Topic: Singer/songwriter ?

[Mr.OMuck]

This may be silly and or irrelevant ( actually I can promise you it is both) but I hate the term singer songwriter even more than I hated it's predecessor "folksinger". BUT it is a fact that many of the Blues Musicians I respond to most like Sleepy John Estes or Bukka White were consciously crafting words to tell stories not just stringing together stock Blues lines as an accompaniment to the music, although there's nothing wrong with that and it has it's own kind of power. So in a way I suppose they can't accurately be excluded from that loathsome category. I guess that raises the issue of whether or not there is any value in seeing them as singer/songwriters. The fact is that we, or the general public,don't usually think about how Big Bill  compares as a lyricist to Paul Simon, Bobby the Dylan, or Joni Mitchell. It's a little curious no? Is it the racial divide, the category, trap, the difference in the complexity of the music, the intended audience or what? Could this mean that Saturday morning college radio shows featuring multiple sincere quavering voiced women and over ernest young men singer songwriters would now have to be interspersed with Furry Lewis &
Jelly Roll Morton? The mind Boggles!

[bnemerov]

Mr. OM,
You have a genius for raising complicated issues. Congratulations.

Looking for opinions? (You know what they're like.)
Mine would be that race is at the foundation.

To give a modern example: Kevin Moore is identified as a "blues" or "pop" artist; soulful John Hiatt, a S/S. (To further cloud things, the "Americana" rubric includes S/S--and a lot of other folks--these days, but it's usually used by marketing people to deflect the shoe-gazing earnestness of the S/S stereotype.)

Of course mostly the ID is made by others. How the individuals ID themselves? Quien sabe.
best,
Bruce

[lindy]

This is a rare occasion where I was ahead of my time, at least in the context of your mini-rant.

In the early 80?s I had a Saturday morning folk music show of the kind you mention, except it was for the local NPR affiliate. One time I did a show that I promoted as ?two hours of singer-songwriter material.? I included country blues and English folksong material, as well as old-timey and bluegrass.

The local Folky Fascists were all over me like a bad suit, calling in to complain that Blind Willie Johnson was not a singer-songwriter, and neither was Ewan MacColl (I played ?Shoals of Herring,? which Ewan wrote, but many people heard it and were convinced that it was from some 18th-century collection of songs from the British Isles). I was younger then, and kind of enjoyed pushing their buttons, please don?t tell anyone.

These days I?m convinced that one of the main goals of American education is to teach us how to make and use categories. I am a product of that system, so I?ze got the habit. Today I would not put Blind Willie Johnson into a category labeled ?singer-songwriter,? but only because I now have a strong category in my mind labeled ?country blues.? I cannot give you a precise definition of country blues, but I don?t care. And I?ll be happy to agree that Blind Willie?s song about the Titanic fits the parameters of singer-songwriter to a T.

Terminology and categories will continue to confound us and cause bar fights. The one that puzzles me most these days is ?roots music,? a vague term that seems to cover a lot of territory. I won?t ask you to define it if you don?t ask me to define country blues, is that a deal?

[eric]

Curmudgeon alert:

I think the whole idea of classifying music into different genres is flawed.  I've been in the field all summer with, as it happens, a truck equipped with satellite radio.  They have a station devoted to "singer/songwriters" and for the most part they sound the same and match your description.   Occasionally someone will turn up with something interesting.  Jason Mraz, for example, is kind of original.  If you go to their blues station, you will get a steady diet of Clapton, BB King and Stevie Ray Vaughan with the rare country blues thrown in the mix, although they did interview the authors of the recent Son House and Big Bill biographies.  So my long winded point is that when you say blues, or jazz or whatever, it means different things to different people.  I once played Willie Brown's M&O Blues and another musician, apparently unaware of of anything preceding Clapton, did his level best to convince me I wasn't playing "blues."

I truly hate the word "folk" to describe music.  Among many other things I dislike about it is it kind of devalues the creativity of the individual musician.

Also, get off my lawn...    

[dj]

I don't think it's racial -  Joan Armatrading is a singer/songwriter.  It's a stylistic thing.  Elements of the style include earnestness, taking a stand on social issues, and (semi-) autobiographical material.  But I think earlier posters have it right: blues singers/songwriters arent "singer/songwriters" because they already fit into a different category.  And one of the unwritten rules of the music business is that you can't ever be in more than one category at a time/   

[davet]

I was wondering whether singer/songwriter was the catchall for those who did not fit into any other category. The home for the unclassified.

[Norfolk Slim]

I don't see it as race based either.  I think its vastly less cynical than that.  C&W guys are C&W guys, not singer songwriters, despite writing lengthy songs about love and loss.

The industry categorises voraciously because it works from a marketing standpoint.  Has done for a very long time.  We can, to an extent, rise above their categorisations but they won't go away.  I don't think theres anything sinister about it, it just happens to work.

Singer songwriter, to me, is simply a category in which they tend to put a particular brand of musician, usually one who plays fairly stripped down stuff, with (often faux) personal / emotional lyrics, and a slightly meandering introspective style.  Most importantly, its stuff thats not blues, country, jazz, rock, folk et al...

[dj]

I just thought of another requirement for being a singer/songwriter, which goes a long way towards explaining why someone like Sleepy John Estes doesn't fit: you have to write and sing songs that are based on some aspect of the Anglo-American folk tradition without actually being in/from the tradition on which you're basing your work.    

[JohnLeePimp]

I just thought of another requirement for being a singer/songwriter, which goes a long way towards explaining why someone like Sleepy John Estes doesn't fit: you have to write and sing songs that are based on some aspect of the Anglo-American folk tradition without actually being in/from the tradition on which you're basing your work.    

...it's true

dead blues guys weren't pretentious enough to befit the songwriter label

[Stuart]

Interesting topic. When did the term "singer-songwriter" get its start and begin to find its way into the common vocabulary?

And why not "songwriter-singer?"  

I remember first hearing it being used back in the 60's to refer to people who previously had their songs recorded by others (Joni Mitchell, Kris Kristofferson, come to mind), but then emerged as people who gained popularity performing their own compositions. Perhaps the associations between the term when it gained currency and the specific people it referred to at the time helped define its range of application.

Taxonomy--you gotta love it--and hate it!

[dj]

weren't pretentious enough to befit the songwriter label

I don't think pretentious is the right word...  Certainly John Prine and Loudon Wainright III weren't pretentious.  And Vermont singer/songwriter legend Richard Ruane hasn't got a pretentious bone in his body.  But Stewart hit the nail on the head.  The name got applied in the late 1960s to a bunch of people who had first become known as songwriters, then started performing their own songs.  The label essentially means "people who perform in a style that we used in 1969 to refer to a small group of people who had just started performing".  It's not a good term, not really descriptive, but we just get stuck with terms like that.   

[Stumblin]

Terminology and categories will continue to confound us and cause bar fights. The one that puzzles me most these days is ?roots music,? a vague term that seems to cover a lot of territory. I won?t ask you to define it if you don?t ask me to define country blues, is that a deal?

You got yourself a deal 

This are Blues singers "singer-songwriters?" thing has bothered me too over the years. Although I am not wholly keen on the term (at both most and least it just about adequately describes somebody who has written and sung a song) I'm inclined to say yes. Sometimes no, but right now, yes.
I don't know.
Or do I?
I don't know.

[Gumbo]

I blame the marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation ....

[Adam Franklin]

One thing I find difficult in a world of categories, is how to categorise myself.

Blues has a terrible name in the UK, 'Roots music' probably came about as a way of selling this music without mentioning the 'B' word. It does cover a multitude of genres but does do the trick with some venues.

How do other people describe themselves?

Duke Ellington said there were only two sorts of music, good music and bad music. My stock answer to "What sort of music do you like?", is, "music I like".


Looking forward, Adam.

[Parlor Picker]

I was going to jump in with the Duke Ellington quote, but that crafty Adam Franklin beat me to it...