A composer (or lyricist) who writes songs. The term is particularly applied to writers of popular songs in the 20th century. Songwriters began to be distinguished from other composers who wrote songs once it became possible for them to earn their living largely from the outright sale of, or royalties from, their works. Stephen Foster, whose income was derived solely from his songs, is generally regarded as the first successful songwriter in the USA, even though he died in poverty. The formation of performing rights organizations, such as ASCAP and BMI in America and PRS in Britain, and the passage of protective copyright laws enhanced the financial gain that songwriters could make from their works.
With the rise of the popular song market, allied to the creation of the musical comedy from the mid-1890s onwards, the process of writing and the industry of selling songs became standardized. Some of the most successful songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley period, Irving Berlin among them, had only a meagre facility with musical notation and arrangement and relied on trained musicians to write their songs down. Many songwriters gained experience by first working as song-pluggers for publishers, demonstrating new songs for customers. Some songwriters founded their own publishing firms in order to allow them to control the distribution of their songs; among them were Paul Dresser and Harry Von Tilzer in the USA and Noel Gay in Britain. Songs that achieved enough popularity to repay the publisher’s investment and to provide income for the songwriter were termed ‘hits’; those that have stayed in the repertory, principally of jazz and popular singers, have become ‘standards’. Although many songwriters are known as teams, combining a composer and a lyricist – from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart through to Elton John and Bernie Taupin – the roles have been combined by such leading figures as Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Noël Coward and Vivian Ellis.
Particularly through the rise of the Singer-songwriter from the 1960s onwards and the expansion of studio recording techniques, the boundaries between the writing and performing of popular songs have become increasingly blurred. Through the early examples of groups such as the Beatles and solo performers such as Bob Dylan, most pop performers now combine both roles. While in the 1960s such songwriting teams as Lieber and Stoller, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich or Holland, Dozier and Holland could be known in their own right, today non-performing songwriters remain largely unacknowledged by the general public.
See also Popular music esp. §I, 2(i) and 3(ii) .
E.M. Wickes: Writing the Popular Song (Springfield, MA, 1916)
I. Goldberg: Tin Pan Alley: a Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket (New York, 1930)
A. Wilder: American Popular Song: the Great Innovators, 1900–1950 (New York, 1972)
W. Craig: The Great Songwriters of Hollywood (San Diego, 1980)
DEANE L. ROOT/R