A singer-songwriter is a musician who writes, composes, and performs their own musical material, including lyrics and melodies. In the United States, the category is built on the folk-acoustic tradition with a guitar,[1] although this role has transmuted through different eras of popular music. Singer-songwriters often provide the sole musical accompaniment to an entire song. The piano is also an instrument of choice.
In the early 21st century, various digital production tools, examples including GarageBand and other software programs, began to be used by singer-songwriters to compose their music and otherwise work as an audio engineer enhancing media.
Definition and usage
The label "singer-songwriter" (or "song-writer/singer"[2]) is used by record labels and critics to define popular music artists who write and perform their own material, which is often self-accompanied – generally on acoustic guitar or piano.[3]
Such an artist performs the roles of composer, lyricist, vocalist, sometimes instrumentalist, and often self-manager.[4] According to AllMusic, singer-songwriters' lyrics are often personal but veiled by elaborate metaphors and vague imagery, and their creative concern is to place emphasis on the song rather than on their performance of it. Most records by such artists have a similarly straightforward and spare sound that places emphasis on the song itself.[5]
The term may also characterise songwriters in the rock, folk, country, and pop-music genres – including Henry Russell (1812–1900), Aristide Bruant (1851–1925), Hank Williams (1923–1953), and Buddy Holly (1936–1959). The phrase "singer-songwriter", recorded from 1949,[6] came into popular usage from the 1960s onwards[7] to describe songwriters who followed particular stylistic and thematic conventions, particularly lyrical introspection, confessional songwriting, mild musical arrangements, and an understated performing style.[8] According to writer Larry David Smith, because it merged the roles of composer, writer, and singer, the popularity of the singer-songwriter phenomenon reintroduced the Medieval troubadour tradition of "songs with public personalities" after the Tin Pan Alley era in American popular music.[9] Song topics of singer-songwriters from the American folk music revival include political protest, as in the case of Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) and Pete Seeger (1919–2014).[10] According to the Journal of Popular Music Studies, from the folk revival and onward into its permanence in pop music, the role of a singer-songwriter has involved several dimensions of creative identity:
The first aesthetic layer encourages songwriters to sing and perform their own works and to instill their own stylistic flavors into the song texts. The songwriters are not independent from the works once they are finished; rather, they enter into, activate, and authenticate the song texts through their vocal and musical performances. While the first layer does not always require the singer to be the songwriter, the second sociological layer not only fixates on the relationship between singer and songwriter (in this case, singer-songwriter is often hyphenated instead of using a slash between singer and songwriter), but also solicits more sociological agency aside from singing and songwriting, such as arranging, mixing, producing, collaborating, and media management. In other words, a singer-songwriter thus undergoes a thickening process involving two-layered voices, including performing stylistic persona, amassing other voices, and coordinating other sociological skills. This thickening process demonstrates the fluid, multiple, and heterogeneous voices underneath the singular authorial image, thus complicating the notion of authorship for singer-songwriters.[11]
The concept of a singer-songwriter can be traced to ancient bardic oral tradition, which has existed in various forms throughout the world. Poems would be performed as chant or song, sometimes accompanied by a harp or other similar instrument. After the invention of printing, songs would be written and performed by ballad sellers. Usually these would be versions of existing tunes and lyrics, which were constantly evolving. This developed into the singer-songwriting traditions of folk culture.
Traveling performers existed throughout Europe. Thus, the folklorist Anatole Le Braz gives a detailed account of one ballad singer, Yann Ar Minouz, who wrote and performed songs traveling through Brittany in the late nineteenth century and selling printed versions.[12]
In large towns it was possible to make a living performing in public venues, and with the invention of phonographic recording, early singer-songwriters like Théodore Botrel, George M. Cohan, and Hank Williams became celebrities; radio further added to their public recognition and appeal.
During the period from the 1940s through the 1960s, sparked by the American folk music revival, young performers inspired by traditional folk music and groups like the Almanac Singers and the Weavers began writing and performing their own original material and creating their own musical arrangements.[13]
In the early 21st century, the digital audio workstation GarageBand has been utilized by many aspiring singer-songwriters to compose and record music.[14] Singer-songwriters who have composed music professionally with GarageBand include Erykah Badu (for her 2008 album New Amerykah Part One)[15] and Bilal (for his 2010 album Airtight's Revenge).[16]
The first popular recognition of the singer-songwriter in English-speaking North America and the United Kingdom occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s when a series of blues, folk and country-influenced musicians rose to prominence and popularity. These singer-songwriters included Bob Dylan, Neil Young, John Lennon, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Albert Hammond, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. Artists who had been primarily songwriters, notably Carole King, Townes Van Zandt, and Neil Diamond, also began releasing work as performers. In contrast to the storytelling approach of most prior country and folk music, these performers typically wrote songs from a highly personal (often first-person), introspective point of view. The adjectives "confessional" and "sensitive" were often used (sometimes derisively) to describe singer-songwriter style.
The scene that had developed out of the American folk music revival, pioneered by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had grown to a major movement in the early 1960s, popularized by Joan Baez and her protégée, Bob Dylan, who had started reaching a mainstream audience with his hit, Blowin' in the Wind" (1963) bringing "protest songs" to a wider audience.[29] There were hints of cross-pollination, but rock and folk music had remained largely separate genres, often with different audiences.[30] An early attempt at fusing elements of folk and rock was highlighted in the Animals "House of the Rising Sun" (1964), a folk song, recorded with rock and roll instrumentation.[31]
By the mid-1960s Bob Dylan took the lead in merging folk and rock, and in July 1965, released "Like a Rolling Stone", with a revolutionary rock sound, steeped in tawdry urban imagery, followed by an electric performance later that month at the Newport Folk Festival. Dylan plugged an entire generation into the milieu of the singer-songwriter. Often writing from an urban point of view, with poetry punctuated by rock rhythms and electric power, Dylan's fusing of folk and rock freed up emerging singer-songwriters to use elements of both traditions to tell their stories. In the mid- to late 1960s, bands and singer-songwriters began to proliferate the underground New York art/music scene. The release of The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967, featuring singer-songwriter Lou Reed and German singer and collaborator Nico was described as the "most prophetic rock album ever made" by Rolling Stone in 2003.[32][33]
In the late '60s a new wave of female singer-songwriters broke from the confines of pop, using the urban landscape as their canvas for lyrics in the confessional style of poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. These pioneering women, appeared in a feature in Newsweek, July 1969, "The Girls: Letting Go: 'What is common to them – to Joni Mitchell and Lotti Golden, to Laura Nyro, Melanie, and to Elyse Weinberg, are the personalised songs they write, like voyages of self-discovery, brimming with keen observation and startling in the impact of their poetry."[34] In The Guardian, author Laura Barton describes the radical shift in subject matter—they sang about politics, love affairs, the urban landscape, drugs, disappointment, and the life and loneliness of the itinerant performer.[35]Lotti Golden, in her Atlantic debut album Motor-Cycle, chronicled her life in NYC's East Village in the late 1960s counterculture, visiting subjects such as gender identity (The Space Queens-Silky is Sad) and excessive drug use (Gonna Fay's). The women in the 1969 Newsweek article ushered in a new age of the contemporary female singer-songwriter that has informed generations of women singer-songwriters into the 21st century,[35] with poet Warsan Shire as the muse for Beyoncé's 2016 album Lemonade.[36]
Lotti Golden performing, Nashville, Tennessee, in the confessional tradition, 1971
Recording on the professional-grade systems became affordable for individuals in the late 1990s. This created opportunities for people to independently record and sell their music. Such artists are known as "indies" because they release their records on independent, often self-owned record labels, or no label at all. Additionally the Internet has provided a means for indies to get their music heard by a wider audience.
David Crosby, (of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash) is one of the singer-songwriters who crossed over into mainstream rock, seen here in 1976 backstage of the Frost Amphitheater, Stanford University.
Tracy Chapman began singing about social issues in American society in the 1980s.
Taylor Swift is a contemporary singer-songwriter (pictured in 2015)
Matty Healy is a British singer-songwriter who fronts the indie art pop band the 1975 (pictured in 2019)
Chanson, the French tradition
French "chanson" comes from an old tradition, since the Middle Ages. It is driven by the rhythms of the French language. It can be distinguished from the rest of French "pop" music or soft rock format that began to spread in France during the 1960s until today, under the cultural influence of Anglo-American rock music and the rock band era.
The first modern French singer-songwriter was Charles Trenet, who began his solo career in 1938. He was the first to use jazz rhythms in chanson. He would remain an isolated act until the creative blooming of a new generation during the post-World War II era (mid-1940s and 1950s), where such artists as Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens, Félix Leclerc (from Quebec), Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel (from Belgium), Henri Salvador (from French Guiana), Charles Aznavour, and Barbara appeared, with contrasted and rich imagination. Most of them are recognized as great masters by younger generations of French artists, especially Ferré (for the richness of his lyrics, his melodic genius, his critical density on social issues and his body of work's profoundness) and Gainsbourg (for the bright and tasteful adaptation of pop or rock music with French language-driven rhythms).
Cantautori (Italian plural; the singular is cantautore) is the Italian expression corresponding to singer-songwriters in English. The word is a portmanteau of cantante (singer) and autore (writer).
Branduardi was greatly influenced by Medieval and Baroque musical styles, while his lyrics are usually inspired by ancient fables. Battiato started as a progressive rock and cultivated music artist in the 1970s, shifting to an original blend of pop, electronic, new wave, and world music in the 1980s.
Those canutautori linked to the city of Genoa (De André, Paoli, Bindi, Tenco, Baccini, etc.) are also referred as members of the Genoese School.
The Neapolitan cantautorePino Daniele often fused genres as diverse as R&B, fusion, blues, pop, jazz, and tarantella to produce a sound uniquely his own, with lyrics variously in Italian, Neapolitan, or English. Similarly Paolo Conte was often tagged as a cantautore, but was more into the jazz tradition.
In the 1980s Vasco Rossi was renowned for his blend of blues-tinged rock music mixed with Italian melodies.
He was nicknamed the "only Italian rockstar" (l'unica rockstar italiana) by his fans.[38]
Mixing international sounds and Italian lyrics, in the 2000s Bugo became the "fantautore", a neologism coined for him.[39] Despite not having achieved great fame, he is considered the pioneer of the renewal of Italian songwriting, making a point to break from the politicised content of the 70s.[40]
The word has been borrowed into other languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalancantautor, French chantauteur, Maltesekantawtur, Romaniancantautor, and Sloveniankantavtor.
Beginning in the 1960s and following the Italian cantautori style of the 1950s (like the one of Domenico Modugno), many Latin American countries developed singer-songwriter traditions that adopted elements from various popular styles. The first such tradition was the mid-1960s invention of nueva canción, which took hold in Andean countries like Chile, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia.
At around the same time, the Brazilian popular style bossa nova was evolving into a politically charged singer-songwriter tradition called Tropicalismo. Two performers, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso became two of the most famous people in all of Brazil through their work in Tropicalismo.
In neighbouring Malta, the main singer-songwriters are Walter Micallef, Manwel Mifsud and Vince Fabri. They all perform in Maltese.
Spain and Portugal have also had singer-songwriter traditions, which are sometimes said to have drawn on Latin elements. Catalonia is known for the Nova Cançó tradition – exemplified by Joan Manuel Serrat and Lluís Llach; the Portuguese folk/protest singer and songwriter José Afonso helped lead a revival of Portuguese folk culture, including a modernized, more socially aware form of fado called nova canção. Following Portugal's Carnation Revolution of 1974, nova canção became more politicized and was known as canto livre. Another important Spain singer-songwriters are Joaquín Sabina, José Luis Perales, and Luis Eduardo Aute.
In the latter part of the 1960s and into the 1970s, socially and politically aware singer-songwriters like Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés emerged in Cuba, birthing a genre known as nueva trova. Trova as a genre has had broad influence across Latin America. In Mexico, for example, canción yucateca on the Yucatán Peninsula and trova serrana in the Sierra Juárez, Oaxaca, are both regional adaptations of trova. Today, Guatemalan Ricardo Arjona qualifies as Latin America's most commercially successful singer-songwriter. Although sociopolitical engagement is uneven in his oeuvre, some see Arjona's more engaged works as placing him in the tradition of the Italian cantautori.
In the mid-1970s, a singer-songwriter tradition called canto popular emerged in Uruguay.
With the influence of Tropicalismo, Traditional Samba and Bossa Nova, MPB (Música popular brasileira), or Brazilian Popular Music, became highly singer-songwriter based. For years solo artists would dominate Brazilian popular music with romantic cynicism alla Jobim or subliminal anti-government messages alla Chico Buarque. After the end of the military dictatorship in Brazil, Brazilian music became less politically and socially conscious. The censored Raul Seixas or the humorous spiritualist Jorge Ben were slowly obscured by funk carioca, axé music, and Brazilian disco. In recent years, however, a new stock of socially conscious Brazilian singer-songwriters is beginning to break the almost strictly dance-music momentum that has reigned since the 1980s (see the 'Brazilian folk/folk-rock sub-article in Brazilian Music).
Since the 1960s, those singers who wrote songs outside the Soviet establishment have been known as "bards". The first songs traditionally referred to as bard songs are thought to be written in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the very existence of the genre is traditionally originated from the amateur activities of the Soviet intelligentsia, namely mass backpacking movement and the students' song movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Many bards performed their songs in small groups of people using a Russian guitar, rarely if ever would they be accompanied by other musicians or singers. Though, bards using piano or accordion are also known. Those who became popular held modest concerts. The first nationwide-famous bards (starting their career in the 1950s) are traditionally referred to as the First Five: Mikhail Ancharov, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Novella Matveyeva, Bulat Okudzhava, and Yuri Vizbor. In the 1960s, they were joined by Vladimir Vysotsky, Victor Berkovsky, Yuliy Kim, and many others.
In the course of the 1970s, the shift to the classical 6-string guitar took place, and now, a Russian guitar is a rare bird with the bards. In the same period, the movement of KSP (Kluby Samodeyatelnoy Pesni – amateur song fan clubs) emerged, providing the bards with highly educated audience, and up to the end of the 1980s being their key promotion engine. Bards were rarely permitted to record their music, partly given the political nature of many songs, partly due to their vague status in the strictly organised state-supported show business establishment of the USSR. As a result, bard tunes usually made their way around as folk lore, from mouth to mouth, or via the copying of amateur recordings (sometimes referred as magnitizdat) made at concerts, particularly those songs that were of political nature. Bard poetry differs from other poetry mainly in the fact that it is sung along with a simple guitar melody as opposed to being spoken. Another difference is that this form of poetry focuses less on style and more on meaning. This means that fewer stylistic devices are used, and the poetry often takes the form of narrative. What separates bard poetry from other songs is the fact that the music is far less important than the lyrics; chord progressions are often very simple and tend to repeat from one bard song to another. On the other hand, in the USSR the chief bard supporter was the state Union of Composers, and the main bard hater was the state Union of Writers. A far more obvious difference was the commerce-free nature of the genre: songs were written to be sung and not to be sold. The similar genre dominated by singers-songwriters is known as sung poetry in other Post-Soviet countries.
Bulgaria
Singer-songwriters are popular in Bulgaria under the name "bards", or "poets with guitars". Their tradition is a mixture of traditional folk motifs, city folklore from the early 20th century, and modern influences. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the Communist regime in the country started to tolerate the Bulgarian "bards", promoting the so-called "political songs", performed usually by one-man bands. A national festival tradition was established, under the title "Alen Mak" (Red Poppy), a symbol with strong Communist meaning in Bulgaria. At the same time, there were some prominent underground figures which were against the official Communist Party line, such as Angel "Jendema" Angelov, Yavor "Yavkata" Rilov, and Velizar "Valdes" Vankov.
After the collapse of Communism in 1989, the singer-songwriters' tradition was re-established. Currently, the Bulgarian "bards" enjoy several festivals (local and international) per year, namely the PoKi Festival (Poets with Guitars, Poetic Strings) in the town of Harmanli, the Bardfest in Lovech, the Sofia Evenings of Singer-Songwriters, and others. Major figures in the Bulgarian tradition are Dimitar Taralezhkov, Angel "Jendema" Angelov, Yavor "Yavkata" Rilov, Velizar "Valdes" Vankov, Dimitar Dobrev, Andro Stubel, Branimir "Bunny" Stoykov, Dorothea Tabakova, Mihail Belchev, Assen Maslarski, Grisha Trifonov, Plamen Stavrev, Vladimir Levkov, Margarita Drumeva, Maria Batchvarova, Plamen Sivov, and Krasimir Parvanov.[citation needed]
Romania
Despite the communist isolation, the tradition of the singer-songwriter in Romania flourished beginning with the end of the 1960s and it was put in the context of folk music, with its three main styles in Romania: ethno folk, American-style folk and lyrical (cult) folk. The framework for many of these initiatives came under the form of Cenaclul Flacăra, a series of mass cultural events with an inevitable ideological touch. Still, with the merit of supporting great opening initiatives: the appropriation of Western artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and others from the Woodstock generation, the public performance of gospel-like music, the opening to big international issues (pop culture, accountability of the leadership, tension surging during the Cold War-with surprisingly neutral positions, etc.).
Overall, the Romanian folk, in general, could be marked as an underground cultural movement, somewhere between non-aligned and protest music.[citation needed]
In the mid-1960s, Sweden witnessed the renaissance of the "trubadur", the Swedish version of the singer-songwriter. Cornelis Vreeswijk and Fred Åkerström were particularly influential in their efforts to blend the heritage of the "visa" (a specific way to render simple stanzaic poems or songs, given distinction by artists such as Carl Michael Bellman and Evert Taube) with modern approaches to balladeering.[42]
Netherlands
Ede Staal (Warffum) (1941–1986) was a Dutch singer-songwriter from the Northern province of Groningen who sang mainly in the Groninger dialect of Dutch.
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