On his book Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music
Cover Interview of May 19, 2021
In a nutshell
Songbooks is a book about books on American popular
music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of
psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary New England to Jay-Z’s Decoded in
2010. I break the book into pieces, with essays on different authors, artists,
and topics carrying the history forward in the order that the book that
headlines an entry was published. You might find yourself reading about a
blackface minstrel in the 1830s and about Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering juke
joint ethnography Mules and Men in the 1930s; there’s room to consider
how Joel Whitburn’s books of chart hits shaped our sense of how to remember pop
songs, but also how Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comic
books became the first place to learn about Latinx punk in Southern California.
I want people to read it however makes them happy: hopscotching to favorites or
checking out a period in time to see how things they didn’t know were connected
spoke to each other.
Two major ideas come out of this study. The first, which has
to be said loudly now that popular music has been embraced by academia, is that
most interesting writing in this field has been by non-academics or decidedly oddball
ones. While heaps of books pledge allegiance to a music genre or an academic
discipline, dutiful to document the lives and work of musicians, I’m driven by stuff
that invents its own form, often writings by women, people of color, outsiders
to set fields. The “hooks” in pop songs come from musical mistakes, odd
phrasings, unlikely collaborations, the broken amp making funny feedback. So
too the most intriguing music books, which come at the subject from a novel
angle—including many novels! From Theodore Dreiser through Jennifer Egan’s A
Visit from the Goon Squad, they are acute on connections between popular
culture and urban desire. Egan knows the tradition and ends with what might be Sister
Carrie’s story: “It was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling
with her keys.”
The second key concept is the now centuries-long reckoning
with vernacular commercial music as culture. It’s not high art, it’s not
folklore. At times it has felt revolutionary. Not so much lately. My groupings
are a mini-history. “Setting the Stage” is the Stephen Foster era of sheet
music and blackface minstrelsy: the original songbooks were cheap amusements or
spiritual collections like Slave Songs of the United States. The Jazz
Age came next: urban modernity from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Louis Armstrong,
whose first books were transcribed trumpet solos. By mid-century, icons were a
staple: Woody Guthrie’s folksy vernacular, Billie Holiday’s beyond-true Lady
Sings the Blues, Américo Paredes’s incredible outlaw corridos study, “With
His Pistol In His Hand.” The revolutionary part came in the 1960s, via Tom
Wolfe and rock critics, but soul countercultures too via Amiri Baraka. When
that moment faded, the epic saga of vernacular music was done. But I’m only
half-way—the rest of the book tracks how later generations rethought what
mattered and why.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Songbooks is a book about books on American popular music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary New England to Jay-Z’s Decoded in 2010. I break the book into pieces, with essays on different authors, artists, and topics carrying the history forward in the order that the book that headlines an entry was published. You might find yourself reading about a blackface minstrel in the 1830s and about Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering juke joint ethnography Mules and Men in the 1930s; there’s room to consider how Joel Whitburn’s books of chart hits shaped our sense of how to remember pop songs, but also how Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comic books became the first place to learn about Latinx punk in Southern California. I want people to read it however makes them happy: hopscotching to favorites or checking out a period in time to see how things they didn’t know were connected spoke to each other.
Two major ideas come out of this study. The first, which has to be said loudly now that popular music has been embraced by academia, is that most interesting writing in this field has been by non-academics or decidedly oddball ones. While heaps of books pledge allegiance to a music genre or an academic discipline, dutiful to document the lives and work of musicians, I’m driven by stuff that invents its own form, often writings by women, people of color, outsiders to set fields. The “hooks” in pop songs come from musical mistakes, odd phrasings, unlikely collaborations, the broken amp making funny feedback. So too the most intriguing music books, which come at the subject from a novel angle—including many novels! From Theodore Dreiser through Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, they are acute on connections between popular culture and urban desire. Egan knows the tradition and ends with what might be Sister Carrie’s story: “It was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.”
The second key concept is the now centuries-long reckoning with vernacular commercial music as culture. It’s not high art, it’s not folklore. At times it has felt revolutionary. Not so much lately. My groupings are a mini-history. “Setting the Stage” is the Stephen Foster era of sheet music and blackface minstrelsy: the original songbooks were cheap amusements or spiritual collections like Slave Songs of the United States. The Jazz Age came next: urban modernity from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Louis Armstrong, whose first books were transcribed trumpet solos. By mid-century, icons were a staple: Woody Guthrie’s folksy vernacular, Billie Holiday’s beyond-true Lady Sings the Blues, Américo Paredes’s incredible outlaw corridos study, “With His Pistol In His Hand.” The revolutionary part came in the 1960s, via Tom Wolfe and rock critics, but soul countercultures too via Amiri Baraka. When that moment faded, the epic saga of vernacular music was done. But I’m only half-way—the rest of the book tracks how later generations rethought what mattered and why.