While it is less a verifiable fact than a general consensus of opinion, the development of Popular Music Studies as a recognisable field of scholarly activity is generally reckoned to have taken place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Early contributions from academics with backgrounds in Musicology, Literary Criticism or Sociology provided a promising, if uneven, foundation upon which research might build, and the publication of Popular Music in 1981 confirmed the legitimacy of the subject, the growing interest it attracted, and its connections with other areas of study.
However, popular music (in its broadest sense) had been written about long before the 1970s. Other voices in other rooms had considered its historical roots, its social and political implications, its cultural significance, its artists and its audiences; and the literary outcomes of many of those deliberations appeared in a diverse range of forms – journalism, (auto)biography, anthologies, memoirs, fiction. Eric Weisbard's goal in Songbooks is to explore that extensive literature, and ‘the very different kinds of writers who have tackled the question of pop, case by case, over time’ (p. 443). The range of his scholarship is impressive: in more than 150 entries (arranged in seven historical periods) from William Billings’ The New-England Psalm-Singer (1777) to Jay-Z's Decoded (2010), he catalogues and assesses some of the most significant writings about, or by, those composers (Stephen Foster, W. C. Handy, Irving Berlin), performers (Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, the Beatles, Madonna), styles (Blackface Minstrelsy, jazz, rock ’n’ roll, punk), critics (Gilbert Seldes, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, Gina Arnold), poets and novelists (Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac), and others who have contributed – directly or obliquely – to our awareness of the shape and form of American popular music.
Readers expecting the kind of succinct, title-specific summaries found in most works of reference will be disappointed. While some essays are pleasingly concise and comprehensive (those on Simon Frith's Sound Effects, Tia DeNora's Music In Everyday Life and Sammy Davis Jr's Yes I Can are exemplary), others are annoyingly disconnected from their title. The entry on Michael Braun's Love Me Do contains less than a page about the book itself, but a further five pages in which more than 40 subsequent Beatles-related books are mentioned. Similarly, after describing Bob Dylan's Chronicles as ‘a memoir of sorts’ (p. 406), Weisbard says nothing more about it in his four-page account. Such mini-chapters contradict the book's stated promise to provide ‘a critical guide to the authors, artists and topics’ (p. 1). While they are certainly indicative of an enviable knowledge of popular music and its varied narratives, many of Weisbard's essays are open-ended discussions rather than formal critical assessments. On more than one occasion, I was reminded of late-night conversations I have enjoyed at popular music conferences – witty, erudite, entertaining debates, in which a variety of connections and comparisons, explanations and opinions compete for attention, often straying from the original topic. This extract from the entry on Fred Moten's In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition illustrates the tendency nicely, by compressing several separate ideas into one tumultuous sentence:
With Burning Spear's dub-heavy ‘do you remember the days of slavery?’ filling his head, Moten could connect cultural studies interpellation and vaudeville interpolation, mourn for the way the late José Esteban Muñoz, whose position steering the performance department at NYU he took over, had let Cubanidad and Latinidad interrupt each other, and then still bluntly demand of Black British cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy, antithetical to U.S. Blackness, “Who the fuck you talking to?” (p. 402).
On the other hand, students and researchers accustomed to (or frustrated by) the overly restrained and sober tone of much academic writing may be surprised and gratified by the velocity of Weisbard's commentaries, which often replicate the energy and pace of Tom Wolfe's new journalism (itself one of the topics included in this collection), and which seem entirely fitting in a book celebrating traditions of non-academic as well as academic writing. For example, the entry on Peter Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley tells us that:
Former ‘Memphis Mafia’ entourage figures Red West, Sonny West and Dave Hebler dished on the pill-popping ‘walking drugstore’, touchy-to-borderline-homicidal deity who believed ‘he is a law unto himself’; whose sexscapades, before and after former young teen bed partner, then wife, Priscilla had her affair and blew away, were more trick-mirror voyeurism than smut, akin to his buying binges (p. 341).
In fact, Weisbard is clearly aware of potential objections from some quarters, warning against the linguistic elitism of ‘university professors raising an eyebrow at hyperbolic sentences that overstate claims’ and insisting that ‘confused statements, incipient forms, displaced intellectuals are at the core […] of our songbooks’ (p. 13).
Where Songbooks undoubtedly succeeds is in its ability to contextualise the selected writings, to approach them not as independent texts, but as part of a shared project. And in doing so, a number of overlapping themes become apparent: the distinction between high and low culture, the tension between the vernacular and the sentimental, and the overwhelming significance of African-American music. Less obvious perhaps, but equally insistent, is the book's recurrent acknowledgement of the debt owed by many of these writers to Walt Whitman, whose ‘poetry as democratic song […] gave popular music writing lasting mandates’ (p. 29).
While it is somewhat glib to (re)introduce the oft-quoted, wrongly attributed and frequently misunderstood aphorism that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, Weisbard's book obliges the reader to reappraise its relevance, and in doing so, to consider the ways in which the written word can and cannot illuminate the diverse histories and circumstances of popular song. In that regard, the essays here are not unlike the musics of the past two centuries to which they refer: revelatory, confusing, dynamic, irritating, rewarding, ephemeral, unexpected, disruptive and always provocative.
