A term used since the late 1950s to describe those mainly American and British singing composer-performers, often with roots in folk, country and blues, whose music and lyrics are considered inseparable from their performances.
Singer-songwriters are generally socially aware performers, the themes of their work often involving a sense of introspection, alienation or loss (real or imaginary): this is shared by both the singer and the listener, the sense of intimacy magnified by the microphone. In their performances and on many of their recordings there is an almost symbiotic relationship between the singers and their instruments, usually guitar or piano, at which the songs have generally been composed. The playing is usually fairly simple and always underpins the text; quirks of technique sometimes trigger a new direction for the lyrics. Remnants of the compositional process can survive in the performance itself: the initial empty bars or anacrustic beginning to the text, for example, give thinking time as well as asserting the pitch.
Singer-songwriters have been described variously as folk poets (Beltz on Chuck Berry), auteurs (Laing on Buddy Holly), poet-composers (Mellers on female singers) and even bards (Bok), indicating the supreme importance of the words, with both the sung lines and their instrumental accompaniment providing support. Although many singer-songwriters have published poems as literature (Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen), the genre is both an aural and oral one with its roots in ancient oral traditions. The songs have the legitimacy of a poet reading his or her own verse, to which is added the authority of a musician singing an own composition. The direct connection between performer and audience can produce a cultural commonality or authenticity which has made some songs extraordinarily representative of their time: Joan Baez and the anti-war movement in the USA, Joni Mitchell and Woodstock, Ray Davies and London of the 1960s. Since Lennon and McCartney the term singer-songwriter has also been used of certain singers who generally wrote only the music (Elton John) or the lyrics (Morrisey). It tends not to be applied to singers for whom the song is a supporting element of a wider agenda, even though the singer may have written both words and music, as in the case of David Bowie.
Many folk and country singers, and almost all blues singers, are singer-songwriters by definition. As such they have been the main sources of renewal in these musics, aided by the post-World War II folk revival and the commercial exploitation of country music and the blues. It is possible to trace a line from Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie through to the present day in which social and political topics emerge as mainstream concerns among the musicians and a wider record-buying public. Hank Williams sang of women and alcohol, Woody Guthrie of social and political reality as seen from the road, both projecting their own experiences into song. Pete Seeger, from a family background in folk music and a seminal position in the American folk revival, fell foul of the Un-American Activities Committee. The influence of all these musicians can be found in the work of the most significant singer-songwriter to emerge in the early 1960s, Bob Dylan.
From his 1962 self-titled début recording onwards, using just guitar and harmonica accompaniment, he has reflected New York folk and blues influences. The eponymous title track of his album The Times they are A-Changin’ cannot be separated from its performance, and none of the cover versions of this or any of his other songs achieve the immediacy of direct contact with the singer-songwriter. Subsequently few guitar-playing singer-songwriters have been able to escape comparisons with Dylan. Joan Baez, an exact contemporary, influence and sometime partner, sang protest anthems in the 1960s and more intimate confessional songs in the 1970s, thereafter reducing her output as her involvement with global peace organizations increased. Country Joe Macdonald’s anarchic urban folk style maintained its vigour through the 1970s and 80s, while Phil Ochs, unjustifiably overshadowed by Dylan, stayed a trenchantly political acoustic composer-performer until his suicide in 1976. Bruce Springsteen, most clearly influenced by Dylan on the album Nebraska (1982) on which he sings rubato over discreet strummed or arpeggiated guitar chords with occasional harmonica, has evolved towards heavier rock anthems such as Born in the USA. In this, a seemingly anti-American song celebrates American patriotism. Harry Chapin created a body of politically aware narratives before his untimely death in 1981, and the influence of Guthrie and Dylan emerged again in the songs of Michelle Shocked of the late 1980s and 90s. Reggae too has yielded important singer-songwriters with socio-political agendas, such as Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley (see fig.1) and Peter Tosh.
From country music singer-songwriters the ballad style of Johnny Cash was commercially successful in the late 1950s (Cry Cry Cry and I walk the line), and John Denver, Kris Kristofferson and Dolly Parton have brought such ballads into the mainstream, as has the English Roger Whittaker. Many country-influenced singer-songwriters of the 1950s and 60s were also successful in rock and roll: Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison are such examples. Gram Parsons’s southern background influenced his country rock albums with the Flying Burrito Brothers and as a solo artist, and Canadian Neil Young’s country-influenced early songs include After the Goldrush (1970) and Harvest (1972), the latter including symphonic orchestral arrangements.
Rhythm and blues and soul also produced significant singer-songwriters, with Chuck Berry’s guitar-driven happy rock, Marvin Gaye’s mainstream soul ballads, and Smokey Robinson’s ballads for Motown. The songs of Sam Cooke and Al Green display the influence of gospel, while James Brown covered almost every style. The keyboard player and vocalist Stevie Wonder was much influenced by Ray Charles, and his collection Songs in the Key of Life (1976) was one of the most significant of the decade. Before her semi-retirement from performing, Laura Nyro’s blend of white soul, gospel and rhythm and blues harnessed to her three-octave range offered new possibilities in this area.
Both blues and country music have influenced a number of virtuosic guitarists in writing their own songs, especially Ry Cooder, Don Hendry, Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler. British and Irish folk music has produced its own singer-songwriters: Donovan, Christy Moore, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake and Al Stewart all achieving mainstream success.
Most of the singer-songwriters who emerged in the 1960s continued to make records into the post-60s rock era, when the term also came to be used more generally of any composer-performers who wrote their own material. The poetic agenda tended to become broader and less melancholic, sometimes embracing the more conventional concerns of Tin Pan Alley songwriters of previous generations, but still demonstrating a legitimacy based on individual control of the whole creative process. Instrumental accompaniment became more sophisticated from the writers themselves, who would often orchestrate their recordings playing some or all of their own instruments. The process was begun by the Beatles, especially Lennon and McCartney, whose songs drew on a range of influences from rhythm and blues to Tin Pan Alley standards. Ray Davies’s tunefully poetic songs for the Kinks in the late 1960s celebrated the romance of the ordinary in Waterloo Sunset and Sunny Afternoon. Paul Simon began with acoustic ballads in the 1970s, taking from African and Mexican music in the following decades. Joni Mitchell’s wide and varied vocal range and skilled playing on both the piano and the guitar allowed her a wider harmonic and melodic vocabulary, already apparent on the 1970 collection Ladies of the Canyon, which includes the song Woodstock, the quintessential late-1960s expression of peace and protest (fig.2). Subsequent work took her into more mainstream music and jazz, notably through her album Mingus (1979). Her contemporaries include Carole King who, like Mitchell, began her career writing songs for others, and on whose 1970 album Tapestry she reveals a close affinity with the piano.
In the later 1970s and 80s Rickie Lee-Jones’s narrative songs were often compared, despite their bleakness, to those of Joni Mitchell; Janis Ian expressed a similar melancholy, moving from folk towards jazz before her temporary retirement in 1981. Randy Newman, a classically trained pianist, uses musical parody and pastiche to support his often ironic view of American Society, and from a similar background Dory Previn also used the language of Tin Pan Alley to express astringent personal themes. Billy Joel’s more mainstream pop songs (Mr Piano Man) show a versatility derived from having complete control of his resources and sometimes verge on an easy-listening style. Joan Armatrading’s music, perhaps once influenced by Mitchell, covers a wide range of genres from folk to reggae, jazz and soul, her vocal delivery ranging from the intimate to the explosive. Tracy Chapman, whose vocal style is reminiscent of Armatrading’s, writes more radically social and political texts: Behind the Wall, on her self-titled 1988 début album is a passionate unaccompanied solo on the subject of domestic violence. Politics are at the heart of Billy Bragg’s social commentary, and more than a passing influence on the white soul songs of Paul Weller (fig.3). The 1980s and 90s also saw the more experimental work of Nick Cave, Lou Reed and Polly Jean Harvey (fig.4), as well as sophisticated extrapolations from folk-rock by Suzanne Vega.
The last three decades of the 20th century saw the emergence and continuing success of Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello. Perhaps more than any others these four represent the essence of the genre. The eponymous title track of Morrison’s first solo record Astral Weeks is a dialogue with an imaginary woman/listener. As music it barely exists: Morrison’s guitar alternates throughout its seven-minute length between tonic and subdominant while the singer declaims his text in a series of repeated phrases using only a small number of notes, occasionally reduced to incoherence. To engage with the piece the listener is forced to become the addressee of Morrison’s rhetoric and enter the singer’s world without ever fully comprehending what the song might be about. There are echoes of Dylan’s recitative-like delivery punctuated by basic root-position chords throughout the album, with surreal flutes and violins giving the songs a magical and romantic quality which pervades many of Morrison’s subsequent albums. Cohen has a similarly powerful effect, his lugubrious baritone drawing the listener in. His songs describe the awfulness of human relationships, sex, religion and death, sparingly spiked with a melancholic humour, as on the depressive Songs from a Room. While his droning delivery can become tedious, at its minimal best he can produce a unique union of poetry, music and self, as in the moving Queen Victoria, a home recording from 1972.
Cohen was an accomplished poet and novelist before he took to performing, and critics have detected various literary references in his work. Morrison, too, drew on Joyce and Yeats, while Elvis Costello soon outgrew his early comparison with Dylan and has applied his versatile imagination to almost every aspect of late 20th-century pop music. From the 1977 collection My Aim is True, musically looking back to American rock and roll and doo-wop, to the later albums including Punch the Clock (1983) and Mighty Like a Rose (1991) he has ranged over social and romantic issues, flirting with pastiche in his efforts to set his free-ranging lyrics in a familiar musical context. Tom Waits, in elevating the bar-ballad to an art-form, marries magical texts with a harmonic vocabulary drawing on jazz, which he delivers in a powerful bass. Both Costello and Waits have had many of their songs sung by others, but like Dylan before them, echoes of their distinctive voices are always present.
The genre continues to reinvent itself. Phil Collins’s Both Sides (1993), on which he played all the instrument lines himself by multi-tracking, is a good example of a confessional album using modern technology as the equivalent of an accompanying instrument. Sting’s albums, especially the partly autobiographical The Soul Cages (1991), have extended the medium, though his use of virtuosic instrumentalists tends to have a depersonalizing effect. All generations have produced composer-performers who stretch the definition of the term: Frank Zappa’s rambling creations, Laurie Anderson’s machine-driven political songs, Kate Bush’s virtuosic excursions into fantasy, Elvis Costello’s collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet and Fretwork, Peter Gabriel’s ventures into world music. What gives them coherence is the creative connection between music, text and listener, and which is mediated by a single singer.
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D. Taylor: ‘His Name was in Lights: Chuck Berry’s “Johnnie B. Goode”’, Popular Music, xi/1 (1992), 27–40
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J. Potter: ‘The Singer, not the Song: Women Singers as Composer-Poets’, Popular Music, xii/2 (1994), 191–9
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JOHN POTTER