It Was 50 Years Ago Today: The Seekers Hit #1 With “Georgy Girl”
February 21, 1967
“Georgy Girl” by The Seekers
#1 on the Cashbox Top 100, February 18-24, 1967
The 1966 British film Georgy Girl, based on the novel of the same name by Margaret Forster, has some elements of comedy but is a rather melancholic movie at heart.
Lynn Redgrave stars as an overlooked, somewhat unattractive young woman lacking self-confidence. She struggles to avoid the unwanted amorous overtures of her father’s boss, a much older man played by James Mason.
Charlotte Rampling plays Georgy’s carefree roommate — though careless is more like it — who becomes pregnant out of wedlock and essentially abandons the baby to Georgy’s care.
Georgy at first carries on a relationship with her roommate’s boyfriend (played by Alan Bates) but loses interest when he proves himself an apathetic father.
The film ends like a traditional romantic comedy, with Georgy married, raising a baby, and rich, yet it’s ultimately a sad conclusion. Her husband is the creepy boss, the baby is not hers, and the money is merely a means to raise the child.
Surely the theme song to this movie evoked Georgy’s difficult decision and dead-end future? Of course not — it’s the relentlessly chipper folk-pop earworm by the Seekers that’s been lodged in your head since reading this article’s headline, with its whistling intro and a melody that bounces around the scales like a ping-pong ball.
That melody was penned by Tom Springfield, brother of Dusty and regular collaborator with the Seekers since they immigrated to England from their native Australia.
Springfield and the Seekers had together produced such lovely, understated songs as “I’ll Never Find Another You” and “The Carnival is Over.” For their cinematic debut, however, they opted for a much catchier, brasher tune, as if attempting to blast the sadness right off Georgy’s face through sheer force of jollity.
Luckily, lead singer Judith Durham’s dulcet voice, along with the warm harmonies of her fellow Seekers, help ground “Georgy Girl” from the pure cheese it threatens to be, as do a few thoughtful melodic touches by Springfield — namely, the tentative pause that offsets the phrase “a little bit.”
More questionable, however, are the lyrics by Jim Dale, an actor best known for the British Carry On series of comedies. It’s not that they’re badly written, exactly, though they don’t reveal any particularly clever insights, either.
It’s plausible that someone feeling lonely or down on herself could hear the song and be inspired to find “another Georgy deep inside.” The problem is that the lyrics seem blithely unaware of Georgy Girl, the movie it soundtracks.
Georgy isn’t just shy or having an off day; she’s stuck in an unhappy situation, trying to make the best of her limited choices. Telling her to “shed your dowdy feathers and fly” is facile at best and insulting at worst, like telling a clinically depressed person that they’d feel better (and look prettier!) if they just smiled once in a while.
It hardly mattered that “Georgy Girl” the song missed the point of Georgy Girl the movie, however. The song ended up topping the charts in the Seekers’ native Australia as well as Cashbox in America and just missed the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart.
Today, many more people know the song than have ever even heard of the movie, especially as “Georgy Girl” still gets airplay on oldies stations. (Some also undoubtedly associate it with Homer Simpson’s “hey there, blimpy boy” rewrite.)
Part of the song’s endurance can be attributed to its relentlessly cheery sound and its vice-grip musical hooks. But the popularity of “Georgy Girl” over Georgy Girl also seems symptomatic of a wider cultural preference — one that favors simplistic, optimistic messages over the more muddled, bleaker reality.
It Was 50 Years Ago Today examines a song, album, movie, or book that was #1 on the charts exactly half a century ago.
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mr bradley