The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter
Most often associated with modern artists such as Bob Dylan, Elton John, Don McLean, Neil Diamond, and Carole King, the singer-songwriter tradition in fact has a long and complex history dating back to the Medieval troubadour and earlier. This Companion explains the historical contexts, musical analyses, and theoretical frameworks of what it means to be a singer-songwriter. Divided into five parts, the book explores the singer-songwriter tradition in the context of issues including authenticity, gender, queer studies, musical analysis, and performance. The contributors reveal how the tradition has been expressed around the world and throughout its history to the present day. Essential reading for enthusiasts, practitioners, students, and scholars, this book features case studies of a wide range of both well and lesser-known singer-songwriters, from Thomas d’Urfey through to Carole King and Kanye West.
Katherine Williams is Lecturer in Music at the University of Plymouth. Her monograph Rufus Wainwright is forthcoming in 2016 and she has published in Jazz Perspectives, Jazz Research Journal and Journal of Music History Pedagogy. She was awarded the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation/Jazz Education Network Research Fellowship 2015 to conduct research on Duke Ellington. She is active as a saxophonist, and regularly works with contemporary composers to create and perform new music for saxophone and electronics.
Justin A. Williams is Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol, and the author of Rhymin and Stealin: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop (2013) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge, 2015). As a professional trumpet and piano player in California, he ran a successful jazz piano trio and played with the band Bucho!, which won a number of Sacramento Area Music Awards and were signed to two record labels.
