Mama Cass Elliot: What Does An Icon Represent?

When I was little, like many people, my mum and I would sing in the car. We loved to sing vintage hits – Motown, Scott Walker, The Supremes; and among our favourites, The Mamas and The Papas. Their best of is full of belters and has a distinctive 60s sound that’s guaranteed to improve a sour mood. It’s the powerhouse voice of Mama Cass Elliot that elevates the group, reaching out over harmonies to push the group out of folk and into pop territory, making their covers distinctive and their original songs more than the simple lyrics. She is versatile enough to sit with both the heavy instrumentation of ‘Words of Love’ and the heartbreak pop-ballad ‘I Call Your Name’. She packs the personality in ‘Dancing in the Streets’, but blends effortlessly with the harmonies in the group’s breakout hit ‘California Dreamin’’. It’s Cass’ voice that rings out, again and again, whatever the tone of the song, and she’s the reason that the band remains a true delight all these decades later.

Mama Cass was a trailblazer – a fat woman in entertainment, a single mother, a career girl – but it’s not what she was in her life so much as what she represented to her audience that’s interesting to me. She moved in circles as varied as New York intellectuals, LA hippies, Vegas glamour, and was the ultimate society hostess of the 60s Laurel Canyon scene, but it was in her capacity as a TV show guest and hostess that she entered the living rooms of ordinary Americans. The women she reached may have been interested in the hippy culture she came up in as bright-eyed, unmarried girls, but their situation in life wasn’t actually so very different from the 50s mothers the counter culture had rebelled against. For most girls who’d bought 6” singles by hip artists of the 60s, that was the extent of their hippy life. Most teens didn’t travel to Haight-Ashbury or take drugs, and although they might have owned a dress that looked Woodstock or some boots that looked London, most of these girls would have married and entered the at-home workforce serving the ordinary men and growing child population of America. It’s these women Cass appealed to – and that’s what makes her star persona particularly interesting.

“Cass’ solo career was a bit odd, with her music veering from bluegrass to soul tunes to gospel. She never seemed to land on a consistent style, even for a single album.”* To my mind, it’s this very versatility that made her a star for the masses: she wasn’t associated with any particular style which went in or out of fashion, and instead it was her voice and her personality that audiences remembered. She wasn’t fashionable at all, and so it wasn’t ever unfashionable to like her – for a young woman who had once been image-conscious, but for whom youthful fashion was now out of reach, this was a selling point. Her voice pitched lower than many female singers, ideal for singing along softly whilst you cook or clean, and she looked and dressed different to the women of variety show television: Cher, Dolly, Karen Carpenter, but she remained sexy and funny and glamorous. When interviewed by these same shows that this humour and glamour came out, somehow – even when she was talking about things the ordinary housewife no doubt worried about like not wanting to be seen with her curlers in, worrying about budgets, and dieting. Her songs would have been just as resonant as her words with this audience, whether it’s ‘Don’t Let The Good Life Pass You By’ re-appropriating the hippie culture for commercial America, discussing the benefits of being neighbourly and the simple, free moments of in life – particularly motherhood – like “watch[ing] a child praying”, or growing to love the right man in ‘It’s Getting Better’ – surely an anthem for the woman whose role was housework. Her lovesongs sound like they’re discussing female friendship, and are peppered with optimism, simple emotions, and the idea that it’s OK not to look like all those women on the television or not be totally happy with where your life is, but her image suggested that you could still aim for what the glamour models and actresses embodied with the right clothes or some well-placed costume jewellery. Essentially, Mama Cass’ star persona was perfectly pitched at the suburban woman, and it was these women who made her music and her image successful.

Every icon represents something, and it’s this idea that the culture buys into or doesn’t. Mama Cass’ low-level yet constant success shows that women want songs that reflect their life with rose-tinted glasses, that celebrities don’t have to be great, unreachable behemoths, and sometimes trailblazers look just like you, they might even be powered by your 7$ purchase. Cass showed women ambitions that they recognised – self-acceptance, being loved by the right man, living a simple and good life – and sang about it with a beautiful voice. When we look at Mama Cass, I don’t want us to see a tragic early death or the beauty standards that continue to pervade our culture – I want to see how the emotions and ambitions of ordinary Americans in the 1960s and 70s were reflected in contemporary culture.

* From ‘You Must Remember This’ episode 157, written and narrated by Lexi Pandell

On This Topic:

• The podcast episode that originally inspired this post.
• One of my favourite authors and her amazing LA prose.
• This insane Scooby Doo conclusion.

To-Do:

• Write about the Golden Gate bridge for PhD.
• Make a date to meet a friend. Srsly girl, leave the house.
• Finish paper for Brontë Soc!!!!

Today’s Culture:

• Popjustice and their impeccable taste
• The Plath Society fan hub – it’s where I drop things that don’t quite fit into our newsletter
• Fox films on Disney Plus. It’s where I’m catching up on teen movies I ought to have seen already