at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on popular music, technological mediation, and reception, and has appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Music and the Moving Image.
Hollenbach applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom, and reported the following:
The following excerpt comes from page 99, which is located near the conclusion of Chapter 3: Finding “the Voice” Organized Fandom as Political Platform.Visit Katie Beisel Hollenbach's website.This celebration of international fan relationships along with the ideas Sinatra’s fans expressed regarding equity and politics in the United States suddenly make media portrayals of teenage girls, such as Swooner Crooner, seem out of touch. While mass media coverage of Sinatra usually chose to focus on those fans who participated in mob hysteria at his live performances – and it is true that these mob occurrences did happen sometimes – the reality of most Sinatra fans was one of more nuanced fandom. Yes, these girls adored Sinatra, but the communities they created around this adoration were equally valuable to them as spaces where they could develop their personal ideas and values as American citizens living during World War II. In many ways, these fan communities helped to shape the identities of American teenage girls as they prepared to enter postwar adulthood.Ford Madox Ford must have been on to something, as page 99 of The Business of Bobbysoxers includes a surprisingly thorough overview of the main themes and arguments of the book as a whole. The book aims to provide a new entrypoint into the history of American popular culture during World War II and one of the biggest icons in popular music, Frank Sinatra, by highlighting the wartime perspectives of his young and largely female fans, known as “bobbysoxers.” The book draws its source material primarily from texts made by American teenage girls who participated in Frank Sinatra fan clubs during the 1940s. These materials mainly include fan correspondence and fan club journals, which were written, produced, and distributed entirely by the teenage members of the clubs. These materials reveal that contrary to stereotypes that surrounded the bobbysoxers in American media - which suggested they were hysterical, frivolous, and blissfully disconnected from the realities of the war effort - these girls in fact used their mutual love of Sinatra to build communities in which they could discuss current issues such as the war, civil rights, and patriotism, as well as share creative contributions such as poetry, illustrations, essays, and reviews that shed light on their relationships with popular culture.
Similarly, wartime media representations of Frank Sinatra as nothing more than a scrawny, sentimental idol of American girls only scraped the surface of Sinatra’s celebrity identity and influence.
The values teenage fans of Sinatra demonstrated in their fan-made materials stemmed in part from Sinatra’s own views during the war, particularly surrounding racial and religious tolerance. Like his young fans, Sinatra was heavily scrutinized during the war in American media for reasons including his lack of military service and vulnerable persona in an era when perceptions of male strength was viewed as an important component in how the U.S. presented itself to the rest of the world. As page 99 suggests though, Sinatra was not only driving the bobbysoxers to swoon, he was also driving them to discuss important issues and share their personal desires and aspirations with their peers.
--Marshal Zeringue
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