Teen Idols

Back in the '50s, rock 'n' roll was a maelstrom of rebel-yellin' subversion, never mind the fact that it was being made primarily by African-American artists. If the establishment — via mainstream radio and TV — was going to embrace the troubadours of the teen revolution, they needed to be a lot less threatening than Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Ike Turner. So began the age of the (mostly white) teen idols, with the squeaky-clean Ricky Nelson ("Poor Little Fool") and the great Elvis Presley ("Heartbreak Hotel") laying the foundations for British heartthrobs Cliff Richard and Adam Faith. Tommy Steele goes neanderthal among the American teen idols in Next Steps.

In the U.S., television was a rich mother lode of teen idols. In addition to the aforementioned Ricky Nelson, former Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeer Johnny Crawford had a successful, if brief, career in the music business, scoring a hit in 1962 with "Cindy's Birthday", while Shelley "Mary Stone" Fabares of The Donna Reed Show had multiple hits (including "Johnny Angel"). Closer to home, Tommy Steele, a cheeky chappie who made the transition from skiffle to rock 'n' roll after hearing a Buddy Holly song on the radio, announced himself as the U.K.'s first teen idol on "Rock With the Caveman". A plucky Scot, a famous dad and a former milkman make up the British lobby of teen idols in Deep Cuts.

Lulu — real name Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie — shot to fame as a teenager in 1964 with her cover of the Isley Brothers "Shout", packing a powerful voice full o' Glaswegian soul, and she was later romantically linked (for publicity purposes only) to Davy Jones from the Monkees. Marty Wilde — father of Kim, who had a hit in the '80s with "Kids In America" — scored with a cover of Richie Valens' "Donna" in 1959, and made regular appearances on TV show the Six-Five Special, the BBC's first-ever rock 'n' roll programme, on which Craig Douglas ("Only Sixteen") got his big break.

Many of the earliest examples of rock 'n' roll — the ones most closely tied to R&B — were generally sung by black artists. Strange as it may seem at the comparatively enlightened turn of the century, this was not always warmly embraced in America's heartland, or even in its suburbs. Believe it or not, Elvis Presley, was excluded from some stations' playlists until it was determined that he was white. Nature abhors a vacuum, so a legion of squeaky-clean (and uniformly Caucasian) "teen idols" sprang up, all of whom quickly found counterparts in the U.K. As rock history has been written and revised, many of these teen idols were rejected by rock critics as being necessarily inferior to their supposedly more authentic black counterparts. Absent the politically charged rhetoric, many of them hold up quite well indeed. You be the judge.