FEATURE SONG: ABIGAIL BEECHER by FREDDY (BOOM BOOM) CANNON

My fellow baby boomers, is it just me, or was this song a harbinger of things to come, and we didn’t even know it? I mean, think about how frequently these days we hear of female teachers who massively overstep their professional bounds and have ‘affairs’ (that’s putting it politely!) with their young male students. How could such a thing come to pass? Well, it just so happens that I have my own (totally tongue-in-cheek, naturally) theory.

Think about the photos you’ve seen of some of these offending teachers. I can think of at least three who all looked to be in their mid-to-late twenties, all had long sleek hair, all looked appealing in a reality TV cookie-cutter blonde sort of way. Just the very thing an adolescent boy in the throes of a hormonal high tide would find distracting at the very least. Now think about the teachers you remember from your own high school days. Uh-huh. Even the younger female teachers looked middle-aged back then. It was the hair and glasses and styles. You could probably give those 1950s and 60s teachers a 21st Century makeover, and they might even look…dare I say it…hot? Well, maybe so, but that’s not my main point. What I'm saying is, here we have a song about a younger teacher in the 1960s, who roars into the faculty parking lot in a Jag, wears a sloppy sweater (what??) and a pony tail (seriously??) to teach in, and who makes the local policeman blanch. She can teach the required subject all right, but she throws in a couple of popular teen dance crazes, too. That’s not any teacher I ever saw. Furthermore, it seems that between classes, Ms Beecher is out in the halls playing guitar in sunglasses instead of monitoring student activity. And she showed up at a PTA meeting with a red surfboard! Well, no wonder the kids all dug her, but you have to think that it’s just a matter of time before she…oh let’s not even contemplate going there. It’s obvious that no one put a stop to this kind of thing, and now we are reaping the results today. For the most part, I like to stick up for vintage oldies. I don’t think of rock and roll as a social or moral evil. But there’s always that one exception







Video by YT member JBauder1948
Photo from http://ocw.mit.edu

FEATURE SONG: PATTY BABY by FREDDY (Boom Boom) CANNON

It’s human nature I’m sure, but when we Baby Boomers were young, and we’d hear a song that mentioned a person by name, we would wonder if the person was real; if the lyrics were truly autobiographical. You don’t think so? Think about it, what bobby-soxer didn’t wonder if Annette really had a tall boyfriend named Paul, or if poor Elvis really got two-timed by a black-haired chick named Marie? You're right, maybe it was just the gals who wondered about things like that. Whatev'. Our feature song today is one I wanted to pay tribute to simply because it’s a great little song, and I always really liked it. But when I looked it up, I discovered that it, too, is about a real person.

The “Patty” in the song is one of the famous American Bandstand regulars from the early days, Pat Molittieri. I logged a lot of hours watching Bandstand, so all the old names are practically as familiar to me as my own high school classmates. As the years roll on, some of the Bandstand Committee members have begun to “graduate” in a different sense, but I was shocked to learn that Pat passed away at such a young age. Still, she is remembered as part of rock and roll history, the Philly chapter. The Freddy Cannon lyrics goes on to include all the other dancin’ “Pattys” all over the country, so we girls can all say we owned a little piece of this tune, in spirit. So, let’s take a moment to remember a great song, a great Philly dancer, and the days when we were young. Ya baby!

Freddy Cannon – “PATTY BABY” 1963