In a recent blog we talked about The Great American Songbook, the collection of songs composed in the first half of the 20th century by the likes of Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers, the Gershwins, and Duke Ellington. It was the first truly American popular music genre, and those songs, better known among musicians as the “standards,” have endured, make up in fact, the bulk and basis of the repertoires of modern jazz musicians.
As enduring as those songs are, they were followed by another genre that has proven just as enduring, the singer-songwriter era. The genre emerged as folk music, so popular in the 1950s and 1960s, was losing its commercial foothold. And Bob Dylan has sounded its death knell in 1965 when he released an album playing electric guitar. As I wrote in my novel, The Musician, “A next generation, unwilling to sit and listen, preferred to drink and dance.”
But even before Dylan’s conversion, tastes were changing, and what emerged was a combination of two musical cultures, folk and rock ‘n roll. It was, in fact, initially referred to as folk rock, a combination of folk’s emphasis on lyrics and rock ‘n roll’s preoccupation with rhythm. Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Carole King, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Elton John, and on and one, even the Beatles—their music lives on, including with listeners young enough that not only were they not alive when those recordings were produced, neither were their parents.
Evidence of the staying power of the singer-songwriters is ubiquitous. Consider that many, like many rock ‘n rollers, are still filling concert halls, even though their voices might not be a strong in their 70s. My favorite example, though, occurred a couple of years ago, a day during our Italian vacation spent in Sicily, where my wife pulled me into a dress shop in Siracusa where she rummaged long enough for the piped in music to get through three songs: two James Taylor recordings and a Paul Simon. ‘Nuf said.