Schubert’s predecessors and contemporaries

The work of a number of early Lied singer-songwriters includes examples of two coexisting, but discrete, influences: the virtuosic Italian sacred and stage music which dominated the courts and public performance spaces of the Holy Roman Empire; and the new, transparent, folk-styled German Lied which emerged in response to the literary and philosophical theories of Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) in the 1730s.⁷ Gottsched’s contemporary, the tenor Carl Heinrich Graun (1703/4–59), exemplifies this split. A professional tenor at the court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Graun composed the simplest of Lieder alongside his Italian opera, court and church music. His songs appeared in various compilations from 1737 onwards. The ‘Ode’ below, drawn from the posthumously published compilation Auserlesene Oden zum Singen beym Clavier (1764) is a typical example.

Example 2.1 Graun, Auserlesene Oden zum Singen beym Clavier (1764), vol. 1, no. 7, ‘Ode’, bars 1–6.

The singer and composer Johann Adam Hiller (1728–1804) is now mainly remembered for his operas. Hiller greatly admired his predecessor Graun, and like him, was proficient in the techniques and styles of Italian opera.⁸ By his own admission, in the 1750s his tastes drew him increasingly towards the ‘light and singable, as opposed to the difficult and laborious’.⁹ Hiller’s importance in the development of German musical culture lies not only in his composition of songs, but also in his commitment to raising the standard of public concert singing:

Hiller was involved with the subscription concerts of the Grosse Concert-Gesellschaft in Leipzig, and also founded his own singing school, which embraced general musicianship, choral and solo singing.¹¹ Crucially, he supported the training of women, and several female singer-songwriters of the next generation studied with him, including Corona Schröter (1751–1802), discussed further below, and Gertrud Elisabeth Schmeling (later Mara) (1749–1833). Hiller drew his pedagogical aims into his songwriting, thus aria-like works sit alongside simple folk-style tunes in his collections. These include the Lieder mit Melodien (1759 & 1772), Lieder für Kinder (1769), Sammlung der Lieder aus dem Kinderfreunde (1782), and 32 songs in the Melodien zum Mildheimischen Liederbuch (1799).

The great Lied scholar Max Friedlaender (1852–1934) argued that this was the point at which the German Lied became truly independent of foreign models.¹² Hiller’s generation of songwriters consisted of a mixture of amateurs and professionals, singers, composers, poets, collectors and editors. Their activity acquired huge ideological and political significance in Germany following Johann Gottfried von Herder’s coining of the term ‘folk song’ (‘Volkslied’) in the 1770s: this would define the distinct cultural identity of ‘Germany’, a country which did not yet exist except in the imagination of its peoples.¹³ By the early nineteenth century, building on Herder’s ideas, writers like the Schlegel and Grimm brothers regarded folk song as a ‘spontaneous expression of the collective Volksseele (or folk soul)’.¹⁴ This new manifestation of German identity had to be accessible, in keeping with the way that lyric poetry was developing; indeed, poetry and music were so closely wedded that the term Lied applied equally to poems as to songs. The poetry often consisted of ‘two or four stanzas of identical form, each containing either four lines of alternating rhymes or rhymes at the end of the second and fourth lines only’.¹⁵ The melodies were often short and memorable, supported by the barest of accompaniments. Importantly, the prevailing aesthetic of simplicity meant that the singing and composition of the Lied was not limited to technically skilled professionals as, say, the composition of operas and symphonies might be. This ideology persisted well into the next century, endorsed by influential figures such as the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and the song composers Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814) and Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832). Melody remained paramount; the accompaniment would ideally provide just harmonic support, ‘so that the melody can stand independently of it’.¹⁶ It is therefore unsurprising that some of Goethe’s amateur associates in his home town of Weimar were more prolific Lieder composers than many professional musicians.¹⁷ Alongside its political weight, the Lied was also the symbol of culture in the upper classes, evidence of Bildung or self-cultivation.

The Lied was also considered respectable for women in a way that opera could never be. Goethe’s friend Corona Schröter was a beneficiary of Hiller’s belief that women should have access to musical education. A singer, actress, composer and teacher, Schröter published two Lieder collections in 1786 and 1794, prefacing the first set with an announcement in Cramer’s Magazin der Musik: ‘I have had to overcome much hesitation before I seriously made the decision to publish a collection of short poems that I have provided with melodies … The work of any lady … can indeed arouse a degree of pity in the eyes of some experts.’¹⁸ A sense of her compositional style can be seen in Example 2.2. Schröter was also an important voice and drama teacher. She was awarded a lifelong stipend for her singing by the Duchess Anna Amalia of Weimar and her voice was praised by both Goethe and Reichardt.¹⁹ Despite her close association with Goethe (she acted in and composed incidental music to his play Die Fischerin of 1782), her compositions are hardly known.²⁰

Example 2.2 Schröter, ‘Amor und Bacchus’ (published 1786), bars 1–12.

In an age when the two leading songwriters, Zelter and Reichardt, were not singers of their own songs, it is figures like Schröter who emerge as central. Two other women who, unlike Schröter, had no access to formal musical education but benefited from their cultivated home environments, were Luise Reichardt (1779–1826) and Emilie Zumsteeg (1796–1857). Reichardt was the daughter of Johann Friedrich Reichardt. She gleaned her musical knowledge from the illustrious company which frequently met in her father’s home in Giebichenstein near Halle, for whom she regularly sang. These figures included the leading lights of German literary Romanticism such as the Grimm brothers, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Joseph von Eichendorff, Clemens Brentano, and Ludwig Achim von Arnim. Luise Reichardt was a remarkable woman. She moved to Hamburg in 1809 while her father was still alive, supporting herself as a singing teacher and composer. Additionally, she played a central role in bringing Handel’s choral works to wider attention, translating texts and preparing choruses for performances which were then conducted by her male colleagues. Although her compositional achievements were overshadowed by her father’s, she wrote more than seventy-five songs and choruses, many of which became extremely popular. Some of her songs were published under her father’s name in 12 Deutsche Lieder (1800). Luise Reichardt’s ‘Hoffnung’ (see Example 2.3) was so popular that it endured well into the twentieth century in arrangements for small and large vocal ensembles, particularly in English translation under the title ‘When the Roses Bloom’.

Example 2.3 Luise Reichardt, ‘Hoffnung’, bars 1–18.

Reichardt’s contemporary Emilie Zumsteeg was also the daughter of one of the most successful songwriters of the day, Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg (1760–1802), who lived in Stuttgart. Emilie Zumsteeg had a fine alto voice and developed a substantial career as a pianist, singer, composer and teacher.²¹ Like Luise Reichardt, Emilie Zumsteeg’s social circle included many leading poets of the day, which stimulated her interest in the Lied. She wrote around sixty songs, and her Op. 6 Lieder were praised in the national press. Almost a century later, they were still singled out for their rejection of Italian vocal style: ‘After this modish Italian entertainment music, it does us much good to get acquainted with the simple, straightforward and intimately sung German songs of Emilie Zumsteeg.’²² The quality of Zumsteeg’s voice was reflected in the relative adventurousness of her compositions; the same reviewer also observed that the first and third song of the set required a larger vocal range than usual.

Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859) presents a very different model of Lied singer-songwriter from the professionally independent Reichardt, Schröter, and Zumsteeg. The sister of one great poet, Clemens Brentano, and the wife of another, Ludwig Achim von Arnim, she too existed in a highly cultivated literary circle that encouraged a text-centred conception of the Lied. Although she composed roughly eighty songs, most of these are fragments, since her true strength lay in improvisation. Von Arnim ‘constantly struggled to commit her ideas to paper and permanence’.²³ Only nine songs were published in her lifetime.²⁴

The Westphalian poetess Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) was one of a significant number of nineteenth-century writers who composed settings of their own and others poets’ verses. These settings tended to follow transparent folk song models, reflecting the original ideological underpinning of the Lied as poetry/music for the people. Similar songs by the poets Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Franz Kugler were absorbed into German folk culture and reproduced anonymously in anthologies throughout the century.²⁵ Von Fallersleben in particular popularised his songs through his own performances. The children’s songs he composed remain popular nursery rhymes in Germany today, while his patriotic songs are still sung by male-voice choirs.

Von Droste’s musical activity was more in keeping with her cultivated and aristocratic background in Westphalia. Music was practised at a high standard at home and was complemented by frequent visits to the theatre and concerts. Her letters reveal her to have been a great admirer of keyboard improvisation, when it was well done, and this is also evident in her songs.²⁶ She was a highly competent pianist; one letter to a friend recounts the events of a concert in which she was to participate with another singer: ‘Finally, when the concert was about to begin, Herr Becker, who was to accompany us, declared that he couldn’t do it and that I, therefore, would have to play the piano myself … well, it went fine and we were greatly applauded.’²⁷

Von Droste’s composition was further stimulated by her growing interest in collecting folk songs (through the influence of her brother-in-law, the antiquary Johann von Lassberg). As a result, she made an arrangement of the Lochamer Liederbuch, one of the most important surviving collections of fifteenth-century German song, in c. 1836. Her uncle, Maximilian Friedrich von Droste-Hülshoff (1764–1840), also gave her a copy of his 1821 guide to thoroughbass, entitled Eine Erklärung über den Generalbass und die Tonsetzkunst überhaupt. Drawing together these various influences, she made settings of her own poetry and verses by leading writers such as Goethe, Byron, and Brentano. None were published in her lifetime.

Women singer-songwriters generally came from well-to-do, cultivated families which offered creative stimulus through an educated social circle – essential in the absence of widespread opportunities for formal training. While gifted Italian women could gain an outstanding musical education, this was not the case in Germany.²⁸ Barred from most public activity, the Lied offered women an arena in which they could be creative without transcending the limitations imposed by societal mores. In other words, women, as well as men, could compose songs, but the professional status of ‘composer’ was deemed appropriate only for men. The nature of the genre fixed it in the home, a space in which women could perform their own compositions without attracting criticism. Following the work of Hiller, Schröter, Zumsteeg and others, education for women flourished. The idea of the Lied as private entertainment and edification was increasingly embraced by a ‘bourgeoisie now prosperous and ambitious enough to want to imitate the sophisticated leisure of the upper classes’.²⁹

Most importantly, from the 1810s onwards, Schubert exploded the limits of the genre by revolutionising the piano accompaniments, and fusing a German sensibility with the richness of Italian vocal music (thanks to the influence of his teacher, the distinguished composer Antonio Salieri (1750–1825)). The tenor Johann Michael Vogl (1768–1840) was thirty years older than Schubert, but their collaboration was to bring about the ‘professionalisation’ of Lieder-singing. The ‘German bard’s’ memorable performances of Schubert’s songs with the composer himself at the piano were widely celebrated.³⁰ Like Schubert himself, Vogl initially trained as a chorister.³¹ His own compositions included masses, duets, operatic scenes and, of course, Lieder.³² As an aside, Vogl’s two published volumes of songs evince a range of influences from cosmopolitan Vienna: the folk-like German Lied and his professional background as an operatic singer. As a result, while his songs are generally quite straightforward, they are not formulaic (see Example 2.4).

Example 2.4 Vogl, ‘Die Erd’ ist, ach! so gross und hehr’ (published 1798), bars 1–20.

Lied singer-songwriters after Schubert

Despite the transformations effected by Schubert, the political and ideological urge to resist the evolution of the Lied was very much alive. In 1837, long after Schubert’s death, the Lied was defined in Ignaz Jeitteles’ Ästhetisches Lexikon as possessing: ‘easily grasped, simple, undemanding melody, singable by the amateur; a short or at least not lengthy lyric poem with serious or comic content; the melody of the Lied should only exceptionally exceed an octave in compass, all difficult intervals, roulades and ornaments be avoided, because simplicity is its main characteristic.’³³ Such a definition could just as easily have been penned half a century earlier. At the same time, public song performance was burgeoning, culminating in the baritone Julius Stockhausen’s performances of complete song-cycles by Schubert and Schumann in the mid-1850s and 1860s.³⁴ Within this maelstrom of influences, the Lied could be anything from the simplest tonal melody accompanied by a few chords, to vocally and pianistically virtuosic songs for the concert stage. In this context, it is worth turning to two Viennese Lied singer-songwriters: Johann Vesque von Püttlingen and Benedict Randhartinger. Each represented a strand of song-making that has been largely forgotten, but was just as productive and popular as works by the masters of the genre.

The distinguished diplomat, jurist, musician and artist Johann Vesque von Püttlingen (1803–1883) was extremely well-connected. He participated in soirées with Schubert, Vogl, the composer Carl Loewe, and the playwright Franz Grillparzer. However he also socialised with composers of the next generation including Robert Schumann, Otto Nicolai, and Hector Berlioz. He even sang his own settings of the poetry of Heinrich Heine to Schumann, who liked them very much.³⁵ Vesque exemplifies the thriving and unselfconscious culture of amateur song performance and composition in the nineteenth century. Like many figures of the Biedermeier period, he was astonishingly proficient in many diverse areas. He was skilled enough to take the tenor role in Schumann’s oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri at the Leipzig Gewandhaus when the singer due to perform had to cancel at short notice – a testament to just how porous the term ‘amateur’ was.³⁶ Under the pseudonym ‘J. Hoven’ (which drew on the last two syllables of Beethoven’s revered name), he composed 300 songs, of which no fewer than 120 are settings of Heine. His 1851 song-cycle of Heine settings, Die Heimkehr, is, at 88 songs, the longest in musical history. After the revolutions of 1848, which were not only a political but also a cultural watershed in Austro-Germany, Vesque’s songs were dismissed as sentimental and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, many have innovative forms, exceptionally well-crafted melodies, and imaginative accompaniments. See, for instance, the rippling, watery texture he devised for the opening of ‘Der Seejungfern Gesang’ (The Song of the Damselfly) Op. 11 no. 2:

Example 2.5 Vesque, ‘Der Seejungfern Gesang’ Op. 11 no. 2, bars 1–6.

It has also been pointed out that Vesque anticipated some aspects of Wolf’s songs, particularly his flexible, speech-like setting of the German language.³⁷ See, for example, Op. 81 no. 58 ‘Der deutsche Professor’:

Example 2.6 Vesque, ‘Der deutsche Professor’ Op. 81 no. 58, bars 1–15.

Vesque’s songs also testify to the quality of his voice. There is no doubt that he deserves to be better known as an exceptionally successful amateur singer-songwriter.

One further Viennese Lied singer-songwriter is the tenor Benedict Randhartinger (1802–1893). Like Schubert, he studied at the Wiener Stadtkonvikt and also with Salieri, before joining the Wiener Hofmusikkapelle. Alongside many other works, he wrote an astonishing four hundred songs, and was successful as a professional performer of his own works – a singer-songwriter in the truest sense, and one with the added lustre of having known Schubert and Beethoven personally.³⁸ Indeed, he was so highly regarded that in 1827, he was ranked alongside Schubert and Franz Lachner as one of the ‘most popular Viennese composers’.³⁹ Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt were among his accompanists.⁴⁰ He had particular success with his dramatic ballads, a sub-genre of German song that gained enormous popularity through the century.

An important influence on Randhartinger was the north German tenor and composer, Carl Loewe (1796–1869). Loewe’s development as a singer-songwriter was shaped by a promise he made to his devout father, a Pietist cantor, not to write music for the stage; possibly as a result of this, he channelled his sense of the dramatic into his songs and ballads, some of which are nearly half an hour long and show some similarities to dramatic scena. He was also a highly successful composer of oratorios. For most of his life, Loewe was the civic music director in Stettin, the capital of Pomerania near the Baltic Sea. He taught at the secondary school during the week and supplied music for the local church on Sundays.⁴¹ However, during the summer holidays, particularly from 1835–47, he travelled and built his reputation as a performer of his own ballads. His performances were enjoyed in Mainz, Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden, Weimar, and Vienna, and further afield in France and Norway.⁴² In 1847 he even performed for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in London.⁴³ Among his fans was Prussia’s crown prince, who later became King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.⁴⁴

Loewe’s ballads have remained in the repertoire, but many are unprepossessing on the page. Randhartinger apparently preferred Schubert’s songs to Loewe’s because he found them more ‘singable’; it is possible that Randhartinger found the demanding vocal range of Loewe’s songs not to his taste.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, as with Schubert, Loewe’s first opus from 1824 already marked him out as a songwriter of great imagination and distinction, as is seen from the drama of the vocal line and the detail of the shimmering, unearthly accompaniment in Example 2.7.

Example 2.7 Loewe, ‘Erlkönig’ Op. 1 no. 3, bars 1–14.

The rapid decline of Loewe’s tremendous popularity suggests that his own interpretation was central to the success of the music. His recitals had an intimacy that distinguished them from the public world of, say, the piano recital. There were never more than two hundred people in the audience. Given the small scale of this musical career, Loewe’s fame is all the more remarkable. For Schumann, Loewe was nothing less than a national treasure, who embodied a ‘German spirit’, a ‘rare combination of composer, singer and virtuoso in one person’.⁴⁶

Lied Singer-Songwriters in Brahms’ and Wolf’s day

By the second half of the century, opportunities for singer-songwriters were shifting. On one hand, it was increasingly acceptable for women to have concert careers (if not operatic careers) after marriage. On the other hand, the Lied onstage had evolved well beyond the simple folk song, thereby excluding anyone who was not truly proficient on the piano.

The career of the teacher, composer, singer and pianist Josephine Lang (1815–1880) showed how the possibilities of publication for female Lied singer-songwriters had been transformed. The daughter of a noted violinist and an opera singer, Lang was a precociously talented pianist who composed her earliest songs when she was just thirteen years old.⁴⁷ At fifteen she met Felix Mendelssohn, who listened to her performing her own Lieder, and he praised her talent warmly, calling her performances ‘the most perfect musical pleasure that had yet been granted to him’.⁴⁸ Lang was to publish over thirty collections of songs during her lifetime, as well as gaining a considerable reputation as a singer at the Hofkapelle in Munich.⁴⁹ Her circle of friends included Ferdinand Hiller, Franz Lachner, and Robert and Clara Schumann. She married the poet Christian Reinhold Köstlin in 1842; when he died in 1856, she supported herself and her six children through teaching. Lang, like Vesque, wrote songs which merit greater attention, as evinced by the opening of ‘Schon wieder bin ich fortgerissen’, published in 1867 (see Example 2.8).

Example 2.8 Lang, ‘Schon wieder bin ich fortgerissen’ Op. 38 [39] no. 3, bars 1–18.

Pauline Viardot-García (1821–1910) was a tremendously successful singer from a family of celebrated vocal performers. Sister of Maria Malibran and daughter of Manuel García, she enjoyed success on the operatic stage as well as the concert platform, and regularly appeared in London, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna and St Petersburg. A fluent speaker of Spanish, French, Italian, English, German and Russian, she composed vocal works in all of these languages (over a hundred items in all), and also added vocal parts to piano works by Chopin.⁵⁰ Her Lieder include settings of poems by Eduard Mörike, Goethe and Ludwig Uhland, including her very first published song: a setting of Uhland’s Die Capelle which she produced at the request of Robert Schumann for inclusion in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in 1838.⁵¹ As a cosmopolitan performer and composer, Viardot-Garcia’s contribution to the Lied is small but significant, given her close friendships with the Schumanns, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner. She was also an influential vocal teacher.

In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the Breslau-born George Henschel (1850–1934) emerged as an exceptionally gifted singer, pianist, conductor and composer who did much to promote the Lied in Germany, England and America. Henschel was a member of the Brahms circle and a protégé of the violinist Joseph Joachim and his wife, the contralto Amalie. The Joachims were keen to support Henschel’s career as a singer, and he appeared in many concerts alongside Amalie Joachim, who was a great proponent of the Lied in public concerts.⁵² Henschel later performed with Brahms in the mid-1870s; but by this stage, he was already accompanying himself in private gatherings.⁵³ Following a hugely successful debut in London in 1877, he travelled to the United States in 1880 with his Boston-born fiancée, Lilian Bailey (1860–1901), who was also a singer. When the two gave their first Boston recital on 17 January 1881, Henschel took the role of singer and accompanist, playing for both himself and his bride-to-be.⁵⁴

Henschel’s importance as a Lied performer was twofold. He was one of the first performers to give regular vocal recitals in which there were almost no non-vocal items – he turned away from the traditional ‘miscellany’ model of programming in order to put the song centre-stage.⁵⁵ He also acted as the sole interpreter of his own compositions on many occasions, and both the accompaniments of his own pieces, and those of other songs he chose to perform, suggest that he was a prodigiously talented pianist. His numerous song compositions include twenty-five numbered opus sets for solo voice, several collections for duet and vocal quartet, choral works and an opera. Since he was popular with both English and German-speaking audiences, many of his Lieder were published with English translations, and he also composed many songs to English poems, such as Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break and texts from Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies.⁵⁶ They range from straightforward parlour pieces, almost certainly intended for an informal setting, to more pianistically and vocally complex items, such as the ballad Jung Dietrich, Op. 45, published in c. 1890:

Example 2.9 Henschel, ‘Jung Dietrich’ Op. 45, bars 1–16.

The decline of the Lied is often dated to the outbreak of the First World War, with Richard Strauss’ Vier letzte Lieder of 1948 as its epilogue. As a result of Germany’s defeat, the growing international popularity of the genre was abruptly halted; within the nation, other changes took place which affected its fate. It should be stressed, however, that in the pre-war period, the Lied was more popular than ever.⁵⁷ For this reason, it is more accurate to talk of a fragmentation of the Lied than a decline, and this was brought about by a range of social and musical factors. Firstly, the collective political impetus behind the Lied – the establishment of the German nation – was defused through Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, which led to the establishment of a unified German nation. The narrowing of professional pathways, and the rise in complexity of both vocal and piano parts meant that the likelihood of finding a single performer capable of singing and playing the piano at a professional level had decreased. In connection with this technical elevation, composers sought to lift the ‘humble’ Lied to the perceived grander status of the symphony and opera, and thus were increasingly attracted by larger-scale, more complex variations of the genre such as the song-cycle and orchestral Lied. A significant aesthetic shift was initiated by Hugo Wolf, who reasserted the centrality of the poem, as Gottsched had proposed a century and a half earlier. It was Wolf’s practice to preface the performance of each of his songs with a recitation of the text; although this arguably restored its supremacy, it also put asunder words and music, which in the ablest of hands had fused so seamlessly. Furthermore, in order to give due attention to each inflection of a poem, Wolf’s musical realisations were musically and conceptually extremely demanding. Harmony in the age of Modernism – of which Wolf was an important precursor – also altered the relationship between melody and accompaniment, which had hitherto generally been intuitive and supportive.

The rejection of received musical models by the followers of Richard Wagner also led to a diversification of approaches to the Lied. Gustav Mahler integrated his songs into his symphonies; Arnold Schoenberg used his Lieder for small-scale experiments with radical harmony; and his pupil Hanns Eisler rejected this aesthetic entirely to write Hollywood-style songs in an attempt to reclaim the Lied’s ‘traditional location at the border between the popular and the serious’.⁵⁸ The lack of a unified view of what the Lied should be served to render it too esoteric and practically complex to retain a place in live private music-making and contemporary popular culture. As jazz and light music took its place there, the development of recording technology offered the Lied a new home. While the Lied continues to live on the recital stage and in the recording studio, the singer-songwriters of the Lied exist no more.

Bill Monroe, bluegrass, and the early country music industry

Bill Monroe’s interest in music flourished during his adolescent years. The youngest of eight children, the music he encountered in church, on recordings, and in his small community near Rosine, Kentucky, provided respite from boredom and loneliness.⁴ He was encouraged by his mother Malissa Vandiver, a multi-instrumentalist with a vast repertoire of old-time tunes and ballads, and was particularly drawn to the fiddle playing of her brother, Pendleton Vandiver. As a teenager, he experimented with his voice, singing old-time songs or ‘hollering’ in a bright, high tenor on the vacant fields of his family farm.⁵ Monroe was largely a self-taught musician and during these early years he closely observed a number of local musicians, picking up fragments of musical knowledge and sounds that would later form the basis of his own style. Aspiring to perform with his older brothers, Charlie and Birch, he adopted the mandolin as his primary instrument. With a few rudimentary lessons from Hubert Stringfield, one of his father’s farmhands,⁶ Monroe quickly excelled on the instrument.

Through the 1920s, Bill Monroe began his performance career accompanying, on rhythm guitar, two local musicians who would become major influences on his artistic growth. Shortly after his father died in 1928 (his mother died just six years prior), the teenaged Monroe briefly resided with his Uncle Pendleton (aka Pen), the relative who initially sparked his deep interest in traditional music. Pen, who maintained an extensive repertoire of fiddle tunes, regularly performed at weekend barn dances. Alongside his Uncle Pen, Bill not only acquired paid performance experience, but he also developed a strong sense of rhythm and amassed a collection of tunes that he could transpose to his mandolin.

During these years Monroe also accompanied Arnold Schultz, a local African American blues guitarist and fiddler. Backing Schultz’s fiddle, he clocked in more hours playing all-night barn dances and earned respect as a capable performer.⁷ Perhaps more valuably, elements of both Schultz’s guitar and fiddle playing seeped into Monroe’s own style. ‘There’s things in my music’, he states, ‘that come from Arnold Schultz – runs that I use a lot in my music’.⁸ Schultz also galvanised Monroe’s fondness for blues music.⁹ Indeed, blues-inflected harmonies, rhythm, and phrasing permeate his music and bluegrass in general.¹⁰

In 1929 Bill Monroe followed his brothers Charlie and Birch to Chicago where the three found work at an oil refinery.¹¹ While there, the brothers began to take their music in a more professional direction performing as the Monroe Brothers at Chicago area barn dances and on local radio stations. By 1934 Birch departed for a more stable livelihood just as Charlie and Bill secured a regular radio spot on Iowa’s KFNF. Now, sponsored by a patent medicine company called Texas Crystals, the pared-down Monroe Brothers were able to perform music on a full-time basis. Soon after, they would encounter Victor Records Artist and Repertory producer, Eli Oberstein.

In 1933, Oberstein was in charge of relaunching a subsidiary of Victor called Bluebird Records, which specialised in southern blues and country music. Oberstein, like many of his counterparts in the early country music industry, embarked on ‘field trips’ throughout the rural south with the aim of unearthing marketable songs and unexploited talent. Setting up makeshift recording studios throughout the southern United States, he ‘discovered’ and established recording deals with a number of notable early country artists including Ernest Tubb and the Carter Family. In February 1936, while on a field trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, he crossed paths with the Monroe Brothers and promptly made plans to record them. Under Oberstein’s direction, the Monroe Brothers recorded a total of sixty songs for Bluebird, the majority of which consisted of material from established gospel songbooks, commercial country/hillbilly music, as well as a smattering of traditional folk songs, ballads, and popular songs from the African American tradition.¹²

That the Monroe Brothers’ repertoire drew so heavily on popular, religious, and folk music written by other songwriters, both known and anonymous, is not exceptional. Indeed, those on the ground floor of the commercial country music industry in the 1920s and 30s inherited a vast catalogue of unrecorded music that had circulated between amateur and folk musicians for decades prior. This large stock of pre-composed material provided lucrative, and often questionable, opportunities to release a continual flow of music. Eli Oberstein was particularly notorious for his ability to attain legal control of artists and their music, aggressively hunting artists already signed to contracts, establishing dummy publishing houses, and publishing songs using pseudonyms with most of the royalties directed towards himself.¹³ Not surprisingly, working with Oberstein, Bill and Charlie did not retain publishing royalties for their Monroe Brothers recordings and made only dismal returns with Bluebird’s sales royalty rate (0.125 cents per side sold).¹⁴

While they were not necessarily profitable for the Brothers, the Bluebird singles were a valuable marketing tool that helped them establish a place within the country music industry. Stylistically, the Monroe Brothers represented the ‘brothers duet’ trend that surfaced in the 1930s and included such acts as the Delmore Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, and Karl and Harty. The brothers duet sound is characterised by close harmony singing. In the Monroe Brothers, Bill built on his early experimentation ‘hollering’ in isolation by harmonising with his brother, working his powerful, high pitches into performance and recording contexts, and incorporating his distinctive voice into the Brothers’ interpretations of stock material. In later years, Bill Monroe’s singing style, commonly described as the ‘high lonesome sound’, would become a defining characteristic of bluegrass music.

Like a number of other brother ensembles, the Monroe Brothers backed their vocal harmonies with guitar (Charlie) and mandolin (Bill). However, as Neil Rosenberg observes, their virtuosic musicianship set them apart. They often performed at a much quicker tempo than their counterparts, giving their music a driving sense of urgency. Furthermore, while Charlie ornamented his rhythm guitar playing with melodic bass runs, Bill chopped percussively on his mandolin and burst into explosive leads.¹⁵ In his mandolin solos, Bill aimed to capture all of the nuances of his favourite fiddlers, especially his uncle Pen. He also worked in other influences such as ‘accidental notes and half-tone ornamentations taken from blues guitar’.¹⁶ In doing so, he not only developed his own style, but reimagined the mandolin as an exhilarating lead instrument.

The Monroe Brothers recorded their Bluebird singles over the course of six hasty sessions. For the most part, the rapid-fire succession of songs demanded straight reproductions of pre-composed material. At times, however, they used their vigorous and occasionally haunting brothers duet sound to enliven songs they heard in their community, on the radio, or discovered in gospel songbooks. While they did not claim songwriting credits for any of their Bluebird material, the brothers demonstrated compositional skill through their arrangements. For instance, the success of their signature song, ‘What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?’, spawned three sequels, which included alternate lyrics and made slight melodic deviations from their original source, a gospel songbook called Millennial Revival.¹⁷ Meanwhile, Bill’s mandolin leads were becoming more exploratory and inventive on songs like ‘Nine Pound Hammer is a Little too Heavy’ and ‘I Am Ready to Go’.¹⁸

In 1938, after prolonged sibling tensions came to a head, the Monroe Brothers disbanded. Soon after, Bill Monroe established his first band, the Blue Grass Boys. Looking to distance himself from the sound of the Monroe Brothers, he fused instrumental prowess with a range of musical influences in a small ensemble context. This required musicians that were both capable instrumentalists and could follow direction. In addition to Monroe’s mandolin, the first Blue Grass Boys line-up¹⁹ consisted of Cleo Davis (guitar), Art Wooten (fiddle), and Amos Garren (upright bass). By including the fiddle, Monroe created opportunities for new melodic possibilities while tying his musical vision to the fiddle-tune traditions he held in such high regard. Amos Garren’s bass, on the other hand, encouraged a tight rhythmic discipline, which was lacking in the Monroe Brothers.²⁰ Monroe coached each musician, imparting specific runs, licks, and textures inspired by his love of folk tunes, old-time string band music, blues, and jazz.

With all four members sharing the vocal duties, Monroe’s new band also broadened the harmonic scope beyond that of his previous act. Like his instrumental coaching, Monroe facilitated quartet-singing rehearsals in which the band arranged harmony parts for a number of well-known gospel songs. All-male gospel quartets, which sang in close four-part harmony, were popular during the 1920s and 30s. Appearing as the Blue Grass Quartet, Monroe’s group would perform gospel standards, reducing the instrumentation to just guitar and mandolin in order to showcase their vocal harmonies.²¹ In later years, quartet singing would have a strong presence in the harmonies of secular bluegrass music.

Through the early 1940s Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys achieved a distinctive sound within the country music field. It wasn’t until the second half of that decade, however, that ‘bluegrass’ was solidified as a genre.²² Specifically, the 1946–48 roster demonstrated unparalleled virtuosity, released a string of commercially successful singles, and maintained a popularity that yielded dedicated fans, as well as imitators. This ‘classic’ Blue Grass Boys era included Lester Flatt’s smooth lead vocals and rhythm guitar, was pinned down by Cedric Rainwater’s walking bass lines, and featured exhilarating instrumental breaks from Monroe (mandolin), Chubby Wise (fiddle), and Earl Scruggs (banjo).

Apart from the band’s capability as a cohesive unit, perhaps the most noteworthy contribution during this era was Earl Scruggs’ exceptional banjo playing. Employing his thumb, index, and middle fingers, Scruggs was able to produce continuous, rapid arpeggios that contained complex melodies while propelling the music forward. The sound became known as ‘Scruggs-style’ banjo, and for many fans it is a defining feature of bluegrass music.

By the early 1950s, bluegrass was characterised as a style of music rooted in the ostensible simplicity of folk song and early country, but with a sonic explosiveness and instrumental mastery more reminiscent of bebop. Bluegrass, Alan Lomax famously reported, is ‘folk music in overdrive’.²³ While each Blue Grass Boy brought their unquestionable talents to the group, and many contributed to the genre in the decades following, bluegrass is ultimately a realisation of Bill Monroe’s musical vision. The Blue Grass Boys became a space where he could creatively assemble his musical influences. What’s more, utilising the resources of a highly skilled band, Monroe was able to earnestly demonstrate his proficiency as a songwriter and arranger. Over the course of his career with the Blue Grass Boys, he composed or co-composed a number of bluegrass and country standards such as ‘Kentucky Waltz’, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, ‘Can’t You Hear Me Callin’’, and ‘Uncle Pen’.

While Monroe’s contributions to the popular music canon are now widely recognised,²⁴ his legacy has been dogged by questions regarding the legitimacy of his songwriting credits. These uncertainties emerged from three main philosophical and ethical discussions surrounding creative influence, the songwriting process within an ensemble setting, and the mechanisms of the early country music industry. The remainder of this chapter explores issues of composition, authorship, and ownership focusing on one of Monroe’s most well-known songs, ‘Uncle Pen’. The song is noteworthy for how it reflects Monroe’s biography and influences, was composed collaboratively, and highlights some of the complexities that emerge when establishing authorship in the commercial music realm.

‘Uncle Pen’: authorship, ownership, and collaborative composition

While it is difficult to pin down exactly when ‘Uncle Pen’ was composed, accounts from former Blue Grass Boys indicate that the song emerged around 1949–50.²⁵ It was first recorded for Decca Records on 15 October 1950. In the decades following, ‘Uncle Pen’ would become one of Monroe’s signature compositions, featured regularly in his live shows, sprinkled throughout his recorded output, and performed innumerable times by both professional and amateur bluegrass groups. What’s more, Monroe’s Uncle Pendleton Vandiver (d. 1932), for whom the song is a tribute, would emerge as a key presence in the artist’s biography and the broader narrative of bluegrass music. Indeed, for fans and followers of Monroe, especially those within the 1960s urban folk revival, Uncle Pen, the person, became something of a mythical figure – a repository of obscure Irish and Scottish fiddle tunes, a catalyst of bluegrass’ driving rhythm, an emblem of and musical link to some notion of pre-modern, pre-commercial ‘authenticity’.

Meanwhile, ‘Uncle Pen’, the song, has emerged as an archetypal bluegrass composition. As David Gates observes, recounting the life of ‘an old fiddler and the tunes he used to play’, the song imparts an anxiety ‘that the old ways of life, and the music that went with them, are vanishing’.²⁶ This is certainly reflected in Monroe’s nostalgic lyrics, which offer a bucolic image of Pen’s fiddle resounding through the countryside, drawing the townspeople together. In an allegorical move alluding to the anxieties observed by Gates, the final verse laments the death of Uncle Pen and the silence that comes over the community.

Like many bluegrass songs, ‘Uncle Pen’s’ lyrics convey nostalgia for a pre-modern sense of community and a view of traditional music as part of the social fabric of rural America. This is tied to notions of collective music-making, which the bluegrass ensemble epitomises and celebrates. Within bluegrass discourse there is an emphasis on the collective; the constituent parts coming together as one unit, listening and responding to one another in order to create a tight, cohesive musical entity. Indeed, the bluegrass sound relies on interlocking rhythms, vocal blending, and subtle shifts in the instrumental balance.

Within this collective music-making environment, songs are often composed as group members exchange and build upon each other’s musical ideas. Such was the case with ‘Uncle Pen’. The first recording of the song features, in addition to Monroe, Jimmy Martin (guitar, vocals), Merle ‘Red’ Taylor (fiddle), Rudy Lyle (banjo), and Joel Price (bass, vocals). There are slightly divergent accounts of who exactly produced the initial spark for the song, though most agree it started with Monroe and Red Taylor.²⁷ All agree that ‘Uncle Pen’ was a group effort and, indeed, the first recording bears the stylistic mark of each performer.

Rudy Lyle recalls that Monroe first begin composing the song ‘in the back seat of the car … on the way to Rising Sun, Maryland’.²⁸ This scenario is likely given the numerous accounts of Monroe picking his mandolin and devising lyrical fragments while on the road between performances.²⁹ Sometimes the musicians surrounding Monroe would latch on to and experiment with one of his musical ideas.³⁰ Alternatively, he might approach particular Blue Grass Boys with a basic melody or single verse in the hopes that they might help develop it into a complete song. According to Merle ‘Red’ Taylor, this is precisely how the framework for ‘Uncle Pen’ was initially sketched out. While resting at a hotel near Danville, Virginia, Monroe came to Taylor’s room with a few ideas for a song about his uncle Pendleton Vandiver. Monroe directed his fiddler to come up with a melody that would mimic the ‘old-timey sound’ of Pen’s fiddling. After spending some time working on his own, Taylor emerged with a fiddle melody that pleased Monroe and became the song’s primary instrumental hook. ‘Bill wrote the lyrics for “Uncle Pen”’, Taylor recalls, ‘and I wrote the fiddle part of it’.³¹

Two other contributions also stand out in the performance and arrangement of ‘Uncle Pen’. Firstly, as Rosenberg and Wolfe note, Monroe, Jimmy Martin, and Joel Price’s three-part harmony on the song’s chorus was uncommon in the group’s Blue Grass Boy repertoire during this time.³² They were, however, accustomed to singing harmony during their gospel quartet features, and if Monroe did not specifically direct his singers, it is likely that they were experimenting with the stylistic conventions of gospel harmony in arranging the song’s chorus. The second contribution is Jimmy Martin’s guitar run, which caps off the final a cappella moments of the song’s chorus while providing an elasticity that propels the reintroduction of Taylor’s fiddle melody. The lick strongly resembles what is now referred to as the ‘(Lester) Flatt run’ and has become a stylistic marker of bluegrass guitar.

In some respects, then, ‘Uncle Pen’ can be viewed as a collaborative composition that involved the creative work of the entire band. The social context in which the song was composed, however, extends well beyond the immediate ensemble. Richard D. Smith maintains that the concept for ‘Uncle Pen’ emerged when a Decca Records executive suggested that Monroe record Hugh Ashley’s song, ‘The Old Fiddler’ (113).³³ ‘The Old Fiddler’ is inspired by and features an old-time fiddler from Arkansas named Frank Watkins. While the song is quite distinguishable from ‘Uncle Pen’, both incorporate old-time fiddle tunes in their arrangement. One of Watkins’ tunes is at the centre of ‘The Old Fiddler’. Likewise, during ‘Uncle Pen’s’ instrumental outro, Red Taylor transitions into the fiddle tune ‘Jenny Lynn’, which Monroe learned from his uncle.

The network of influence surrounding ‘Uncle Pen’ is expansive, comprising pre-commercial tunes, early country recordings, and input from several artists. In his discussion of the song Richard Smith describes Monroe as ‘the synthesizing creator who … brought it all together’ (113).³⁴ There’s no doubt that he was pivotal in composing ‘Uncle Pen’, and, like most popular music artists, he was a synthesising creator. However, the apparent obligation to elevate Monroe in this role reflects the difficulty of reconciling, on the one hand, Western representations of the songwriting process and, on the other hand, conventional songwriting practice. Western romantic and legal understandings of the songwriting process maintain a rigid emphasis on the ‘genius-author’ who, working alone, creates static ‘works’.³⁵ A thorough investigation of the narratives surrounding ‘Uncle Pen’s’ composition, however, supports Morey and McIntyre’s assertion that ‘It is more productive to understand creativity as distributed across the participants in musical practice, while composition itself – often seen as the paradigm of individual creation – is better understood in implicitly social terms.’³⁶

Removing the emphasis from an individual author demystifies the songwriting process while drawing attention to collaboration and ensemble performance as a mode of composition.³⁷ This is particularly befitting of bluegrass, which, as noted above, celebrates the collective. Within the bluegrass ensemble, musicians carve out a sonic space from which to listen and respond to their peers, all the while attempting to maintain or elevate the performance with their own contributions. This might involve, for instance, subtle dynamic shifts that draw attention to a particular performer. Alternatively, instrumentalists might step out front during improvised solos. Here the artist responds to the overall feel of the song or competes with other soloists. Over the course of a solo the performer draws on his/her own specific influences and instrumental skills. Former Blue Grass Boy fiddler Gordon Terry, for example, describes Merle Taylor’s inventive ‘slow bow’ and ‘funny reverse’ on ‘Uncle Pen’.³⁸ Like the basic melody, structure, or lyrics, such features of performance shape songs like ‘Uncle Pen’ in ways that draw attention to the collective as author. This becomes more palpable when we consider that Monroe generally offered little creative direction to his Blue Grass Boys.³⁹ Indeed, like others in the group, Monroe communicated with the musicians around him in the moment of performance with subtle bodily or musical gestures. Furthermore, when subsequent Blue Grass Boys approached him for direction on staples like ‘Uncle Pen’, he would often refer them to the original recording.⁴⁰ In this way, the creative exchanges not only occur between contemporaries, but also cut across time as artists engage with and build upon past performances.⁴¹

With all of this in mind, why has the narrative of ‘Uncle Pen’ as a musical work composed during a particular time (c. 1949–50) by a lone Bill Monroe maintained such authority? For one, it complements the hierarchical politics of ensemble music-making. In this case, Bill Monroe was the leader of the Blue Grass Boys, and, according to the logic of the early country music industry, he was the central force behind that ensemble’s creative output. So, while some viewed the Blue Grass Boys as a largely ‘democratic’ outfit⁴² and were satisfied with their role within the ensemble, there was a general understanding that Monroe was the ‘bossman’ and hence he would receive credit for the group’s music. Mark Hembree, who played bass with Monroe from 1979–84, compares the Blue Grass Boys to a corporation, stating ‘Any work you did for the corporation belonged to the corporation … I think you had to go a long way before you got any kind of a half credit … on something that you wrote with Bill’.⁴³

Hembree’s reference to ‘half credits’ points to another reason why ‘Uncle Pen’ is viewed as a fixed work composed by an individual author: the ‘author→work’ model of artistic production underpins copyright law and has a utilitarian value in the mechanisms of the commercial music industry.⁴⁴ ‘Copyright’, Jason Toynbee argues, ‘institute[s] a form of property in music … As such it has been central to music industry strategies of profit-making’.⁴⁵ While copyright law doesn’t necessarily reject the possibility of co-authorship – Monroe’s catalogue includes a number of shared composition credits – ‘half credits’ tend to complicate the simplicity of individual authors and their works in ways that increase the potential for disputes and interfere with gainful flows of capital. Accurately representing the creative milieu of a bluegrass ensemble can prove altogether messy.

Bill Monroe filed the copyright for ‘Uncle Pen’ in 1951. By this time, institutions were already established for legally declaring authorship-cum-ownership of a song and charting the flow of royalties. Most significantly, private publishing companies provided the resources to promote a song, monitor its use, collect royalties, and distribute money to the author (after subtracting an agreed upon percentage for these services). By the early 1950s, two decades into his professional career, Monroe was familiar with the benefits of such institutions. What’s more, influenced by mid-century recording industry culture and people like Eli Oberstein, Monroe was well-versed in business tactics such as publishing songs under pseudonyms and purchasing song rights directly from other composers. All that’s to say, there were several institutional and strategic options available when Monroe asserted ownership of ‘Uncle Pen’.

Despite using pseudonyms like James B. Smith and Albert Price just a year prior, Monroe filed the copyright for ‘Uncle Pen’ under his own name with the publishing company Hill and Range Songs, Inc.⁴⁶ While it is only possible to speculate on Monroe’s rationale, his decision in this instance reflects shifts in his career and in the broader country music industry during the 1950s. At the end of 1949, Monroe left Columbia Records. Shortly after, in February 1950, he performed on his first recording session for Decca Records. Around this time Monroe began to record in Nashville, and indeed his transition to a new label was accompanied by the increasing professionalisation of a country music industry concentrated in that city. When he signed with Decca, he also formed relationships with Nashville-oriented institutions, such as the publishing conglomerate BMI and its affiliate, Hill and Range. During these transitional years Monroe likely used pseudonyms as a strategy to skirt contractual obligations to Columbia and the ASCAP affiliated publishing company Peer-Southern.⁴⁷ By the time he published ‘Uncle Pen’, however, it appears Monroe’s relationship with Decca had been solidified. He was publishing under his own name and sometimes through his own publishing house, Bill Monroe Music. Indeed, by the early 1950s, Monroe was ensconced in the song-publishing culture of the burgeoning Nashville country music industry. The romantic assumptions about composition circulated within this industry would ultimately inform how we understand Bill Monroe as a songwriter.

By examining the collaborative composition and publication of ‘Uncle Pen’, the goal of this chapter has not been to diminish Monroe’s status as a creative and original songwriter. Rather, this case study creates opportunities to question common assumptions about authorship, musical works, and the songwriting process. As an artist, Monroe was engaged with the music and styles that surrounded him. He experimented with these influences in his work as an instrumentalist, composer, and bandleader. In this way, his role as a ‘synthesising creator’ is best reflected in developing the bluegrass sound.⁴⁸

Monroe, however, was also protective of his musical vision, and recording industry institutions provided the tools and legal principles to safeguard the work of the Blue Grass Boys. The publication of ‘Uncle Pen’ illuminates how romantic notions of authorship influence legalistic representations of songwriting and the business strategies that form around them. We see, for instance, the significance of (individual) names within the mechanisms of publishing. Interestingly, despite contemporary concerns with the oeuvre of ‘great’ songwriters, the prevalence of pseudonyms in the early recording industry suggests that the names tied to particular works had less to do with composer identity than with securing compensation through legal ownership. What’s more, Monroe’s navigation of and reliance on private publishing houses to affix his (or some other) name to a song demonstrates how the recording industry infrastructure privileges, if not demands, adherence to the rigid ‘author→work’ model. As Toynbee observes, ‘most writers and composers are forced to sell on their copyright. No-one can make it without a publishing deal’.⁴⁹ Concerned primarily with the copyright that ‘subsists in songs’⁵⁰ – hence, approaching songs as property, which can be purchased, endowed, or revoked – corporate publishing conglomerates promote the notion of fixed ‘works’ and individual authors, both of which can be managed as concrete units of exchange. Such rigid categories overlook performative and collaborative modes of composition that are often more applicable to the creative exchanges within a bluegrass ensemble. Stepping outside of the ‘author/genius model’,⁵¹ however, provides opportunities to explore alternative, flexible approaches to songwriting that, in many cases, more accurately reflect the social realities of songwriting in a popular music context.

Origins

The starting-point for the renewal of this tradition is the work of Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd, effectively the instigators of the revival. MacColl worked initially with Joan Littlewood, forming Theatre Workshop as both actor and playwright, a role which incorporated some songwriting. He worked freelance for the BBC, a process which culminated in the famous Radio Ballads, broadcast between 1958 and 1964. An earlier programme spawned the Ballads and Blues club, forerunner of Britain’s folk-club movement. An apologist for industrial folk song,⁵ many of MacColl’s own songs focused on aspects of the lives of the working class, but usually written from a position of immense familiarity with traditional song, ballads, work songs, lyric songs and others. Bert Lloyd learnt some of his repertoire from an early sojourn in Australia; working as a left-wing journalist in England he became considered the foremost expert on traditional song (and he had a similar interest in industrial song). As singers, both recorded widely, mainly in the 1950s and 60s, both separately and together, largely singing traditional material. MacColl’s own songs could easily be listed. ‘Shoals of Herring’, written for the third of the Radio Ballads, has become a well-known ‘Irish traditional’ song under the title ‘Shores of Erin’ (exemplifying the glory of the non-notated folk process). It is written from the perspective of the herring fisherman. ‘Dirty Old Town’ envisages industrial blight as containing the seed of socialist revival, a far cry from the stereotypical naïve view of the subject of folk songs. Likewise, perhaps, ‘The Ballad of the Big Cigars’, written in praise of the Cuban Revolution. MacColl’s socialist principles underpin all his work, although ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, written for his beloved Peggy Seeger, is both more personal and apparently more universal, judging by the very different people who have recorded it. In opposition to MacColl’s case, Bert Lloyd’s songs cannot be listed. For years it was assumed he simply sang songs he had collected himself, or had found in obscure earlier collections.⁶ In more recent years, it has become clear that he extensively rewrote many of the songs he sang, moving verses from song to song, filling in narrative gaps, often passing on the results to younger compatriots in the Revival. It is, however, impossible to trace all the cases, and details, of this rewriting. The creative approaches adopted by these two founding fathers come to represent two major forms of songwriting adopted by those in this line of tradition: writing from scratch (whether that means inventing lyrics to pre-existing melodies, or lyrics and melodies, alone, both of which were MacColl’s approach, or whether that also means supplying chords and arrangement too); and surreptitious rewriting. This latter approach must not be sidelined, since in the tradition itself, it is and was engaged in by most experienced singers, consciously, and conscientiously, or not.

Politics

The politics of folk song in the 1950s and 60s was determinedly left wing, partly because of particularly MacColl’s influence, and partly because so many traditional songs and broadside ballads are written from the perspective of the disenfranchised and the wage labourer. Leon Rosselson came to prominence as a songwriter on the first BBC satirical TV show, That Was the Week That Was.⁷ As part of the early folk group The Galliards,⁸ he had already recorded international folk songs and would work with such later luminaries as Martin Carthy, Roy Bailey and Frankie Armstrong. His songs spring directly out of his socialism, whether protesting particular disasters such as the Aberfan school tragedy of 1966 (‘Palaces of Gold’), social relations (‘Don’t Get Married, Girls’), capitalism tout court (‘Who Reaps the Profits? Who Pays the Price?’) or celebrating movements such as the Diggers⁹ (‘The World Turned Upside Down’) or individuals like the late Victorian socialist polymath William Morris (‘Bringing the News from Nowhere’). Rosselson’s songs are strong on lyrics (of which there are frequently very many) but do not fit conventional stereotypes. Some (‘Who Reaps the Profits’, for instance) show the definite influence of Georges Brassens and French topical song. Such political topics remain relevant, as shown by Devonian Steve Knightley’s ‘Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed’ (2009),¹⁰ which has already travelled widely. In the 1960s, Jeremy Taylor had been working as a young teacher in South Africa, falling foul of the authorities with songs like the comedic ‘Ag Pleez Deddy’ which questioned acquisitive culture. Back in the UK, many of his songs raise general problems through focusing on stereotypical individuals, such as ‘Mrs Harris’ (with its complex plot lampooning publicity-seeking do-gooders) or ‘Jobsworth’. Both Rosselson and Taylor must communicate directly – lyrics are clear, melodies syllabic and unornamented, and guitar parts straightforwardly strummed, for the most part. The greater degree of arrangement apparent in Knightley’s recording of his song (with his folk duo, Show of Hands) demonstrates a shift in perspective I shall return to. While some writers pursue their politics with anger and others with (very pointed) humour, Ralph McTell’s approach is more one of regret. ‘England 1914’ captures a beautifully delineated scene which, only at the last, points up that war has already started, while the gay ignorance of the male protagonists off to war in ‘Maginot waltz’ is, in retrospect, still shocking.¹¹

Indeed, the 1914–18 war often surfaces as a source for songs of social justice. Active since the mid-1960s, Harvey Andrews’ ‘Margarita’ again contrasts a (distant) war with the last dance of a soldier off to the front. Mick Ryan’s stunning ‘Lark Above the Downs’ contrasts the freedom of the lark with the first-person view of the execution of a young victim of shellshock, but it also illustrates another key feature of some singer-songwriters – Ryan, as singer, most usually works with accompanying instrumentalists – Paul Downes, as on the 2008 recording of this song, or Pete Harris. Ryan is better known in folk circles as a writer of ‘folk operas’, perhaps the inheritor of the ‘ballad opera’ genre relaunched by Peter Bellamy’s influential The Transports of 1977. Scotland-born Australian writer Eric Bogle’s ‘Willie McBride’ (1976) is equally powerful.¹² It takes the form of a one-sided dialogue between a contemporary sitting on the grave of young war victim McBride and the dead young soldier, a discourse which angrily questions both this, and all, conflict. Again, it illustrates another general factor, for the song was for years better known in others’ versions (that of June Tabor most notably), and perhaps Bogle is not the best interpreter of his own material. Other wars are also mined for material. Martin Carthy, doyen of the Second Revival, took a set of anonymous lyrics from the Commonwealth period to create ‘Dominion of the Sword’ (1988) but, rather in the fashion of Bert Lloyd, cuts material and adds two new verses, on the politics of South Africa and Greenpeace. This may seem a strange mixture but, allied to a powerful Breton tune full of awkward cadences, they all strengthen the song’s ‘might is right’ message. Among the younger generation of singer-songwriters, Gavin Davenport’s ‘False Knight’ (2012) leans heavily on traditional balladry, while commemorating the death of his own grandfather in the 1939–45 war. Ewan McLennan’s already celebrated ‘Joe Glenton’ (2012) narrates the tale of a soldier turned conscientious objector within the recent Afghanistan conflict, and notably his guitar accompaniment is simpler in this song, whose details are so important, than in others he sings.

We should not be surprised at the dominant presence of what I am calling political songs – the roots of the revival in socialism and CND marches to Aldermaston left a long legacy,¹³ and songs which protest a situation remain common. Sometimes, the topic is profound, as in Dave Goulder’s simple ‘Easter Tree’ (no later than 1977) which does little more than note ways people are killed by ‘civilised’ society. Well known as a dry-stone waller, Goulder’s website catches the tone of so many of these musicians,¹⁴ enumerating a rich, complex identity strong on community, and within which the description ‘professional musician’ is notably absent. In this song there is no moral, no conclusion, as in the best traditional songs: that is left up to you. But politics as the protestation of inequalities, of all kinds, can become too simple a topic. Ralph McTell’s gentle ‘Streets of London’ became so well-known and widely performed in the 1970s that it has become almost unplayable now. Ralph May took his stage name from the American blues singer Blind Willie McTell, in homage to the ragtime/blues guitar style which was the bedrock of so many of the leading figures of the 1960s–80s. Roy Harper preferred a simple, strummed style as backdrop to a rich lyrical palette; his less specific ‘I Hate the White Man’ is still too potent to be easily taken up by any other singer. To listen to Bert Jansch, however, is to be beguiled by the intricate finger style and altered tunings which contributed so much to the distillation of an English folk-guitar style by the end of the 1960s:¹⁵ his ‘Needle of Death’ is merely, perhaps, the best of those songs which take the side of the no-hoper. These latter songs typify what seem to be the two dominant attitudes in this repertory – the sheer commitment to a just cause which can turn to anger (in Harper’s song) and compassion (in Jansch’s). And, perhaps that explains why there are so very few songs within this tradition which explore the egotism of the singer/writer.

A further, much-mined political topic concerns the pace of change and/or ecological concerns. The gnomic, almost riddle-like structure of Yorkshireman Pete Coe’s¹⁶ ‘Seven Warnings’ (2004) conveys its power through an almost necessary distancing of the narrative from reality, otherwise too grim to bear. Richard Thompson’s ‘Walking Through a Wasted Land’ (1985) is more matter-of-fact, while his direct delivery avoids any pleasantries. The resilience, part-feminist, part-mythic, hinted at in Karine Polwart’s ‘Follow the Heron’ (2006) offers a more poetic take (more often found in what I identified above as the third generation), while many of her songs are concerned with a range of contemporary social concerns. West Country singer Nigel Mazlyn Jones’ songs are frequently activated by an infatuation with the very earth, songs such as ‘Behind the Stones’ (1999). This concern for the ground, and by extension a certain groundedness, leads me to a second type of subject matter.

Locality

Traditional song is often strong on a sense of place. Sometimes specific locations are given, sometimes types of location (forest, ship, field, coalmine), but we are rarely left completely to guess. A similar emphasis can be found in much of the newly written material where the location can, occasionally, mythologise the entire land, Although no writer majors on this theme, individual examples are notable, such as Maggie Holland’s ‘A Place Called England’ (1999, and well-known through June Tabor’s recording), Ashley Hutchings’ ‘This Blessed Plot’ (2003, with its use of those resonant phrases from John of Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II) or Steve Knightley’s ‘Roots’ (2006), which ties national identity to music. Despite the material reality of the songs’ subject, the earth of England, there is also an insinuated mythic identity which few writers try entirely to deny.

More common than writing of ‘England’ is the presence of regional distinction. Particular writers are associated with, and often write about, regions and, in some cases, specific counties: to speak of established writers, Northumbria for Jez Lowe and Peter Bond, Gloucestershire for Johnny Coppin, Teesside for Vin Garbutt, Derbyshire for John Tams, Wiltshire for Mick Ryan, Somerset for Fred Wedlock, etc. There is no competitive element here, more normally an attempt to display commonalities of the singer’s locale, thus Jez Lowe’s humorous invention of time spent in ‘Durham Gaol’, his sentimental recounting of pit ponies in ‘Galloways’ (both 1985), or his study of the Newcastle writer Jack Common in ‘Jack Common’s Anthem’ (2007). Coppin offers an alternative approach, frequently setting the words of established Cotswold poets (John Drinkwater, Ivor Gurney, W. H. Davies) in addition to writing his own lyrics. Pete Morton’s Leicester background creeps into the lament that is ‘Rachel’ (1987), but the specificity of a local landmark gives the song particular poignancy, as does Bob Pegg’s curious transplanting of ‘Jesus Christ Sitting on Top of a Hill in the Lake District’ (1973). Perhaps this suggests that the local resists the global in constructions of folk song, in England at least. It is also important to note that some regional writers remain regional. As a teenager going to folk clubs in Dorset I remember how widely Mike Silver’s ‘Country Style’¹⁷ was taken up, and yet now common knowledge of the song seems to be restricted to Germany, where Silver has frequently worked.

Humour

A certain pointed humour is often apparent in traditional songs, usually directed at pomposity, wealth and advantage. Fred Wedlock’s ‘The Vicar and the Frog’ (1973) is a contemporary take on this approach.¹⁸ Sometimes, humorous songs take the form of parodies, as in Scotsman Hamish Imlach’s ‘Black Velvet Gland’ (c. 1967),¹⁹ while the ironic self-parody of Adge Culter’s ‘I am a Zider Drinker’ (1976) loses nothing through its lack of subtlety. The comedy in Dave Goulder’s ‘The Sexton and the Carpenter’ (1971) is black indeed, but with plenty of forerunners within the tradition. Many singers – McTell, Coe and Rosselson for example – have a large output of children’s songs where, again, humour is often to the fore. Shows for children, whether broadcast or live, remain an important avenue for the folk writer. Other satirists, like Jake Thackray, worked at arm’s length from the tradition although his starting-place mirrored Rosselson’s. Writers like Mike Harding combine traditional material with humorous songs, such as ‘The Number 81 Bus’ (1972) which, again, relies on geographical specificity for some of its humour (Harding is now better known as a BBC radio presenter). Even mainstream comedians like Jasper Carrott are part of this story – the risqué parody ‘Magic Roundabout’ (1975) originated, like many of his other songs, in his own Birmingham folk club.

Compassion

I suggested above that the dominant aesthetic positions to be found in this repertoire are probably those of anger and compassion. Anger, of course, is most appropriately found in a range of political song and usually needs striking imagery, beautifully countoured melody and very careful word choice (the culminatory ‘again, and again, and again, and again’ in ‘Willie McBride’, for instance) to avoid becoming an unsophisticated rant. An unconsidered compassionate tone, of course, can in turn become almost inconsequential: songs like Donovan Leitch’s Dylanesque ‘Catch the Wind’ (1965) and Ralph McTell’s idyllic ‘Kew Gardens’ (1970) demonstrate how careful a writer must be here. John Tams has had a long career as a theatre musician. In some of his songs (‘Harry Stone’ (2000), or the anthemic ‘Raise Your Banner’ (1986)), the tone of compassion for his subjects moves, by way of Tams’ commitment, close to anger. Bill Caddick spent much of his career with musicians, including Tams, originating in National Theatre productions of the 1970s. His ‘The Old Man’s Song’ (co-written with Tams in the 1980s) typifies the compassionate depth that some writers can go to in order to try to understand another’s experience – there is little doubt that it takes as its subject ‘growing old disgracefully’. As with any other first- or second-generation singer, the content, however, lies securely in the words, and to a lesser extent the melody, as we would expect from a song. A comparison with the much younger Lisa Knapp’s ‘Two Ravens’ (2013) is instructive. Knapp’s song is ‘about’ Alzheimer’s disease, according to a number of sources, and yet this reading is far from obvious. She sings with a markedly compassionate tone, and the instrumentation of her recording is gentle, if the combination of sounds is slightly unconventional. But the sounds of the recording are at least as important as the ‘song’ in enabling the listener to make sense of the experience.

Personal experience

The degree of personal experience apparent in traditional song is moot. Where songs take a personal perspective, it is normally an anonymous, or anonymised, one. New songs often take this line, but are enabled to appear convincing because of the apparent life experience of the author. The career of Cyril Tawney is a case in point. Joining the Royal Navy immediately after the war, he became the first English ‘professional folk singer’ by the late 1950s. While his songs are written from personal experience, because so many of them speak of the life of many a sailor (‘Oggie Man’, ‘Sally Free and Easy’, or ‘The Grey Funnel Line’), they retain a usability absent from the songs of some revivalist singers. This raises another issue particular to this repertory – the quality of a song is sometimes judged by the degree to which other singers take it up and modify it. Too personal and it fails this test. Many of Sydney Carter’s²⁰ songs count here: ‘The Crow on the Cradle’, for instance, which at first hearing appears almost a lullaby (a tone most performers emphasise), turns out to be a vicious anti-war song. ‘Lord of the Dance’ is widely known, and widely used in some schools. The tune is taken from an old Shaker hymn,²¹ and yet in its rewriting, mythologising aspects of the life of Christ, it clearly belongs in the folk tradition. Martin Simpson’s ‘Never any Good’ (2007), essentially a personal biography of his father, but sung with great compassion, is sufficiently vague about its narrative that, combined with the wealth of rich imagery it offers, it becomes possible for amateur singers to pick it up. Other writers manage to catch this self-effacing tone, even in a folk rock context, particularly Richard Thompson (‘Down Where the Drunkards Roll’ (1974), ‘I Misunderstood’ (1991)) and Sandy Denny (‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ (1968), ‘One More Chance’ (1975), ‘Solo’ (1973)). Both Thompson and Denny rose to notice with the band Fairport Convention: while Denny perhaps convinces a listener that her personal experiences have a core commonality, and while the same can be said of the experiences recounted in Thompson’s songs, the consistent life failures of his protagonists suggests it is less likely the experiences are Thompson’s own.

Mention of Thompson and Denny introduces yet another distinctive feature of these musicians. While some operate as soloists, or with a small number of backing musicians, as would be expected from ‘singer-songwriters’ in any other genre, the birth of folk rock in the late 1960s – an approach which remains current to the present – means that some singer-songwriters work in a band context. This was true of Thompson and Denny, of Ashley Hutchings, and later of Dave Swarbrick and Chris Leslie, all particularly with Fairport Convention. It became the case for Maddy Prior, particularly when working outside the band Steeleye Span (such as the songs on Lionhearts (2003) concerning Henry II and his sons). With a new (post-punk) folk-rock generation, it became the case for the Oysterband, with usual lyricist Ian Telfer, and for Joseph Porter’s pointed history lessons for Blyth Power. Subsequently, it’s become the case for Little Johnny England, for writers Gareth Turner and P.J. Wright.

The new tradition

Most writers who have come out of the tradition seem, at one time or another, to have felt a need to make that lineage explicit. Not only does this seem to be the best explanation for the plethora of faux traditional songs produced, but it explains why a very large majority of singer-writers still include traditional songs in their repertoire. Sometimes, the inauthenticity of faux trad songs is blatant for humorous effect (such as Paddy Roberts’ ‘The Ballad of Bethnal Green’ from 1959), but equally historically located. Only rarely, I suspect, is there any attempt by a writer to pass off a newly minted song as a true traditional. The motive almost always appears to be one of homage to a canon consisting, in free-reed virtuoso John Kirkpatrick’s words, of ‘captivating stories told in beautiful language and extraordinary melodies’. A singer like Steve Tilston has made something of a speciality of this mode of working: ‘The Naked Highwayman’ (1995) pictures a narrative which could so easily have had an eighteenth-century origin, but probably didn’t. ‘Nottamun Town Return’ (2011) takes off from the old evergreen ‘Nottamun Town’, adding a powerful contemporary slant. Richard Thompson’s ‘The Old Changing Way’ (1972) invents a plausible travelling life with a final moral of what happens when you fail to ‘share with your nearest’. Thompson’s songs, while frequently alluding to the tradition in tone or musical arrangement, sit a little apart in being drawn so often from the mis-turnings of contemporary life. Chris Wood sometimes sets the lyrics of Hugh Lupton: their joint song ‘One in a Million’ (2005) completely rewrites a traditional tale, bringing it into the present – the narrative of a lost ring eventually recovered does not give the easy optimism of popular song, but the outcome is positive nonetheless.

Kate Rusby first rose to prominence in the mid-1990s, at the start of the latest generation. Known originally for her approach to traditional songs, some of her own songs could almost pass as traditional, with their slightly archaic language and narrative (‘I Courted a Sailor’, ‘Matt Highland’ (both 2001)), although the effortless virtuosity of her working band perhaps belies this. The same goes for the younger Bella Hardy’s celebrated ‘Three Black Feathers’ (2007), her own take on the night-visiting song (less a genre in its own right than a group of genres). Mastery of both language and melodic contour is necessary to bring off such songs: it is tempting to identify them as pastiche, since they work against existing models, but this seems unfair in that the best of them certainly have an identity in their own right. This mastery is, perhaps, even more important for singers who adapt, in Lloyd fashion, pre-existing songs. I have already referred to Martin Carthy in this context, and shall do so again. Nic Jones, whose musical tastes went far and wide, and who insisted he became a folk singer ‘by accident’, was well known for rewriting lyrics and tunes (‘Musgrave’, ‘Annan Water’ (both 1970), ‘Canadee-i-o’ (1980)), to make them usable, or even simply to assuage his boredom at singing the same song the same way for gig after gig. Sometimes, the relationship between new and traditional material is more tangential – Bella Hardy’s ‘Mary Mean’ (2009) takes just one verse from the song ‘The Water is Wide’, but it brings a striking sense to its new context.

The supernatural

Many traditional songs incorporate aspects of the supernatural, often in the guise of resurrected or reincarnated corpses, or of other-worldly beings. While there seems to be some resistance to incorporating such elements overtly in new songs, they do nonetheless appear in other guises. Dave Goulder’s ‘January Man’ (1970) personifies the months of the year in the same way that a traditional song like ‘John Barleycorn’ personifies the process of beer-making. Martin Carthy’s ‘Jack Rowland’ (1982) draws from a number of sources, including the traditional tale ‘Child Rowland and Burd Ellen’, but does not stint in its shape-changing climax. Interestingly, although details make clear that Jack’s journey is into Elfland, this is not actually stated in the song. Some of Chris Wood’s songs disport a wary wonder as he reworks this tradition in the context of a stark socialism: ‘England in Ribbons’ (2007), which takes its cue from mummers’ plays before bringing the narrative up to date – the ‘ribbons’ are something England is both bedecked in, and torn into; or ‘Walk this World’ (2005), the beginnings of a modern-day wassail; or ‘Come Down Jehovah’ (2007) with its affirmation of the sacredness of everyday life, aligned to a love of the land to which I have already drawn attention. Among younger writers, Emily Portman’s ‘Hatchlings’ (2012) takes as its topic the myth of Leda, but in a manner far from straightforward, and with a concern for musical arrangement more typical of contemporary writers than of previous generations.

Contemporary approaches

The most recent generation of folk singers seems to have developed a new relationship to tradition, in that their own intervention in the narratives they sing is far more marked than among earlier singers. Seth Lakeman has become emblematic of this approach, in his rewriting of widely known songs, an approach which seems to sit mid-way between MacColl’s and Lloyd’s. His ‘The Setting of the Sun’ (2006) revises the song sometimes known as ‘Polly Vaughan’. He turns it from a third-person to a first-person perspective, in the process shearing the narrative of its branches and turning it into a streamlined account of disaster. Alasdair Roberts goes further, dismembering songs in order to create new situations. His ‘I Fell in Love’ (2003) seems to draw images and narrative elements from traditional songs ‘The Elf Knight’, ‘Pretty Polly’, and ‘The Bows of London’ without settling on any of them. In his narrative, the protagonist sings of dismembering his lover’s body to create music, a metaphor for Roberts’ own process, perhaps. Gavin Davenport’s recent ‘From the Bone Orchard’ (2013) explicitly refers to the body of traditional song in a moment of lucid self-awareness, as had Richard Thompson’s ‘Roll over Vaughn [sic] Williams’ four decades earlier (1972).

Perhaps the most notable recent development in this tradition concerns the distinction between singers and writers. In the 1950s, the early writers would also sing many traditional songs, indeed ones they themselves may well have collected or unearthed from nineteenth-century (or earlier) collections. From the early 1960s through at least to the 1980s, either one tended to be a singer-songwriter majoring on singing one’s own songs, or one did not openly write. The current generation of singers, however, have frequently turned to writing (usually having made an impact as a singer). There are two different stories to tell here, too. Some major performers – Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden, for instance – seem to become serious songwriters at the point at which they produce albums which seem a long way from the tradition (respectively Angels and Cigarettes (2000) and Painted Lady (2006), for instance), bringing that writing experience back to folk performance. Earlier singers who became writers and moved away from folk (such as Al Stewart, Roy Harper, Richard Digance) did not generally return.²² More recent singers who became writers – I have already mentioned Knapp, Polwart, Portman, MacLennan, Davenport, but many others too – work from within accepted approaches and standard ‘folk’ venues (folk clubs, arts centres, folk festivals).

In this chapter I have tried to identify the major features of songwriting within the tradition set by the Second Revival: the writing of complete songs and the intervention in pre-existing songs; the presence of singer-songwriters not only as soloists, and as not necessarily the best singers of their own material; the dominance of anger and compassion as modes of emotional expression; some degree of continuity of subject matter with traditional songs and the avoidance of the confessional, personal tone; both continuity and generational distinction across six decades of writing. Of these, it is perhaps the distinctive tone of the current generation of writers which might be regarded as most marked: in their emphasis on arrangement, on the ways these songs sound in rendition, found within this current generation, we may suspect that the practice of writing new folk songs will not remain unchanged for much longer.

Introduction

The Brill Building is an eleven-story Art Deco-style office building located in New York City that has played an important role in popular music since the pre-World War II era, particularly as a home to music publishers and songwriters. By the early 1960s, the Brill Building housed more than 160 businesses operating in the music industries, and it is this period in its history, and the history of a neighbouring music publishing company called Aldon Music, that is the focus of this chapter.¹ As suggested by the title of this piece, sustaining a career as a professional songwriter is a precarious form of work.² However, from the Tin Pan Alley era to the present day, the friendly competition of the office environment has served as a productive context for songwriters in all manner of genres. For non-performing songwriters particularly, the organised approach to songwriting practised at companies like Aldon Music was key to nurturing ongoing success during the early 1960s, and it is no coincidence that similar modes of work can also be observed at successful labels and production houses like Motown, Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, and latter-day enterprises like Xenomania and The Writing Camp.

This research explores how routinised approaches to creative work improve productivity, increase the likelihood of commercial success and reduce career instability. This is accomplished by examining the ways in which the work of professional songwriters is organised (usually by music publishers), and by situating this case study of the Brill Building era within a broader continuum of underlying stylistic and organisational continuities. My approach involves a synthesis of a cultural study of the professional practice of songwriters combined with a political economy of the music industries in which they work. I am informed by those that have defined the study of creative labour, such as Bourdieu, Negus, Hesmondhalgh, and Banks, as well as political economists like Golding, Murdoch, and Mosco, who have argued in favour of drawing together political economy and cultural studies to form this sort of ‘dialogic inter-disciplinarity’.³ Throughout this chapter, I draw on interviews that I have conducted for Sodajerker On Songwriting, a podcast devoted to the art and craft of songwriting.⁴ The podcast features conversations with professional songwriters including Brill Building alumni such as Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry, and Mike Stoller. These interviews present an array of life stories, reflections on professional development and practice, and perspectives on the industrial contexts of song production, all of which serve to evince the experiences of those carrying out this sort of creative labour. By studying the political, social and economic factors that shape the work of professional songwriters, we can better understand their importance, and in turn, more readily acknowledge them within popular music studies, media studies and other fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Historical context

Situated north of Times Square at 1619 Broadway on the northwest corner of Broadway and West 49th Street, the Brill Building was established in 1931 as the Alan E. Lefcourt building. It later came to be named after the Brill brothers, who owned a clothing store at the site and from whom the space had originally been leased. During the depression, the Brill brothers rented office space to music publishers, songwriters, composers and other agents, some of whom had ties to Tin Pan Alley, a historic centre of music publishing activity situated further downtown. Through the years, tenants at the Brill Building have included music publishers like the T. B. Harms Company, Mills Music Inc., Famous Music, and Hill & Range, as well as performers like Cab Calloway, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and Nat King Cole.

The structure of the Brill Building is an example of ‘vertical integration’; that is to say that publishers, songwriters, arrangers, producers and performers were located in such proximity, that the entire process of writing a song, arranging it, transcribing it, recording a demo, pitching the song to a label or artist, and contracting a ‘plugger’ to take the song to radio, could all be done in-house. Indeed, there are stories of songwriters who would start at the top of the Brill Building and visit every publisher on the way down until a song found a home, sometimes with more than one company.⁵ Although the Brill Building is widely recognised as the epicentre of this kind of activity, a great deal of work took place at another office building across the street from the Brill Building, a block away at 1650 Broadway on 51st Street.⁶ It was for a music publishing company at 1650 Broadway called Aldon Music, founded in 1958 by Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, that songwriting teams like Goffin and King; Sedaka and Greenfield; and Mann and Weil wrote many of their most celebrated songs.⁷

Nevins and Kirshner were music industry entrepreneurs who recognised the cultural impact of rock ‘n’ roll and hired a coterie of young songwriters to create music for the growing market of teenage music consumers.⁸ With eighteen writers on staff by 1962, Kirshner and Nevins essentially recreated the Tin Pan Alley mode of production by hiring talented songwriters and providing them with cubicles to work in and pianos to write songs on. At Aldon Music, the songwriters were encouraged to make demos of their songs, and take an active role in the production of records.⁹ In addition to simplifying the production process and reducing costs for music publishers and record labels, this gave songwriters the opportunity to develop their skill sets and their careers. Indeed, many of these employees became arrangers, producers and performers too (often recognised as ‘singer-songwriters’). With the popular 45 rpm single as their target format, the songwriters of 1650 Broadway ‘wrote records’ that would speak directly to young people.¹⁰ As such, 1650 Broadway is typically understood as a more dynamic environment than the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, and one that was not as readily mired in the traditional cultures of Tin Pan Alley.¹¹

As a predominantly white, Jewish workforce, these young songwriters imbued their work with progressive political and racial sensibilities. Their songs, which were typically recorded and performed by African American women organised into ‘girl groups’, were variously inspired by the sounds of ‘classical music, jazz, doo-wop, African American music and Afro-Cuban music’.¹² Typically organised into two-person teams, writers like Carole King and Gerry Goffin; Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield; Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil; Burt Bacharach and Hal David; Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman; Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and others, helped to define what is often described as the ‘Brill Building sound’.¹³ This was a sound that, until The Beatles arrived in America in 1964, dominated the charts, incorporating Latin rhythms, and progressive approaches to arranging, particularly through the use of string sections.¹⁴ Emerson argues that these young tunesmiths were the ‘last gasp in the grand tradition of the Great American Songbook’ and should be understood as the ‘heirs of Irving Berlin. Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen’.¹⁵ Collectively, these songwriters are responsible for a pop canon that has lasted more than fifty years and includes such titles as ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’, ‘The Loco-Motion’, ‘Stand by Me’, ‘Be My Baby’, ‘Chapel of Love’, ‘Leader of the Pack’, ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’, ‘Viva Las Vegas’, ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘Magic Moments’, ‘Calendar Girl’, ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen’, ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’, ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’, ‘On Broadway’, ‘You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’’, and many others.¹⁶

Studying the Brill Building

In popular culture, there has been ongoing interest in the music of 1619 and 1650 Broadway and the lives and careers of those that worked in and around those spaces. In film, this has been depicted in documentaries such as AKA Doc Pomus, and in works of fiction such as Grace of My Heart, the tale of a Brill Building-era songwriter called Denise Waverly, whose career and personal life echo that of Carole King.¹⁷ In the theatre, stage productions such as Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Smokey Joe’s Café (featuring the songs of Leiber and Stoller) and They Wrote That (the stories behind the songs of Mann and Weil) have attracted large audiences both on and off Broadway.¹⁸ There have been memoirs published by songwriters such as Burt Bacharach, Carole King, and Leiber and Stoller, whilst biographers have awarded attention to the likes of Neil Sedaka, Doc Pomus, and Bert Berns.¹⁹ Histories of the Brill Building and its neighbouring hubs of activity include Ken Emerson’s work on the ‘bomp and brilliance’ of the era and Rich Podolsky’s book on the career of music publisher Don Kirshner and his company, Aldon Music.²⁰

Academic literature pertaining to the Brill Building has frequently highlighted its impact on popular culture. Inglis’ work, for instance, is concerned with acknowledging the Brill Building’s status as an influential force in pop music beyond its heyday. He asserts that the structures and cultures of the Brill Building helped to transform the emphases of music as a business and that it should be understood as central to the core of popular music. This is illustrated through a detailed analysis of the impact of the Brill Building on four examples from popular culture: the ‘British invasion’, Motown, the productions of Phil Spector, and soul music in general.²¹ Scholars such as Fitzgerald and Scheurer have taken a highly focused approach to exploring the ways in which Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building composers influenced British rock acts.²² Fitzgerald carries out a musicological analysis of songs by The Beatles, arguing that ‘the transition to the British invasion era actually involved much greater continuity with the musical past than is often acknowledged’.²³ Scheurer regards The Brill Building and its eleven floors of music publishing offices as the ‘last bastion of Tin Pan Alley’ (c. 1890–1950) and makes a comparative analysis of Brill Building songs with those of The Beatles in order to demonstrate their common features in terms of structure and melody.²⁴ From a political economic perspective, Rohlfing’s study of the importance of women to songwriting, arranging and recording during this period is a welcome addition to the field in that it calls for studies of songwriting and production to consider issues of race and gender in addition to economic relationships and class.²⁵

Despite the range of literature about the creative output of the Brill Building, little attention has been paid to the nature of songwriting as a form of work, and the ways in which that work is organised in order to maximise the potential for success. In 1964, Leiber and Stoller’s Red Bird label put out nine records that reached the top 100, four of which ascended to the top 10. As Emerson points out, seven of these were written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, a record only surpassed by Lennon and McCartney of The Beatles, and Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland.²⁶ Fitzgerald notes that when analysing top 40 hits from 1963–4, Barry and Greenwich, Mann and Weil, Goffin and King, and Bacharach and David account for forty-eight pop hits with thirty-two different performers.²⁷ To begin to understand how this sort of success was achieved, it is necessary to consider the methods adopted by these songwriting teams, and the ways their work was organised by music publishers.

The creative labour of the professional songwriter

With the general decline of rock ‘n’ roll towards the end of the 1950s, mainstream popular music in the United States during the early 1960s was dominated by songwriters at both 1619 and 1650 Broadway, who wrote pop songs for groups like The Ronettes, The Crystals, and The Drifters. At Aldon Music, Nevins and Kirshner ‘made rock and roll a profession’.²⁸ By signing gifted young songwriters at a starting salary of $50 per week, Kirshner invested in the idea that teenagers could write songs that would resonate with other teenagers. Barry Mann, who along with his writing partner and wife, Cynthia Weil, wrote songs like ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’, says: ‘we thought of ourselves as the bridge between old pop and rock ‘n’ roll. We came along at just the right time.’²⁹ Cynthia Weil concurs: ‘we were the right age at the right time, writing the right kind of material, and with the right kind of energy and thought processes’.³⁰

There can be little argument with Emerson’s suggestion that the great skill of these songwriters was their ability to ‘articulate the anxieties of adolescence in ways that were neither condescending nor anachronistic’.³¹ From the teen romance of songs by Barry and Greenwich, to the socially conscious messages of Mann and Weil’s ‘Uptown’, ‘Only in America’ and ‘On Broadway’, the Brill Building songwriters, themselves young people, tackled a broad range of experiences. Weil remarks: ‘It seemed back then that music was about ideas. When Barry educated me in rock ‘n’ roll, those were the subjects that I naturally wanted to write about. The atmosphere in our office was more about writing love songs, but we just went our own way and did what we did.’³²

A popular way to characterise the work of these songwriting teams is to suggest that employees of Aldon Music ‘cranked out hit after hit with assembly-line efficiency’.³³ Whilst the typical configuration of two-person teams encouraged collaboration and the rapid advancement of ideas, as Inglis has pointed out, the concept of the production line or ‘songwriting factory’ reduces the creative act of writing a hit song to a workaday task.³⁴ Barry Mann shares in the view that the ‘factory’ metaphor does not fully represent their work in this period. He argues: ‘“songwriting factory” is such a negative phrase. It gives you the idea that we wrote a song in twenty minutes and there it was, you had a hit record. We really thought of it as a songwriting school.’³⁵

Though songwriters like Goffin and King and Mann and Weil learned a great deal from each other and imbued their efforts with creativity and passion, the organised approach inculcated by Don Kirshner was extremely effective in maintaining productivity and connecting songs with artists that could deliver the required performances.³⁶ Kirshner, who was only a few years older than most of his writers, would call his staff at home every week to tell them which artists were about to record, and who would need songs. For the writers, the aim then was to produce songs that could be hits for those artists. At the end of the week, all of the writers would gather in Kirshner’s office to play their creations and solicit feedback. Barry Mann relates: ‘what gave us a framework was knowing which artists were about to record. That’s why we ended up learning how to write for different artists.’³⁷

Echoing Mann’s concept of the songwriting school and the importance of having an artist in mind for a song, Cynthia Weil agrees: ‘it was homework, and sometimes someone else would record it and it would become a hit with someone else, but that was the impetus that got you to the piano, that so-and-so was going to be recording and Don Kirshner wanted a song for them in two days or three days’.³⁸

Though these songwriting teams were highly motivated, there was no mandate that they had to write, nor that they should write in certain genres. Indeed, as Mann states, songs were often written for girl groups, and later reworked for male vocal ensembles:

Whilst the sparse writing cubicle inhabited by the professional songwriter has been a pervasive image throughout popular music history, Mann indicates here that Aldon songwriters worked at home just as often. At the office, or from the comfort of their homes, they experimented with different styles in order to respond to the opportunities that had been presented to them. Cynthia Weil acknowledges that this kind of stylistic fluidity was an important part of their ongoing success: ‘today people think of themselves as a certain kind of writer, a country writer or a pop writer. We never were told: “you can’t write country”, so we wrote country.’⁴⁰

There was also a great deal of competition among the writing teams, particularly in pursuit of writing suitable ‘follow-ups’ for artists that had recently had hit records. Mann and Weil and Goffin and King were regularly engaged in competition to write hit songs that would please their employers. Cynthia Weil describes the friendly competition that drove this rivalry: ‘our best friends were Carole King and Gerry Goffin, who were the other married-couple songwriting team at the time. They were our fiercest competitors, but they were also our friends and we shared everything with them.’⁴¹ Emerson suggests that Goffin and King and Mann and Weil built their entire lives around the process of writing songs and making demos, to the extent that they had time for few other friends.⁴² Though Kirshner encouraged these friendly rivalries in order to generate new material for artists, he perhaps did not expect these two couples to vacation together in order to keep the competition fair.⁴³

The first songwriters hired by Nevins and Kirshner were Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, teenage collaborators from Brighton Beach, who had already achieved some success publishing songs. Sedaka, a Juilliard-trained pianist, and Greenfield, a poet and lyricist, insisted that Aldon place one of their songs on the charts before they would sign with the company. Once under contract with Aldon, they flourished, having hits like ‘Stupid Cupid’, Calendar Girl’, ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen’, and ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’. ‘I wrote records’, Sedaka says, ‘you had to tell the whole story in two and a half minutes. Howie and I mastered that art form.’⁴⁴ Though Sedaka is confident about his accomplishments, he has always found the process onerous: ‘you have to force yourself. As much as I have done it for sixty years, I’m still afraid of it.’⁴⁵ The routines that enabled the Sedaka/Greenfield partnership to accumulate new songs were similarly hard-won:

Writing on a regular basis, even when little usable material results, is a strategy also adopted by Mann and Weil. Cynthia Weil reports: ‘We would have what we called ‘slump songs’, when we were in a writing slump and we just couldn’t get anything, so we’d say “let’s just write something so that we don’t forget that we are writers.”’⁴⁷ In a similar fashion, Bacharach and David maintained a routine of meeting daily at 11am in order to write songs for their publisher, Famous Music, based at 1619 Broadway. Contrary to Bacharach’s legacy as a melodic innovator, the pair experienced a relatively unpromising start to their career.⁴⁸ They did, however, produce top-20 hits for Perry Como, Marty Robbins, and Patti Page using the methodology of a daily routine. Other techniques routinely adopted by songwriters during this period included rewriting an existing hit song ‘sideways’; that is to say, changing enough of the melody and chords of a successful song until it becomes an original property. It was using this method on the song ‘Little Darlin’’ (made famous by The Diamonds in 1957) that produced the Sedaka/Greenfield hit ‘Oh! Carol’.

Another practice among Brill Building-era songwriters was to swap partners for writing sessions. Jack Keller, who was not part of a songwriting team, maintained a routine that involved collaborating with different Aldon writers on different days of the week. He wrote twice a week with Howard Greenfield, who was often available due to Sedaka’s busy touring schedule. Together they penned ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ and ‘My Heart Has a Mind of its Own’, both of which were number-1 hits for Connie Francis. Keller wrote with Gerry Goffin on Tuesdays and Thursdays and with Larry Kolber on Fridays.⁴⁹ Together, Keller and Goffin penned ‘Run to Him’, a hit for Bobby Vee. With the exception of Mann and Weil, who wrote together exclusively, these sorts of collaborations were commonplace and can be understood as techniques employed to sustain the success rates of (mostly) non-performing songwriters.⁵⁰ As Podolsky notes, Carole King and Gerry Goffin failed to achieve success forty-five times before topping the charts with ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’.⁵¹ However, as a result of the methods used, the talent gathered by Nevins and Kirshner, and the environment they cultivated, extraordinary results were achieved. When Goffin and King’s ‘The Loco-Motion’ reached number 1 on the charts in 1962, it knocked Sedaka’s ‘Breaking Up is Hard to Do’ off the top spot. With two number 1s, eight top-10 hits and eighteen top-20 songs, two of which were on their own label, this organised approach to songwriting enabled Aldon Music to effectively dominate the charts.⁵²

In 1962, to take advantage of their commercial success, Kirshner and Nevins established their own record label. Leiber and Stoller followed two years later. The consolidation of all of the aspects of recording, publishing and releasing records provided greater financial returns and led to the sale of Aldon Music to Columbia Pictures Screen Gems in April of 1963 for somewhere in the region of $2–3 million.⁵³ With Kirshner now fulfilling a new role at Screen Gems, there was less time to manage the careers of his writers. Many of the Aldon writing teams migrated to the west coast, but were generally now too old to target their material at an audience of teenagers.⁵⁴ With the arrival of The Beatles and an upsurge in rock ‘n’ roll acts writing their own material, it became increasingly difficult for non-performing songwriters to obtain cuts on records. Whilst singer-songwriters like Neil Sedaka and Carole King were able to achieve fame performing their own material as solo artists, life beyond the Brill Building era was less assured for those who relied on others to perform their songs.⁵⁵ By 1969, the community that Jack Keller once described as the ‘Garden of Eden’ for professional songwriters had essentially dissolved.⁵⁶

Conclusions

As an economic model, the vertically integrated structure of the music businesses at 1619 and 1650 Broadway enabled close professional and personal relationships between songwriters, producers, publishers and promoters, ensuring the best opportunities for the records they produced. The strategies inculcated by Aldon Music to encourage the creation of new material increased opportunities for commercial success and developed the professional skill sets of its songwriters. As members of this ‘songwriting school’, the songwriting teams were motivated to compete with each other in a collegiate environment, striving to write the hit single that would afford them cuts on future albums. The philosophies and work routines adopted, including the necessary grind of writing ‘slump songs’ and regular collaborations outside of their established partnerships, were just some of the methods that provided them with continued success during the early 1960s.

Though the arrival of The Beatles in America (and the ‘British Invasion’ in general) is often used to symbolise the relegation of Brill Building songwriters, it should be understood that when The Beatles arrived in New York in 1964, Lennon and McCartney were ‘continuing and reinforcing the traditions of the professional songwriter’ and that they were inspired by the sounds they displaced from the charts.⁵⁷ In addition to being fans of Goffin and King, and occasionally covering their songs, Lennon and McCartney’s approach to rhythm, structure, chords and melody was not dissimilar to that of the Aldon crew, particularly between 1963 and 1966.⁵⁸ Even in the throes of Beatlemania, America was not immune to the charms of pop singles sung by girl groups; Motown’s Supremes achieved five consecutive number-1 hits between the summers of 1964 and 1965. Indeed, Fitzgerald argues that Motown ‘updated and replaced’ the Brill Building model for success in this genre, and the statistics bear out this claim, showing that Motown’s Holland-Dozier-Holland equalled the success of Lennon-McCartney in 1965 and bettered them in 1966, by scoring twice as many top-10 hits and top-40 entries.⁵⁹

Likewise, it should not be understood that organised approaches to songwriting were outmoded during this period, but that the underlying similitude of songwriting and production across different genres continued despite the ebb and flow of individual careers. Motown was, as Fitzgerald puts it, ‘kind of a black Brill Building’.⁶⁰ Moreover, founder Berry Gordy was directly inspired by the Aldon Music model and told Don Kirshner of his intention to build a company like Aldon Music in Detroit.⁶¹ Through its attention to a star-focused system, its round-the-clock studio practices, quality control meetings and emphasis on melodic songs married with social and political commentary, Motown blossomed, and sold millions of records to teenagers engaged by soul music. Just as Motown was an exclusive team of people brought together to produce songs through a series of structured processes, so too Xenomania, the British pop music production team behind number-1 hits for acts like Girls Aloud and Sugababes, benefits from this approach.⁶² In the five decades since the sounds of the Brill Building dominated the charts, the routines and methods adopted by the music publishers and songwriters of that era have become part of an ongoing legacy furthered by those who continue to engage with organised approaches to the art of songwriting.

Getting to the Golden State

‘The Troubadour was the first place I went when I got to LA’, claimed the Eagles’ Don Henley, who moved to California from small-town Texas in 1970.⁵ Like Henley, many artists migrated to southern California throughout the 1960s, magnetised by the burgeoning music industry in Los Angeles as several recording companies relocated to West Coast offices. In addition to abundant recording studios, the city boasted a rich history of live performance, and touring acts passed through Los Angeles in between San Diego and San Francisco en route up the California coast on a circuit that continued through Oregon and Washington. Los Angeles cradled the beginnings of several home-grown genres developed during the 1960s, including the surf music of Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound created at Gold Star Studios, and the folk rock of The Byrds and The Mamas and the Papas. At the beginning of the 1970s, two new sounds dominated the Los Angeles live music scene, the singer-songwriter movement and California country rock, which both formed at the Troubadour. But the history of the club has older roots with the folk revivalists who followed the music industry’s migration to the Golden State at the end of the Beat Era.

Doug Weston, the idiosyncratic owner of the Troubadour, opened the venue in 1953 at a small space next to the Coronet Theater on Hollywood’s La Cienega Boulevard.⁶ The name of the club evokes a romantic image of Renaissance-era wandering poets, a moniker applied to travelling folk musicians and Beatniks. The simple room featured only a small stage in the back left corner and could seat no more than sixty audience members.⁷ After four years, Weston relocated the venue to a larger space that could hold up to three hundred people on Santa Monica Boulevard on the border between Hollywood and Beverly Hills. But even at the larger space, Weston maintained the intimate atmosphere created in the tiny room.⁸

The Troubadour’s new location touted two main rooms: the bar area and the performance space. Inside the performance space, tables filled the room, while wooden beams ran across the ceiling, adding warmth to the relatively unadorned space. The stage stood on the right-hand side as patrons entered the room. Approximately 5m by 8m, the stage was large enough to hold a small ensemble even though many artists opted to perform solo acoustic sets. In front of the stage, the audience sat at tables topped with red-checked gingham tablecloths and flickering candles, creating a ‘shabby-chic’ ambience. Behind the tables stood a second bar and kitchen, from which servers delivered patrons’ orders off a menu featuring wines and cheese plates.⁹ Lofted above the kitchen, Weston created more seating where audience members could squeeze-in on church pews. Even from this vantage, the stage was not far away, giving listeners a sense that they were still up close to the music. The sound and lighting booth sat at the back section of the loft next to the dressing room and Doug Weston’s office, where performers would access the stage by descending a wooden staircase that led from the office. Each of these elements brought out the idea of warmth and intimacy crucial to the singer-songwriter identity.

However, the Troubadour’s allure – attracting Henley and others to the club – came from the way Weston set up the new venue as a bar and social scene more than any specific musical catalyst. The location was geographically central to Hollywood recording studios and Laurel Canyon, the eclectic neighbourhood many Troubadour patrons called home. In addition to the prime location, the Troubadour bar offered the perfect mix of socialising and music that differentiated it from other Sunset Strip venues, whose bars were integrated into the performance space. An elite crowd of music industry executives and insiders began frequenting the Troubadour bar, where people could hang out for the price of a beer and not have to pay admission to the venue.

The Troubadour had a fluid clientele comprised of a core group of artists, producers, and critics based in Los Angeles and a rotating cast of musicians who came through town on tour or while recording, and the bar provided a space for these people to meet, exchange ideas, and forge collaborative partnerships.¹⁰ Los Angeles-based singer-songwriters – King, Taylor, Browne, and Mitchell – encountered touring acts, including Chicago-native John Prine and New Yorker Laura Nyro, both of whom had great success at the Troubadour.¹¹ As Kate Taylor – recording artist and sister to James Taylor – explained to me, she could find her friends there on any given night.¹² Remembering the feeling of familiarity walking through the club’s doors, Taylor recalled:

Taylor’s memories of the environment demonstrate how the quotidian interaction fostered the scene’s sense of community. Beyond the friendships fostered by the social scene, Troubadour regulars used the venue to form industry partnerships. Well-known producers like Lou Adler and David Geffen brokered recording deals for many of the major names from the club’s growing singer-songwriter constituency. The Troubadour became such a legendary location because it functioned as a space where artists, even beyond the borders of Los Angeles, converged, and producers could funnel the talent into the music industry.

The Troubadour’s business practices

‘Bring your axe or whatever you swing with!’ read an advertisement in 1962, publicising the Troubadour’s open mic, or hoot night, during the folk revival of the early 1960s.¹⁴ The hoot was a promising platform for artists longing for a chance to be heard by the venue’s esteemed crowd. Along with Weston’s practices for booking talent, this recurring event fed the club’s impression as a launch pad for singer-songwriters.

Weston began the hoots in the early 1960s to fill a dead night on the calendar. Unlike contemporary concert culture, in which artists perform one night in each city on a tour, the Troubadour used to book an act for a six-night engagement, playing two shows a night Tuesday through Sunday. This left Monday night available for the open mic, which required minimal advance planning. Although the title of the event hearkens back to the hootenannies held for string bands in the Appalachian Mountains, the Troubadour hoot was less an open jam session and more a formal event. Starting Monday afternoon, hopeful songwriters and other entertainers would queue up outside the venue in a line that wrapped around Doheny Drive. Booking agents auditioned the acts while still in line and picked the top candidates to perform during the 9 pm show. Producing artists such as Jackson Browne and Tom Waits, the hoot created an eager audience at the Troubadour each Monday night.

Along with the hoot, Weston sought undiscovered acts for his weekly bookings, scouring through unreleased albums to find upcoming artists. Weston’s willingness to take a chance on an unknown name compounded with the presence of powerful industry voices magnified the venue’s influence, as Robert Hilburn – popular music critic for the Los Angeles Times throughout the 1970s – explained: ‘The Troubadour could ignite careers because performers were, in many ways, auditioning for the entire record industry when they stepped on that small wooden stage. Every Tuesday night, some 300 to 400 industry insiders, including radio station programmers, critics, and concert bookers, showed up to pass judgement.’¹⁵ Performing for a discerning audience with the ability to influence opinions in the music industry elevated the idea of a Troubadour debut, and successful sets in this particular space were said to be instrumental in propelling a relatively unknown artist into the national spotlight.

Weston’s own comments about the Troubadour reveal how he viewed the club’s role in discerning an artist’s authenticity. When Hilburn interviewed Weston for the Los Angeles Times in 1970, Weston affirmed the importance of performing in an intimate setting to establish ‘validity’. During the interview, Weston pointed Hilburn to a list of performers printed on the Troubadour’s menu:

Weston saw the size of the club as the key to the Troubadour’s status, allowing both the audience to experience the immediacy of the performance and the artist to receive audience feedback.

Infamous in Hollywood for driving a hard bargain, Weston also imposed strict control over his talent, forcing artists to sign his ‘options’, a contract that restricted performers from playing larger venues the next time they played in the Los Angeles area. Therefore, if an artist earned national attention after playing at the club, the artist remained contractually obligated to play the Troubadour a second time regardless of the artist’s ability to sell out venues three times the size. From an outsider’s perspective, this made the Troubadour appear as the preferred venue for singer-songwriters regardless of their popularity or ability to play to larger houses. In actuality, this repeat business came from Weston’s grip on his new acts.

‘People got quiet for her’

When ‘the crowd goes wild’, the volume of shouts and applause indicate the audience’s enthusiasm, and in many genres performers have used this reaction to gauge audience approval. But at the Troubadour, the crowd developed a new set of rituals to deem a performance legitimate. Of course, a little applause never hurt anyone’s ego, but the true mark of a successful set at the Troubadour became a silently enraptured audience during a singer-songwriter’s performance. The audience reaction became one of the most influential markers of authenticity for the singer-songwriter identity, and critics would convey this aspect of the performance in their reviews, implying that the power to initiate an artist as a singer-songwriter came from the audience.

Many of these practices came from the layout of the venue and the logistics of navigating the social scene at the club. Weston’s layout for the seating in the performance space, combined with the atmosphere and ambience of the club, primed the audience to expect the immediacy of a singer-songwriter performance. Comparing the venue to another folk club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove, the multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow, a regular on the Troubadour stage, remarked, ‘[The Troubadour] was a little bit more intimate than the Ash Grove, in a different kind of way because the room was set up differently, but it was about the same size.’¹⁷ In his opinion, the difference came from the ‘state of the room’, describing how the rectangular shape of the Troubadour made for fewer rows that were longer, which allowed listeners to feel close to the stage even from the last row.

Even in the small space, patrons had to travel between the two sections of the Troubadour, which inspired unique ways for the audience to demonstrate their engagement with the music. For example, as servers navigated the small space to deliver drinks throughout the night, it caused a great amount of noise within the audience. Many patrons even carried on conversations during performances, escalating the noise level in the room. However, if an artist captivated the audience amid the noise and commotion, a quietude came over the audience that served as a tacit approval of the performer.

Such an ability to command silence from the audience became an important factor in Joni Mitchell’s authentication when she first arrived in Los Angeles as a young folk singer. When Mitchell made her debut in August of 1968, Darrow commented, ‘She had a presence, and people got quiet for her. She didn’t have to ask for it. It came as a result of the presence that she had. She was obviously going to do something.’¹⁸ Billboard reported on the performance the following week and placed a similar emphasis on the tacit approval of the audience, demonstrated through their silence, writing, ‘Miss Mitchell achieved rapport with her audience. They sat attentively as she spun stories based on human experiences and personalities which have inspired her writing.’¹⁹ When Mitchell played the club again six months later, reviews revealed that she had gained a national following. Stephen Braitman of the Van Nuys News reported, ‘The crowd was larger, more expectant this time, as they waited for Joni Mitchell to mount the Troubadour stage Tuesday night and begin her return engagement. Since her last opening here … a virtual cult of Joni Mitchell followers has grown and moved the Canadian-born songstress into national prominence.’²⁰ For Mitchell and others, silence signalled the audience’s respect and connection to the songs and stories of the artist and promoted an optimal environment for listeners to experience the immediacy of the performance.

Another indication of audience engagement unique to the Troubadour’s layout arose from the club’s limited restrooms, with only one set of bathrooms in the entire venue located in the performance space. As country-rock singer and Troubadour regular Linda Ronstadt described in her autobiography, Simple Dreams:

Beyond the chance happening of needing to use the restroom, patrons would flood into the listening room on the auspices of ‘visiting the bathroom’ when the music inside sounded promising – a request that the bouncers could not deny even to bar patrons who had not paid the admission fee. As Jackson Browne recalled, ‘If there was somebody everybody was waiting to see, the bar would empty out into the room for that person’s set … If you could empty the bar into the house for part of your set, that was doing pretty well.’²² Audience members and critics perpetuate the importance of this method of granting credibility as they retell the story of Elton John’s debut performance, one of the most often mythologised stories of a Troubadour debut.

John’s first performance at the Troubadour in August of 1970 was also his premiere in the United States. According to legend, on opening night of his week-long gig in Los Angeles, the young British artist accompanied himself on the piano to a small audience sitting in the performance space. The rest of the patrons were packed into the bar area. However, when John played his song ‘Take Me To the Pilot’, the bar crowd poured into the venue, captivated by his earnest performance and entertaining musicianship. The next morning, Hilburn published an unrestrained review in the Los Angeles Times. ‘Rejoice. Rock music, which has been going through a rather uneventful period lately, has a new star. He’s Elton John, a 23-year old Englishman whose United States debut Tuesday night at the Troubadour was, in almost every way, magnificent.’ Hilburn declared John’s music ‘staggeringly original’, comparing the artist’s uniqueness to other Troubadour favorites Randy Newman and Laura Nyro and acknowledging John’s place in the canon of singer-songwriters to emerge from the club. Hilburn concluded, ‘By the end of the evening, there was no question about John’s talent and potential. Tuesday night at the Troubadour was just the beginning. He’s going to be one of rock’s biggest and most important stars.’²³ The way that the story of John’s premiere has lived on in the oral history of the venue reinscribes the importance of the event and the method that the audience used to ensure John’s place in the tradition.

The Troubadour today

Today, artist memoirs and biographies contribute to the Troubadour’s legendary status by pointing to their debuts as turning points in their careers. Carole King has continued to emphasise the Troubadour as a defining piece of her legacy. When King first made the transition from Brill Building songwriter to solo performer in 1970, her album, Writer, received little critical attention and low album sales. But after King took the Troubadour stage in 1971, Hilburn lauded her talent, writing, ‘The marvelous reception being paid this week to Carole King at the Troubadour – where all tickets for her six-night engagement were sold out two weeks in advance – underscores the fact that singer-songwriters in all probability, have never had it so good in pop music.’²⁴ Following this performance, King’s Tapestry (1971) broke industry sales records, lasting seventeen weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, and earned King four Grammy awards.

King’s 2012 memoir, A Natural Woman, dedicates an entire chapter to her Troubadour premiere. King claims that during the time onstage, she learned how to overcome crippling stage fright, writing, ‘The more I communicated my joy to the audience, the more joy they communicated back to me. All I needed to do was sing with conviction, speak my truth from the heart, honestly and straightforwardly, and offer my words, ideas, and music to the audience as if it were one collective friend that I’d known for a very long time.’²⁵ King accentuates the importance of the connection between artist and audience, facilitated by the size and atmosphere of the venue. ‘I had found the key to success in performing. It was to be authentically myself.’²⁶ Claiming that the Troubadour allowed her to access this part of her artistry, King’s language illustrates the perception of a singer-songwriter’s authenticity based on an artist’s display of honesty, vulnerability, and sincerity during a performance.

In recent years, the Troubadour has featured mainly local Indie groups, but the venue maintains its importance in authentication narratives for singer-songwriters. Performers continue to animate their sets at the club as a way to prove their place as an established singer-songwriter. For example, James Blake, an electronic artist from England, chose the Troubadour as the site for his US debut in 2011. The stories that emerged after Blake’s performance echo the themes of Troubadour premieres forty years earlier, emphasising the importance of the venue’s atmosphere and audience’s spellbound silence. A review in LA Weekly by journalist Lainna Fader proclaimed, ‘He used space and silence to great advantage in his short but mesmerising set, playing nearly an hour without more than a couple words. The soul in his music wrapped around every member of the silent crowd, who kept quiet all night’, in language that even evokes the tone of Hilburn’s effusive reviews.²⁷ At the performance, Blake paid homage to the Troubadour’s legacy by ending his set with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’ (1971). The choice demonstrated his knowledge and proficiency within the canon of works by singer-songwriters that turned the venue into the institution it is today.

The version of the story published by Los Angeles Times critic August Brown further divulged that Mitchell herself was present for Blake’s set, writing:

Blake’s biography reiterates the importance of this event, reading ‘It all started, says Blake, with Joni Mitchell. His favorite singer and songwriter came to see him at the Troubadour in Los Angeles two years ago and hung around afterwards to talk. “She’s an oracle … I learned a lot just from meeting her.”’²⁹ Mitchell’s presence at his performance acted as validation of Blake, inducting him into the Troubadour hall of fame.

This exploration reveals how the Troubadour became the premiere establishment for singer-songwriters, and in turn, how that institution has framed the perception of the singer-songwriter. Initially, the mixture of powerful industry voices at the Troubadour and its reputation as a proving ground drew artists to the venue. Meanwhile, the club’s atmosphere, curated by the management, reinforced the values connected with the singer-songwriter identity for the audience. The identity forged within the Troubadour’s walls solidified the values of personal music, authenticity, vulnerability, and intimate performance as the defining marks of artists deemed singer-songwriters, and continues to inform the listener’s perception of this category.