The 60s are plenty weird, but it's been a while since we had a song that really came at me out of left field. Fortunately, for people who like to be kept on their toes, this week's track will do just that, with its mix of throwback vibes and (at least implicitly) saucy lyrics.
Shotgun Wedding - Roy C (peaked at Number 6)
This one feels like a novelty track. I mean, it starts with some very loud stock ricochet sounds, proper Looney Tunes cartoon sound effect stuff, all of it over a saxophone rendition of Here Comes the Bride. It's an incredibly literal interpretation of the title, and the shotgun noises and Lohengrin interpolations continue throughout, sometimes to kind of comical effect. But aside from that, the song does actually take itself fairly seriously, eschewing straight-up funny or satirical lyrics in favour of something a bit more genuine, all of it set over a chugging blues groove that wouldn't have been out of place in 1958.
The only thing that dates this to the 60s is the slightly more risqué lyrical material, which perhaps reflect changing sexual mores, or at least a growing de-stigmatisation of casual and/or pre-marital sex. Because this is very much a song about getting a girl pregnant and then being forced to marry her, and it's a story told without any sense of judgement, or really of remorse on Roy's part. Instead, we just get a description of the wedding, where people were standing all around / At a shotgun wedding here in this town, / And I'm the victim, oh yeah / Of a shotgun wedding 'cause your father got a gun / And there ain't no place to run. Roy sees himself as a victim, not least because he now needs to get a job to support his new wife and child. But there's no sense of him regretting it, beyond these practical concerns. And, like, I bet people were actually making songs like this back in the 1950s. But I just can't imagine one making it into the charts in the same way. Come 1966 though? Shotgun weddings for everyone, why the heck not?
I have little else to say here about this song, but I did dig up a fact about Roy C, which is that he was later also the producer for a high school group called the Honey Drippers, who made a song called Impeach the President in 1973, released after the Watergate scandal, calling for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. It's a smooth bit of funk, but notably, it's also one of the more sampled tracks in hip hop. Which in turn means that Roy C has a foot in old-school rock and roll R&B, but also in funk and even in hip hop. Quite the career, for somebody I'd never heard of.
You don't get songs about shotgun weddings nowadays, do you? Heck, do you get shotgun weddings themselves? It's still a cultural concept that we have - I knew what one was, for example - but I genuinely don't think it's something that happens in the West so much anymore, or at least not so much that you'd bother making a song about it. And I suspect that even in the 60s, it was potentially on its way out, as a concept. Still, it gets one last retro-sounding hurrah here. And it's fine, if a little old-fashioned. The cartoon shotgun sounds are a bizarre touch and arguably a little too much. But the saxophone Lohengrin is quite charming to me, and Roy gives it his best, so it's hard to be too mad about this one.
Favourite song of the scandalously pre-marital bunch: Shotgun Wedding
