The Singer-Songwriter

Defining the Genre - Defining the Style

There is a musical genre, that has largely defied categorisation.
It has lain, hidden, misfiled, in music stores and radio stations,
frequently misrepresented with mystifications by it's marketeers
throughout the USA and Europe... particularly Europe for as
long as I can remember. I hope here to try to offer up a way to
begin to bring some core defining threads together into some
kind of patchwork tapestry.
I think an early, perhaps the first, key mutation, was forty years
ago, when The Byrds took Bob Dylan's "Mr Tambourine Man"
(an acoustic folk song with surreal drug inspired lyrics) and
turned the music of the modern folk singer and troubadour into a
pop category briefly called electric folk. There this fundamental
adaptation of the genre remained for several years, while singer
songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Carol King
and Tom Rush were spawning astonishing new works and
Dylan ("Something is happening here and you don't know what
it is... Do you Mr Jones") was breaking every rule ever laid
down about style and genre, culminating in Blonde on Blonde as
early as 1966... though revisited with equal passion nine years
later with Blood on The Tracks (1975).
With emerging artists like James Taylor, Crosby Stills and
Nash, the Woodstock generation of acoustic rock, who followed
the barefoot trail Dylan, and others, had laid, was also coming
business demands for another re-badging of this americanaarthouse music, with it's bastard hybrid celtic blues, jazz and
pop influences. They called CSN a "Supergroup" which hardly
did justice to either the form or content of what was basically
three guys high on marijuana singing in close harmony about
love and subversion of the Vietnam War ethos... often to just
one acoustic guitar
In the late sixties and early seventies the entire industry was

turning slowly on it's head in it's scramble to contain and

accommodate the demands of this yet to be defined baby
boomer generation. A label, appropriately called Asylum, was
created at WEA by David Geffin just to house the newly
emerging talents of what would become hugely influential
artists like Jackson Browne. Also furrowing parallel but equally
compelling grooves were European artists like the Fairport
Convention and from Ireland Van Morrison, again making the
job of categorisation all but impossible with tracks like "Snow
in San Anselmo" incorporating operatic choir and strings to beef
up the intentional free-form looseness he had created (despite it
defying categorization) with Madame George and his now
landmark "Astral Weeks" album - as important a contribution to
20th century music as Miles Davis "So What" which cauterized
the jazz world a generation before. Browne spawned the Eagles
- another supergroup who were re-badged as "outlaw country
rock" to give the suits some way to keep market forces intact...
Oh boy... and how! :(
What this category of music wasn't and isn't, is far easier to
define than what it is. It wasn't heavy metal - not tamla - it
wasn't the blues - it wasn't "black music" so called - not soul absolutely not rock n roll - not Elvis - not pop - not punk certainly not the Beatles or the Stones. It wasn't even the Doors
or Jimi Hendrix and God knows, a more important figure for the
electric guitar and for pushing the envelope would be impossible
to name, with his rendition of Dylan's tame original of "All
Along The Watchtower" or the luminescent genius of Voodoo
Chile.
No, this music was essentially acoustic and introspective. It was
driven by the garret writer, with just one six string guitar and
perhaps iconically a packet of rizlas. As Neil Young ably
demonstrated with "After The Gold Rush" - sometimes it would
have drums (brushes preferred) sometimes just a shaker or a
conga or a tambourine - sometimes nothing more than a solitary
guitar. Think of the dissident poets of an earlier century like
Shelley and Keats making their way to Italy where they hoped

to shake down the stars with just parchment and quills - then
contemporise them with electricity and mass communication,
and you have the singer songwriter. In the sixties Leonard
Cohen showed us that Dylan might have a lyrical rival with
sensuality oozing from recordings like "Suzanne Takes Us
Down". In the seventies Cat Stevens redefined himself as a
serious artist - moving from "I'm Going to Get Me A Gun" bare
torso pop pin up to what has become another utterly remarkable
pair of albums produced by Paul Samwell Smith "Tea For The
Tillerman" and "Teaser and the FireCat." ... even using his own
art to adorn the sleeve. The hippy artisan class were beginning
to give the appearance of having economic teeth to bite with.
Since then this bluegrass influenced arthouse-americana variety
of ill fitting titles like "singer-songwriter", and "acoustic" or
"un-plugged" continues to incorporate hard to pin down talents
like Rickie Lee Jones, Mark Cohn, Tom Waits, Randy Newman,
Shawn Colvin ("A Few Small Repairs" is a great example of the
evolution of the genre) Bonnie Raitt. Not rock - not country not AOR or MOR or any other radio easy format. As the late
Lowell George knew... It's simply about the song... What makes
a great song?.. When is it art?
The eighties and nineties produced a whole new phenomenon of
MOR stadium rockers, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen Dire
Straits, Brian Adams, Chris Rea, U2... and Clapton continued an
uninterrupted regime of mega success with all the self-abuse the
eighties demanded. Whilst these guys all carried considerable
writing talent - no question about it - they also carried 100
trucks worth of equipment and for awhile there - it looked like
the humble acoustic guitar was becoming as desirable as an old
Ford Cortina. The wonderful deep thwack of the loudest
backbeats ever recorded to date from Shelley Yakkus at the
Power Station (started back in the early seventies with Alice
Cooper's "School's Out") continued unabated. The addition of
disco - synthesizers and sampling then rap and hip hop has,
however, not helped rescue this much misunderstood art form
which has at it's essence - the simple craft of songwriting.

But the reflective songwriter is still among us - still rather

chameleon like - still obscured and obfuscated by the chill
winds of market forces and marketing demands - that require
stylisation - but still they write and still they record and even all
the pre-formatted, pay for play, dead hand of Clear Channel
doesn't seem able to stop them. Like weeds through the cracks,
sublime recordings continue to be made, and find marginalised
outlet- like Warren Zevon's "My Shit's Fucked Up" - the
stripped back sound of upright bass, brushes and acoustic guitar
or acoustic piano, come back as perennial as the garden wisteria
to remind us that the genre of the singer songwriter is the real
deal - as true as real art has to be - and even while in the case of
Warren, it's author is dying, it remains alive and well...
Sometimes (though rarely) it even breaks the rules surprising
itself, and everyone else, and crosses over the dance floor to join
the mainstream of commercial "product"... Norah Jones might
be a good recent example. More commonly not. I can name
twenty or more extraordinary young singer-songwriters out
there in cyberspace and in the clubs making great work - real
work - most without labels even - most who'll never become
household names.
Despite the frequent distractions of those who think (incorrectly
in my view) this process is first and foremost about money (it
isn't it's about art) it is for my love of the unadorned song and
within that tradition I've dedicated and rededicated all my
writing efforts since throwing out my clicks, codes and designer
clothes in 1990. Like a reformed alcoholic, I've sometimes
stumbled and fallen into bad company and allowed the blurring
of the moral lines around my own creative aspirations and
beliefs but each time I do I learn another way not to do it again.
The less travelled road is still there and still calling to me.
Sadly many of the great studios that always supported real
music continue to go broke, even as cable TV spouts ever more
debased pornography and calls it music. Keep changing the
labels and bring in trendy new designers boys - keep merging
and talking the usual horse shit but we'll still keep writing and

recording stretching ourselves to our creative limits, frequently

failing but trying nevertheless to produce real songs unadorned;
work that we'll still like to hear thirty years from now and
somehow, through the wide margins of the ongoing dissent of
the counter-culture that the sixties gave us, we'll continue to be
heard and even promoted and enjoyed by those with enough
imagination to visit art galleries, libraries, bookshops,
mountains, lakes and empty beaches... Those who'll continue to
reject this increasingly bleak and conservative paternalism of the
mass media.
With apologies to the legions of honourable musicians and
technicians out there who deserved mention as contributors to
the real process of making the work of the artisan songwriter this article is posted as my prayer for today and also my two
fingered salute to the music business that remains so helplessly
screwed up right now with lousy values, it both breaks my heart
and defies belief.
David Knopfler 18th June 2003
David Knopfler 2003
http://www.knopfler.com/articles/songwriters.html