Video from two “Beach Party” films from the 1960s feature a teen-aged Stevie Wonder, long before he became the music industry’s “blind seer apocalyptically exposing America’s injustices.” We analyze these videos, which suggest that Wonder’s appearance was part of the films’ problematic racial-performance politics.
In 1964, Stevland Hardaway Judkins still lived up to the “Little” prefix to the “Stevie Wonder” title Motown label-head Berry Gordy had given him when he signed with the black-owned label in Detroit in 1962 at the age of twelve. Little Stevie Wonder was a curiosity at first—a “special guest” on the Motown barnstorming tours as the label built its artist roster and national imprint, trading artists’ performances for radio airplay. The machinations worked: Within a decade, Gordy’s label would become the largest black-owned business in the nation.
But two years into his career, Little Stevie’s label was still trying to triangulate a fit for the talented, blind teen, who had had a #1 hit with “Fingertips” but was more of a novelty than an artist with a cohesive brand like the label’s other acts The Supremes and The Miracles. They’d attempted relatively unsuccessfully to connect him to jazz with The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, which failed to chart. Tribute to Uncle Ray, inspired by on-the-nose connections to fellow blind “genius” Ray Charles similarly failed to recapture “Fingertips’s” initial success.
It was another strategy—connecting the gangly Wonder to the youth culture that had breathed life and sound into the 1950s narratives of boring domestic stability—that we want to delve more deeply into today. Teenagers wanted to dance, cavorting and making spaces for themselves, whether in the backseat of a car parked at Makeout Point or on a beach where the exotic and primitive could become accoutrements to a cool party. After the emergent genre of the documentary-style surf film (popularized by The Endless Summer(1966) and explored previously by me in 2012’s Identity and Myth in Sports Documentaries) came the Beach Party films, where the clothes were smaller, the skin was tanner, and the white kids could become transgressive tourists free from their nonexistent parents. The only adults that appeared in these films were the villains of these movies, such as Professor Robert Orville Sutwell, the first film’s adult wet blanket, who attempts to study the “wild mating habits” of the exotic breeding ground of the So Cal beach.
“It’s what happens when 10,000 kids meet on 5,000 Beach Blankets!” the poster for Beach Party, the first of a dozen films released between 1963 and 1967 suggested. By the following year, Muscle Beach Party was even less subtle: “When 10,000 biceps go around 5,000 bikinis, you know what’s going to happen!” Indeed, you do.
The racial implications of this should not be lost on us: The beach, with its grass skirts and ‘nativizing’ ground, was a place for white teens to act out aberrant sexual liberation fantasy. This allowed them to make a kind of purchase on their proximity to the exotic and spatial distance from white norms. These films allowed for what RL Rutsky calls “a rather disturbing exoticism in which all Third World cultures tend to be seen as similarly wild, irresponsible, sexual, and even ‘primitive.’” If the beach was merely a white space, it would not be able to do the raced signifyin(g), becoming the space for white teens to act out racial fantasy, a Sixties-era follow-up to the previous decades’ Slumming excursions to Harlem’s Cotton Club and elsewhere. “This appeal is…linked to the allure of non-Western cultures,” Rutsky continues, “Appropriated and submerged within the white, bourgeois milieu of the beach, these ‘other’ elements are…crucial to the films’ appeal.”
Wonder’s invite to the beach (part of his continued entrée into white pop culture) came at the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello-starring Muscle Beach Party (1964) where the still-thirteen-year-old Wonder performs backed by surf guitarist Dick Dale and his band, the Del-Tones. “Now children of the surf, do you think there are seven wonders of the world?” an exotically-masked performer asks a crowd of surf resort guests. “Well now here’s the eighth!” This mimicked much of the Motown advertising and promotional model around Wonder, but in the beach’s exoticized context, it takes on a more concerning valence.
As Wonder pulls out his harp, the all-white beach crowd jump up onto tables dancing along, before engaging in call-and-response “Hallelu” chants drawn directly out of the black church vernacular, seemingly learning the practice in real time. The camera focuses on—where else?!—the midsections and rears of the dancers’ bodies, suggesting a connection to the kinds of aberrant, sexualized dance practice and that Elvis Presley had set off the nation’s cultural alarms with the previous decade. Wonder’s song, “Happy Street,” was reprised in the end credits.
He would also appear in Bikini Beach (1964) later that year, performing at a key concluding moment in the film when older white elites join the rebellious, sex-crazed, watusi-dancing beach teens. “That certainly isn’t the Bunny Hop they’re doing,” one older woman muses to a friend during his performance. Together, the performances paint Wonder as a welcoming-party of sorts, inviting white audiences to dance to black music. This translational role—long before he would come to be known as the “Blind Prophet of Soul”—similarly welcomes white audiences to non-white practice, making sure to draw connections to the hyper-sexed setting.
Wonder and Motown would attempt to capitalize on these performances with a full album, Stevie at the Beach, that featured the teenager singing somber white surf anthems. It failed to make a major dent, though: Divorced of the beach party space made for white listeners, it just wasn’t as fun, apparently.
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