A Wellspring of Grain

Mary Wells, "Bye, Bye Baby" (1960)

"The 'grain' of the voice is not--or not only--its timbre; the signifying it affords cannot be better defined than by the friction between music and something else, which is the language (and not the message at all). The song must speak, or better still, must write, for what is produced on the level of geno-song is ultimately writing" ("The Grain of the Voice" 273-274).