s ability to correct and steady the singer’s rhythm
cannot be understood if we simply see the relationship between the boys in the
group as the solidarity of equals. The invisibility of this material work performed
by the chorus suggests an analogy with that of the mother for the son in the home.
But the other analogy suggested is that of the invisibility of black musicians’ creativ-
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Barbara Bradby86
ity in its appropriation by white rock stars, itself a transformation of the historical
relationship between master and slave.
The influence of black musicians on Buddy Holly has been documented (Laing
1971), and Holly himself acknowledged his debt to Bo Diddley, in covering his song
‘Bo Diddley’ (1955). This song is itself a variation on the ubiquitous nursery rhyme,
‘Hush little baby’, and was reworked in a number of variations by Diddley himself,
including ‘Hey Bo Diddley’ (1957), and ‘Hush Your Mouth’ (1958). Following this
lead, Holly himself also did a variation on the musical basis of the ‘Bo Diddley’
song in his ‘Not Fade Away’ – the second cover emphasising his interest in Diddley,
but also appropriating his rhythms for his own lyrics.
As already mentioned, the rhythm of the chorus’s ‘Dum de dum dum . . . oh
boy’ in the break of ‘Oh Boy!’ is immediately evocative of Bo Diddley’s distinctive
rhythm developed in these and other songs. Something very close to it can be heard
in the long instrumental section that closes Bo Diddley’s original song of that name,
where the basic shuffle becomes in the fadeout:
It can also be heard in Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’, another 1955 release, where a har-
monica intones the rhythm on a monotone (amidst other scoring) in the long instru-
mental break, and (with the guitar) in the fadeout at the end.
15
It should also be noted that the ‘Hey, Bo Diddley’ call/response in the song of that
name is more or less equivalent
16
to a half-time version of the ‘Dum de dum dum’
rhythm (though this song has a faster basic beat than Diddley’s others on the
theme).
Holly’s own cover of ‘Bo Diddley’, and his variation in ‘Not Fade Away’, can
be heard as his own representations of the Bo Diddley sound. In ‘Not Fade Away’,
a thickly scored, rhythm and chorus ‘response’ (which also opens the song), alter-
nates with Holly’s own vocal ‘call’, which is accompanied only by a softer, solo
drum beat. The first bar of this light, drum accompaniment beats out the identical
rhythm to ‘dum de dum dum’ in ‘Oh Boy!’:
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 87
while the second bar of ‘Not Fade Away’s contrasting drum/chorus riff is identical
to the emphatic ‘two-three’ rhythm of the chorus’s ‘Oh boy’ throughout the latter
song:
17
In my own hearing, Holly’s guitar break in ‘Not Fade Away’ combines these two
phrases into something very similar to the complete rhythm of ‘dum de dum dum
. . . oh boy’:
Returning to ‘Oh, Boy!’, the chorus’s use of these ‘Bo Diddley’ rhythms in
conjunction with the ‘imaginary lyrics’, ‘you’re with me oh . . . oh boy’, can then be
heard as Holly’s evocation of Bo Diddley’s steadying response.
18
And if ‘you’re with me’
is an association set-up within the song itself, there is also a (less accessible) external
association with the words ‘Hey, Bo Diddley’, from Diddley’s song of that name.
These two phrases become a ‘call’ and ‘response’, both summoned up by the use
of ‘dum de dum dum’ – syllables conventionally used in conversation to indicate
rhythm, or in the case of a song, when one cannot recall its words. With these
associations in mind, the simplest and most economical evocation of Bo Diddley’s
rhythm becomes the chorus’s steadying enunciation of ‘Oh boy’ on the ‘two-three’
rhythm throughout the song. In other words, the title of the song itself encapsulates
this ‘call’ to, and evocation of the response of, Bo Diddley, which can be heard in
the performance of the song.
If ‘Oh, Boy!’, then, imagines the rhythmic relation between singer and chorus
as that of Buddy Holly to Bo Diddley, this adds a further dimension to the earlier
observations about the potential reference of the song’s key statement to rhythm
itself. The singer’s desire for ‘you’ to be ‘with me’ models the conventional view of
the woman’s place in love as being to keep in time with the man, on the white rock
musician’s need to keep in time with his black master. This, in turn, is represented
rhythmically as the restructuring of adult speech by the strict rhythm of children.
Bo Diddley’s use of children’s rhythms was explicit. His name itself (like ‘Buddy
Holly’) forms a section of binary rhythm, and could be read as formed by the
insertion of the nursery-rhyme, nonsense-word ‘diddle’ into the word ‘boy’. He
reworked nursery rhymes in many of his songs, especially the ‘autobiographical’
ones, as if continually rewriting his narrative of transition from child to adult
(Bradby and Torode 1982). This form was taken over by Holly when he covered ‘Bo
Diddley’, and more generally, as we have seen, in his use of ‘children’s rhythms’.
This reversal, where the child teaches the adult, the black man the white man,
does help to explain how rock represented a space where sexuality was ‘freed’ from
adult and patriarchal constrictions. But a problem remains. If the chorus’s Bo
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Barbara Bradby88
Diddley rhythm in ‘Oh, Boy!’ is heard as a response, we must also ask what it is
responding to. The obvious answer is the phrase ‘Oh boy’, heard literally as a call,
and which first summons the chorus into the song. Holly’s invocation of solidarity
with the black musician here founders on the reality of racism. For a white man
cannot address a black man as ‘boy’ without evoking the traditional call of the
white master to the black slave. Perhaps in the end, Holly’s ‘solidarity’ fails to gloss
over the history of racism in the New World.
The position of the white musician ‘paying tribute’ to his black ‘master’ was
seen from the black musician’s point of view, in Chuck Berry’s autobiographical
film, Hail, hail, rock and roll. Organised around an attempt by white British rock
stars to pay their debt to Berry by arranging a fiftieth birthday concert for him in
the Opera House in St. Louis, the film shows Berry’s sadness that his dream of
breaking down racial barriers with his music was made meaningless by its adoption
as white culture. He has entered the Opera House, the citadel of the slave-owning
classes, but thirty years on, the audience still remains, almost exclusively, white.
However, Chuck Berry has the last laugh, and it is a rhythmic one. Faced with the
white musicians who made millions out of their appropriation of his riffs, returning
humbly and wishing only to ‘jam’ with him as equals, Berry delightsin showing them
that they still can’t play ‘with’ him. In fact, they can’t even get his most basic, most
famous, rhythmic riff ‘right’. Gently, subversively, he shows them how the guitar
introduction to ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ should go. But their imitations sound wooden by
comparison, and it’s not clear whether they even get the point. Berry’s demonstration
points up, as economically as anything, the limitations to ‘solidarity’, and the inad-
equacies of the ‘buddy group’ as a form for overcoming social divisions.
Copyright acknowledgements
‘Oh, Boy!’ words and music by West, Tilghman and Petty 1957 MPL Communications Inc, Peermusic
(UK) Ltd, London. Used by permission.
‘In the Still of the Nite’ words and music by Fred Parris 1956 Mantoglade Music Ltd, London. Used
by permission.
Endnotes
1. ‘In the Still of the Nite’ has been described as 2. Cf. the Mystics’ ‘Hushabye’ (Laurie 3028),
‘one of the greatest rhythm and blues ballads another ‘doo-wop’ hit from 1959, which is
of all time’ by Jay Warner (1992, p. 168), as explicitly in the form of a lullaby, but this time
‘this all-time doo-wop classic’ by Alan Warner sung by the man to the woman.
(1990, p. 127), and as an ‘all time fave oldie’ by 3. ‘Oh, Boy!’ was put out on Brunswick 55035 in
Hansen (1981, p. 87). Written by Fred Parris, the USA on 27 October 1956, and peaked at
lead singer of the Five Satins, it was originally No. 10 in the charts on 2 December. It was
put out on Standard 200 as the B Side to ‘The released in the UK on 22 December that year.
Jones Girl’ in March 1956, and was reissued on It was written by Sunny West, Bill Tilghman
Ember 1005 in June 1956. Later that year, ‘the and Norman Petty. As with Holly’s other
label was revised to read ‘‘(I’ll Remember) In Brunswick releases, the song was actually
the Still of the Nite’’ in order to differentiate it recorded in the name of his band, the Crickets.
from Cole Porter’s standard’ (Warner Although their name suggests soothing back-
1992). Note that the new title also plays on the ground voices, they were, in fact, the instru-
‘nostalgia’ of remembering the standard, as mental band, not the vocal backing group,
well as acting as an advertisement for the song which, on this record, was called ‘the Picks’.
itself in the way pointed to by Adorno 4. This corresponds to the opinion of Dave Laing,
(1978). for instance, in his book on Buddy Holly: ‘the
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Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!) 89
feature which most obviously dates The Crick- second line of a couplet in English children’s
ets’ records is the group of voices which backs verse are quite few and far between, but see
Holly on all of them. The harmonies are those for instance ‘I see the moon and the moon
of barber-shop quartets, and to the ’70s ear the sees me, God bless the moon, and God bless
contrast between the raw energy of Holly’s me’ (Opie and Opie 1951, p. 312), or ‘There
delivery and the WASP-ish tones of the vocal was a mayd that eate an apple, When she
backing can be distracting.’ (Laing 1971, p. 50) eate two, she eat a couple’ (Ibid., p. 311).
5. Schwenger (1979) provides an illuminating However, neither of these combines the
discussion of the ‘buddy movie’ as a construc- assonance in the second line with the greater
tion of male–male relationships, using the repetitive assonance in the first that is found
example of Deliverance. I am grateful to Brian in Holly’s verse (i.e. a (4 +4) +(4 +4)
Torode for pointing out to me the Eagles’ epi- structure in Brailoiu’s terms). To find this
tomising of the buddy-group ideology of we have to look for parallels among highly
‘independence from women’ in their perform- repetitive action rhymes, such as ‘Fly away
ance of the lines, ‘And I found out a long time Peter, fly away Paul, Come back Peter, come
ago / What a woman can do to your soul / back Paul’, or ‘Here sit the little chickens,
Ah but she can’t take you any way / You don’t here they run in, Chin chopper, chin chop-
already know how to go’ (from ‘Peaceful Easy per, chin chopper, chin’ (Opie and Opie 1951,
Feeling’). p. 279). Far more usual is the (4 +4) +8
6. The settings of the two songs make this clear: structure, where an initial repetition leads
‘In the Still of the Nite’ is set ‘before dawn’, away to difference in the second line.
while ‘Oh, Boy!’ is set at dusk (‘Stars appear 11. This symmetrical partitioning may seem
and the shadows are falling’). strange in the case of ‘This old man . . .’ since
7. A brief explanation of the characters used for there is no obvious consonance between the
dividing sections of rhythm from each other is two halves of the line. But as soon as we
given below in the text. A full explanation is bring melody into the analysis, then it is clear
contained in Brailoiu’s article. that the usual tune produces such a conson-
8. This last example is of the second broad type ance, by setting both halves of the line to an
outlined by Brailoiu, in that it combines the identical ‘sol-mi-sol’ pattern.
short unit of duration with pairs of units of 12. The metaphor of rhythm for sexuality and,
double the length, i.e. crotchets. The crotchet more generally, for harmony in relationships
pairs form rhymes and are varied according is, of course, widespread in popular music. In
to the same system as the quaver pairs, how- disco music and the subsequent plethora of
ever. ‘dance’ forms, it has taken on new importance.
9. Figure 3 represents my own attempt to tran- The Rolling Stones’ ‘Baby, baby, baby you’re
scribe onto paper what I hear in the song. out of time’ is one, very literal example from
Like all transcriptions, therefore, its apparent the rock era.
objectivity masks a subjective element. I have 13. I have ‘partitioned’ the first line in three as
also consciously, and no doubt uncon- I hear an assonance between ‘little’ and ‘bit
sciously, simplified some of the variations a’, and between the ‘l’s of ‘little’ and of ‘lov-
between verses, in the interests of producing in’’. In ‘children’s rhythms’, the up-beat at
a representation of the song’s rhythms that the beginning of the line would generally
can be viewed on a single page. I am also be matched by a symmetrical up-beat at the
aware that I have not even aspired to com- beginning of the following line: alternatively
plete accuracy in registering the exact antici- it could be ‘compensated’ by a rest of equiv-
pation of each beat by Holly’s voice. How- alent value in the empty beat at the end of
ever, I believe that this last aspect escapes the line. Holly’s syncopation of the first syl-
purely musical notation, since part of the lable of ‘e - verything’ plays on this ambi-
effect is achieved by the clipped pronunci- guity of expectations. The syllable occupies
ation of the first or last consonant of a word the last beat of the line as if it were an unac-
or syllable, slightly separating it from the cented syllable attached to the beginning of
vowel sound that succeeds or precedes it. I the next line. Whereas, in fact, it turns out
am very grateful to Allan Moore for his help to be accented, and so ‘misplaced’ from
and advice on the transcriptions. Responsi- where it belongs, on the first beat of the next
bility for their shortcomings is my own. line. The Opies’ orally collected versions of
10. I have chosen to ignore the repetition of ‘Ring a ring a roses’ demonstrate this point.
‘you’ in the second line, which hints at a Most versions that start with the up-beat on
kind of assonance between the two halves of the first line continue with the up-beat onto
the line. Examples of such assonance in the the second line, as:
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Barbara Bradby90
‘Not Fade Away’ himself, rather than leaving
the basic track for the Picks to finish off.
18. The rhythms of ‘dum de dum dum . . . oh
boy’ are close to a number of rhythmic
phrases in Holly’s songs from this period.
‘You’re gonna say you’ll . . . miss me’ – the
main phrase of the lead vocal in ‘I’m Gonna
Love You Too’, repeated eighteen times
(Opie and Opie 1985, p. 222) across the song – is very close to the whole
phrase in ‘Oh, Boy!’, and shares the distinc-
However, one version, dating from 1840, has a
tive second/third beat emphasis in the
compensatory rest at the end of the first line:
second bar. The words ‘rave on’ from the
song of that name also share this distinctive
second/third beat accentuation on their first
occurrence in the verses. (The ‘cra-zy feelin’
continuation of this phrase uses the rhythm
of ‘dum de dum dum’, so representing the
inversion, ‘ . . . oh boy . . . dum de dum
dum’.) The guitar introduction to ‘Heartbeat’
(ibid., p. 153). is close to the first bar of ‘dum de dum
dum’ (with the addition of the distinctive
14. Striking examples of chorus parts that come
syncopated quaver on beat one-and-a-half). It
into conflict with the desires of the lead
seems worth pointing out that the second/
singer can be found in The Cookies’ ‘Don’t
third beat sequence that is so distinctive of
Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby)’, in The
Bo Diddley and of Holly’s echoes of him is
Shirelles’ ‘Foolish Little Girl’, and in The
also utterly distinctive of the Afro-Cuban
Chiffons’ ‘Sweet Talkin’ Guy’. See Bradby
clave rhythm that underlies the son that was
(1990) for analyses of these and other
popular during the 1950s and is said by
examples.
Cubans to be the basis of salsa and other
15. The whole rhythm occurs again very clearly in
subsequent forms:
‘Hush Your Mouth’, but as this was not
released on record until 1958 it is not clear
whether Holly himself would have heard it
before recording ‘Oh, Boy!’.
16. As with many of the repeated riffs here tran- The first bar of this clave rhythm is, of course,
scribed, slight variations are evident in the also quite close to ‘dum de dum dum’ (one
rhythm as it is repeated throughout the song. could say that the clave syncopates the ‘chil-
In this case, there is sometimes a slight antici- dren’s rhythm’ by omitting the second ‘dum’).
pation of the beat on the second syllable of Holly’s guitar break in ‘Not Fade Away’ leans
Did-dley, or a pattern that might be better con- towards this syncopation, as does the introduc-
strued as its lengthening into the three-syllable tion to ‘Heartbeat’, but it can be heard more
‘Did-duh-ley’. explicitly in the chorus’s enunciation (together
17. At one level, these similarities between the with lead vocal) of ‘Rave on, it’s a’, in ‘Rave
parts of the chorus in ‘Oh, Boy!’ and ‘Not Fade On’, and in the lead vocal’s words ‘miss, when
Away’ are unsurprising, since the two songs my’ from ‘Heartbeat’. I have not been able to
were recorded around the same time, and find any analysis of what would seem to be an
were released as A and B sides of the same important cross-cultural connection, though
single (Beecher, n.d.). Beecher also informs us Warner (1990, p. 39) does refer to Bo Diddley’s
that Holly overdubbed the backing vocals in ‘rocking rumba rhythms’.
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