England Meets Jamaica’s Lollipop Girl

Abstract

Black Jamaican singer Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” was one of the first global pop hits with origins in Jamaican pop music. British commentators caricatured Small’s Jamaican background while construing her as the ideal ambassador to bring Jamaican pop to white British audiences. This chapter listens to Millie Small’s voice in this context. Despite attempts to diminish her accent, Small’s distinctive voice proved difficult to discipline and its reception reveals how ideas about sonic femininity collide with racist anxiety. The chapter closely attends to the way she sings “My Boy Lollipop,” and the way that Black and white audiences responded to her voice. It then discusses her performance on the iconic Around the Beatles TV special, which allows us to hear her voice in the context of competing discourses of modernity. The chapter concludes by reflecting on one of Small’s later recordings—the antiracist anthem “Enoch Power.”