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"Some Kind of Wonderful": The Creative Legacy of the Brill Building
... For example, songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin were hired as 'staff writers' at The Brill Building in the 1960's. The Brill Building housed numerous music companies that would buy songs from competing song-writing teams producing many hit songs [19]. ...
... Expression is a fundamental part of interpretation and performance of a musical piece, but to bend the rules of timekeeping, a performer must be familiar with those rules. Studies suggest that musicians will naturally vary in tempo when listening to or performing passages of music, slowing at the beginning and end of musical phrases [19]; perhaps using this flexibility to imbue a sense of musical punctuation to the piece. Nevertheless, to form a fixed idea of timekeeping, a more mathematical approach is required. ...
Music has been a fundamental aspect of human existence for thousands of years. It fulfills many roles for humanity that range from the intimidating precepts of the bloodiest battles to the emotional release of the biggest celebrations. It is a key creative output channel for humans, which is on a par with the visual arts. Technology has been an important aspect in the development of music, from facilitating new instruments and methods of creating sound, to providing a vehicle by which music can be notated and its sounds recorded. The focus of this chapter is upon the relationship between musical creativity and technological development in recent history and an exploration of the influence that technology is likely to have in the future. As particular case studies, we explore how music and technology interact in two case study scenarios: (1) the creative processes surrounding music production and (2) the education of musicians, particularly in the teaching of timekeeping. It is shown that these aspects of music have remained dependent upon human influence and have been reluctant to fully embrace the possibilities offered by new technologies, unlike other areas of the music industry. Our work discusses ideas and possibilities, encapsulated within the current work of the authors, which seeks to change this situation and embrace the new musical opportunities that technology affords.
... For example, songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin were hired as 'staff writers' at The Brill Building in the 1960's. The Brill Building housed numerous music companies that would buy songs from competing song-writing teams producing many hit songs [19]. ...
... Expression is a fundamental part of interpretation and performance of a musical piece, but to bend the rules of timekeeping, a performer must be familiar with those rules. Studies suggest that musicians will naturally vary in tempo when listening to or performing passages of music, slowing at the beginning and end of musical phrases [19]; perhaps using this flexibility to imbue a sense of musical punctuation to the piece. Nevertheless, to form a fixed idea of timekeeping, a more mathematical approach is required. ...
Music has been a fundamental aspect of human existence for thousands of years. It fulfils many roles for humanity that range from the intimidating precepts of the bloodiest battles to the emotional release of the biggest celebrations. It is a key creative output channel for humans, which is on a par with the visual arts. Technology has been an important aspect in the development of music, from facilitating new instruments and methods of creating sound, to providing a vehicle by which music can be notated and its sounds recorded. The focus of this chapter is upon the relationship between musical creativity and technological development in recent history and an exploration of the influence that technology is likely to have in the future.
As particular case studies, we explore how music and technology interact in two case study scenarios: (1) the creative processes surrounding music production and (2) the education of musicians, particularly in the teaching of timekeeping. It is shown that these aspects of music have remained dependent upon human influence and have been reluctant to fully embrace the possibilities offered by new technologies, unlike other areas of the music industry. Our work discusses ideas and possibilities, encapsulated within the current work of the authors, which seeks to change this situation and embrace the new musical opportunities that technology affords.
... At the center of Louise Meintjes' ethnography of the production of the South African mbaqanga popular music genre is an analysis of the power relations and systems of exclusion at play in Gallo Studios, as the studio " offers a prism into late capitalist, late apartheid experience and into how global popular culture flows are activated within the context of local politics " (2003: 9). Two articles on the Brill building (Scheurer 1996; Inglis 2003) provide a foundation for understanding that legendary New York songwriting institution and suggest the importance of studying creativity as a social rather than individual process. Yet, similar attention has not been afforded to the most prolific studio institutions such as the loose group of Los Angeles session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew – performers and arrangers of the backing tracks for thousands of singles including all of Phil Spector's hits and much of the work of the Everly Brothers, Beach Boys, Sonny & Cher, The Fifth Dimension and countless other artists (Hartman, 2012). ...
http://www.iaspmjournal.net/index.php/IASPM_Journal/article/view/613
Building on Philip Tagg’s timely intervention (2011), I investigate four things in relation to three dominant Anglophone popular music studies journals (Popular Music and Society, Popular Music, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies): 1) what interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity means within popular music studies, with a particular focus on the sites of research and the place of ethnographic and/or anthropological approaches; 2) the extent to which popular music studies has developed canonic scholarship, and the citation tendencies present within scholarship on both Western and non-Western popular musics; 3) the motivations for two scholarly groups, Dancecult and ASARP, to breakaway from popular music studies; 4) the forms of music analysis and the kinds of musical material commonly employed within popular music studies. I suggest that the field would greatly benefit from a true engagement with anthropological theories and methods, and that the “chaotic conceptualization” of musical structuration and the critical discourse would likewise benefit from an attention to recorded sound and production aesthetics.
The article focuses on professional songwriters, who have been subject to much attention, neither in public nor academic discourse. It discusses the individual and subjective perceptions of the artists’ life worlds. Based on narrative-biographical interviews with twelve songwriters, the paper elaborates on (a) the self-perceptions and motivations of the artists, (b) the mental challenges of their work routines and environment, and (c) the impact of the pandemic on these aspects of their (professional) lives. The study not only shows how pandemic-related factors such as the lack of commissions or the canceling of sessions and collaborations have detrimental effects on the work- and living conditions of songwriters; it furthermore becomes apparent that the activities of songwriters are affected by personal challenges and structural problems of the music business (e.g., financial insecurity, unpredictable schedules, lack of acknowledgement, discrimination of women). These adverse conditions may lead to (psychological) burdens that may cause or further the development of mental illness.
This chapter in Paul McCartney and His Creative Practice: The Beatles and Beyond, emphasises a multifactorial and confluence-based view of creativity that demonstrates how both Paul McCartney and John Lennon contributed individually and significantly to the songwriting output of The Beatles and, importantly, that the overall success of the songs they were credited with was attributable to a largely collaborative system at work. In the beginning both McCartney and Lennon acquired the skills and knowledge of the symbol system and this extensive knowledge of songs of all types provided, in Bourdieu’s terms, the possibilities of action for them but while they both shared a major context for the acquisition of this musical material, each absorbed it within his own idiosyncratic way. Both had an evident set of interactions between the standards and traditions of a structured domain of musical knowledge and they also had significant interactions with the many operatives who exist in the arena of social contestation, that is, the field of popular music, which includes publishers, managers, record producers, engineers and fellow musicians, and the individual songwriters who formed the collaborative partnership of this creative system. This partnership was both enabled and constrained by the structural factors of the domain and the arena of social contestation that is the field of popular music, which afforded this creative pair to produce some of their best work.
A system’s perspective sees the individual or agent as only one part of a system and underlines that creativity arises from the dynamic interaction between the agent and the system’s other elements: a domain and field. Systems are not isolated however, they are connected to, and dependent upon, other systems (Skyttner in General Systems Theory: Problems, Perspectives, Practice, World Scientific, River Edge, NJ, 2006). Their connections are so intricate and multi-layered that: ‘a system in one perspective is a subsystem in another’ (Laszlo in The Systems View of the World: The Natural Philosophy of the New Developments in the Sciences, George Braziller, New York, 1972, p. 14). Consequently, within the creative system of commercial record production, there are a series of multi-layered, vertical, horizontal and diagonally interconnected systems. In particular, the creative systems of songwriting, performing, engineering and producing can be seen to directly contribute to the production of the final recording (Zak in The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, University of California Press, London, 2001). This chapter introduces the history, traditions and function of these distinct but interconnected systems beginning first with the creative system of songwriting.
Research into the relationship between the British Beat Groups, the influence of American Soul primarily from Detroit (Motown) and Memphis (Stax) and this impact upon Norwich during 1963 -1968 and the baby-boomers growing up within this influential period.
The arrival of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have permitted and fostered new avenues of communication between some singer-songwriters and their fans. As Nancy Baym discovered, in her 2012 study of the online interactions between fans and independent musicians, social media are offering the possibility that ‘through the eyes of musicians, [fans] are revealed in part as relational partners. They may be distant ‘fans’, relegated to interacting primarily with one another, but they may be people who become friends’. This chapter will explore how some singer-songwriters are using digital tools and social media to connect with their online fans and how understandings of participation and connection are being currently negotiated and formed. It will also unravel how the nature of the media, which can invoke feelings of close proximity and intimacy, can be skilfully used in particular by musicians who write and perform their own material. Rather than focus specifically on one artist (though considering the online strategies and posts of musicians such as Amanda Palmer, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega, Neil Tennant, James Arthur, and James Blunt), this chapter will give a wider overview of how some singer-songwriters are engaging with these social media platforms, the new opportunities for connection and participation with their fan bases that they offer, and the implications of these changing modes of interaction on relations with their fans and the creative process. I will argue that the confessional and personal nature fostered within the music of some singer-songwriters can compliment and lend itself well to communicative practices on social media platforms, with fans seemingly being offered striking and valued insights into everyday and ‘intimate’ moments of the musicians’ lives that were previously unobtainable for many. In addition, I will argue that Twitter use by musical artists can sometimes reveal transgressive elements of the individual that had not been clearly visible as part of their public image, elements which can either enhance or shatter relations with fans and their wider online public. Framing intimacy: singer-songwriters and their use of social media platforms When examining the contemporary vista of engagement between musicians and their fans, use of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram has proffered a most startling and disruptive interjection.
Origins of canzone d’autore Early attempts to renovate Italian popular song, freeing it from old-fashioned escapist lyrics and pre-WWII music styles took place in the late 1950s. Most lyricists and composers active then had started their careers in the 1920s and 30s, and their songs circulated thanks to the Sanremo Festival (established in 1951) and RAI’s broadcasting monopoly. No trend comparable to the renovation of cinema (neo-realism) or literature could be found in post-war (and post-Fascist) Italian popular music, until a group of composers, poets, and singers established ‘Il Cantacronache’ in Turin in 1958, with the aim to ‘escape from escapism’. Influenced by French auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes (ACI) and by Brecht’s collaborations with Weill and Eisler, Cantacronache was a marginal group of engagé intellectuals (including writers like Italo Calvino, Franco Fortini, Umberto Eco), and their work left traces mostly in political song and folk revival. In 1958, the winning song at Sanremo was Domenico Modugno’s (and Franco Migliacci’s) ‘Nel blu dipinto di blu’. It was a huge international hit, composed by its performer: a rare feature in Italian popular music history. Modugno’s success encouraged young recording industry executives to sign new lyricists and/or composers as performers (as they wouldn’t find proper interpreters for their songs), or to persuade singers to write their own songs (rather than cover foreign material or interpret songs by old-fashioned professional authors). Between 1959 and 1961 some of these singer-songwriters (Umberto Bindi, Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber, Gianni Meccia) hit the charts. A new term, cantautori, created by one of the first (and few) female representatives of the category, Maria Monti, was adopted to designate them: by 1961 it was firmly established in Italian language. Initially, it was intended almost as a joke - a lighter term compared to the cultural connotations of chansonnier. However, during the 1960s cantautori became more and more involved in the debate on cultural and political commitment (versus commercialism) in popular music, also under the influence of foreign examples: from French ACI to Bob Dylan, and also Theodorakis (especially after the 1967 coup in Greece).
As she entered the studio in September 1972 to begin recording her eleventh solo album, Dolly Parton’s career was at a crossroads. Parton and duet partner Porter Wagoner had achieved considerable success with both the syndicated television programme The Porter Wagoner Show and their duet recordings. They were also named the Country Music Association’s Vocal Duo of the Year in 1970 and 1971. Despite these successes, tension was mounting between the duo behind the scenes over Wagoner’s attempts to control her career, and Parton’s lack of commercial success with her solo albums. When Parton joined The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967, Wagoner convinced the young singer-songwriter to leave Fred Foster at Monument Records and join him at RCA Victor. Wagoner personally shaped this next stage in her career: he produced their duets and all of her early RCA Victor solo albums, controlling album content and musical arrangements. Wagoner also owned 49% of her publishing company (Owepar), and they co-owned Fireside Recording Studio in Nashville. Under his guidance, however, Parton had only achieved one number 1 hit with ‘Joshua’ in 1971. Having left her family in Sevierville, Tennessee, to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter in Nashville eight years earlier, Parton was becoming increasingly anxious to make her mark on the country industry. Frustrated and homesick, she assembled a collection of songs about her rural upbringing in the Smoky Mountains for her 1972 recording sessions, and for the first time included only her own songs. The result was an autobiographical concept album and homage to her homeplace, childhood, and familial bonds on My Tennessee Mountain Home (1973). As Nancy Cardwell stated in the opening chapter of her 2011 monograph on Dolly Parton, ‘It’s been said that where you’re from has a lot to do with who you are’. With this statement, Cardwell captures perfectly the important role that the Smoky Mountain region has played in Parton’s life, music, and identity. The fourth of twelve children born to a sharecropper and his wife in Sevierville in January 1946, Parton was steeped in the traditions and culture of her southern rural-mountain origins. Life was challenging for the Partons in the late 1940s and early 1950s; they did not have electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, or a telephone. They grew their own food, made their own clothes and toys, and always managed to make enough money to stay off welfare.
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly (1888-1949), was one of the most unique, fascinating and influential singer-songwriters of the foundational American blues and folk traditions - a starting point of the contemporary singer-songwriter development. Born in 1888 on Jeter Plantation, near Mooringsport, Louisiana, he belonged to the first generation of blues artists - formed by itinerant African American musicians with outsider lifestyles, seeking social advancement in spite of the Jim Crow south. Stylistically, however, his extensive and varied repertoire has earned him a differentiated and sometimes peculiar status in blues studies and popular music history, as he is often considered a songster rather than a bluesman. A multi-instrumentalist who could play guitar, piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin and accordion, Leadbelly gained notoriety as the ‘the King of Twelve-String Guitar’, developing a distinctive, powerful drive that has had a profound impact on the evolution of popular music. Throughout the decades, his obscure and appealing persona has constantly inspired further reinterpretations of material he composed or first popularised by musicians from different scenes and styles, ranging from the mid-twentieth century folk revival, roots and surf rock of Pete Seeger, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Beach Boys respectively, to the more recent grunge and garage rock sounds of Nirvana and the White Stripes. Leadbelly’s case poses significant challenges for any researcher, writer or reader discussing his music, life, and legend. Many episodes of his life remain unclear, others have been interpreted in contradictory ways, and the artist himself continuously reconstructed his persona through malleable stories. The aim of this chapter is to offer a reliable and nuanced framework for approaching such a complex character, based on the most relevant stages of Leadbelly’s artistic and life trajectory. In this process, I will refer to significant events and circumstances, relating them to particular songs and styles, and incorporating previous discussions about the musical, socio-political, and racial meanings and implications of his remarkable journey. Rambling singer-songwriters in the deep south Leadbelly grew up around Caddo Parish, Louisiana, a frontier, rural area that hosted one of the highest concentrations of African Americans west of the Mississippi River. As a strong, rambunctious young man, he proved to be an effective agricultural worker, picking cotton and learning about farming and cowboy culture, and, by the time he was fourteen, he had won a local reputation for his guitar playing and singing.
In 2007, on the fifty-year anniversary of one of Los Angeles’ most storied music venues, singer-songwriters Carole King and James Taylor reunited in West Hollywood to commemorate Doug Weston’s Troubadour club. For both King and Taylor, the club held extra significance as the place where they first collaborated on King’s song, ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ (1971). Explaining his first encounter with the song, Taylor said, ‘This is a Carole King tune - a pure Carole King tune. I heard it for the first time standing right there’, pointing to the sound booth lofted above the stage. ‘I worked it up on the guitar and got a version of it, and in an amazing act of generosity, she let me cut this tune first. I was amazed because she was cutting Tapestry at the time, and that she would let go what I thought was maybe one of the best pop tunes ever written.’ Then Taylor joked, ‘I didn’t realise at that time that I would be singing that song every night for the rest of my life. But it’s a great song to be known for, and I thank Carole for it.’ To close the concert, the two performed a duet version of the tune. King added a counter-melodic tag to the end of the song, singing: Here we are at the Troubadour We never thought we would do this anymore, but this was the place that opened the door. What was it about the Troubadour that drew artists to its stage? How did this club ‘open the door’ and influence the careers of artists who played there? And how did this space shape the way that a generation of music fans understood that elusive quality of personal, authentic music? This chapter explores the network of musicians, space, atmosphere, and histories tied to Doug Weston’s Troubadour between 1968 and 1975, investigating the role the Troubadour played in constructing the meaning of the singer-songwriter identity.
Numerous scholars have identified hip-hop as rooted in the practice of storytelling. Nelson George describes rap ‘as a showcase for the art of verbal dexterity and storytelling’, while Tricia Rose has discussed its ‘ability to use the powerful tradition of black oration and storytelling to render stylistically compelling music’. We hope to contribute to an understanding of the hip-hop singer-songwriter by revealing Kanye West’s lyrical and musical strategies as aligned with the characteristics of the singer-songwriter genre: hence, we consider how he communicates about life experiences and delivers social commentaries; we trace numerous social themes and concerns at the core of his lyrical expression throughout his work; we examine how he creates an intimate space through his musical expression and recording practices; and we discuss how he uses technology as his instrument in order to develop innovative vocal and sonic expressive strategies. Throughout his career, West has consistently engaged with the themes of fame and celebrity, the music industry, consumerism, class and race. Some tracks develop these themes in a ‘braggadocio’ style (e.g., ‘Good Life’), while others reveal his struggle with the negative consequences of fame (e.g., ‘Everything I Am’). Our aim is to examine how West communicates his social messages with a sense of immediacy by means of innovative musical strategies and technologies. We also aim to illustrate how West extends and deepens his cultural critique of fame, consumer culture, race and class through these same strategies and technologies. More specifically, our analysis focuses on his much-acclaimed work in the domain of sampling and production where we see him connecting closely and intimately with the process. West’s work has been widely received as innovative in terms of how it expands the conventions of hip-hop production. In what follows, we concentrate on his selection of samples as well as their manipulation in the context of his song structure, design, and expression. After gaining success as a producer (notably on Jay-Z’s 2001 album The Blueprint), West became a rapper in 2002. Damon Dash, the CEO of Roc-A-Fella, found it hard to imagine marketing West as a rapper. In addition to his style of dress, his middle-class upbringing set him apart from many MCs. As Jay-Z states, ‘We all grew up street guys who had to do whatever we had to do to get by.
When introducing his 2001 oral history of the Brill Building for Vanity Fair magazine, David Kamp suggests that the early 1960s marked a paradigm shift in American popular music, from the workmanlike output of New York’s contracted composers to the more baldly personal material from the singer-songwriters that followed: The Brill Building sound was the sound of bigness and tidiness, of exuberance underpinned by professionalism - the fulcrum between the shiny craftsmanship of Tin Pan Alley and the primal energy of 60s soul and rock. It represented the last great era of assembly-line-manufactured pop - before the success of The Beatles and Bob Dylan lent a stigma to not writing your own material. Kamp’s historical trajectory here corresponds tidily with a common narrative about popular music’s changes in the 1960s. In many listeners’ views, that decade saw the ascendance of the introspective voice in songwriting, a tradition derived perhaps from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, and best defined through the iconic examples of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell. For half a century, popular music had depended on a symbiosis between the offstage composer (a lineage that ran from Irving Berlin through George Gershwin to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller or Gerry Goffin and Carole King) and the celebrity performers of stage, film, and record. The late 1960s, on the other hand, merged these roles dramatically. From Dylan onwards, the story apparently goes, the singer was more likely to have written his own material, offering an emotional proximity and raw sincerity that eschewed overtly commercial gloss. Moreover, in this narrative, this ostensible earnestness continued into the following decade, with artists like James Taylor, Janis Ian, and Bruce Springsteen. But the 1970s also saw the rise of a different kind of singer-songwriter: namely, the ‘professional’ composer. These artists were steeped less in the naked performance of the folk tradition than in the more businesslike conventions of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, both of which Kamp perhaps too quickly presumed dead by the early seventies. In short, to remember that not all singer-songwriters after the mid-sixties aspired to unchecked autobiography or raw introspection is to complicate the monolithic narrative that Kamp and others propose.
British songwriter, singer, and guitarist Nick Drake is known for his introspective songs and innovative acoustic guitar style based on alternative tunings and elegant finger-picking techniques. His three studio albums created between 1969 and 1972 continued to rise in popularity after his tragic death in 1974. More recently, larger audiences have been introduced to Nick Drake’s music through the many film soundtracks, television episodes, and particularly, television commercials that have featured his music. We might imagine the act of songwriting starting with a melody, lyric, some chords, or an instrumental riff. But in abstracting aspects of a song, we may not account for the role of the body in the creative process. We can enrich our understanding of musical, expressive, and cultural processes operating in a song, and perhaps uncover aspects of the songwriter’s craft, by locating the creative impulse in an embodied action: a musical gesture. This chapter explores the relationship between Drake’s varied choices in guitar tuning and the gestural movements of guitar performance he employs to create unusual textures, dissonances, and modal harmonic patterns, showing how Drake created an optimal idiomatic approach that minimises necessary physical motion on the fretboard while effectively engaging the resonance of open strings. Drake’s characteristic timing in delaying the vocal melody results in an expressive temporal dislocation between the guitar and voice. This often takes the form of an afterbeat gesture, in which the voice seems to rebound off the guitar rhythm, like a musical agent commenting on events already past. This enhances Drake’s recurring narrative strategy of projecting the vocal persona of a conflicted and detached observer of the world. Drake’s producer and mentor, Joe Boyd, writes of an encounter prior to their collaboration on Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left (1969): One evening, Nick played me all his songs. Up close, the power of his fingers was astonishing, with each note ringing out loud - almost painfully so - and clear in the small room. I had listened closely to Robin Williamson, John Martyn, Bert Jansch and John Redbourn. Half-struck strings and blurred hammerings-on were an accepted part of their sound; none could match Nick’s mastery of the instrument. After finishing one song, he would retune the guitar and proceed to play something equally complex in a totally different chord shape.
My aim in this chapter is to isolate certain key threads that have emerged from the substantial body of literature on songwriting that has been produced over the last few decades - threads that constitute those theoretical perspectives that might usefully inform the development of practical pedagogical frameworks for the teaching of songwriting. In particular this will involve a consideration of the nature of the songwriter’s social environment (or ‘domain’) and the apparent tensions between this and the educational context, as well as a discussion of the range of factors that determine the means by which songwriters come to understand the practice of songwriting in technical terms. My principal objective is to demonstrate that approaching the study of songwriting from this vantage point can provide useful insight into the creative process and engender constructive self-reflection on an activity that is often engaged in intuitively. It will be useful, as a starting point, to provide an overview of the literature in question as a means of highlighting the kinds of sources that have a bearing on the discussion. An overview of the literature on songwriting Songwriting is today well established as an area of formal musical study and is widely taught within academic courses at universities and colleges. A survey on the teaching and assessment of songwriting in the UK (Isherwood 2014), for example, represented data drawn from over forty programmes, across twenty-two institutions in which songwriting tuition was available in one form or another. Discussions of songwriting pedagogy have emerged naturally in response to a need on the part of tutors to find effective ways to formalise their teaching, resulting in two particular avenues of enquiry. The first is concerned with getting to the heart of the songwriter’s creative process itself, while the second aims to clarify the nature of the text that is actually being taught, in other words, what constitutes a song? Investigations into the creative process have typically been concerned with the conditions (or environment) that produce the songwriter, as well as finding a means of judging what constitutes a valuable creative contribution to the discipline. Questions of the nature of the songwriting text direct attention towards the songwriter’s medium, be it, for example, the handwritten score, the musical instrument, or the Digital Audio Workstation, as well as the form in which the song is realised, such as the live performance, the sound recording and so on.
Thomas D’Urfey (1653-1723) was a very popular poet/songwriter and a productive dramatist in the period between the closing years of the reign of Charles II (r. 1660-1685) and the years of the reign of Anne (r. 1702-1714). Nevertheless, he lost his fame in the late eighteenth century, with the disparity between popularity and oblivion being exceptionally striking. In the mid-nineteenth century, more than a hundred years after D’Urfey’s death, William Chappell introduced him to the readers of his two-volume book, Popular Music of the Olden Time (1859). Then, in 1923, two established literary periodicals published bicentennial memorial essays, and a decade later, in 1933, a book of D’Urfey’s songs was published. Twenty-six songs, selected out of some five hundred, were edited by Cyrus Lawrence Day, with music reproduced in facsimile. On the whole, the historians of English literature have paid only cursory attention to his poetry and songs, and, if he has been known at all, it has been as the editor of Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20), a six-volume collection of popular songs of the time. The works of D’Urfey In addition to songs, the works of Thomas D’Urfey include dramatic works and poems of political satire. These total thirty-two in all and make him the most prolific dramatist of the time, and his plays did indeed enjoy great success around the decade 1691-1701, but his friends apparently preferred his songs. In the late seventeenth century he also wrote a variety of narratives both in prose and verse, whose literary quality is negligible. It was in the genre of songwriting that D’Urfey showed himself at his best. In particular, he was blessed with the ability to grasp and express in his songs what the general public desired. His success was also due to his appropriate selection of tunes. According to the traditional method, he adopted the tunes of songs - popular songs and folk songs - with which the general public were already familiar, often also using tunes written by renowned contemporary composers, such as Henry Purcell.
The subjects of this chapter are a heterogeneous collection of individuals, distinguished by far more than they share, but ultimately owing their greatest debt, and generally their identity, to the Second (British) Folk Revival and its inheritors. The folk tradition, of course, is just that: marked by the encounter with traditional songs and dances, many of these musicians share(d) the desire both to maintain that tradition and keep it relevant to contemporary listeners. It is the primacy of that encounter, and of the continued commitment to the folk genre, which marks out all the singer-songwriters I identify below. The English folk tradition, from the early days of the Second Revival of the 1950s through to the present, has frequently blurred that apparent purity (in the way that folk traditions are assumed to modify their material), both implicitly and explicitly, and one outcome of this blurring is a particular line of singer-songwriters that it is the purpose of this chapter to survey. Historically, it is possible to divide these musicians into three generations. The first generation, those involved with the revival and its immediate aftermath, tended to place more emphasis on the writing of a good song than on details of its performance. Politics is, perhaps, the dominant topic, although this comes in a number of guises. From the mid-1970s, and with the rise of the punk aesthetic, folk retreated to the margins of musical expression, and many writers appear to have become far less outspoken. From the late 1990s, partly with the rise of ʼnu-folk’, a new set of concerns and approaches can be discerned among the most recent, ‘third’, generation of singer-songwriters. Rather than stick to a historical narrative, I shall be most concerned, here, with the topics musicians have taken up (politics, geography, humour, emotional tone, the supernatural, and reference to the tradition), and with some stylistic generalisations concerning how these songs sound, broadly the move from songs conceived for live performance towards songs conceived for recorded arrangements. Since there is no comprehensive study of this music, my sources are generally the songs themselves, their recordings, articles in magazines like fRoots and Musical Traditions (see bibliography), a host of fan and artist websites, and the material I am developing for my own monograph on the English folk song tradition.
Introduction In May 1994 the cover of Q magazine featured three female singersongwriters, PJ Harvey, Björk, and Tori Amos, with the strapline ‘Hips. Lips. Tits. Power.’ These three women were hugely popular artists, all riding high with five commercially successful albums between them at that point in time. The 1990s saw a new kind of female artist emerge, writing songs that focused on intimate topics of sexuality, gender and the body in an explicit, direct way. The artists pictured on the Q cover represented varying expressions from this new wave of singer-songwriters. They explored how everyday life is experienced through the body and at the centre of their songwriting was a specifically female experience, drawing on female agency and power, all experienced through an embodied self. The strapline of the Q cover neatly draws out these themes in its punchy four-word phrase. These artists also drew on the confessional history of singer-songwriters, drawing in their audiences with a closeness and intimacy, through their bodily experiences. Other singer-songwriters in this group included Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Alanis Morissette, and Ani DiFranco. This chapter will explore these themes of embodiment in the work of this wider group of singer-songwriters, whilst locating their work in a broader cultural and musical context. As songwriters, these women had creative control over their output and a high level of agency. All of the artists in this group wrote their own material, predominantly with sole writing credit, and most played an instrument as well as providing lead vocals. They often worked with independent labels, whose ethos allowed for more experimentation and more artist control. For example, Björk has released all her work on One Little Indian, Harvey’s debut was on Too Pure, and DiFranco has her own label, Righteous Babe Records. These singer-songwriters drew on a number of stylistic approaches, with their music straddling multiple genres; Björk’s jazz and dance music influences, Harvey’s distorted punk guitar, DiFranco’s acoustic folk, and Amos’ classical piano technique painted varied sonic worlds. It could be argued that, despite being contemporaries, pulling together these women into one coherent grouping is rather arbitrary, given their stylistic diversity. In the 1994 Q interview, Björk, Polly Harvey, and Tori Amos are asked if they feel in competition with each other.
The Western motif of musician as a creative but lonely journeyman harkens back to the medieval days of the European troubadour. Singersongwriters are one version of a modern-day musical troubadour. Many of today’s singer-songwriters are closely connected with the increasingly widespread musical event called an ‘open mic’. The development of the musical open mic, where many musicians perform short sets back-to-back, exemplifies the growth of hybridised performance forums (e.g. karaoke) and changing practices and rituals of public performance. A contemporary discussion about the genesis of the (post-)modern singer- songwriter would be remiss if a historical and organisational component linking singer-songwriters’ biographies and pathways is absent. This chapter explores the open mic event as one historical, organisational, and biographical linkage. Open mics ushered in a new organisational, intermediate place for artists’ performing styles and genres to expand and hone their skills in music-making. These burgeoning activities help musicians practise and improve the playing of instrument(s) and the techniques of musical composition and public performance within a quasi-public setting. These recurring events provide an interstitial place revealing malleable biographical and murkier performance boundaries. A further examination of singer-songwriters and open mics illuminates a rich social and symbolic fabric underlying the lonely and seemingly polished forms on the surface. While today’s connection between singer-songwriters and open mics began in the late 1970s, academic literature investigating this cultural sphere remains lean. As of now, Behr and I have published the only academic investigations of these specific intersections between singersongwriters and open mic settings and scenes. Much of this section’s specific ethnographic examples, social regularities or patterns, and biographical experiences derive from these few research projects. This includes qualitative data such as quotations taken directly from singersongwriters interviewed in these noted research projects. Nevertheless, this research topic remains extraordinarily ripe for future research. An open mic is a group activity comprised of many shortened musical performances by different singer-songwriters, folk and popular musicians. This activity is a recurring performance setting and meeting place that also represents intersections of different m [278] usical genres and performance practices. The contemporary but dynamic musical open mic was birthed from different performance and musical activities of the past, some connected to the precursors of the twentieth-century singer-songwriter.
The category and perception of a class of performers known as singer-songwriters did not emerge into public consciousness until after 1968. Indeed, Google Ngram shows that the term ‘singer songwriter’ has no usage prior to the early 1970s. It is true that there were individuals referred to as ‘singer and songwriter’ as early as the 1870s, and earlier in the twentieth century the descriptions ‘singer songwriter’ and ‘songwriter-singer’ were used. These terms are rare, however, after World War II. The ‘singersongwriter’ is not anyone who sings his or her own songs, but a performer whose self-presentation and musical form fit a certain model. There had been rock singers who wrote their own songs since Chuck Berry, but they were not singer-songwriters. Bob Dylan, who helped create the conditions for their emergence, was not himself called a singer-songwriter in 1968, and he did not produce an album that fit the label until Blood on the Tracks in 1974. While the singer-songwriter becomes highly visible in 1970, in retrospect we can see that the movement emerged in 1968, when Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Laura Nyro released important early examples. What distinguished the singer-songwriter was both a musical shift away from the more raucous styles of rock and a lyrical shift from the more public concerns that had helped to define the folk revival. By the early 1970s, James Taylor, Mitchell, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Carly Simon, and others created a new niche in the popular music market. These singer-songwriters were not apolitical, but they took a confessional stance in their songs, revealing their interior selves and their private struggles. The year 1968 was a turning point not only because it was the highwatermark of the New Left, but also because it saw the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the bloody police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the disappointment of Richard Nixon being elected President and the Vietnam War continuing unabated. Up until 1968, youth culture was hopeful about progressive change and about individual opportunities, but the events of that year began to alter the dominant outlook. In the summer of 1969, Woodstock provided a few months of uplift, but the shift was solidified in the reading given to the free concert at Altamont in December.
The singer-songwriter label can suggest a distinctive artistic persona. Dark, brooding, or simply self-absorbed, these musicians are widely known as practitioners of confessional songwriting - artists who seem to bare the secrets of their soul in introspective prose and appropriately moody harmonies. How might such expectations weigh on the creative pursuits of the singer-songwriter? Are there situations in which the promise of emotional vulnerability can overwhelm individual artistic intentions? With whom do audiences truly connect - the singer, the song’s protagonist, or the songwriter? The following ponders these questions as they relate to the example of Adele Adkins, a mainstream popular music sensation who has achieved considerable success in the early twenty-first century as the ‘Queen of Heartbreak’. In the public eye, it is largely the strength of Adele’s voice - rather than her songwriting credits - that has made the artist’s personal misfortunes into an integral component of her musical signature. Nevertheless, recurring themes in fan commentary (see Figure 16.1) consistently point to the sounds of sincere, heartfelt angst as a primary draw. Both 19, her 2008 debut, and 21, her 2011 sophomore release, were conceived of as break-up albums, inspired by (different) failed romantic relationships. Adele’s vocal style - alternately characterised as bluesy, soulful, and raw - has conspired with memories of anonymous ex-boyfriends in the creation and maintenance of an emotionally volatile artistic identity. Despite a stylistic departure from the more traditional singer-songwriter aesthetic of 19, Adele continued to perform for audiences who yearned for the perpetually melancholy version of the heart-on-her-sleeve singer they first encountered in her music. In an effort to better understand the nature of the underlying conspiracy between emotive voice and anonymous ex, I approach more constrained views of Adele and her music as a manifestation of the impact traditional conceptions of singer-songwriters can have on an artist and their work. Through an examination of the narrative contributions of the anonymous friend characters who make appearances on both albums, I illustrate the extent to which outside voices have intervened in the ongoing construction of what I call Adele’s singersongwriter identity. Interpreting Adele Opting to address Adele’s artistic persona as that of a singer-songwriter engages with the shared sense of intimacy, or knowing, that exists between artist and audience.
Genre-defying British electronic musician James Blake is a fairly emotional type of guy - at least that’s what reviews of his 2013 Mercury Prizewinning sophomore album Overgrown tell us. Writing for The Telegraph, music critic Neil McCormick gave Overgrown an enthusiastic four out of five stars, describing the record as music full ‘of emotion and imagination’. Bob Boilen, of NPR Music, similarly called it ‘breathtakingly emotional music’ and Erik Harvey at Pitchfork found it full of ‘emotional resonance’. The brushstrokes in his so-called ‘post-dubstep’ sonic palette, those of throbbing bass lines, silence, arresting soundscapes, and beautiful vocals set up the emotional power of his music. But is there a singer-songwriter who does not use their songbook to dig into the pockets of human emotion? The content of Blake’s music should come as no surprise to anyone, particularly as the singer-songwriter is typically a solo artist who plays her or his own instruments and who often writes songs about love and heartbreak. Where Blake differs in the genre, though, is in how his ‘post-dubstep’ sound embraces and emerges out of digital technologies and club culture. James Blake studied Popular Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, an art school of great renown that has produced other British stars like Katy B and Damien Hirst. Between 2009 and 2010, while still at university, Blake began releasing a string of dubstep EPs and singles straight out of his bedroom, including his much-loved 2009 debut ‘Air and Lack Thereof’ and EPs CMYK and The Bells Sketch. These recordings were all exercises in UK dubstep, a genre Interview magazine once described as so powerful that ‘you can only get the full picture in person, when the bass is so enormous it actually makes your clothes flap’. Although Blake has always sung and played piano, his early EPs and remixes focus more on abstracted soundscapes, dubstep-beat pastures (loops layered over muffled-sounding beats), and technologies of sampling than on clear vocals, choruses or discernible lyrics. As musicologist and scholar of DJ culture Mark Katz has described, digital sampling allows musicians to use software or personal computers to recontextualise pre-existing content into brand-new musical ideas. For Katz, ‘sampling works like a jigsaw puzzle: a sound is cut up into pieces and then put back together to form a digitised “picture” of that sound’.
The construction and representation of the gender identities of singersongwriters KT Tunstall (UK), Missy Higgins (Australia), and Bic Runga (New Zealand), artists who destabilise typical binary notions of gender in their media output (specifically their music videos), will be analysed in order to argue that female masculinity is a means for singer-songwriters to negotiate a dichotomously gendered mainstream, constructed to appeal to the ‘male gaze’. I contend that blurring the lines of ‘cultural differentiation of females from males’ allows for multidimensional readings that appeal to a queer gaze. The effect of this is arguably a wider mainstream appeal, inclusive of heterosexual and queer female spectators, increasing cultural and economic capital and artistic credibility. The key issue underpinning the discussion of gender identity in this chapter is the difficulty female musicians in the popular music industry have traditionally had attaining commercial success whilst gaining or maintaining artistic credibility, potentially caused by the heteropatriarchal and sexist hegemonies that have existed in mainstream Western music since its inception. The ‘mainstream cultural industries’ of rock and pop are closely linked with gender and ‘perceived as masculine or feminine’. While rock music has connotations of authenticity, autonomy and seriousness, pop music faces negative bias as a ‘feminized form of mass culture’ that is superficial, formulaic, and commercialised. Bannister points out that the difficulty women have in gaining artistic credibility exists because ‘female performers are identified with genres viewed as having less cultural capital’ in contrast to their male peers. As the notion of gender identity is so critical to this chapter, it will be useful to clarify my usage of the expression before continuing to the case studies. My ideas around gender identity are heavily influenced by the work of Judith Butler, who argues that ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the “expressions” that are said to be its results’. In other words, gender is a set of acts and rituals that we perform constantly. As such, masculinity and femininity as attached to male and female bodies are simply a cultural construct. When discussing the gender identity of a particular artist, I am referring to the set of acts or representations that connote either masculinity or femininity, regardless of sex.
The era of the German Lied stretched approximately from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century. It flowered most richly during the nineteenth century, chiefly in the hands of four leading composers: Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Robert Schumann (1810-1856), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), and Hugo Wolf (1860-1903). Altogether they produced more than a thousand songs, from which the core Lied repertoire is drawn today. These men were fine pianists although none was a singer of their own material except in the loosest sense. This chapter focuses on figures who were both composers and performers of their own material, in other words, possible precedents for a modern conception of the singer-songwriter. Their activity has often been overlooked because the concept of the public song recital was in its infancy for the greater part of the nineteenth century, so while most singers sang songs within mixed programmes, none could earn a living exclusively in this way and most participated in a thriving salon culture. Many were women, who benefited from the opportunities for musical training which emerged in the late eighteenth century. In comparison, professional pianists or even conductors, as in Schumann’s case, had clearer routes to establishing a professional identity. Indeed, from the very outset, the piano was integral to Lied performance. Therefore although the term ‘Lied singer-songwriter’ is used throughout this chapter, the implication is always, in fact, Lied singer-pianist-songwriter. This chapter traces the history of Lied singer-songwriters in three stages: a consideration of Schubert’s predecessors and contemporaries (c. 1760-1830), Schubert’s followers (c. 1830-48), and finally, contemporaries of Brahms and Wolf (c. 1850-1914). Broadly speaking, the Lied evolved from a technically undemanding type of music largely aimed at amateur (often female) singers, to a genre which eventually dominated professional recital stages in 1920s Berlin. Various interlinked factors contributed to this shift: the rise of institutionalised musical training; the concomitant emergence of the idea of a ‘recital’; and the astronomical growth of the music publishing industry, which made sheet music for every conceivable technical standard available to the public. Songwriters worked in an ever more complex environment which coexisted with (but did not fully supplant) the original, amateur, private nature of the genre.
Singer-songwriter Billy Joel (b. 1949), an American musician whose career spanned the 1970s through to the present, is perhaps most famous for ballads and love songs such as ‘Piano Man’ (from Piano Man, 1973) and ‘Just the Way You Are’ (from The Stranger, 1977). A closer look at Joel’s musical output, however, reveals not only an autobiographical impulse familiar to many twentieth-century popular musicians, but also a keen ability, common among singer-songwriters, to render larger cultural trends as compelling musical narratives. This chapter examines one of the themes on which Joel has mused throughout his career, the working class, and its musical manifestations in three songs that span his catalogue, ‘Ain’t No Crime’ (from Piano Man), ‘Allentown’ (from The Nylon Curtain, 1982), and ‘The Downeaster “Alexa”’ (from Storm Front, 1989). Although they vary stylistically, each song offers the composer’s observations of, and commentary on, working-class and broader American culture in the late twentieth century. Joel was raised on New York’s Long Island in the town of Hicksville, one of the earliest examples of a ‘Levittown’, in which thousands of identical, inexpensive houses were constructed and sold to veterans returning from World War II. While taking piano lessons as a child there, he would master classical pieces by ear and even offer his own improvisations on them. The influence of classical music can be seen in several of his pieces, including ‘The Ballad of Billy the Kid’ from Piano Man and ‘This Night’ from An Innocent Man (1983). The Beatles’ 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show inspired him to pursue a future in popular music and to compose songs that exhibited varying degrees of ‘Beatlish compositional, vocal, instrumental, and studio-technical production’. He achieved commercial success with his second album, Piano Man, whose title track peaked at number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. But it was The Stranger that established the suburban New Yorker as a household name, yielding four hits in the top twenty-five and two Grammy awards. ‘I came from a blue-collar area’, Joel said in a 2007 interview. ‘You know, some people think that because I came from the suburbs I lived in a privileged area, very hoity-toity. Well, it wasn’t. It was a working-class town’.
Introduction The Brill Building is an eleven-story Art Deco-style office building located in New York City that has played an important role in popular music since the pre-World War II era, particularly as a home to music publishers and songwriters. By the early 1960s, the Brill Building housed more than 160 businesses operating in the music industries, and it is this period in its history, and the history of a neighbouring music publishing company called Aldon Music, that is the focus of this chapter. As suggested by the title of this piece, sustaining a career as a professional songwriter is a precarious form of work. However, from the Tin Pan Alley era to the present day, the friendly competition of the office environment has served as a productive context for songwriters in all manner of genres. For non-performing songwriters particularly, the organised approach to songwriting practised at companies like Aldon Music was key to nurturing ongoing success during the early 1960s, and it is no coincidence that similar modes of work can also be observed at successful labels and production houses like Motown, Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and latter-day enterprises like Xenomania and The Writing Camp. This research explores how routinised approaches to creative work improve productivity, increase the likelihood of commercial success and reduce career instability. This is accomplished by examining the ways in which the work of professional songwriters is organised (usually by music publishers), and by situating this case study of the Brill Building era within a broader continuum of underlying stylistic and organisational continuities. My approach involves a synthesis of a cultural study of the professional practice of songwriters combined with a political economy of the music industries in which they work. I am informed by those that have defined the study of creative labour, such as Bourdieu, Negus, Hesmondhalgh, and Banks, as well as political economists like Golding, Murdoch, and Mosco, who have argued in favour of drawing together political economy and cultural studies to form this sort of ‘dialogic inter-disciplinarity’. Throughout this chapter, I draw on interviews that I have conducted for Sodajerker On Songwriting, a podcast devoted to the art and craft of songwriting. The podcast features conversations with professional songwriters including Brill Building alumni such as Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry, and Mike Stoller.
It was the mid-1990s and Sarah McLachlan had been on the road promoting her Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993) album. At the time, a growing number of female singer-songwriters, such as Tracy Chapman, Jewel, Tori Amos, and Liz Phair, were experiencing significant commercial success. This gave McLachlan an idea. She suggested to her promoters that singer-songwriter Paula Cole be added to the bill as an opening act. Promoters balked and McLachlan quickly realised she had overlooked one crucial yet astoundingly superficial factor: Paula Cole is a woman. For decades, major record labels in the North American popular music industry have operated under the assumption that multiple women on a single concert bill would simply not be a profitable venture. It is assumed audiences would not want to hear more than one female voice in an evening. Rather than accept this logic, McLachlan railed against convention and founded Lilith Fair. Lilith Fair was an all-female music festival that toured North America during July and August of 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2010. McLachlan was accompanied by a rotating line-up of approximately eleven to twelve female or female-led acts as the festival travelled to various cities, playing between thirty-five and fifty-five shows, depending on the year. The festival played one or two dates in each city it travelled to, the performances beginning in the afternoon and lasting through the evening. Lilith Fair quickly defied the music industry’s logic by outselling all other North American touring music festivals of 1997. The commercial success of the inaugural Lilith Fair allowed the festival to expand its roster from just over fifty female performers in 1997 to well over one hundred in subsequent years. As Lilith Fair began touring in 1997, it was apparent that the festival’s ‘celebration of women in music’, as it was billed, was a celebration of a particular type of woman: white, female, singer-songwriters. In 1997, the lineup consisted of fifty-two acts. Thirty-nine of these acts were singersongwriters, and thirty-six of these women were white. African American singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman would be the only non-white performer included on the Main Stage of Lilith Fair that year. Various news outlets and music publications picked up on this point, Neva Chonin accusing Lilith Fair of having a ‘whitebread, folkie focus’.
Be a hobo and go with me, from Hoboken to the sea, Be a hobo and go with me … These were the lyrics of the refrain that closed Welcome to Dreamland - a Perspectives show at the Carnegie Hall, New York, in February 2007, curated by David Byrne. The aim of the evening was to showcase the best of the world’s ʼnew folk’ movement. As a performer that night, I sang those words alongside Devendra Banhart, Vashti Bunyan, Adem, Coco Rosie, Vetiver, and David Byrne himself, and together we closed the show climactically by entreating the thousands in the audience to ‘be’ something that they were not (Ben Ratliff of the New York Times described the audience that night as, ‘models and rock stars and people with money’). Since then, I have often wondered: what was the meaning of that request? Can models and rock stars become hobos? What would it look like for a person to ‘become’ something other? What is this ‘becoming’ that the new folk movement recommends to us? I hope to demonstrate that this notion of ‘becoming’ is especially relevant to critical questions surrounding the new folk movement. I will suggest that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming-other’ might help us explore such questions regarding the nature of ‘becoming’ as stated above, and can be used as a particularly effective model through which we can try and understand the complex associations of authenticity related to this genre and its musical output. More specifically, I am going to examine the use of the genre term ‘New Weird America’ (which was a prevalent early description of new folk music) and focus on the work of one artist in particular - Joanna Newsom - who is the most widely known singer-songwriter of the genre. ‘New’ and ‘Old Weird America’ The first significant use of the term ‘New Weird America’ (hereafter NWA) to describe a musical genre, was by David Keenan in his cover article for Wire magazine titled, ‘The Fire Down Below: Welcome to the New Weird America’. In this article, Keenan described a, ‘groundswell musical movement’, based in improvisation, and ‘mangling’ a variety of American genres of different ages, including mountain music, country blues, hip- hop, psychedelia, free jazz, and archival blues.
Most often associated with modern artists such as Bob Dylan, Elton John, Don McLean, Neil Diamond, and Carole King, the singer-songwriter tradition in fact has a long and complex history dating back to the medieval troubadour and earlier. This Companion explains the historical contexts, musical analyses, and theoretical frameworks of the singer-songwriter tradition. Divided into five parts, the book explores the tradition in the context of issues including authenticity, gender, queer studies, musical analysis, and performance. The contributors reveal how the tradition has been expressed around the world and throughout its history to the present day. Essential reading for enthusiasts, practitioners, students, and scholars, this book features case studies of a wide range of both well and lesser-known singer-songwriters, from Thomas d’Urfey through to Carole King and Kanye West.
The early history of bluegrass music provides numerous opportunities to examine the tangly issues of song authorship and ownership. Emerging as a sub-genre of country music in the years immediately following World War II, the bluegrass sound and repertoire are rooted in pre-war ‘hillbilly’ music, traditional Anglo-Celtic folk song and tunes, as well as African American blues, jazz, and spirituals. The bluegrass sound found an audience and became a ‘genre’ within the context of a booming post-war commercial country music industry. Indeed, the most highly esteemed bluegrass groups, such as Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, Flatt and Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers, were established in the late 1940s and 50s. It is during this period that many bluegrass standards were first composed and recorded for commercial release. Bluegrass, then, reaches back into the tradition of anonymously penned, publicly shared folk song, but evolved in a nascent country music industry that peddled publishing contracts and legally determined composition credits. Focusing on the early career of bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, this chapter explores the tensions that emerge between songwriting practice and conventional views of authorship in the commercial music industry. Monroe, the self-proclaimed and widely acknowledged ‘father of bluegrass’, began his professional performing career in the 1930s amidst a quickly evolving recording industry. During this period, underdeveloped and vague copyright legislation enabled industry executives and, in some cases, artists to secure copyright in ways that did not necessarily reflect the songwriting process. Authorship claims were even murkier in the country music industry where artists regularly recorded, ‘arranged’, and/or asserted ownership of a vast repertoire of ‘traditional’ material. While most of Monroe’s songwriting credits are sound, a number of ambiguous or decidedly misleading authorship claims have surfaced. In some instances, erroneous credits stem from the politics of ensemble composition and Monroe’s governing position in his ever-changing group, the Blue Grass Boys. More often, however, it appears he was adopting conventional industry practice (e.g., using pseudonyms, purchasing material, et cetera) and attitudes towards songwriting and ownership. I begin with a brief biographical profile of Bill Monroe (1911-1996), which is inevitably intertwined with the early histories of both bluegrass and the country music industry.
Tori Amos appeared in the early 1990s as a prototypical confessional singer-songwriter. She sang candidly about the intimate details of a troubled, yet vividly lived life. Her recordings were marked by closely miked vocals and minimal arrangements which sometimes featured only her voice and piano. Both in terms of music and lyrics, it takes great courage to perform in such an exposed and revealing way, and it is difficult to come away from Amos’ performances or recordings without feeling like one has had an up-close and personal encounter with the musician. This effect is the stock-in-trade of the confessional singer-songwriter, and this is one key reason why mass audiences connect so strongly with artists like Amos. Her songs about her strict religious upbringing, her struggles to reconcile her budding sexuality with it, her recounting of rape and recovery, and her later miscarriage have called in a large audience who, in many cases, do more than relate to her experiences; in the manner of a ‘talking cure’, Amos’ songs have a healing effect for some by opening up topics, experiences and feelings that are often kept repressed or hidden. In the analysis below, I consider how Amos’ songs of personal confession and mythology are framed by her cultivation of an image of an almost mystical ‘healer’. Indeed, Amos’ songs cohere around the notion of revelation: Amos reveals personal, spiritual, and symbolic ‘truths’ as a way to heal. Recalling the songs she wrote leading up to her 1991 debut album, Little Earthquakes, Amos said: I think I’m working on that place in me that was terrorised and really afraid. Now when I sing it, it gives me a lot of strength because I’m not running. At a certain point, there does become a place where the heart opens up and people express their fears and pain. That’s when the healing really takes place. Elsewhere, Amos characterises healing through performance as an existential journey into the underworld of the self: ‘I’m very interested in chasing a shadow and chasing the dark side. This is what I do … To heal the wound, you have to go into the dark night of the soul’. The healing journey Amos describes here is self-consciously drawn from shamanism, a form of ritual and mystical healing.
A characteristic feature of the singer-songwriter idiom is the perceived confessional and personal nature of communication from musician to listener. The most commercially successful singer-songwriters use lyrics to describe personal experiences in ways heard by the listener as shared, universal experiences (falling in love, breaking up with a partner, and so on). Allan Moore concurs, describing this validation of listener’s life experiences as ‘second-person authenticity’. In most cases in the Anglophone pop mainstream, these assumed shared life experiences between creator and receiver reinforce the expected norm of the heterosexual, usually white, Western adult. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) perspectives complicate this universality. In this chapter, I consider how three LGBTQ singer-songwriters have used musical styles, lyrics, and extramusical actions and activities to effect and respond to changing social attitudes and tolerance over the last fifty years. Elton John Reginald Kenneth Dwight was born in Pinner, Middlesex (UK) on 25 March 1947. He began playing the piano aged three, and was awarded a Junior Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music aged eleven. In 1962, he began performing in a local pub, playing the piano to accompany himself singing cover versions of contemporary hits as well as his own songs. Two years later he joined his first band, The Corvettes, which later reformed as Bluesology. Dwight took his stage name from the Bluesology saxophonist Elton Dean and their lead singer Long John Baldry, and legally changed his name to Elton Hercules John in 1967. In 1967, Elton John answered a ‘Talent Wanted’ advert in the New Musical Express. Ray Williams of the NME put him in touch with lyricist Bernie Taupin, and thus began the longstanding songwriting collaboration that persists to this day. (For more biographical detail, and issues of authorship and performance, see Chapter 11.) The collaboration began remotely, with Taupin sending John completed lyrics to set to music. This can be seen as a modern-day counterpart to the ‘Lied singer-songwriters’ of the nineteenth-century (see Hamilton and Loges in Chapter 2) - although a distinction may be drawn between the latters’ tradition of setting established poetry to music, and John setting lyrics that Taupin had written for the purpose. Despite changing environments - the pair shared bunk beds at John’s mother’s Pinner home in the 1970s and later flat-shared - they have continued working in series to this day (2015).
Authenticity and singer-songwriters Singer-songwriters have traditionally fared well in authenticity debates. Those of a particularly style (acoustic and minimal instrumentation) have been considered to ‘convey their own truth’ by giving the impression of unmediated expression. Further, the singer-songwriter’s status rises in popular music discourse, by virtue of his or her fluency in multiple musical areas (i.e. singing and songwriting). This can be viewed in terms of Allan Moore’s ‘third-person authenticity’ (‘that they speak the truth of their own culture, thereby representing (present) others’), insofar as the singersongwriter is true to the values of their popular music culture. Moore’s third category also acts as the springboard for the current chapter, which addresses New Zealand singer-songwriter Don McGlashan. One of the prominent themes in New Zealand music discourse is what may be termed ‘local authenticity’. A number of authors have focused their work on artists who demonstrate a relationship, explicitly or implicitly, with their ‘local’ geographical and socio-cultural settings. Zuberi argues that the nationalist strands of this idea are borne out of a ‘postcolonial and oedipal reaction’ to British influences and a ‘backlash’ against American cultural imperialism. Authenticity, in this context, can thus be understood as presenting a distinct New Zealand voice in the face of global musical forces. McGlashan has been an important figure within this discourse; as per the ideas above, the aim of this chapter is to develop a greater understanding of McGlashan’s status as an ‘authentic’ New Zealand singer-songwriter. Don McGlashan’s local authenticity Firstly, however, some background material may be useful. McGlashan has been the singer and songwriter for several New Zealand bands since the 1980s, including Blam Blam Blam, the Front Lawn, and the Muttonbirds, as well as forging a successful solo career. He plays multiple instruments, including the guitar, drums, and French horn, and has developed a stylistically plural approach to songwriting courtesy of a diverse musical upbringing: in his words, ‘while my friends were listening to the Clash, I was listening to the Clash and Mahler’. Critics and academics have held McGlashan’s output in high esteem, with many highlighting the local connections in his songs.
I thought I was black for about three years. I felt like there was a black poet trapped inside me, and [’The Jungle Line’] was about Harlem - the primitive juxtaposed against the Frankenstein of modern industrialization; the wheels turning and the gears grinding and the beboppers with the junky spit running down their trumpets. All of that together with that Burundi tribal thing was perfect. But people just thought it was weird. (joni mitchell) Art is short for artificial. So, the art of art is to be as real as you can within this artificial situation. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what art is! In a way, it’s a lie to get you to see the truth. (joni mitchell) Joni Mitchell has always been weird, even by her own account. Personifying as well as versifying the tensions, contradictions, and affinities between the footloose and the fenced-in that is a main theme running through her work, she has remained one of pop music’s enduring enigmas despite over five decades in the music business. By turns, she has described herself or been characterised by others as an idiosyncratic singer-songwriter, the ‘consummate hippy chick’, ‘Annie Hall meets urban cowgirl’, the ‘babe in bopperland, the novice at the slot machines, the tourist, the hitcher’, a poet, a painter, a reluctant yet ambitious superstar. Who, in fact, are we confronting in a ‘self-confessional singer-songwriter’ who withholds her ‘real’ name? Born Roberta Joan Anderson to parents preparing for a son named Robert John on November 7, 1943, the artist better known as Joni Mitchell concocted her name through a combination of youthful pretensions and her first, brief marriage. Eschewing Roberta, Joan became Joni at the age of thirteen because she ‘admired the way [her art teacher, Henry Bonli’s] last name looked in his painting signatures’. Her marriage in June 1965 to older folk singer, Chuck Mitchell, when she was a twenty-one-year-old unwed mother, lasted less than two years yet she has continued to use Mitchell publicly for more than five decades (further, published accounts indicate she is called ‘Joan’ by intimates in her everyday life). Her acts of performative alterity reflect a lifelong interest in exploring the possibilities as well as testing the limits of identity claims, performed years before she harboured any concrete thoughts regarding a professional music career.
Elton John has become a brand, a term under which a range of activities and values are grouped together. This chapter will focus specifically on how Elton John’s role as an author is influenced by notions of performance and performer, creating a nexus of characteristics that encompass the figure of the singer-songwriter. Having changed his name by deed poll, the man formerly known as Reginald Dwight is now indistinguishable from ‘Elton John’, the global music icon. The person and the onstage artist are no longer separate. More than a popular music artist, he is a philanthropist, a gay rights campaigner, gay icon, art collector, and composer for films and musicals. Through the mixing of the person and the stage persona, the longevity and success of his career, and interests outside of popular music, Elton John is exemplary of how authorship in popular music draws upon elements of both the intramusical and extramusical. Songwriting partnership Elton John and Bernie Taupin have an unusual songwriting partnership. Taupin writes lyrics (without any verse/chorus structure) and posts them to John. Throughout their career they often write their respective parts of a song in separate rooms, a fact that was the inspiration for the title of the 1991 tribute album Two Rooms. The 1975 album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy also referred to the John/Taupin songwriting partnership, with John as ‘Captain Fantastic’ and Taupin as the ‘Brown Dirt Cowboy’. In contrast to other songwriting partnerships such as Lennon and McCartney, they never switch roles and only one is consistently the performer. In comparison with the most commercially successful popular music artists, Elton John is noteworthy as a singer-songwriter. At one end of the composer-performer spectrum are artists and groups such as Madonna and Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, that have significant authorial voices. At the other end are those like Elvis Presley for whom, although he wrote some of his own songs, most of his material was written by others (such as Leiber and Stoller, and Otis Redding). Or to put it another way, the interaction of intramusical and extramusical features of Elvis Presley’s songs would take into account that in most cases he was the performer but not the composer. As a singer-songwriter Elton John is between the two groups, as John is a portion of the songwriting partnership, albeit a crucial one.
There are relatively few media products that can compete with Star Trek in terms of longevity and cultural saturation. First introduced to audiences in 1966, the franchise now encompasses more than fifty years, six television series, thirteen films, countless spin-off novels and ancillary books, multiple annual international fan conventions and an enduring place in the popular culture lexicon of the English language—a remarkable feat for a television show that almost never made it to the screen and, even when it did, was canceled for poor ratings after just three seasons. San Francisco served as both the site of the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers and the fictional headquarters and charter site of Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets and Starfleet Headquarters. During the 2016 AAG meeting, geographers continued to expand the Society’s exploration of the integration of popular culture and geographical understanding. Star Trek can and has been utilized in many instances as a reflection of broader geographical problems, concepts, and trends, but there are also geographical implications of Star Trek and the spatial and philosophical impacts of the franchise’s broad reach. This special issue originated from a panel session which delved into these geographical concerns; the papers contained here reflect the breadth of knowledge of the contributors. The authors not only have an intimate knowledge of Star Trek, but apply that knowledge to their expertise in historical, cultural, political, and environmental geographies and an even wider breadth of theoretical perspectives. This special issue presents the possibilities of popular culture to be studied geographically and how popular culture, and Star Trek in particular, has itself had a significant impact upon geographical processes.
This study addresses how singer-songwriters engage with emotion, unconscious processes and affect, and therefore embodiment, feelings and experiences. It questions the use of the term singer-songwriter, what it means to use this term to refer to popular music composition, and whether it relates to a set of practices or a genre. Considering and problematizing definitions, it focuses upon the poietic, in this case the development of original musical material, drawing upon interviews with successful musicians in order to explore how they conceive of their own activities. This leads to a discussion of ways that songs elicit perceptual and emotional responses, and a consideration of reception and various forms of mediation. This necessitates a discussion of authenticity of various types, of inscribing and ascribing authentication. Adele’s song ‘Someone Like You’ is used as a case study that illustrates these issues. The perceived emotional honesty of her public performances of the song is contrasted with its sophisticated marketing campaign, directed at audience manipulation to generate sales. The paper explores the significance of maintaining within the contemporary music industry a spirit (or appearance depending on one’s perspective) of unmediated emotional transmission born of oral traditions and unconscious processes.
The plotlines of many science fiction television programs and films establish the identities of the protagonists and antagonists at an early stage of the viewing experience. These boundaries serve to position the viewer on a particular side of the story, rendering it difficult to fully consider the Other’s actions and motivations. It is in this manner that media influences our perceptions of place and social dynamics through a formation of popular geopolitics. In this paper, I present the Cardassians, an extraterrestrial species in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as a case study in considering how a re-reading of the shows’ antagonists serves to contextualize the meanings behind being “bad.” I use the Cardassians to explore how a de-villainizing of a science fiction antagonist can lend insight into real-world reconciliation and understandings of those deemed to be the Other.
Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view: that Britpop celebrated Englishness at a time when British culture, with its English hegemonic core, was being challenged and dismantled. It is now timely to look back on Britpop as a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s that can be set into the political context of its time, and into the cultural context of the last fifty years - A time of fundamental revision of what it means to be British and English. The book examines issues such as the historical antecedents of Britpop, the subjectivities governing the performative conventions of Britpop, the cultural context within which Britpop unfolded, and its influence on the post-Britpop music scene in the UK. While Britpop is central to the volume, discussion of this phenomenon is used as an opportunity to examine the particularities of English popular music since the turn of the twentieth century.
This essay is focused around a seemingly simple question – what do recording studios do? First, a clarification. I am not primarily asking “what are studios” or “what do people do in studios,” two comparatively straightforward questions that are tangentially addressed in academic and trade writing. Rather, I wish to consider some of the ways in which the studio itself shapes the kinds of social and musical performances and interactions that transpire within. I contend that studios must be understood simultaneously as acoustic environments, as meeting places, as container technologies, as a system of constraints on vision, sound and mobility, and as typologies that facilitate particular interactions between humans and nonhuman objects while structuring and maintaining power relations.
http://www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/what-studios-do/
This feminist cultural analysis explores a period in American rock ‘n’ roll known as the Brill Building era. While previous researchers have characterized this era as inconsequential to women's history in rock music and as a time wherein regressive songs reinforced traditional views toward femininity, I argue that such a claim is untenable when other features of this music, besides its lyrics, are explored. The Brill Building era marked the massive entry of women into rock ‘n’ roll, providing anglo Americans with their first taste of a female youth culture focused on sexuality and their first exposure in popular rock ‘n’ roll to the voices and vernacular of young, African American women.