Born to Take the Highway: Women, the Automobile, and Rock ‘n’ Roll

In a Washington Post feature article from a few years back, popular music critic J. Freedom du Lac laments the death of the car song. Du Lac attributes the demise of the car song—a musical phenomenon that peaked in popularity during the 1950s and 1960s—to the current crop of automobiles. He contends that the quiet, safe, economical, and eco-friendly cars of today provide little inspiration for music about cars. While he acknowledges that contemporary music often references the automobile, as du Lac remarks, “they aren’t actually car songs at all.” The classic car song to which du Lac refers— and to which music journalists and scholars most often address—is that intertwined with the automotive culture of the post-World War II era. The jet-inspired automobiles of the 1950s and the noisy and powerful muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s, writes du Lac, were “objects of lust, symbols of liberation and power, and the center of the youth movement’s sexual universe.” These big, loud, and powerful automobiles were an integral component of teenage culture and inspired the music of a generation. As Jack DeWitt, in “Cars and Culture,” suggests, the automobile’s influence on popular music was evident not only in the names of fledgling singing groups (Vettes, Deuce Coupes), but also in the profusion of auto-themed songs about favorite cars (GTO, Barracuda), car engines (Chevy 409, Rocket 88), car parts (Four in the Floor, Stick Shift), and highways (Route 66, Thunder Road) (38). In addition, cars—as objects of desire, devotion, and obsession—were often linked through song with women (Maybellene, Mustang Sally), or given feminine personas (Betsy, She’s My Chevy). As du Lac writes, automobiles—in song and on the road—were not only good for getting girls, but were also “desirable girls themselves.” The decades following the Second World War produced two exclusive male provinces— American car culture and rock ‘n’ roll—which serendipitously and successfully combined into a plethora of music about the automobile. The car song came to prominence at a time when men were in the driver’s seat of both the automotive and recording industries. The car song was produced and marketed by men for the consumption of the young white male driver. Whether expressed through the “country tinged” rhythm and blues backbeat style of Chuck Berry (Garofalo 99), the lush multi-part harmonies of the Beach Boys, or the rough working-class vocals and simple guitar riffs of Bruce Springsteen, the intention of the car song