The category and perception of a class of performers known as singer-songwriters did not emerge into public consciousness until after 1968. Indeed, Google Ngram shows that the term ‘singer songwriter’ has no usage prior to the early 1970s. It is true that there were individuals referred to as ‘singer and songwriter’ as early as the 1870s, and earlier in the twentieth century the descriptions ‘singer songwriter’ and ‘songwriter-singer’ were used. These terms are rare, however, after World War II.¹ The ‘singer-songwriter’ is not anyone who sings his or her own songs, but a performer whose self-presentation and musical form fit a certain model. There had been rock singers who wrote their own songs since Chuck Berry, but they were not singer-songwriters. Bob Dylan, who helped create the conditions for their emergence, was not himself called a singer-songwriter in 1968, and he did not produce an album that fit the label until Blood on the Tracks in 1974. While the singer-songwriter becomes highly visible in 1970, in retrospect we can see that the movement emerged in 1968, when Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Laura Nyro released important early examples. What distinguished the singer-songwriter was both a musical shift away from the more raucous styles of rock and a lyrical shift from the more public concerns that had helped to define the folk revival. By the early 1970s, James Taylor, Mitchell, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Carly Simon, and others created a new niche in the popular music market. These singer-songwriters were not apolitical, but they took a confessional stance in their songs, revealing their interior selves and their private struggles.

The year 1968 was a turning point not only because it was the high-watermark of the New Left, but also because it saw the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the bloody police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the disappointment of Richard Nixon being elected President and the Vietnam War continuing unabated. Up until 1968, youth culture was hopeful about progressive change and about individual opportunities, but the events of that year began to alter the dominant outlook. In the summer of 1969, Woodstock provided a few months of uplift, but the shift was solidified in the reading given to the free concert at Altamont in December. The anti-war movement would continue, of course, and the student strikes of the 1970, which shut down more than 450 campuses in the wake of the Kent State shootings and the US invasion of Cambodia, might be seen as the largest manifestation of the student Left, but also its last gasp. There would be no major campus ‘unrest’ in the years that followed. In the summer of 1969, Students for a Democratic Society, the leading New Left organisation, disintegrated. One of its fragments, the Weatherman faction, turned to a strategy of violence it hoped would incite the working class to join them. It resulted rather in the opposite reaction, and made the New Left look loony, dangerous, and out of touch. There had been sporadic violence throughout the 1960s, but as Time reported in early 1971, even the Weatherman group, by then reduced to a tiny underground contingent, had publicly forsworn violence after an explosion killed three of its own in a Manhattan apartment used for bomb-making. Time noted this as part of what it called ‘the cooling of America’, discussed in a ten-page special section, which observed that ‘In rock music … a shift can be perceived from acid rock to the soft ballads of Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, and James Taylor’.²

Time’s ‘cooling’ thesis is questionable with regard to music. The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Grand Funk Railroad represented the emergence in the early 1970s of what Steve Waksman has dubbed ‘arena rock’, the latter three representing the roots of what would by the end of the decade be known as heavy metal. As Waksman’s title, This Ain’t No Summer of Love, suggests, he also sees the ‘decline of the sixties’, but in favour of ‘the growing demand for a heavier brand of rock’.³ Moreover, while Time’s assertion that ‘Large numbers are alienated from present political patterns. . . they believe that all the effort and idealism they have expended on such issues as the war and racism have had little impact on Washington’⁴ is doubtless correct, that does not mean that one can account for the rise of the singer-songwriter entirely in terms of a retreat from the politics of the New Left. For one thing, even among the young, it is not clear that opposition to the war, much less to racism and other social inequities, was ever a majority view. For another, the student Left was never driven purely by these issues. Nick Bromell argues a ‘sense of estrangement from everything that might give life meaning is what the writers of the Port Huron Statement [the founding document of SDS⁵] were trying to articulate as a political problem when they claimed that people are “infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities”, and when they opposed “the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things”’.⁶ The insistence on the personal in the work of the singer-songwriters remains consistent with this position. The rock audience was maturing. While The Beatles had expanded the audience for rock and roll to include college students, a younger cohort, who had been early teens when The Beatles invaded, was now entering college. With The Beatles having broken up, they were looking for something new. But it is also true that new political issues were emerging. One might hazard a guess that female listeners in particular sought not only more mature themes, but also perspectives that matched their own experiences as women, especially in light of the women’s movement that was emerging at just this moment.

The key to understanding the changes in popular music in the early 1970s is the realisation that the market was already beginning to fragment. By 1969, the top 40 format, which had long dominated radio, was being challenged. Progressive rock stations were programming album tracks – and sometimes, whole albums – instead of singles. Bands like Grand Funk and Black Sabbath, who appealed to younger listeners, continued to be heard on top-40 stations, while the singer-songwriters clearly benefited from the style and mood of new stations. In place of shouting and hype, the new format featured DJs who spoke, if not quite in hushed tones, more or less conversationally. Their approach was no longer to sell, but to curate. But it was not just changes in rock that mattered. Another condition for the emergence of the singer-songwriter was the decline of folk as a distinct style and scene. The early issues of Rolling Stone, a magazine identified strongly with rock, give a good sense of this process. In one of its first issues in 1967, one finds a story about Joan Baez going to jail to protest the draft and a notice of Judy Collins’ new album, Wildflower, of which is observed, ‘for the first time she has written her own material for the record … three of her original songs’.⁷ Baez was known as a folksinger and Collins is identified as such, but their very presence in Rolling Stone is evidence that the boundary between rock and folk had already become flexible.

An indication of the way in which the singer-songwriter would be understood is apparent in Jon Landau’s positive review of James Taylor’s self-titled first album. The review begins,

These remarks reveal the moment of the singer-songwriter’s emergence with striking clarity. One key point is the connection Landau makes to folk music, which is utterly inaccurate. The folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s had little to do with reflections of individual lives. Folk music of this era was a celebration of community. It promised to put the listener in touch with ‘the people’, and even when its lyrics were not explicitly political, the identification of it with the people made it a political statement. As one of the chief proponents of the revival, Izzy Young put it, ‘the minute you leave the people, or folk-based ideas, you get into a rarified area which has no meaning anymore’.⁹

Bob Dylan is, of course, a key figure in the transition from folk to singer-songwriter music even though he was not himself a singer-songwriter until later. Dylan’s very early work is folk, and Dylan’s songs were heard as public music and not private revelation even though as early as ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, he was writing songs that were rooted in his private experience. But this song, along with later expressions of similar emotion, such as ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, were not heard as particularly personal. And the dominant emotion they seemed to express, anger, is one not typically associated with introspection. Dylan, however, did turn to introspection in ‘My Back Pages’, a song that was heard as repudiation of his earlier, more political stance.¹⁰ Irwin Silber in ‘An Open Letter to Bob Dylan’, published in Sing Out (November 1964), wrote about songs that would later be released on Another Side, ‘I saw at Newport how you had lost contact with the people … [the]new songs seem to be all inner-directed, no, inner-probing, self-conscious.’¹¹ In 1965 Izzy Young describes Dylan and others going through a ‘period of gestation from “protest” to “introspection”’.¹² But Dylan moved away from introspection in his work of the later 1960s, which culminated in Nashville Skyline (1969), an album of commercial-sounding country music.

Folk music began ‘a sharp commercial decline’ in 1965, the year Dylan performed his fabled electric set at the Newport Folk Festival.¹³ Almost at the same time, folk rock emerged as a successful commercial genre, but the singer-songwriter movement did not in the main come out of folk rock, which retained folk’s public orientation and married it to rock beats and arrangements. The first singer-songwriters were people who came from outside rock. These emerge in 1968, including Randy Newman, who had been writing songs since 1961, releasing his first album (Randy Newman) in 1968, Laura Nyro, who had been part of folk scenes in New York and San Francisco, with Eli and Thirteenth Confession, and Canadian poet Leonard Cohen releasing his first album (Songs of Leonard Cohen). All of these records would be influential, and taken together they are evidence of change in popular music. But these first buds of the singer-songwriter spring are not in the main typical of what the movement in the 1970s would become. Those central to mainstream of the singer-songwriter in 1970s had some connection to the folk movement itself. A key figure in the transition from folk to singer-songwriter was Tom Rush, a folk performer who did not mainly record his own compositions. According to Stephen Holden, Rush ‘was the first to popularize songs by Jackson Browne, James Taylor, and Joni Mitchell’¹⁴. In 1968, Rush released Circle Game, which included songs by all three, at a time when only Mitchell had an album of her own. It may be the Tom Rush of Circle Game whom Jon Landau was thinking of when he listened to James Taylor, especially since Landau was then writing for Boston’s Real Paper and Rush’s home base was the Boston area folk scene. Rush’s most famous composition, ‘No Regrets’, first released on Circle Game, is an introspective song that has more in common with the confessional songs Mitchell would later write than with those Rush recorded on this album. ‘No Regrets’ recounts the narrative of a past relationship in images that belie the chorus’ assertion that the singer has no regrets about its ending. While this disjunction makes the song a bit less overtly confessional than, say, ‘Fire and Rain’, or ‘River’, it is more personal than Mitchell’s contemporary work.

James Taylor was the first of the group to emerge clearly as a new kind of performer. That did not happen with his first album, which despite good notices did not sell many copies. In 1969, he appeared to acclaim at the Newport Folk Festival, where he met Joni Mitchell who would be his girlfriend for the next several years. But it was not until the success of his second album, Sweet Baby James, and especially the song ‘Fire and Rain’, which got wide AM airplay, that Taylor began to be recognised as ‘a new troubadour’ and ‘the first superstar of the seventies’.¹⁵ What distinguished the new singer-songwriters was the confessional mode, and ‘Fire and Rain’ was the first song in this mode to become a hit.

‘Fire and Rain’ illustrates the confessional mode perfectly. As I have written elsewhere, ‘What is remarkable about “Fire and Rain” is the starkness of the pain and despair it reveals. Pop music had long featured laments about lost love, but being pop they seemed to be conventional rather than personal. “Fire and Rain”, however, advertises itself as autobiography.’¹⁶ It does this, however, not by the explicitness of its references – or by their truth or accuracy – but by the language of the lyrics and the style in which the song is performed. That fans heard the song as autobiographical is clear from the press coverage, although while the song was on the charts the references remained obscure. In early 1971, Rolling Stone explained the autobiographical background of each verse: a friend’s suicide, Taylor’s heroin addiction, and the break-up of Taylor’s first band, the Flying Machine.¹⁷ Rolling Stone and the nearly simultaneous New York Times Magazine piece also discuss at some length Taylor’s confinement on two occasions in mental hospitals, one of which he sang about in an early song, ‘Knockin’ Round the Zoo.’ Indeed, both of these long articles are more focused on Taylor’s personal life than on his music.

As I argued in Rock Star, songs like ‘Fire and Rain’ came to be called ‘confessional’ because of a perceived similarity to the poetry of what by the late 1960s was being called the confessional school. Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) was the first book to be discussed as confessional, its poems making explicit use of autobiographical materials presented in a relatively plain style, especially compared to the more elaborate diction and poetic effects of his earlier work. Among the other members of the school were three of Lowell’s writing students, W. D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, the latter two embodying for many a connection between confessional poetry and the emerging women’s movement. Clearly, one appeal that this poetry had for readers was its sense of authenticity; it seemed to be not only telling the truth, but also telling it about problems that anyone might suffer. Confessional poetry, however, was not defined by its accuracy to the facts of the author’s life. For the critic who first named the movement, M. L. Rosenthal, the key issue is the way that the self is presented in the poems, the poet appearing as him or herself and not in the convention of an invented ‘speaker’.¹⁸ As Irving Howe explained later, ‘The sense of direct speech addressed to an audience is central to confessional writing.’¹⁹ That sense of direct address is present in ‘Fire and Rain’ and in many other songs of Taylor, Mitchell, and Browne. In other words, what mattered ultimately is not whether the details were true, but that they were presented in a form that made them seem so.

Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971) cemented the confessional stance of the singer-songwriter. Mitchell’s previous release, Ladies of the Canyon (1970) had included a mixture of confessional songs, such as ‘Willy’ and ‘Conversation’, with the more folk-like compositions ‘Circle Game’ and ‘Big Yellow Taxi.’ Blue leaves out the folk sound and lyrics entirely, in favour of a style likened at the time to both ‘torch’ songs and ‘art’ songs.²⁰ Yet neither of these labels is quite right. The lyrics establish a sense of direct address and autobiographical reference by using more or less conversational language, including specific details of time and place. Like ‘Fire and Rain’ which begins, ‘Just yesterday morning’, and Mitchell’s ‘River’, opens with ‘It’s coming on Christmas’, Mitchell’s ‘Carey’ is set in a tourist town where she complains of having ‘beach tar’ on her feet, while ‘A Case of You’ and ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ include accounts of particular taverns. These latter two songs also include fragments of conversations, giving them a documentary character. There is also often a sense of helplessness that Taylor and Mitchell’s songs share with confessional poetry. Taylor cannot remember to whom he should send the song his friend’s death has provoked him to write. Mitchell complains that she is ‘hard to handle,’ selfish’ and ‘sad’, a description that sounds strange in the first person. The admission of such failings, along with revelations such as Taylor’s stay in a mental hospital, point to another dimension of the term, ‘confessional’, the sense that secrets are being revealed. Finally, there are musical cues that make us feel that what we are hearing is a direct address to us and not a performance or show meant mainly to entertain. I have already noted that the singer-songwriters moved away from the sing-along style, with its catchy melodies, major chords, and upbeat tempos typical of the folk revival. What we get instead are Mitchell’s open tunings or Taylor’s unusual chords presented at a slow tempo in arrangements that distinguish these recordings as something other than folk. The accompaniment, unlike in much rock, allows the lyrics to take the foreground, but it is also distinctive, individualising the material rather than making it sound traditional.

Rosenthal had understood Lowell’s confessional poetry as ‘self-therapeutic’.²¹ One finds evidence of that in both Taylor and Mitchell as well. Taylor’s songs on first several albums often report on his mental state, or describe one, such as when he’s ‘going to Carolina’ in his mind. Mitchell’s songs may be less obvious about their therapeutic intent, but it’s hard to read songs like ‘River’ any other way. Why is the singer telling us she’s selfish and sad? In an interview in 1995, Mitchell said of this song, ‘I have, on occasion, sacrificed myself and my own emotional makeup … singing “I’m selfish and I’m sad” [on “River”], for instance. We all suffer for our loneliness, but at the time of Blue, our pop stars never admitted these things.’²² Earlier, she had said she ‘became a confessional poet’ out of ‘a compulsion to be honest with my audience’.²³ Later, Mitchell herself would deny that her songs were confessional, rejecting the idea that she wrote them under ‘duress’, and describing their motive as ‘penitence of spirit’.²⁴ It is not clear that confessional poetry directly influenced singer-songwriters like James Taylor or Joni Mitchell. But whether the singer-songwriters were reading Plath or Lowell is irrelevant to the fact of the similarities in the two bodies of work and that the audiences for each seemed to like them for similar reasons.

One of those reasons has yet to be addressed. Rosenthal does not value Lowell’s poetry merely because of its shift away from high-modernist norms or its honest expression. He reads these poems as expressions of social critique that reveal ‘the whole maggoty character’ of American culture that the poet ‘carries about in his own person’.²⁵ With regard to Life Studies this may be a strong reading, but Lowell went on, in the sonnets that would make up the Notebook and History volumes, to write poetry that was explicitly critical. And with Plath and Sexton, the fusion of personal revelation and social critique was much more widely perceived. These poems were commonly understood as feminist statements by 1970, and this connection leads us to reconsider the question of whether the emergence of the singer-songwriter represented a retreat from politics or social concerns. While the new genre clearly represents a change in focus and in attitude from public confrontation and anger to personal struggle and a reflective sadness, it does not entail a rejection of social concerns.

Indeed, feminist issues were often entailed in the concerns of the singer-songwriters, and this mode was well suited to their expression. Joni Mitchell became known as a performer who expressed a distinctly female perspective (see Chapter 18). ‘Mitchell’s songs illustrate the notion that the personal is the political by the way in which they deal with the power dynamics of intimate relationships.’²⁶ Feminist organising in the second wave was focused on consciousness raising, that is, helping women understand that what had seemed to be merely private problems were in fact the product of systemic male dominance. Consciousness raising might be seen as a confessional form because it asked women to publicly voice their personal issues. Moreover, the turn away from confrontation and anger, while not entirely reflective of the women’s movement, can also be seen as consistent with feminism’s goals. Because feminism could not succeed by depicting men and women as inherently opposed camps, its expression needed to offer the possibility of mutual understanding and positive personal transformation for both genders. Mitchell refused to call herself a feminist, saying that the term was ‘too divisional’, but that very refusal reveals the desire for a different kind of politics. Here songs gave voice to the concerns of many women by using her own life as an example. But one could argue that it was not just female singer-songwriters who raised feminist concerns. While I will not assert that Taylor, Browne, or the Dylan of Blood on the Tracks were intending to make feminist statements, by reflecting on their roles in intimate relationships, they were at least beginning to react to a key feminist demand.

By 1972, the phenomenon of the singer-songwriter was already widely recognised, as Meltzer’s profile of Jackson Browne from that year reveals:

Browne’s confessionalism was less consistent than Taylor’s or Mitchell’s at this time, but one song on For Everyman, his second album, ‘Ready or Not’, is as clear an example of the mode as one can find. The song is a narrative in which the singer describes how he met a woman in a bar, took her home for the night, and discovers soon after that she is pregnant. As Cameron Crowe describes it, the story is about the origin of Browne’s first child, Ethan, and meeting of his mother, Phyllis, ‘the model, actress, and star of the bar-fight/knock-up adventure described in Jackson’s song’.²⁸ The song’s attitude differs from that of ‘Fire and Rain’ or ‘River’ in being someone what distanced and ironic. The singer is not depressed, but bemused. Browne would continue to mix confessional material with more public songs, and he would be associated with environmentalism and the anti-nuclear movement.

Carole King and Carly Simon were also widely understood to be important examples of early 1970s singer-songwriters, and they would both further the mode’s association with feminist concerns. While on the whole these artists’ work was less confessional than Mitchell’s, it was understood as direct address. King had begun writing songs with partner Gerry Goffin in the early 1960s, and the duo penned hits for a long list of artists including The Shirelles, The Drifters, The Animals, The Byrds, and Aretha Franklin. King did not release her first record as a singer, Writer, until 1971, but it was her second album of that year, Tapestry, that broke through. The album included a version of ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, a song she and Goffin had written for the girl group The Shirelles who made it a hit ten years earlier. Susan Douglas argued that The Shirelles’ recording had made female sexual desire explicit, but King’s version made the song’s question seem personal.²⁹ But the big hit from Tapestry was ‘I Feel the Earth Move’, a much more explicit celebration of a woman’s pleasure in sex. Carly Simon’s ‘That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard it Should Be’, called into question the traditional expectation that marriage was what all women want. As Judy Kutulas described it, ‘Simon situated her song within feminism and self-actualising movements with lines such as “soon you’ll cage me on your shelf, I’ll never learn to be just me first, by myself”.’ The performance, by contrast, was hesitant and fragile, conveying uncertainty.³⁰ Her later hit, ‘You’re So Vain’, upped the autobiographical ante, making everyone wonder about whom the song was written. The songs of both King and Simon were perceived as authentic and personal, even if the personalities they expressed seemed more stable than those of Mitchell or Taylor.

As the singer-songwriter genre developed, it did not remain bound by confessionalism per se, though it retained the idea of authentic individual expression. Even in the early 1970s, there were artists associated with the movement, such as Gordon Lightfoot and Cat Stevens, whose work was less explicitly personal. Lightfoot’s big hit was ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’, a traditional ballad about a Great Lakes shipwreck. But the confessional mode has continued to be used, from Dylan’s account of the break-up of his marriage in Blood on the Tracks to Richard and Linda Thompson’s record of their break-up, Shoot out the Lights (1982), on through to Suzanne Vega, Tori Amos, Liz Phair, Alanis Morissette, Juliana Hatfield, Laura Marling, and many others. The emergence of the singer-songwriter was not just a moment in the early 1970s, but the start of a new formation that continues to this day.