singer-songwriters
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What is a singer-songwriter?
A singer-songwriter is a performer who writes and sings their own songs. Emerging in the early 1970s, singer-songwriters became prominent in commercial pop, appealing to the baby boom generation seeking political and social discourse through music.
Figures like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul Simon paved the way for this movement, influencing artists such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Carole King. These musicians broke conventional song forms, using their music to explore personal experiences and societal themes.
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How is a singer-songwriter different from other musicians?
Singer-songwriters are distinct because they write and perform their own songs, often of an autobiographical nature. This contrasts with other musicians who may perform songs written by others or specialize primarily in instrumental performance or composition. Singer-songwriters rose to prominence in the 1970s, with artists like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor leading the way by breaking down conventional song form and exploring personal experiences in their music.
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What are some famous singer-songwriters?
Singer-songwriters are professional performers of autobiographical songs who rose to prominence in the early 1970s, following the communal fervor of 1960s rock.
Some singer-songwriters include:
* Bob Dylan
* John Lennon
* Paul Simon
* Joni Mitchell
* Neil Young
* Carole KingThese artists owe much to Bob Dylan for breaking down conventional song form and undermining traditional vocal decorum.
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How have singer-songwriters influenced different styles of music?
Singer-songwriters have had a profound effect on numerous musical genres, often blending personal experiences with musical innovation.
Influence on Genre
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Folk: Bob Dylan paved the way for untrained voices singing original "song-poetry," influencing artists such as Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
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Jazz: Joni Mitchell opened up the genre to jazz influences in the mid-1970s.
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Rock: The blues have greatly influenced rock music. Early rock singers such as Elvis Presley often used blues material.
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Country: Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard paved the way for the "outlaw country" movement of the 1970s.
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singer-songwriters, professional troubadours performing autobiographical songs who ascended in the early 1970s to the forefront of commercial pop in the wake of the communal fervor of 1960s rock. For the baby boom generation that had chosen rock as a medium for political and social discourse, the new preeminence of the singer-songwriters, which lasted until the late 1970s, was a natural development. As countercultural heroes such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul Simon reached age 30, they experienced their first intimations of mortality and faced uncertain commercial futures in a youth-oriented music market.
Dylan, who had almost single-handedly dragged folk music from the political into the personal realm in the mid-1960s, had made it safe for untrained, idiosyncratic voices to sing their original “song-poetry.” In 1970, after leaving the Beatles, Lennon released his confessional “primal scream” album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, in which he repudiated the group’s deified mystique. Simon, following his breakup with Art Garfunkel, released a wistful solo debut, Paul Simon (1972), with several songs that addressed physical deterioration and death.
In the early 1970s a white, mostly middle-class pantheon of soloists coalesced—Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Randy Newman, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne, and Loudon Wainwright III, all of whom owed much to Dylan for having broken down conventional song form and undermining traditional vocal decorum.
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Mitchell, the most gifted and influential, smoothed out Dylan’s narrative line in songs of unprecedented candor and poetic refinement about her restless search for love in a hedonistic, sexually liberated age, and in the mid-1970s she opened up the genre to jazz influences. Young, in his raw acoustic ballads, epitomized a hippie visionary painfully shaking off his dreamy idealism. Morrison created cryptic dreamscapes tinged with Celtic mysticism, sung with artfully slurred diction. Newman, who came from a family of Hollywood composers, wrote ironic dramatic monologues that juxtaposed the musical worlds of Gustav Mahler, Stephen Foster, and Fats Domino. Taylor, who grew up in North Carolina, fused Appalachian mountain music with sophisticated, often cryptic personal confessions of emotional disorder.
Carly Simon, who was married to Taylor in the 1970s, personified white, East Coast, upper middle-class longing in her blunt folk-pop songs. Stevens, an English hippie mystic, wrote impenetrably fanciful but pretty folk-pop meditations. King, a professional New York songwriter, embodied an optimistic, commonsense earth mother in her plain, keyboard-based songs with gospel chords. Nyro, vastly influential but only marginally successful, invented an intensely passionate and private, keyboard-based style that borrowed from gospel, folk, jazz, and Broadway. Cohen, a Canadian poet-turned-songwriter, mixed biblical and erotic imagery in elevated folk-pop songs that had a droning Middle Eastern flavor. Browne’s morally searching generational anthems borrowed the harmonic vocabulary of Protestant hymns. Wainwright, a brilliant comic buffoon, punctured his own and his peers’ self-seriousness in needling, clownish light verse. The genre reached its commercial peak in the mid-1970s with the formal country-pop ballads of John Denver that substituted official good cheer for intimate personal revelation.
Other pioneering singer-songwriters of artistic note included John Prine, a homespun comic fabulist and storyteller from Illinois; Tom Waits, a Californian who acted the role of raspy-voiced hipster and latter-day beatnik saint; and Waits’s female counterpart, Rickie Lee Jones, whose pop-jazz suites echoed Nyro’s effusions. In England, Richard Thompson wrote scathingly despairing social realist ballads, while the hugely prolific Elvis Costello, whose first album was released in 1977, brought the anger and skepticism of punk rock into his trickily rhymed circumlocutory songs that often explored situations from multiple perspectives.
Although the reign of the singer-songwriters ended with the twin upsurge of punk and disco in the late 1970s, the genre has remained relatively stable, and the market for personal, idiosyncratic, overwhelmingly female voices with lofty, often unrealized, artistic goals has proved extremely remunerative for a select few.
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