Beachboys

The argument that the Beach Boys belong in the same conversation as the Americana and folk-roots lineage is not an obvious one. The California surf, the sunshine harmonics, the car songs — the surface markers put them somewhere else, in a genre space that doesn't overlap in obvious ways with the country, folk, and roots music this site covers.

But the argument is worth making, because the serious portion of the Beach Boys' catalog and the serious portion of the American folk-roots lineage share a set of preoccupations that have more in common than the surface suggests.

The folk element in the Beach Boys

The Beach Boys' vocal approach was shaped by close-harmony traditions that run directly back to American gospel and folk. The stacked harmonies, the blend, the careful voice-leading — these are techniques that derive from the same sources that produced the country close-harmony groups and the Everly Brothers and the folk revival groups of the early 1960s.

Brian Wilson was working within these traditions even when the surface material was about cars and surfboards. The harmonic sophistication of Pet Sounds (1966) comes from someone who had spent years absorbing vocal harmony practice. The Four Freshmen influence that Wilson has acknowledged openly is a bridge between the vocal jazz tradition and the pop tradition.

What Pet Sounds meant in retrospect

Pet Sounds was received in the United States as a commercial disappointment relative to the previous work. Its critical rehabilitation is so complete now that it's difficult to reconstruct the original reception. The album that is now treated as one of the defining documents of popular music in the twentieth century was, at the time, something that confused people.

The folk and roots music tradition has its own version of this pattern — records that were out of step with their moment and found their audience later. The tradition of artists making records that their immediate audience wasn't ready for is one of the constants in the history of American music.

The California pastoral

There is a pastoral impulse in the Beach Boys' music that connects to the same impulse in American folk and country. The idealized California landscape in the early recordings is a cousin of the idealized rural south and Appalachian landscape in country music. Both are constructions — fantasies of place that serve emotional functions distinct from geographic description.

When the pastoral impulse in Wilson's music turned darker and more complex in the mid-1960s, it was moving in the same direction that the folk and country traditions had always moved when their practitioners went deep: toward ambivalence, toward loss, toward a more complicated relationship with the places and times being invoked.

Related: Guides — American Roots Music Primer.