Teen Idols

If rock 'n' roll weren't subversive enough, the fact that it was being made primarily by black artists was a virtual powder keg. If Top 40 radio, let alone television, was going to embrace rock artists, they had to be a lot less threatening than Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Ike Turner. Enter the (mostly white) teen idols. The squeaky-clean Ricky Nelson had unparalleled access to teens, appearing weekly on television; "Teenage Idol" summarized his plight.

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. Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, from the 77 Sunset Strip detective show, turned his on-screen behavior into a hit with "Kookie Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)." And Paul Petersen, who played Jeff Stone on The Donna Reed Show, hit with "She Can't Find Her Keys."

Two female television heartthrobs, Annette Funicello of The Mickey Mouse Club and Shelley "Mary Stone" Fabares of The Donna Reed Show, had multiple hits (including "O Dio Mio" and "The Things We Did Last Summer," respectively). Dion's "The Wanderer" served as the epitome of the swaggering sound much beloved among East Coast wise guys. And James Darren's ode to "Gidget" nicely mirrors his on-screen role as Moondoggie in the stylish 1959 Sandra Dee beach movie.

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 suburbia. Even Elvis 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. 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.