Did Sha Na Na 'Invent' the 50's ?

[HoosierDaddy]

I just skimmed over the link at the top of this thread...concerning Columbia College.
It seems to me that the '50s era is attempting to be dissected by those who were not teenagers or pre-teens of that time period. There was a big differece in perspective back then. BTW..Performers wore the satin sports jackets. The pespective of my parents concerning the '50s of McCarthy...bomb shelters..and serious stuff...didn't enter our world. Instead of concern about.."Drop and roll"...we would rather "Rock n' Roll". Prob the biggest downers was when Buddy Holly and JFK died...until "Nam"....
HD

 

[Creeping Past]

Just to say that the 1950s were happening all over again in a musical way throughout the 1960s various parts of the world.

The Fleetwood Mac b-side credited to Earl Vince and the Valiants' "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight" appeared early 1969. This was an ironic rockin' homage to the violence inside and outside ballrooms and cinemas often associated with the early days of rock 'n' roll in the mid-50s in Britain.

In the mid to late-60s, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band re-imagined the less rocky and more showbiz end of the rock 'n' roll era.

If you want to go even further back, there's an argument to be had about whether Bobby 'Boris' Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers started the 1950s nostalgia boom in 1962, with "Monster Mash".

 

[HoosierDaddy]

It does seem a lot of people envision how people looked in the 50s as being more like this (Set in the 50s, filmed/taken long after):

The only one not dressed in authentic '50s attire in this photo is Olivia Newton John..IMHO. I remember many of my friends of that time period as looking just like this...hair and all. Kids from 13-15 to early 20s+ years old. T shirt..leather jacket..jeans rolled...engineer boots...long dresses..skirts...even the shorts. Hey...it's true!

 

[reetpleat]

the more I think about it, I would have to speculate that the authors of this paper, have a certain bias. obviously, they are a bunch of egg heads (excuse me, intellectuals) so perhaps it would be natural for them to want to hold up the intellectual beatnik as the rebel icon of the real fifties, while suggesting that the hood was not.

But in reality, just as the bad boys today, they were mytholiged, and the women loved them.

These authors probably got their head dunked inteh toilet one too many times in high school. But it may be true that Sha na na was on the forefront of a fifties revival that somwhat set the tone and iconography of later nostalgia. But it isn't as if coon skin caps, hoods with greasy hair and bobby soxers and poodle skirts were unheard of inventions of sha na na.