The enduring, plain jane beauty of "Johnny Angel"

Shelley Fabares croons "Johnny Angel" on The Donna Reed Show.

Actress Shelley Fabares, who died on August 22 at the age of 82, never considered herself much of a singer, despite the fact that she scored a #1 hit single in America. In interviews, she talked about how the producers of The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) strongarmed both her and costar Paul Petersen into recording pop singles. The makers of the sitcom were apparently eager to replicate the multimedia success of Ricky Nelson from The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet and made it clear that, if Shelley didn't comply, she'd be written out of the show. And so, in late 1961, she became a reluctant pop star. Shelley recalled being extremely nervous to step into an actual recording studio, surrounded by talented professional musicians, but she somehow got through it.

Shelley's big musical moment.

The song she recorded, a winsome ballad called "Johnny Angel," debuted on February 1, 1962 during a fourth season episode of The Donna Reed Show called "Donna's Prima Donna." The public's response was simply overwhelming. By April 1962, "Johnny Angel" was the most popular song in America. Shelley was still no singer, and her music career was not sustainable for long. While she had a few more charting singles, including a direct sequel to "Johnny Angel," Shelley largely stuck to acting for the rest of her life. Later in her career, she was a regular on the popular ABC sitcom Coach, which ran from 1989 to 1997. Shelley Fabares' musical legacy is largely limited to this one song: two minutes and 19 seconds of audio cotton candy. 

As for The Donna Reed Show, it lasted four more seasons and eventually became a staple of syndicated reruns. I'm sure many people of my generation, born well after the original run of the show, became familiar with Donna Reed because of its frequent airings on Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. What distinguishes this series is that it has nothing to distinguish it. Unlike The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, it is not built around a wild comedian with an over-the-top personality. It doesn't tap into "kid logic" the way Leave it to Beaver and Dennis the Menace do. It doesn't even have an unusual family structure, like My Three Sons or The Brady Bunch. Nope, it's just an unadorned, straight-down-the-line sitcom about a nuclear family in mid-20th-century America. This is exactly the kind of blandly wholesome show that inspired Gary Ross' film Pleasantville (1998).

But then there is "Johnny Angel." While I watched those Donna Reed reruns, I really became familiar with the song through radio. Back in the '90s, one of my go-to stations was 96.1 WHNN in Flint. They've changed formats several times since then, but at the time, they specialized in oldies from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Let's say their jurisdiction was everything from Bill Haley to Don McLean. I listened to this station in my car just about everywhere I went in those days, and I'm sure it had a major effect on my musical tastes. How many songs did WHNN introduce me to? I can't say for sure, but "Johnny Angel" was definitely one of them.

A big part of the song's appeal is the fact that it's being performed by someone who isn't an established professional singer. Shelley cannot overwhelm you with skill or technique, so she delivers the song as simply and plainly as possible. There's a sincerity to "Johnny Angel" that you rarely get in mass-produced pop music. As Talking Heads singer David Byrne once put it, "The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying." Well, I have no problem believing every line of "Johnny Angel," and a lot of that comes down to Shelley Fabares. She sounds like she means every word.

Like "All I Have to Do is Dream," by The Everly Brothers, "Johnny Angel" is a song of romantic longing. Shelley pines for this dreamy Johnny Angel fellow from a distance but confesses that "he doesn't even know that I exist." While there are many songs about people being deliriously happy in romantic relationships (think of "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and The Waves), there's something undeniably compelling about someone being denied the love of their dreams. It's like true happiness is just waiting there behind a velvet rope, tantalizingly close but out of reach. There's a heartbreaking urgency to every "how I want him!" and "how I love him!" in Shelley's song.

It must also be said The Donna Reed Show introduced this song to the world in the best possible way. The plot of "Donna's Prima Donna" has homemaker Donna Stone (Reed) doubting her daughter Mary's (Fabares) decision to pursue a singing career. She changes her mind when she sees Mary perform in public in front of a rapt audience. As Shelley Fabares acknowledged in interviews, a big reason the scene works is Donna Reed herself. While Mary performs "Johnny Angel" onstage, we see Donna's reaction from the audience. The Oscar-winning actress does not say a word, nor does she need to. Her expressions convey her emotions perfectly.

We must not discount Shelley Fabares' appeal either. I'm sure that, because of The Donna Reed Show, the actress became a crush object for a generation of American boys in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She wasn't an audacious sex symbol in the Marilyn Monroe/Brigitte Bardot category. She did not possess the exotic, extravagant good looks of Disney's Annette Funicello (who also had a manufactured pop music career). Instead, Shelley was the kind of sweet, unassuming, all-American girl that boys could imagine marrying someday.

I'm sure that, in 1962, there were millions of guys hoping to be "Johnny Angel." Maybe some of them kept hoping for decades after that.