(Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Isabelle Marc, Stuart Green (Eds.) - The Singer-Songwriter in Europe. Paradigms, Politics and Place-Routledge (2016)

THE SINGER-SONGWRItER IN EUROPE
The Singer-Songwriter in Europe is the first book to explore and compare the multifaceted
discourses and practices of this figure within and across linguistic spaces in Europe and in
dialogue with spaces beyond continental borders. The concept of the singer-songwriter is
significant and much debated for a variety of reasons. Many such musicians possess large
and zealous followings, their output often esteemed politically and usually held up as the
nearest popular music gets to high art, such facets often yielding sizeable economic benefits.
Yet this figure, per se, has been the object of scant critical discussion, with individual
practitioners celebrated for their isolated achievements instead. In response to this lack of
critical knowledge, this volume identifies and interrogates the musical, linguistic, social
and ideological elements that configure the ‘singer-songwriter’ and its various equivalents
in Europe, such as the French auteur-compositeur-interprète and the Italian cantautore,
since the late 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of this figure in the post-
war period, how and why its contours have changed over time and space subsequently,
cross-cultural influences, and the transformative agency of this figure as regards party and
identity politics in lyrics and music, often by means of individual case studies. The book’s
polycentric approach endeavours to redress the hitherto anglophone bias in scholarship on
the singer-songwriter in the English-speaking world, drawing on the knowledge of scholars
from across Europe and from a variety of academic disciplines, including modern language
studies, musicology, sociology, literary studies and history.
Isabelle Marc is Lecturer at the Department of French in Universidad Complutense,

Madrid, Spain, where she teaches French language, culture and translation. She has worked
extensively on the aesthetics of French popular music, covering genres such as rap and
chanson, individual artists Georges Brassens, Charles Aznavour and Dominique A, and
topics including identity, intertextuality and nostalgia. She has published in French, English
and Spanish in journals such as French Cultural Studies, Journal of European Popular
Culture, Volume! La revue des musiques populaires and IASPM Journal. Her latest research
interests and publications explore nostalgia, transcultural phenomena, and cultural policy
in the field of popular music and popular culture. She is co-editor of Theleme. Revista
Complutense de Estudios Franceses and board member of IASPM Spain.
Stuart Green is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Leeds, UK, where he
teaches and researches on the performing arts in modern Spain. He is author of From Silver
Screen to Spanish Stage, a study of the influence of Hollywood on theatre in Spain. His
current research explores ways in which theatre, television, cinema and music engage with
the issue of ethnic diversity. He has published on this area in journals such as Journal of
Spanish Popular Culture and Popular Music and Society. He is a member of the editorial
board of journal Estreno and co-editor of Intellect journal New Cinemas.
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series
Series Editors:
Stan Hawkins, Professor of Popular Musicology, University of Oslo
and Lori Burns, Professor, University of Ottawa, Canada
Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with popular
forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment and leisure
activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research in
this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis of the music itself, as well as
locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context. The focus of the series
is on popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass
the entirety of the world’s popular music.
Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being continually
developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the transcultural and inter-
cultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding of social context, reception
and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as reggae, township, bhangra and flamenco
are features of a shrinking, transnational world. The series recognizes and addresses the
emergence of mixed genres and new global fusions, and utilizes a wide range of theoreti-
cal models drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics,
postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.
Other titles in the series:
From the chanson française to the canzone d’autore in the 1960s and 1970s
Authenticity, Authority, Influence
Rachel Haworth
Post-War French Popular Music: Cultural Identity and the
Brel-Brassens-Ferré Myth
Adeline Cordier
Litpop: Writing and Popular Music
Edited by Rachel Carroll and Adam Hansen
Singer-Songwriters and Musical Open Mics
Marcus Aldredge
Critical Musicological Reflections
Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott
Edited by Stan Hawkins
Protest Music in France
Production, Identity and Audiences
Barbara Lebrun
Stereo: Comparative Perspectives on the Sociological Study of Popular Music
in France and Britain
Edited by Hugh Dauncey and Philippe Le Guern
Chanson
The French Singer-Songwriter from Aristide Bruant to the Present Day
Peter Hawkins
The Singer-Songwriter in Europe
Paradigms, Politics and Place
Edited by
Isabelle Marc
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
and
Stuart Green
University of Leeds, UK
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Isabelle Marc and Stuart Green; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows

The singer-songwriter in Europe: paradigms, politics and place / edited by Isabelle Marc
and Stuart Green.
pages cm – (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-5210-8 (hardcover: alk paper) – ISBN 978-1-315-55291-0 (ebook)
1. Popular music – Influence. 2. Popular music – Political aspects – Europe.
3. Popular music – Social aspects – Europe. 4. Music and transnationalism.
I. Marc, Isabelle, editor. II. Green, Stuart (Stuart Nishan), editor.
ML3917.E85S56 2016
782.42164094–dc23 2015031558
ISBN: 9781472452108 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781315552910 (ebk)
Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita
Typeset in Times New Roman

by codeMantra
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii

Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiii
General Editors’ Preface xv
Introduction More Than Words: Theorizing the Singer-Songwriter 1

Stuart Green and Isabelle Marc
PaRT I PaRaDigms
1 ‘The Songs I’d Write Would Be Like That’: Transnational

Influences between Poets, Composers, Singer-Songwriters 23
Franco Fabbri
2 Politique des Chant-Auteurs: French Auteur Theory and Italian

Canzone d’Autore Compared 37
Jacopo Conti
3 ‘Words Take the Place of Meaning’: Sound, Sense and Politics

in the Music of Robert Wyatt 51
Richard Elliott
4 Thinking the Canzone d’Autore 65

Rachel Haworth
5 Rediscovered Sisters: Women (and) Singer-Songwriters in Italy 79

Jacopo Tomatis
PaRT II PoliTics
6 ‘I Write the Songs. He’s the Eye Candy’: The Female

Singer-Songwriter, the Woman Artist-Producer and the
British Broadsheet Press 95
Paula Wolfe
vi The Singer-Songwriter in Europe
7 In Germany After The War: Broadening the Discourse on the

Liedermacher 109
Dietmar Elflein
8 Judges, Guitars, Freedom and the Mainstream: Problematizing

the Early Cantautor in Spain 123
Sílvia Martínez
9 Starting Over: Singer-Songwriters and the Rhythm of Historical

Time in Post-Revolutionary Portugal 137
Luís Trindade
PaRT III PlacE
10 The Re-Invention of the French Singer-Songwriter in the

Liberation Years: Léo Ferré and the French Poetic Heritage
in Popular Song 153
Peter Hawkins
11 Transitions of the Cantautor: Aesthetics, Politics and Authenticity

in Spanish Popular Music from the Late Franco Dictatorship to the
Present Day 163
Fernán del Val and Stuart Green
12 When Jake Met Georges: The Chanson across the Channel 177
Mark Goodall
13 A Place for Us? Building the Sense of Place in the ʻGenoese

School’ of Cantautori 191
Alessandro Bratus and Giuseppa Vultaggio
References 205
Index 229
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
I.1 Screenshot of archival record of Beck’s Wikipedia entry at

05.27am on 9 February 2015 2
13.1 Melodic cells in the first verse of ‘Genova per noi’ (Lauzi, 1975) 200
Tables
13.1 Structural outline of ‘Genova per noi’ (Lauzi, 1975) 200

Page Intentionally Left Blank
Notes on Contributors
Alessandro Bratus gained his PhD in Musicology in 2009 at the Università

di Pavia, where he is currently Research Fellow. His teaching and research
experiences in Italy and abroad have focused on analytical approaches to musical
and multimedia products in Anglo-American and Italian popular culture from the
1960s onwards. He has published on topics related to composition and multimedia
experimentation in popular music, the structural relationship between form and
meaning, and authenticity in contemporary media. He is currently member of the
Scientific Committee for the Italian study group on music theory and analysis
(GATM) and editor of Analitica: Online Journal of Music Studies.
Jacopo Conti obtained his PhD in musicology at the Università di Torino in 2013,
focusing on the influences of popular music on ‘art’ music. He teaches psychology
of music at the Istituto Europeo di Design (Milan) and modern guitar techniques. His
research embraces musical analysis and genre crossover as regards contemporary
‘art’ music, popular music and jazz, and the relationship between music and other
media. He is the Italian translator of Philip Tagg’s Everyday Tonality and Music
Meanings and writes for the Teatro Regio of Turin. He is member of the Italian
branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).
Fernán del Val was recently awarded his PhD in Sociology (Universidad
Complutense, Madrid), and is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia. He has published articles in Spanish and
English on popular music, youth and politics in Spain. In 2010 he was Visiting
Scholar at Newcastle University. He is Chair of SIBE (Ethnomusicology Society)
and president of the Spanish branch of IASPM.
Dietmar Elflein is an ethnomusicologist and lecturer on popular music at the

Technische Universität Braunschweig with teaching assignments at the Hdpk
Berlin, Popakademie Mannheim and HfMT Köln among others. He is member
of the advisory board of the German Society for Popular Music Studies. He has
published on the stylistic norms of heavy metal and German popular music history.
His research interests also include the application of actor-network theory and
actor-media theory to popular music and post-colonial studies.
Richard Elliott is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Sussex. He is a

cultural musicologist working primarily in the discipline of popular music studies.
His current research focuses on the representation of time, age, experience and
x The Singer-Songwriter in Europe
voice in popular music, particularly in relation to singers and songwriters. He also

researches musical materiality, with a particular focus on phonography. He is the
author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City,
Nina Simone and The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music. He
has also published articles and reviews on popular music, literature, consciousness,
memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology.
Franco Fabbri is a musician and musicologist, and teaches popular music and
sound studies at the Università di Torino. His main interests are in the fields of
genre theories and music typologies, the impact of media and technology across
genres and musical cultures, and the history of popular music. He has served
twice as chairman of IASPM. He has published on the rapport between music
and technology (Elettronica e musica), on the confrontation of musical cultures
in the contemporary world (L’ascolto tabù) and on the fabric of influences and
coincidences in the history of popular music (Around the Clock). His most read
book (Il suono in cui viviamo, 3 editions) contains articles on subjects including
genres, analysis of popular music and the aesthetics of sound. He is co-editor
(with Goffredo Plastino) of the book series ‘Routledge Global Popular Music’.
Mark Goodall is Senior Lecturer at the University of Bradford. He has published

research on cult films (Italian mondo films, French horror), music (The Fall,
Charles Manson), graphic art (Raymond Pettibon) and literature (he is editor of
The Firminist, the only journal devoted to Malcolm Lowry). His latest book is
Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation, a study of music
and the occult. He has written about French music in a variety of publications. He
has co-translated songs by Georges Brassens for his group Rudolf Rocker, and is
working on a translation of Brassens’s novel La Tour des miracles.
Stuart Green is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at University of Leeds, where he

teaches and researches on the performing arts in modern Spain. He is author of
From Silver Screen to Spanish Stage, a study of the influence of Hollywood on
theatre in Spain. His current research explores ways in which theatre, television,
cinema and music engage with the issue of ethnic diversity. He has published on
this area in journals such as Journal of Spanish Popular Culture and Popular
Music and Society. He is member of the editorial board of journal Estreno and co-
editor of Intellect journal New Cinemas.
Peter Hawkins is Senior Research Fellow in French at the University of Bristol.

He taught courses on French cinema, poetry, chanson, and post-colonial literatures
for many years until his retirement in 2008. He held visiting posts at the University
of Benin, Nigeria and at the Université de la Réunion. He was twice President of
the Association for the Study of African and Caribbean Literatures in French (now
re-named the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies). His books include
Chanson and The Other Hybrid Archipelago: Introduction to the Literatures and
Notes on Contributors xi
Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean. He is also a writer, performer and

translator of French chanson in France and the UK. In 1998 he received the French
academic award of Chevalier dans l’ordre des Palmes académiques, later being
promoted to the grade of Officier.
Rachel Haworth is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull. Her research

interests lie broadly within the area of Italian popular culture, and, specifically,
in popular music. She is interested in questions of gender, performance, stardom,
legitimation and value within Italian popular music. She has published on topics
such as the importance of media commemorations, the notion of performance in
the chanson française, the figure of the singer-songwriter as performer in French
and Italian popular music, and the Italian singer Mina. Her work has appeared
in journals such as Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of
European Popular Culture and Contemporary French Civilization. She is author
of the monograph From the chanson française to the canzone d’autore in the 1960s
and 1970s: Authenticity, Authority, Influence.
Isabelle Marc is Lecturer in the Department of French in Universidad Complutense,

Madrid, where she teaches French language, culture and translation. She has
worked extensively on the aesthetics of French popular music, covering genres
such as rap and chanson, individual artists Georges Brassens, Charles Aznavour
and Dominique A, and topics including identity, intertextuality and nostalgia.
She has published in French, English and Spanish in journals such as French
Cultural Studies, Journal of European Popular Culture, Volume: La Revue
des musiques populaires and IASPM Journal. Her latest research interests and
publications explore nostalgia, transcultural phenomena, and cultural policy in the
field of popular music and popular culture. She is co-editor of Theleme: Revista
complutense de estudios franceses and board member of IASPM Spain.
Sílvia Martínez is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the Universitat

Autònoma de Barcelona and Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Escola Superior
de Música de Catalunya. She is the founder of IASPM Spain and was its first
president. Her main research topics are current theoretical and historical issues
related to Spanish popular music and gender studies. Her publications include
Enganxats al heavy: Cultura, música i transgressió, ‘Seeking Connection
through a Sea: Mediterranean Sounds in Spanish Folk and Popular Music’
(in Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds), ‘From South to
South: Indo-Pakistani Diaspora and Recent Cultural Practices in Spain’ (in Musica
e Migração), and Made in Spain: Studies in Popular Music.
Jacopo Tomatis is a doctoral student at the Università di Torino. His research

deals with the genres of Italian popular music, paying particular attention to
historical and ideological issues. He has published on a range of topics, including
the history, criticism and ideology of the concept of ‘cantautore’ and ‘canzone
xii The Singer-Songwriter in Europe
d’autore’. He is board member of IASPM Italy, and chief editor of its journal Vox
Popular. He is also a widely published music journalist, and is editor of the online
magazine Il giornale della musica.
Luís Trindade is Senior Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at Birkbeck, University

of London. He has worked on Portuguese nationalism and several other aspects
of twentieth-century cultural history, and in 2008 published O estranho caso
do nacionalismo português, on the relations between Salazarism and literature.
He has also published on the histories of Portuguese cinema, intellectuals,
journalism and advertising. In 2013, he edited The Making of Modern Portugal,
an introduction to Portuguese modern history. His current research focuses on
Portuguese revolutionary and post-revolutionary culture.
Giuseppa Vultaggio studied at the Università di Pisa, where she took her Master’s
Degree in Italian Language and Literature. Following her award of a teaching
qualification, she has been a secondary school teacher in Italy. Her main research
interests include literary criticism, Italian metrics and the interdisciplinary study
of the relationship between twentieth-century Italian poetry and canzone d’autore.
Paula Wolfe was recently awarded her PhD at the University of Liverpool.
Her thesis documents the responses of women artists, producers and industry
professionals to the impact of digital recording and marketing technologies in the
first 12 years of the digital era. She has published on music production, music
technology and gender and is currently revising her thesis for publication with
Ashgate Publishing. Her new research explores hybrids of production practice and
gender. Paula is also a critically acclaimed artist-producer and is completing the
production of her third album, due for release in 2016 (Sib Records).
Acknowledgements
This book is a large step forwards in the history of the European Popular Musics
Research Group, which we have convened together since its creation in 2011.
Many have assisted us over the past five years in our endeavour to establish the
EPMRG as a key cluster of popular music scholars in the international field, a
point of reference on the theories, methodologies and analyses of popular music
studies as a discipline through its inclusive focus on a particular geographical
space. For their wise words and generous provision of their time to this end, we
are indebted to David Hesmondalgh, David Looseley, Derek Scott, Simon Warner
and Duncan Wheeler, fellow popular music scholars at the University of Leeds, as
well as Mike Bellhouse, Paul Cooke, Max Silverman and Becky Wilding in their
administrative capacities. As regards this particular project, we are most grateful
to Diana Holmes and Margaret Atack for allowing us to draw on their academic
expertise during the elaboration of our introductory chapter – and for the diligence
with which they undertook to read drafts and feed back to us when busy with other
matters. For their good humour and unconditional support throughout the last five
years, we would also like to thank our colleagues and friends Gregorio Alonso,
Richard Hibbitt and Dave Platten.
It goes without saying that this book would not have been possible without the
erudition and hard work of its contributors. We hereby express our wholehearted
gratitude to each and every one of them for embarking on this enterprise with us
and for working with us so patiently to ensure its successful realization. We have
learnt a great deal from you over the the last two years as we have read drafts
and discussed finer points of international musical terminology, artistic creation,
academic methodologies and historical contexts. Neither would this have been
possible without the guidance and understanding of Emma Gallon and Michael
Bourne at Ashgate during our initial proposal and writing of this book.
For their excellent company, encouragement and advice during this period,
Stuart would like to thank his friends and family in the UK and Spain, as well as
his colleagues in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University
of Leeds.
Isabelle would like to thank her friends and family for their continuous support
during the editing of this book, as well as her colleagues in Madrid and Leeds for
their intellectual stimuli, especially those in La Uni en la Calle. David and Avril
Looseley deserve special recognition for enabling her to discover Leeds and all the
wonderful colleagues she now has there. Finally, she thanks Stuart for his patience
and hard work during and since her maternity leave.
xiv The Singer-Songwriter in Europe
Note on Style
Translations of quotations and titles in this book, except where noted, are the
authors’ own.
General Editors’ Preface
Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with
popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment
and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present
the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis
of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings
in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the world’s
popular music.
Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being
continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the
transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding
of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as
reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational
world. The series recognizes and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and
new global fusions, and utilizes a wide range of theoretical models drawn from
anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial
studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.
Stan Hawkins, Professor of Popular Musicology, University of Oslo and

Lori Burns, Professor, University of Ottawa, Canada
Introduction
More Than Words: Theorizing the
Singer-Songwriter
Stuart Green and Isabelle Marc
Introduction
For over half a century now, singer-songwriters have featured prominently among
the best-known names in international popular music. Many such figures elicit great
devotion on the part of fans, as shown by the outpouring of grief on the death of
Amy Winehouse in 2011 and the growing numbers of attendees at the Annual
Gathering in memory of Nick Drake at Tanworth-in-Arden. The esteem in which
such figures are held is high not merely within the music industry but also outside
its borders, most impressively in the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres
awarded to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith by the French Ministry of Culture in 1990
and 2005 respectively. Similar places in the Western collective imagination are
occupied by individual artists who compose and perform their own songs in
non-anglophone spaces.1 Chilean cantautores Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara are
still celebrated for their socially aware and politically committed compositions,
as well as for their promotion of a national musical culture. In France, auteur-
compositeur-interprète Georges Brassens was awarded the Académie Française’s
Grand Prix de Poésie in 1967, and the close relationship between song and poetry
that he and others forged in the post-war decades continues to be present in the
work of figures such as Dominique A and Jeanne Cherhal. A superstar in her native
Italy since the mid-1990s, cantautrice Carmen Consoli is revered for her feminist
treatment of a number of topics. Brazilian Gilberto Gil’s successful blend of music
and politics led president ‘Lula’ da Silva to appoint him Minister of Culture in
2003. These are just some examples of the wide-ranging influence of and popular
admiration for singer-songwriters across the world. The status of this figure in
popular music was serendipitously illustrated at the time we were writing our
introductory chapter by the public spat between fans of Beck and Beyoncé played
out on the former’s English-language Wikipedia entry, an aftershock of Kanye
West’s loud objections at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards that the Album of
the Year award had gone to Beck’s Morning Phase (2014) and not to Beyoncé’s
1
Our understanding of the geopolitical concept ‘the West’ here encompasses Europe
and other countries across the Atlantic and elsewhere whose economic development and
political systems derive substantially from European colonialism.
2 The Singer-Songwriter in Europe
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beck&oldid=646298830 (accessed on

13 February 2015). This work is reproduced under CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.
org/licences/by-sa/3.0).
Figure I.1 Screenshot of archival record of Beck’s Wikipedia entry at

05.27am on 9 February 2015
eponymous album (see Figure I.1). The fact that the defence of Beck and counter-
attacks aimed at Beyoncé were articulated in the very terms we wish to explore
here – autonomy and authorship – attests to the continuing prestige of the single
figure who displays such characteristics, and the heated debate to which questions
of cultural value pertaining to these terms in popular music can give rise.
Strangely, despite the significance of the singer-songwriter within and beyond
the cultural field of music, this figure has received scant academic attention.
The closest to scholarly analyses of the term ‘singer-songwriter’ are entries in
encyclopaedias and dictionaries of music. These commence with a very broad,
literal definition of the term: ‘singing composer-performers, often with roots in
folk, country and blues, whose music and lyrics are considered inseparable from
their performances’ (Potter, n.d.), ‘[p]opular music artists who write and perform
their own material (often self-accompanied, most frequently on acoustic guitar
or piano)’ (Strachan and Leonard, 2003, p. 198), and ‘a category of popular
musician who composes and performs his or her own songs, typically to acoustic
guitar or piano accompaniment’ (Wise, 2012, p. 430). The entries then mention
in brief several other issues associated with this figure: the relative importance
Introduction 3
of lyrics, their emotional and/or political content, auteurship and cultural value,
musical heritage, performance dynamics, temporal developments, gender, and
the notion of authenticity. The vast majority of other publications on the subject
are targeted at a non-academic readership. The remit of the Praeger Singer-
Songwriter Collection, for example, encompasses artists ‘all [of whom] have
written and recorded commercially successful and/or historically important
music and lyrics at some point in their careers’ (Perone, 2009, p. ix). These books
focus on the work of individual practitioners and refrain from theorizing on what
they have in common.
The aforementioned writings ignore non-anglophone singer-songwriters
and the more detailed scholarly enquiry of which they have been the subject.2
Publications in English on these figures include studies of the French auteur-
compositeur-interprète within the broader context of the chanson (Hawkins, 2000),
the cantautor in its Spanish-, Spanish-American- and Catalan-speaking variants
(Colmeiro, 2003, pp. 37–40; Pring-Mill, 1990[?]; Ayats and Salicrú-Maltas, 2013),
the Soviet бард (Ament, 2004), the German Liedermacher (Holler, 2007), the
Italian cantautore (Fabbri, 1982, pp. 63–80), as well as comparative studies of the
auteur-compositeur-interprète with forms of sung poetry in Greek (Papanikolaou,
2007) and with the cantautore (Haworth, 2015). Despite such publications, there
is no single academic study that brings this knowledge together and enables us to
look across national borders in order to reach a fuller understanding of what unites
these practitioners, what might set them apart from each other, and why these
connections and disconnections are so.
In our book, we endeavour to begin to fill this void by expanding and nuancing
the critical awareness of the singer-songwriter sketched above. To this end, the
book encompasses anglophone artists and musicians elsewhere in Europe, for
which we have called upon the expertise of a number of modern linguists and
musicologists from across Europe. We commence our book with an in-depth
theoretical reflection on the figure of the singer-songwriter as a discursive
construct specific to popular music following the Second World War and linked
to the ideology and aesthetics of modernity, and whose ever-shifting parameters
and cultural values are most effectively comprehended and problematized by
approaching it as a genre. This introduction is followed by a series of chapters
which better and broaden our understanding of models of the singer-songwriter
within and across borders, and the various discourses surrounding this figure since
the turn of the 1950s. The keywords we have chosen to (loosely) structure these
studies – paradigms, politics and place – encompass those issues mentioned with
greatest regularity at the conference we organized in September 2012 (‘From
Adele to Zeca Afonso: The Singer-Songwriter in Europe’) to determine and debate
the state of the question on this figure.
2
Wise pays lip service to the Italian cantautore and claims the French equivalent to
be the chansonnier (2012, p. 430).
Exploring the Singer-Songwriter in Europe
As its title indicates, our book explores the singer-songwriter specifically within
Europe. By focusing on this continental space, we do not imply a perceived
Europeanness of Barbara, Paulo Conte and Sinéad O’Connor in opposition to
a perceived Americanness of Tracy Chapman, Leonard Cohen and Fito Páez.
Neither do we wish to dismiss musicians such as Miyuki Nakajima (Japan),
Nimal Mendis (Sri Lanka) and Syd Kitchen (South Africa). Instead we have
chosen this geographical space heuristically: by looking across various national
configurations of the singer-songwriter in Europe, we endeavour to move towards
a more complete understanding of this term and its practitioners. Although current
political, social and economic factors mean this is a particularly critical moment
in the history of Europe, the continent continues to be, as we have defined it
elsewhere, ‘a shared contemporary geopolitical reality within which coexist
diverse languages and cultural … histories linked by organizational structures,
common economic policies and cultural affinities that in many ways facilitate
more dynamic … exchange than with other spaces’ (Green and Marc, 2013, p. 4).
Supported by diverse national and transnational bodies, much European artistic
production possesses certain shared attributes. Our approach to the singer-
songwriter in Europe is emphatically polycentric, and recognizes the continent
as a complex geographical, historical and cultural construct not sealed off from
other spaces but in dialogue with them – most obviously the USA and Canada,
but spaces such as Latin America too – through demographic movement as well
as through constant and ever-growing cultural transfer. The Europeanness of the
singer-songwriters discussed in this book is deemed a circumstance rather than
an essential feature, then, a circumstance that nonetheless illuminates our case
studies and deepens our insight into the figure of the singer-songwriter at a more
global level.
A cross-cultural approach to the singer-songwriter throws into stark relief the
Anglocentrism of those who see the figure as a primarily US/UK phenomenon
initiated in the early 1960s (Potter, n.d.; Strachan and Leonard, 2003, p. 198;
Wise, 2012, p. 430). Counter to such histories, Dimitris Papanikolaou (2007,
pp. 5–6) and David Looseley (2013, pp. 61–4) postulate that the cultural
legitimacy – a location in the field of culture which they respectively call the
‘high-popular’ (Papanikolau, 2007, p. 3) and the ‘middlebrow’ (Looseley, 2013,
p. 51) – pursued by Bob Dylan and his contemporaries commenced earlier in
France, when musicians embraced poetry and a discourse emerged that claimed
literary status for their lyrics. And it was this figure that inspired counterparts in
Spain (Marc, 2013a), Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union (Djagalov, 2013, p. 159).
Our cross-cultural approach also enables the identification and appraisal of
differences between conceptualizations of the singer-songwriter beyond their
common basic characteristics. Such differences exemplify how the category is by
no means fixed, its semantic field varying from one chronotope to another. This is
evident in the very terms employed to refer to such figures: an author who sings
Introduction 5
(in Spanish, Catalan and Italian), an author who sets his/her creations to music
and then performs them (in French), a bard (in Russian), and a manufacturer/
artisan of literary songs (in German). Such labels denote and connote differently
from someone who writes and sings his/her own music and lyrics: German artist
Herbert Grönemeyer, for example, is referred to as a singer-songwriter in English
but not as a Liedermacher in his native country. For this reason, henceforth in this
book the anglophone expression is indicated by the use of inverted commas. The
compound noun without such markers refers to a global term that encompasses
the ‘singer-songwriter’ and its various non-anglophone counterparts, as in the title
of this book.
Our theorization below approaches the singer-songwriter as a genre, as others
have done regarding specific national types (Fabbri, 1982, pp. 65–80; Papanikolaou,
2007, pp. 2–3; Looseley, 2013, p. 62). Genre here is not merely a matter of ‘style’,
as Allan Moore labels the aesthetic features of music (2012, p. 119); while certain
instrumentation, chord progressions and rhythms characterize blues and salsa, for
example, genre also encompasses social and ideological questions, such as who
listens to it and why. Hence the label includes the ‘specialized cultures’, such as
heritage music, that Fabian Holt claims straddle the boundaries of more traditional
genres (2007, p. 6). It is this more accommodating conceptualization of genre –
less tied to stylistic matters – that we claim for the singer-songwriter. And whereas
Tim Wise suggests that – for this very reason – ‘[i]t may be more logical to regard
singer-songwriter as a popular music format’ (2012, p. 432; our emphasis), we
contend that a generic approach enables us to conceptualize and map the subject
of this book most productively.
The Singer-Songwriter as Genre
A genre is a discursive construct, ‘the result of a loose agreement’ (Frith, 1996,

p. 88; our emphasis) between the various makers, mediators and consumers
of popular music. This elasticity entails that genres are always (theoretically)
under debate and (practically) in constant evolution, their production and public
reception mutually informing one another. The terms of such an agreement in the
case of each genre are best identified and comprehended by tempering Fabbri’s
‘socially accepted rules’ (1982, p. 52) with Holt’s more subtle terminology of
‘conventions’ (2007, p. 22). According to Fabbri, each genre obeys, in its own way,
five categories of rule. Firstly, formal and technical rules concern how music and
lyrics are composed and performed vis-à-vis existing codes and norms. Secondly,
the music, lyrics and performance of a particular genre are shaped by semiotic
rules. To comprehend this category of rule, Fabbri draws on Roman Jakobson’s
six communicative functions (referential, expressive/emotive, conative, poetic/
aesthetic, phatic and metalingual/reflexive) and highlights the importance of
spatial relations between performer and audience. Thirdly, behavioural rules
comprise attitudes struck by the performer and the question of sincerity. Fourthly,
social and ideological rules have to do with who produces and consumes such
genres, why they do so, and how such borders are created and maintained. The fifth
and final category of rule identified by Fabbri consists of economic and juridical
rules, which impinge on all the above features of genre. The overall dynamic in
which these rules exist, the extent to which each contributes quantitatively and
qualitatively to the genre in question, is regulated by a ‘hyper-rule’, which Fabbri
brands its ‘ideology’ (1982, p. 55). Better viewed as conventions than as rules
in order to avoid the normative connotations of Fabbri’s nomenclature,3 together
these shape how each genre is produced and consumed in the three areas of
popular music identified by Simon Frith: ‘the sales process’ (1996, p. 75), ‘the
playing process’ (p. 87) and ‘the listening process’ (p. 88). Thus, as Tim Wall
writes, ‘a genre analysis … involves identifying the rules [conventions] that are
established in a new genre culture and then the subsequent record company and
media practices that streamline and order the music and its culture for their own
gain’ (2013, p. 203). It is to such a task that we now proceed.
The aforementioned encyclopaedia entries on the singer-songwriter declare
that this figure embodies a union of performer, lyricist and composer. Yet this
union existed prior to the emergence of Brassens and others in post-war Paris. This
is most obviously so in the figure of the protest singer, such as Woody Guthrie.
Even further in the past, this union is found in the troubadours, trouvères, bards
and similar figures in the history of lyrical poetry.
We postulate that a more precise defining convention of the singer-songwriter
concerns lyrics and their performance, specifically their production and
consumption as part of an art discourse (as Papanikolau and Looseley observe
with respect to the auteur-compositeur-interprète). According to Motti Regev
in his study of the legitimization of rock music during the 1960s, this discourse
insists on the following:
1. It is demonstrated that specific works belonging to that form contain in some

way (a) formal-aesthetic sophistication or genuineness, and (b) philosophical,
social, psychological or emotional meanings; 2. It is possible to point to a creative
entity – usually an individual – whose spirit and ‘inner truth’ is the source of the
form and meaning of the work; 3. It can be argued that the creative entity has
produced the work by way of (at least) some commitment to that ‘inner truth’,
beyond considerations of practicality and usefulness. (Regev, 1994, p. 86)
Such a discourse operates within all three of the ‘processes’ of music production
and consumption mentioned by Frith. The most essential ingredients of ‘formal-
aesthetic sophistication’ for the singer-songwriter are the words he/she sings
(Fabbri, 1982, p. 67). While epitomized by the description of many as poets,
3
Fabbri acknowledges this himself in a recent study (2012a, p. 21).
Introduction 7
this convention does not stipulate literariness.4 Rather, we contend, the singer-
songwriter’s lyrics are perceived as meaningful. That is to say, they must be
deemed to convey some kind of ‘philosophical, social, psychological or emotional
meanings’ – a perceived ‘inner truth’ – by means of the referential and emotive
functions of the language they employ.5 Lyrics are therefore central to the
classification of any recording artist as a singer-songwriter, hence the exhaustive
analysis of their words by fans and critics. Published editions of lyrics not only
give these a certain literary status, but most importantly allow the reader both to
appreciate the skill with which they have been assembled, and to explore their
potential meanings in even greater detail. The significance of lyrics is frequently
underlined in statements by artists themselves (see Dylan, quoted in Shelton,
2011, p. 139, and Astor, 2010, p. 147).
Moreover, lyrics are performed by the singer-songwriter such that the song –
so the listener infers – reveals something about his/her personality and values.
Key to this inference is that the singer-songwriter is assumed to harmonize what
David Brackett (1995, p. 15) and Frith (1996, p. 199) refer to as the ‘multiplicity
of voices’ heard simultaneously in music. As Frith argues in his typology of the
voice in popular music, performance is often construed by listener (and artist) as
unmediated self-expression (1996, pp. 185–6), resulting in what Hugh Barker and
Yuval Taylor describe as the ‘heightened identification of the singer with the song’
(2007, p. 173). In the particular case of the singer-songwriter, this correlation is
exceptionally tight on account of the overlap, in the figure of a single artist, between
what Frith terms the ‘physical voice’ of the performer and the ‘authorial voice’
of the lyricist (1996, p. 184). These two voices are brought still closer together
by those lyrics written in the first person – that is, when the ‘apparent speaker’
(Frith, 1996, p. 183) of the words (as written text) appears to seal the overlap
between singer and writer shut.6 The close attention demanded by the lyrics to this
end may also be aided by formal and technical qualities such as simple melodic,
harmonic and rhythmic structures, placing the vocal high up in the mix, and sparse
musical accompaniment, as well as the spatial convention of proximity (small
performance venues, between-song explanations, and/or singing close to the
microphone to achieve a sound of intimacy).7 The emotive and referential truths
inferred from these lyrics are usually amplified by aural qualities of the music
4
The poetic status of song lyrics is, of course, a highly contested subject (see, for
example, Griffiths, 2003, and Astor, 2010).
5
While we are aware that the notion of referentiality is a problematic one, our
hypothesis concerns the producer’s and consumer’s perception that lyrics refer (truthfully)
to a reality beyond language.
6
This is clearest to see in autobiographical songs. For instance, the break-up album is
a category in which singer-songwriters enjoy a virtual monopoly (see Green, 2014).
7
Music here gives room to the message, not unlike the ‘margins of silence’ that
Gérard Genette (borrowing from Paul Éluard) identifies in poetry (1997, p. 34).
(see Moore, 2012, pp. 19–118), all of which together lend music its ability to
‘mak[e] expressed feelings more intense’ (Frith, 1996, p. 215).
Accordingly, a song whose lyrics and music are composed, and which is
performed, by the same individual is interpreted as enabling direct access to the
other voice identified by Frith, ‘a personal quality – a quality of [one’s] personality’
(1996, p. 184). In such a way, the singer-songwriter epitomizes the second and
third features of art discourse listed by Regev above. It is this perceived unison of
voices to which Papanikolaou refers when he writes of the auteur-compositeur-
interprète’s ‘transformation of the song of “je” (represented in songs by well-
known singers where the “I” was seen merely as the role taken by the singer) to
the song of “moi” (where a fully integrated sense of “singing personality” was at
stake and was easily conflated with the singing persona adopted by the singer)’
(2007, pp. 18–19). Papanikolaou’s last comment here reminds us that singer and
narrative persona are always held to co-exist in the act of performance in the field
of popular music. Consequently ‘[t]he pop musician as interpreter (Billie Holiday,
say) is therefore more likely to be understood in biographical terms than the pop
musician as composer (Mark Knopfler, say), and when musicians are both, it is
the performing rather than the composing voice that is taken to be the key to
character’ (Frith, 1996, p. 185). We argue that the appeal of the singer-songwriter
is so great precisely because the first-person protagonist common to popular song
is his/her own creation, which implies an ontological fusion of physical voice
and artist’s personality. We look at the ideological connotations of this perceived
single subjectivity further below.
The singer-songwriter as outlined above must be underwritten by the
behavioural convention of authenticity, for many ‘the sine qua non of artistic
success’ (Barker and Taylor, 2008, p. xi). We refer here not only to the emotional
sincerity which Fabbri deems essential to the figure of the cantautore (1982,
p. 71), but to the two other types of authenticity identified by Barker and Taylor:
representational and cultural (2007, p. x).8 That is to say, the impression of
authenticity is given by means of a variety of features. For instance, as regards
vocal style, a chest voice is often interpreted as more indicative of sincerity than
a head voice on account of the relative distance of these body parts from the heart
and stomach, areas where sentiments are still felt to originate. Instrumentation
and compositional techniques borrowed from deep-rooted musical forms are also
interpreted as somehow more genuine. Likewise, the use of modern production
technology tends to be concealed. Additionally, singer-songwriters often display a
public demeanour in disavowal of their public persona: shyness or unease in live
performance and when interviewed (Wise, 2012, p. 431), and a seeming refutation
of the commercial reality of their line of work. These practices of what Moore
labels ‘first person authenticity’ (2002, pp. 211–14) and its associated discourse
reinforce the apparent truth of the artist revealed in performance.
8
Barker and Taylor list sincerity in the third of their types of representation: personal
(2007, p. x).
Introduction 9
The cultural prestige of the singer-songwriter as a generic label is also manifest

in the ‘sales process’. The individualism embodied – and the affective proximity
supposedly enabled – by the singer-songwriter can be seen in publicity images,
most obviously in the predominance of singer-songwriters’ faces on album
covers. As mentioned above, the publication of many singer-songwriters’ lyrics
in book format fosters their image as authentic artists who convey an ‘inner truth’
unrestrained by commercial imperatives. The singer-songwriter is one of some 25
generic labels used by iTunes to catalogue its products. A search on the website
of Amazon.com reveals it is often used as a title for albums, predominantly
collections of the work of one or many artists. The label is still routinely used in
music festival booklets and entertainment guides.
Our broad definition of the singer-songwriter is therefore as follows: an artist
who composes and performs music and lyrics (with or without the assistance of
other musicians) in light of which fact the listener believes he/she can discern
the artist’s personality and values by paying close attention to lyrics, to how
these are sung, and to their musical accompaniment, all through the prism of a
perceived authenticity. Our definition thus hinges on the singer-songwriter as a
musical hermeneutic of the ‘listening process’, and not as a cultural reality.9 This
hermeneutic is also applied to their own work by the artists themselves, who
believe that their personality and values can be expressed by careful attention to
composition and performance in the ‘playing process’. In this way, the hermeneutic
feeds back into the field of cultural production. The exegetic advantages of such a
theorization include its capacity to explain why the first UK artist to be referred to
as a singer-songwriter appears to have been Elton John: his exclusive collaboration
with lyricist Bernie Taupin (honed over a number of years as staff songwriters prior
to his 1969 debut album Empty Sky) allowed listeners to assume that the words
John sang were expressive of his personality. Moreover, the subjective element of
the listening and playing processes which we incorporate in our definition allows
for the fact that, despite rudimentary parallels, different contexts result in different
paradigms of the singer-songwriter, both synchronically (within and across national
borders) and diachronically. We explore these issues in greater detail further below.
Now, however, we consider why this figure appeared when it did. Our points are
illustrated with examples from mainly anglophone, French and Spanish popular
music, since these constitute our academic fields and listening habits.
The Origins of the Singer-Songwriter
Notions of complexity, meaningfulness, creative autonomy and ‘inner truth’

expressed in song have been used to categorize artists as singer-songwriters avant
9
As regards authenticity, Sarah Rubidge writes that it is ‘not a property of, but
something we ascribe to a performance’ (quoted in Moore, 2002, p. 210).
la lettre.10 More curiously, it appears the label was coined some years after the
emergence of those deemed the first singer-songwriters proper. Jacques Canetti,
director of Paris concert venue Les Trois Baudets, claimed to have invented the
label auteur-compositeur-interprète some time between 1947 and 1967 (Canetti,
2008). ‘Singer-songwriter’ appears to have been first employed as a marketing
tool: in the title of Elektra’s 1965 Singer Songwriter Project Album, a collection
of songs by artists closely connected with the folk revival and protest song, such
as Richard Farina. Likewise, the first reference to the ‘singer-songwriter’ in the
media (Dallas, 1966a) refers to Phil Ochs. The same journalist used the term later
that year to refer to Jacques Brel (Dallas, 1966b). Two years later, the term was
used retrospectively to compare folk-singers Arlo Guthrie and Janis Ian with
newcomers Joni Mitchell and Jerry Jeff Walker (Shelton, 1968). Cantautor was
first employed in print at this time, too, initially in Barcelona-based newspaper
La Vanguardia Española (Anon., 1968), although not in reference to a Catalan
artist but to Castilian Manolo Díaz. In Madrid daily ABC, the term was first
employed to refer to North American Rod McKuen (Murciano, 1970) and soon
after to the Catalan Lluís Llach (García Soler, 1970).
The relative ‘delay’ in the coining of these terms, we contend, is due to the
figure’s roots in folk music. The emergence of the ‘singer-songwriter’ label and its
equivalent terms in the third quarter of the twentieth century can be explained by
reference to the ideology of authenticity in the context of a broader transformation
within popular music at this time in the West. This transformation consists of the
growing autonomy enjoyed by musicians over the course of the 1940s and 1950s,
prompted by several economic, legal and technological developments: the decline
of the traditional composer/lyricist arrangement (Barker and Taylor, 2007, p. 174),
changes to copyright and performance rights that meant more money was to be
made from record sales than from sheet music (Lebrun, 2009, p. 6; Moore, 2012,
p. 156), patent laws leading to the dominance of the 45rpm vinyl record, the rise of
independent radio stations (Wise, 2012, p. 431), and the ready availability of cheap
transistor radios (Peterson, 1990, pp. 100–102). Such developments gradually
moved the recording artist centre-stage. One consequence of this was the birth of
rock music (Peterson, 1990), within which Anglocentric histories tend to locate
the singer-songwriter. Wise, for example, sees ‘the inspiration of the Beatles’
(2012, p. 431) as crucial to its development. And as we note above, it is easy to see
the singer-songwriter as the embodiment of those features cited by journalists in
publications such as Rolling Stone as part of a discursive strategy of legitimization
of rock music from the mid-1960s onwards (Regev, 1994, p. 90; 2013, p. 35).
Unsurprisingly, the first appearance of the term in media discourse is in one such
publication: Melody Maker. Nevertheless, given the emergence of the auteur-
compositeur-interprète in France in the late-1940s and of the Chilean cantautor
not long after, we argue it is more appropriate to see the singer-songwriter and
rock as contemporaneous manifestations of a peculiarly ‘modern’ attitude.
10
See, for example, Papanikolaou (2007, p. 14) as regards Charles Trenet.
Introduction 11
In the post-war period, the pursuit of authenticity that lies behind all three
features identified above by Regev (sophistication and genuineness, an identifiable
creative entity responsible for the work, and a commitment by that entity to the
revelation of an ‘inner truth’) was also enabled across Europe and the Americas
by interest in autochthonous musics.11 As Moore notes with respect to anglophone
spaces, collections of old forms of music by Allan Lomax and the BBC triggered
the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s (2012, p. 135), within which many of
those later called ‘singer-songwriters’ rose to prominence. These folk roots are
foregrounded in the terms employed to refer to them before ‘singer-songwriter’ was
coined. Dylan was still being referred to as an ‘American folksinger’ (Anon., 1966,
p. 7) only three months before Phil Ochs was referred to as a ‘singer/songwriter’
(Dallas, 1966a, n.p.), while the month after Dallas’s article, Time spoke of them as
‘[t]roubadours’ (quoted in Thompson, 2012, p. vii). A similar look backwards can
be identified in France (Papanikolaou, 2007, p. 22; Marc, 2012, p. 228), Catalonia
(Colmeiro, 2003, p. 37), and West Germany (Holler, 2007, p. 146). Questions of
authenticity and formal purity, as Frith remarks (1996, p. 40), are central to a ‘folk
discourse’. A number of terms across Europe that refer to the artist who performs
music and lyrics of his/her own composition remain specific to the folk idiom, such
as the písničkář in the Czech Republic and the visesanger in Norway. Additionally,
country and blues reached the airwaves in the USA during the Second World
War on account of disputes between radio stations and the American Society of
Composers, Authors and Publishers (Peterson, 1990, p. 99). All such musical forms
lent themselves to the kind of proximity required by the singer-songwriter to ensure
appropriate attention was paid to lyrics. What is more, with the rise of the electric
guitar and similar technological advances in the post-war period, folk musics and
the instruments on which they were originally played acquired an air of authenticity
(Moore, 2012, p. 138).
Besides the link with folk music, we need to recognize the advent of a youth
culture – enabled by the opening of cafés and other meeting places for students – in
the emergence of the singer-songwriter. Scholars have noted the crucial importance
of the Rive Gauche cellar clubs in post-Liberation Paris for the emergence of the
auteur-compositeur-interprète (Papanikolau, 2007, pp. 18–19; Looseley, 2013,
pp. 61–2) and of Soho at the turn of the 1950s for the British folk and blues scene
(Harper, 2006, pp. 23, 70–71), while it is common knowledge that Greenwich
Village was the Mecca of all aspiring folk singers in the USA during the late
1950s and early 1960s, a musical trend which gave birth to Dylan and other
‘singer-songwriters’ soon after. These small clubs provided the spatial proximity
key to the genre. Furthermore, the audience for this kind of music grew over the
course of the post-war decades as baby boomers and similarly large generations
of young people born in post-war Europe came of age. A parallel rise in birth-rate
11
As Moore notes regarding the English folk revivals of the early twentieth century
and the 1950s, these were viewed as a celebration of authentic popular music as opposed to
commercially oriented mass entertainment (2002, pp. 211–21).
occurred in Spain following the Civil War. Hence universities became the most
important centres of opposition to the Franco dictatorship at the turn of the 1960s,
and their students became some of the most avid consumers of cantautores’ music.
Furthermore, the 1960s saw the advent of the album format and a drop in cost
of portable record players. Together these developments facilitated the kind of
extended intimate communication to which the singer-songwriter was best suited.
The above developments – the folk revival and a burgeoning youth culture –
need to be located in the national and international socio-cultural contexts of the
post-war period. First of the international factors enabling the emergence of the
singer-songwriter was the tension at this time between large-scale, often grassroots
political activism and a burgeoning individualism. Secondly, there took place
what Nicholas Hewitt describes as a ‘definitive shift [between 1945 and 1960] in
connotation of the term ‘popular culture’ from ‘working-class’ or ‘labour’ culture
to the culture of mass consumption’ (1999, p. 355). Finally, this period also saw
the rise of an ideology of postmodernity. The singer-songwriter must be viewed
in light of these three factors in the field of popular music. Counter to the shifts
identified in Fredric Jameson’s essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism’, the singer-songwriter can be seen as the greatest manifestation
of modernity in popular music. In place of the decentred subject of postmodernity
(Jameson, 1984, p. 63), the singer-songwriter purportedly embodies the self-
sufficient author of modernity. This ‘modern’ conception of the subject is buttressed
by the presence of the physical voice and musical elements which, as we observed
above, shape how the listener connects the artist’s life and his/her work. In theory,
these additional, extra-textual elements entail that the process of listening to and
interpreting music constitutes a more complex dynamic than the one construed by
formalist literary studies as regards printed texts. Yet, as Frith notes, the question
of the death of the author ‘tends to be put aside in music criticism because of the
belief that music is a more directly emotional form of expression than literature,
and is therefore more directly (or unconsciously) revealing of the composer’s
character’ (1996, p. 185). The singer-songwriter parallels – or foreshadows, in the
case of the auteur-compositeur-interprète – what Regev identifies in rock music:
‘the belief that the ideology of autonomous art still determines the struggles and
defines the prizes in the field of cultural production’ (1994, p. 87). Furthermore,
far from a ‘waning of affect’ (Jameson, 1984, p. 61), listeners look to the singer-
songwriter for direct access to raw emotional expression and that ‘inner truth’
denied by postmodernity. In cultural history, such qualities are epitomized by
the modern figure of the Romantic poète maudit suffering for his (sic) art. The
renaissance of this figure in the singer-songwriter is articulated most explicitly by
Donald Brackett’s choice of ‘pathology’ in the subtitle of his book on ‘tormented
teller[s] of tales’ (Brackett, 2008, p. ix) such as Brian Wilson and Elvis Costello,
and his description of such artists as ‘the most personally vulnerable and
emotionally wounded’ (2008, p. x). A third ‘modern’ trait observed in the singer-
songwriter is the authenticity to which he/she lays claim (and/or which is claimed
on his/her behalf by fans). This trait is attributed to ‘the social alienation produced
Introduction 13
under modernity’ by Moore (2002, p. 210), for whom the decentred subject is
not the sole domain of postmodernity. The subject which thus endeavours to
be centred (so to speak) is not only the first person of the singer-songwriter but
also the second person of the listener (Moore, 2002, pp. 218–20). The massive
popularity and prestige enjoyed by the singer-songwriter, therefore, challenges
what Jameson (1984, pp. 55–8) claims is postmodernity’s position of dominance
in contemporary culture, as does the case of rock music (Regev, 1994, p. 87).
Nuancing the Singer-Songwriter
While the predilection for self-referentiality in popular music – the dominance of

the ‘I’ in its lyrics – attains particular power in the case of the singer-songwriter
on account of the potential for artist, author, persona and singer to co-exist in
performance, the autobiographical paradigm needs to be viewed as one choice
from an array of combinations of referentiality and emotion available to the
singer-songwriter, although always with a commitment to that perceived ‘inner
truth’. This is one sphere in which subtle distinctions can be traced between
singer-songwriters, not only as regards individual cases but also more generally
across space. Over time, ‘further negotiations’ (Holt, 2007, p. 20) also take place.
As noted above, any understanding of the singer-songwriter must acknowledge
the use of personas other than the autobiographical subject. Many singer-
songwriters deal with matters other than their own confessions. This often involves
them relating a story or taking on the role of a fictional character. Such narratives,
as Frith has pointed out (1996, p. 170), are particularly widespread in French
chanson. Auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes have created many memorable songs
along these lines, such as the tale of a ticket-puncher’s gradual slide into despair
in Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Le Poinçonneur des Lilas’ (1958). Furthermore, we can
believe we gain access to the singer-songwriter’s personality via the literary conceit
of the unreliable narrator. Yet the misunderstandings and controversies provoked
by Gainsbourg’s ‘Nazi Rock’ (1975) and Randy Newman’s ‘Short People’ (1977)
attest to the dominance of the author-persona-singer chain in the listening process,
and to irony’s disruptive potential in this respect.
Secondly, broad national and temporal differences can be observed as regards
subject matter. Introspection and confession initially dominated anglophone spaces.
In contrast, many of the lyrics of the first Catalan and Spanish cantautores were
political, even if state censorship required them to present this content indirectly,
as in Chicho Sánchez Ferlioso’s ‘Gallo rojo, gallo negro’ (1964) (Red Rooster,
Black Rooster). In recent decades, these national trends have moved closer to the
centre of this individual–collective spectrum. Individual emotions and collective
concerns co-exist in the output of many singer-songwriters, as can be seen in the
presence of political songs such as ‘To Have and To Have Not’ alongside the
romantic declarations of ‘The Milkman of Human Kindness’ on Billy Bragg’s
debut album Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy (1983). Nevertheless, there appears to
be a stronger predilection for autobiography and emotional topics in the figure of

the contemporary singer-songwriter on the whole: P. J. Harvey’s state of the nation
address Let England Shake (2011) was considered a volte-face in her career,
and figures such as Rosana and Albert Pla (from Spain) have routinely avoided
social comment. Barbara Lebrun notes a similar shift in the auteur-compositeur-
interprète towards self-analysis over the past decades (2014, pp. 13–15).
The matter of lyrics is at the centre of a third type of distinction between
variants of the singer-songwriter: the socio-cultural status enjoyed by this
figure in each national context. While ‘meaningful’ lyrics constitute part of our
general definition of the genre, the words of auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes
and cantautores are highly regarded by the intellectual elite in France and Spain.
Hence the inclusion of several of the former in the ‘Poètes d’aujourd’hui’ and
‘Poésie et chansons’ series of monographs, alongside studies of prominent poets
such as Louis Aragon and Pablo Neruda (see Looseley, 2013, p. 62). In Spain, a
similar prestige can be observed in the sales process: besides the use of the label
in concert listings, there is a ‘Cantautor’ section in the Hispanic music section of
the central Madrid branch of the FNAC entertainment store. Consequently, while
we classify the singer-songwriter genre as middlebrow, we also recognize that its
‘formal characteristics predisposing [it] to enter into legitimate culture’ (Bourdieu,
1993, p. 128) are valued somewhat differently across national frontiers. The issue
of the relative prestige of the singer-songwriter stems to a great extent from the
cultural heritage of this genre: in addition to the legal and material factors that
smoothed the progress of Brassens, Ferré et al., the close relationship between
the first such musicians with poets and other intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre
bolstered their aspirations to auteur status, crystallizing in the so-called chanson
poétique or chanson à texte. The setting to music of the work of renowned poets,
such as Ferré’s adaptations of Apollinaire, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, are clearly
the stimulus for other mainland European singer-songwriters, such as Paco Ibáñez,
who did the same for the poems of Luis de Góngora and Federico García Lorca
in 1964 (Marc, 2013a, pp. 145–6). Hence the cantautor enjoys a similar status in
Spanish culture. In the anglophone world, however, this figure appears to occupy
a lower position within the middlebrow. This may be because, while the Beat
Generation was important in its evolution (Moore, 2012, p. 139), the affiliation
of the ‘singer-songwriter’ with poetry, and with literature more generally, is not
so entrenched. We suggest that this is so because anti-intellectualism is stronger
in the anglophone world than in continental Europe. It is in this regard – the
appreciation of lyrics – that listeners’ ‘horizons of expectations’ (Jauss, 1970),
and the ‘aesthetic competence’ (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 203) of the ideal listener, differ
across national cultures.
As a postscript to this third nuance, we also suggest that Raymond Williams’s
‘structures of feeling’ which Moore identifies in the vocal style of soul music (2012,
p. 124), are culturally constructed rather than fixed. That is, what is interpreted as
emotion in vocal or musical performance differs across national borders. Hence,
for example, the thin and falsetto voices commonly associated with Chinese vocal
Introduction 15
music can sound inexpressive to the Western ear. The opposite may be true in the
case of African-American voices, whose music connotes sincerity in the West on
account of its roots in slavery and racial segregation (most notably blues, gospel
and spirituals).
A fourth nuance concerns musical style. As Frith notes, ‘genre labels describe
musical skills and ideological attitudes simultaneously’ (1996, p. 87). In this
respect, the singer-songwriter is a predominantly ideological genre: while the
singer-songwriter’s initial musical permutations drew mainly on national folk
forms (and to a lesser extent jazz, blues and country), these do not constitute a style
in the way disco and power pop do. Yet we must also recognize that many artists
who conform to our basic definition of the singer-songwriter work in musical
styles which push at those boundaries: the electronic instrumentation and R&B
beats on Taylor Swift’s 1989 (2014) encourage us to dance, diverting our attention
away from her words, while the vocal style and musical experiments on Björk’s
break-up album Vulnicura (2015) often obscure comprehension of what she sings.12
From 2005, a new generation of auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes began to create
‘remarkably richly orchestrated songs … including lavish string sections …, and
rare instruments … demonstrating their creative autonomy in the ACI [auteur-
compositeur-interprète] mould, but also deviating from the pared-down formula
of single instrumentation’ (Lebrun, 2014, p. 168). Nevertheless, we must also bear
in mind that terms exist in Italian and Spanish to refer to a style conceived by the
original folk-influenced singer-songwriters, the canzone d’autore and the canción
de autor, which might exclude artists from such a classification and/or restrict
innovation by singer-songwriters in these areas of Europe to a greater extent
than elsewhere.
We close the nuancing of our theorization by returning to the row between fans
of Beyoncé and defenders of Beck with which we began this chapter. This quarrel
was driven in part by two factors regarding the singer-songwriter that we did not
mention then, but which we wish to raise now. First of all, it is no coincidence that
the winner of the Album of the Year Grammy artist went to an artist who is male
and regularly categorized as a singer-songwriter. Beyoncé, on the other hand, is not
granted such cultural prestige, despite the fact that Beyoncé engages explicitly with
feminism (sampling a 2012 TED talk by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) as
well as more personal issues such as ‘bulimia, post-natal depression, the fears
and insecurities of marriage and motherhood, and … sex’ (Mackay, 2013). While
dismissed ostensibly on account of the fact that she is ‘merely’ co-writer of her
songs, we argue this is more a question of gender: nobody challenges Beck’s and
other male singer-songwriters’ claims of sole authorship of their work, despite
the collaborative nature of popular music production. The perceived autonomy
essential to the singer-songwriter is routinely denied to female artists, as Björk
decried in a recent interview:
12
Despite this, Björk has described Vulnicura in classical singer-songwriter terms
(Hopper, 2015).
With the last album he [Kanye West] did, he got all the best beatmakers on the
planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there.
Yet no-one would question his authorship for a second. … I did 80% of the beats
on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album … Matmos came
in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs … and they are
credited everywhere as having done the whole album. (Quoted in Hopper, 2015;
original italics)
What we perceive as a negative opinion of female singer-songwriters by the

music industry and many male listeners (with the conspicuous exceptions of Joni
Mitchell, Joan Baez and a handful of others) is consistent with the discrimination
against women in popular music in general. This bias also stands in sharp contrast
to the prominence of women in the genre of the singer-songwriter (Strachan and
Leonard, 2003, p. 201; Shuker, 2011, p. 311).
Secondly, we wonder whether another hindrance to the recognition of Beyoncé
as a serious artist who deals with her subject matter in a serious way (enabled by
a certain artistic autonomy) is the fact she works in the musical styles of pop and
R&B – that is, styles which are dance-oriented. As Dai Griffiths notes, there is a
tendency among public, critics and scholars alike to see dance as an activity that
prevents us from paying attention to the words, and therefore to ‘avoid attending
to the words altogether’ (2003, p. 40). We suggest that the African-American
artists who meet our above definition of the singer-songwriter are generally not
held in such high esteem as their white counterparts on account of the fact much of
their work encourages us to dance as well as think (for example, Curtis Mayfield
and Alicia Keys). A nuanced approach to the singer-songwriter must allow for
the listener to do both. Spanish cantautor Luis Eduardo Aute recognized this in
an interview, when claiming that ‘rappers are the singer-songwriters of today’
(in Ruiz Mantilla, 2007).13 The same view is not uncommon in France, where a
number of rappers are celebrated as – and/or consider themselves – poets.14 In this
sense, it is worth noting that rappers could meet most of the ‘conventions’ of the
broad singer-songwriter genre that we outline above. They write their own lyrics,
which are deemed to be meaningful. They share the modern view of authorship and
confidence in the power of art. Authenticity – keeping it real – constitutes a major
convention of rap aesthetics. For these reasons, the inclusion of Ice Cube in the
Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection strikes us as a perfectly justifiable decision.15
13
‘hoy, los cantautores … son los raperos’.
14
See French Minister of Culture Christine Albanel’s 2008 speech on naming Abd
al Malik Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Albanel, 2008), and the lyrics of Rockin’ Squat
(Mathias Crochon) (quoted in Marc, 2008, p. 41).
15
The most significant obstacle to a more general acceptance of rappers as singer-
songwriters, we suggest, is the question of musical composition: rap’s widespread use of
samples (and perhaps also of loops) challenge notions of autonomous composition rather
than reinforce them.
Introduction 17
The Chapters in this Book
Our theorization of the figure of the singer-songwriter above focuses on the shared
features and conventions of such disparate figures as P. J. Harvey and Llach and
explains how artists such as Abd al Malik and Beyoncé might also be classified
as such (and why such a classification might give rise to passionate arguments).
The chapters that follow build upon this conceptual foundation, exploring specific
issues of contention that concern the figure as a whole, tracing histories, mapping
national scenes, and analysing individual artists. These 13 chapters are divided
into three sections named after the subtitle of the book. That is not to say that
each chapter’s contribution to knowledge concerns only that label under which
it appears; each text in its own way engages with what a singer-songwriter is
understood to be, the dynamics of power, and the pertinence of location and
cultural exchange. These chapters, therefore, can be read independently or in any
order. The sequence in which the chapters appear below is, however, one which
we believe is particularly enlightening if the book is to be read from cover to cover.
The first section, ‘Paradigms’, explores models of the singer-songwriter, and
how and why these take shape and evolve in discourse and practice. Franco Fabbri’s
opening chapter tackles the deceptively simple concept of ‘influence’ in order to
enable its use in a history of transcultural exchange. Fabbri thus challenges the idea
of the anglophone origins of the singer-songwriter figure, presenting a panoramic
view of the musical and literary vectors that intersect in popular music production
and individual singer-songwriters across Europe, both from within and beyond
the continent’s borders. Next, Jacopo Conti brings to light a number of significant
features of the singer-songwriter as ‘author’ by means of a comparative study of
the Italian cantautore during the 1960s and 1970s with the politique des auteurs
(auteur theory) articulated by French cinema critics from the mid-1950s onwards.
Conti’s analysis of how cantautori positioned themselves (or were positioned)
with respect to the music industry and the collaborative process of music-making,
of the construction of a canon, and of the importance of performance, stimulates
critical thinking about the singer-songwriter in other national contexts. In ‘Words
Take the Place of Meaning’, Richard Elliott does precisely this, showing how
Robert Wyatt simultaneously displays and defies certain canonical features of the
singer-songwriter in a detailed analysis of his career on the margins of the record
industry. Alongside Wyatt’s politically committed songs and confessional lyrics,
Elliott eloquently argues that his sonic experiments, nonsense verse and vocal
style constitute a parallel musical idiom in which meaning is communicated in
ways less linear than singer-songwriters are usually assumed to employ. Rachel
Haworth’s diachronic study of the label canzone d’autore in Italian popular music
assesses many of the discursive conventions regarding the singer-songwriter more
generally. By examining critical writings on this genre since its inception in the
1960s, Haworth traces the process of cultural legitimization via which canzone
d’autore has become a synonym of quality, erudition and meaningfulness in
Italian popular music, in stark opposition to other forms of music associated with
commercial goals and banality. Jacopo Tomatis’s chapter, ‘Rediscovered Sisters’,

prompts reflection on the gendering of this same field. After his examination of how
the figure of the cantautore is underpinned by an ideology of authorship associated
with masculinity, Tomatis surveys the work of those women who cultivated the
new genre at its inception (but who were swiftly sidelined as ‘mere’ performers by
record companies and critical histories) as well as several later cantautrici (many
of whom suffered the same fate).
The second section, ‘Politics’, highlights a range of ways in which power
struggles are embedded in the theory and practice of the singer-songwriter, and
explores how individual artists are able (or not) to intervene in party and identity
politics in a variety of national and historical contexts. Developing questions
concerning gender broached by Tomatis, Paula Wolfe explores the media
representation of female singer-songwriters in the British press since the early
2000s. By means of two case studies, Wolfe shows how music journalism has
begun to move away from approaches to such artists that focus on everything
but their work. The greater critical appreciation of Isobel Campbell’s output is
problematic, however, coming literally at the expense of Campbell’s own voice
(and thus the first half of the term singer-songwriter). In the following chapter,
Dietmar Elflein also draws attention to how female artists have been excluded
from the canon in his analysis of academic histories of the German Liedermacher.
As Elflein shows, the principal victim of male critics’ chauvinism, Bettina Wegner,
is also one of the many artists whose political engagement in East Germany
challenges the exclusivist political viewpoint adopted by West German scholars
of the Liedermacher, one which limits our knowledge of this figure. In ‘Judges,
Guitars, Freedom and the Mainstream’, Sílvia Martínez traces the emergence
of singer-songwriters in another highly politicized environment: Spain during
the second half of the Franco dictatorship. While the cantautor is often written
about and celebrated as a political dissenter, Martínez problematizes this figure,
arguing that its characteristics, including the very practice of performing self-
penned songs, can be identified in the careers of others. The public interventions
of singer-songwriters mentioned by Elflein and Martínez take centre stage in
Luís Trindade’s chapter on Portuguese singer-songwriters at a time of political
upheaval. Acknowledging the role of singer-songwriters in the closing stages of
the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, Trindade then details the concrete musical
responses of two such artists to the Carnation Revolution in 1974, arguing that they
articulate a cautious optimism as regards the future in the very musical structure of
their output at the turn of the 1980s.
The first three chapters of the final section of our book, ‘Place’, open up and
explore issues concerning national borders and spaces. Peter Hawkins examines
the exceptionally close relationship in France between the auteur-compositeur-
interprète and elite literary culture at the turn of the 1950s. Hawkins details how
Léo Ferré set to music works by some of the most acclaimed French poets, and
how he drew on such poetic inspiration in his own work. Ferré is thus presented
as the epitome of the artist as auteur in popular music. The next two chapters
Introduction 19
consider cultural exchange across borders. In ‘Transitions of the Cantautor’,

Fernán del Val and Stuart Green examine the crucial role of musicians such as
Bob Dylan in changing conceptualizations of the singer-songwriter in Spain from
the turn of the 1970s to the 1980s. This move away from political compromise and
folk aesthetics towards more personal lyrics and pop-rock sounds was reversed
somewhat in the 1990s by artists who fused both approaches. The re-politicization
of the cantautor, del Val and Green observe, has been particularly noticeable
since the global economic crisis, which hit Spain particularly hard. In ‘When
Jake Met Georges’, Mark Goodall challenges facile assumptions that transcultural
dialogue between anglophone and non-anglophone singer-songwriters moves in
one direction only. Goodall shows how the Yorkshireman Jake Thackray took
inspiration from (and adapted a number of songs of) Georges Brassens. This
attempt to fashion an English chanson peaked in 1973, when Thackray opened
for Brassens at a concert in Cardiff. In contrast to these explorations of national
and international dynamics, Alessandro Bratus and Giuseppa Vultaggio examine
the uniquely regional affiliations of a number of Italian cantautori who came to
be labelled the ‘School of Genoa’. In their musicological study of Bruno Lauzi’s
‘Genova per noi’, Bratus and Vultaggio detail how the liminal, almost oriental,
space of this city is discussed not only in the lyrics of this song but represented in
its sounds and structure.
In its transnational approach and recognition of singer-songwriters outside
English-speaking culture, this book provides a window onto a fascinating world
for fans of music and other non-academic readers. For this reason, we have avoided
obscure jargon wherever possible. The terms auteur-compositeur-interpète,
cantautor, cantautore and Liedermacher (as well as others where appropriate) are
retained precisely in awareness of the significant differences between these and
the ‘singer-songwriter’ – yet they are always accompanied by definitions and/or
explanations in English.
Our book is envisaged as the departure point for a rigorous exploration of
a figure so important in popular music yet so oddly overlooked in academia.
Our wish to reach a diversity of readers has involved striking a delicate balance
between critical histories (for those interested in expanding their knowledge
and appreciation of popular music) and in-depth analysis (to advance scholarly
understanding). Although we are aware of areas left untouched in this book, both
geographical (Russia, Greece, etc.) and disciplinary (dialogues with genres such
as rap), we hope our attempt to establish the singer-songwriter as a field within a
field stimulates and lays the ground for further study in these and other areas.
Part I
Paradigms
Chapter 1
‘The Songs I’d Write Would Be Like That’:
Transnational Influences between Poets,
Composers, Singer-Songwriters
Franco Fabbri
It wasn’t until the publication in 2004 of his Chronicles, Volume One that Bob
Dylan revealed he had been strongly influenced by Bertolt Brecht, ‘the antifascist
Marxist German poet-playwright whose works were banned in Germany’ (Dylan,
2004, p. 272), and especially by ‘Pirate Jenny’, one of the ballads in The Threepenny
Opera (1928), to which he was exposed during an off-Broadway performance
of Brecht songs in the early 1960s (Dylan, 2004, pp. 272–6). After listening to
that and other pieces, dismounting and re-assembling them many times, Dylan
would compose and sing ‘in a few years’ songs such as ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only
Bleeding)’, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’,
‘Who Killed Davey Moore’, ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, ‘A Hard Rain’s
A-Gonna Fall’: in 2004 he maintained that without Brecht’s example those songs
would never have been born (Dylan, 2004, p. 287). In the same autobiographical
book, Dylan wrote that he was (at about the same time) influenced by French
existentialist playwright and novelist Jean Genet: ‘The songs I’d write would be
like that’ (Dylan, 2004, p. 89). None of Dylan’s critics before 2004 ever dared to
suggest an influence on Dylan by the best-known German communist poet of the
twentieth century, or by one of the exponents of the Parisian intellectual scene that
had produced engagé songs by the likes of Boris Vian, Georges Brassens and Léo
Ferré. Surprise was the reaction of those who had been writing essays and books
on how Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash or William
Blake, and the Bible, had moulded Dylan’s poetry and music.
This chapter will be about such unjustified surprises, and it will begin with
some theoretical reflections on how and why models are chosen in artistic work. It
goes without saying that in the history of music (and of poetry) individual artists,
as well as genres, styles, scenes, schools, became the models for others: in some
cases the influence is obvious (Italian opera, Austro-German instrumental music,
French operetta, tango, jazz, rock’n’roll, the British Invasion bands, hip-hop) in
others less so (like the way French chanson was taken as a model in late nineteenth-
century Austria and Germany, giving birth to Kabarett, or how Greek éntechno
laikó traghoudi was based on a similar attempt to make ‘art’ out of an urban
popular tradition, that of rebetiko). Focusing especially on Europe, the chapter
will inevitably take into consideration examples from other continents, like the
influence of Dylan himself (and of the US folk revival scene) on British, French,
Spanish, Italian, German, Greek singer-songwriters, as well as influences by Latin
American singer-songwriters (from bossa nova artists like Tom Jobim to Silvio
Rodríguez and Atahualpa Yupanqui) on Spanish and Catalan cantautores, and
Italian cantautori. Intra-European influences include the widespread adoption of
the Rive Gauche auteur-compositeur-interprète model from Spain to Russia (and
Italy and Germany), the long-standing influence of Brecht–Weill and Brecht–Eisler
songs on Italian, French, British political song and ‘committed’ rock, the way
British folk revival (Ewan MacColl) and singer-songwriters (from the Beatles to
Cat Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Sting, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson
and others) were received in other European countries by lyricists, composers and
singers who thought: ‘The songs I’d write would be like that.’
Influence: Theoretical and Practical Approaches
‘Influence’ is a widely used critical concept in music journalism, also adopted by

artists, especially at the beginning of their career, and by the recording industry
(in press releases, for example). It connotes similarity, and so it functions like
class concepts such as genre, style, scene, school, as a workaround to avoid more
specific descriptions of the lyrical or musical text, or of the way they are performed
or recorded. Recommender systems on the Internet (Celma, 2010) try to fulfil the
same need (to create associations among similar items, without describing them),
although these are based on quantitative rather than qualitative data: those who
liked, or listened to, or bought a certain song, or album, or artist, or genre, also liked
others, which are the object of recommendation. Influence appears as one of the
recommendation factors in iTunes Store (in the biographical section for a given
artist, although not all artists have one).1 There is also a recommender system
fully based on influence, inflooenz.com – ‘The music lineage guide’ – which
promises to ‘Discover who influenced your favorite artists’.2 Influence adds a hint
of causality, suggesting a reason for similarity, and this may be an explanation
of the concept’s success among music critics, who often seem to be aiming at a
(rather trivial) rationalization of music history.3
Influence is not a trivial concept. When similar content elements or stylistic
traits are found in different texts, influence may be (or may be not) operating.
1
Contents are provided by All Music Guide.
2
Developed by Argentinian programmer Hernán Gauna, Inflooenz is powered by
APIs provided by Last.fm, YouTube and Rovi (by Rovi Cloud Services Documentation).
3
Here is a comment on Inflooenz by recommender systems specialists: ‘influence is
a wider concept than similarity: while still related to a starting point (the favorite artist),
the user can come up with new music that it’s not [sic] “more of the same”’ <www.
programmableweb.com/mashup/inflooenz> [accessed 23 February 2015].
‘The Songs I’d Write Would Be Like That’ 25
Phenomena such as intertextuality and disciplines like translation studies, then,

can be invoked as relevant to the study of influence. In this chapter, however, I
will concentrate on the poietic4 aspects of influence, rather than on its post factum
effects. Harold Bloom elaborated a theory of influence in literature, developing the
idea of anxiety generated in poets by the implicit challenge posed by precursors
who influenced them; Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) was considered
at the time of its publication as one of the foundations of a new, ‘revisionary’
approach to literary criticism. Bloom’s insistence on hierarchic values, and on
the opposition between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ poets, as well as his faith in the
dominance of the Western canon, make his theory old-fashioned – to say the least –
in our age. However, some of Bloom’s suggestions could probably be applied
to singer-songwriters, without implying any resemblance or identification with
poets (a highly controversial issue).5 The six basic concepts, or ‘movements’, or
‘Revisonary Ratios’, developed by Bloom in order to explain various modalities
of influence – clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, apophrades
(Bloom, 1973, pp. 14–16) – apply independently of their author’s canonistic views.
One of the most important suggestions we can draw from these categories is that
influence is an active (rather than passive) process on the side of the influenced.
In other words, the influenced is the agent of influence: which should be obvious,
if we weren’t misled by the usage of a passive form. It could also be observed
that to some respect ‘to be influenced by someone’ is a euphemism for emulating,
imitating, copying or even stealing from someone.6 If we were to adopt Bloom’s
hierarchies, we could say that ‘stronger’ singer-songwriters would admit they stole
from someone, while ‘weaker’ ones would maintain they were influenced. Of
course, the idea of influence as exerted actively by an influencer onto an influenced
is implicit in constructs like acculturation, commercial and media dominance,
cultural imperialism, but it must also be noted that often in music history processes
of influence were initiated before influencers were massively visible/audible in the
context of the influenced. A paradigmatic example is offered by Georges Brassens’s
fortune in other European countries in the 1950s and 1960s: non-French singer-
songwriters (like Italian cantautori) began ‘to be influenced’ by his songs at a
time when Brassens was probably one of the least known auteurs-compositeurs-
interprètes outside France (or, rather, known only by a niche of enthusiasts, while
other auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes like Charles Trenet and Gilbert Bécaud,
4
From Ancient Greek ‘poiein’, to make. The term is used, among others, by Nattiez
(1990), referring to the production of symbolic forms.
5
I would argue that a feeling of public obsession, due to the persistent usage of
the concept of influence by music journalists, is more apt to describe the condition of the
popular singer-songwriter, compared to the intimate state of anxiety postulated by Bloom.
6
And also correcting, completing, demonizing and so on, as suggested by
Bloom’s ‘Revisionary Ratios’.
had access to radio, television and the record market).7 The example of Dylan and
Brecht is even more revealing: aside from his encounter with Brecht’s songs in
English translation during an off-Broadway performance, there would have been
hardly any other chance for Dylan to listen to them at any time.
Models and their copies are created out of the desire that they be transported
into a new context: as Borges said, ‘poets create their precursors’ (quoted in
Bloom, 1973, p. 19). New styles or genres are also often created by desire, like
Italo Calvino’s Nonexistent Knight (Calvino, 1962), an empty suit of armour
put together and brought to life by the popular will that such a hero existed.8
Communities of any magnitude whose members adopt the conventions of a certain
genre or style may be formed by and around examples offered by individual works
(i.e. music events) or by other genres or styles (Fabbri, 2012b).
Transnational Influences: Early Examples, from Art to Popular, from

Popular to Art
In the history of music (and of poetry) individual artists, as well as genres, styles,
scenes and schools, have become models for others. In some cases the influence is
obvious. Italian opera was the model for musical theatre across Europe from the
seventeenth up to the nineteenth century. When operas by Italian composers were
first performed in Paris, arias were preceded by recitatives where singers declared
they would soon sing a famous song to moderate the shock for severe French
aristocrats unaccustomed to singing actors.9 Soon, however, French opera was
born, with composers such as Lully and Rameau. German and British opera, also
based on Italian models, followed shortly. Similarly, Austro-German instrumental
music became canonical in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially after
Beethoven’s death and the creation of the myth of his ‘genius’. Subsequently,
‘national schools’ were created elsewhere in Europe. Likewise French operetta was
taken as a model in Austria, Great Britain and Italy. The habanera, a dance from
Cuba (itself probably influenced by French contredanse) was imported to Europe
7
Many biographical accounts of De André report that he owned some of Brassens’s
records because his father often used to travel to Paris, which means that those records
could not easily be found in Italy, even by the son of a rich businessman.
8
By coincidence (or not?) Calvino’s short novel was published originally in Italian in
1959, while the author was collaborating with Cantacronache, a group of songwriters and
singers (and singer-songwriters) aiming at a renovation of Italian popular song, based on
the models of French chanson and Brecht’s songs (Jona and Straniero, 1995). Calvino wrote
the lyrics of two of Cantacronache’s best-known songs: ‘Dove vola l’avvoltoio?’ (Where Is
the Vulture Flying?) and ‘Canzone triste’ (Sad Song).
9
Like in Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo, staged at the Palais Royal in 1647: ‘Però pria di partire
voglio per allegrezza cantar quella canzone che a quell’altra – “Al fulgor” – proprio
s’oppone’ (before I leave I want to sing merrily that song, which is opposed to the other
one, ‘To Resplendence’).
in the 1860s, and used by Georges Bizet in his Carmen (1875) for its generic
Hispanic exoticism; ‘O sole mio’, one of the so-called ‘classics’ of Neapolitan
song, composed in 1898, is a habanera. Argentinian–Uruguayan tango, resulting
from different Afro-Caribbean and Latin American sources (habanera, candombe,
milonga), ‘invaded’ Europe and the Middle East in the early twentieth century,
during which thousands of tangos were composed, imitating and transforming the
original models. Jazz, rock’n’roll, the British Invasion bands, hip-hop are other
more recent and even more obvious examples of the influence of genres, styles
and scenes on composers, lyricists and performers from other countries. Even the
name of just one band, the Sir Douglas Quintet, from San Antonio, Texas (one of
the US responses to the British Invasion in 1964–1965), offers a good example
of the agency of the influenced.
Other cases of influence are less known and less obvious, such as the way
French chanson was taken as a model in early twentieth-century Austria and
Germany (Jelavich, 1973). This gave birth to Kabarett, whose repertoire
was formed around Otto Julius Bierbaum’s collection of Deutsche Chansons
(Brettl Lieder) (Bierbaum, 1900). While Bierbaum, in his quest for a form of
‘applied lyric poetry’ (or Gebrauchslyrik) was looking at songs composed by
French chansonniers such as Maurice MacNab, Xanrof and Aristide Bruant,
Kabarett songs were composed mostly by professional composers, based on poems
written by poets, not lyricists.10 Conversely, Yvette Guilbert, a star of the Parisian
café concert and cabaret in the same period as Bruant (and similarly portrayed by
Toulouse-Lautrec), started in 1913 to include songs based on the poems of Paul
Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire and other nineteenth-century poets in her repertoire
(Hawkins, 2000, p. 76), originating a practice that would characterize French
chanson until the 1950s and 1960s (Calvet, 2008).11
Greek éntechno laikó traghoudi (artistic popular song) was based on a
similar attempt to make ‘art’ out of an urban popular tradition, that of rebetiko
(Papanikolaou, 2007). Again, while the repertoire of rebetiko had been moulded
primarily, but not exclusively, by singer-songwriters such as Markos Vamvakaris
and Vassilis Tsitsanis, éntechno was originally the creation of classically trained
composers like Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis, who set to music poems
by Yannis Ritsos, Giorgos Seferis, Odysseas Elytis and others.12 Theodorakis
conceived his idea of éntechno after returning to Greece from Paris, where he had
been studying composition (with Olivier Messiaen) and conducting, from 1954
to 1959: he was certainly exposed to the fascination of the Rive Gauche scene,
almost at the same time as other followers of the auteur-compositeur-inteprète
10
Such as ‘Bierbaum, Dehmel, Falke, Finckh, Heymel, Holz, Liliencron, Schröder,
Wedekind, Wolzogen’, as listed in the subtitle of Bierbaum’s collection. Poems by these
authors were set to music also by Brahms, Alma Mahler, Reger, Schoenberg, Strauss,
Webern, Zemlinsky.
11
Léo Ferré’s rendition of famous French poets is a paradigmatic example.
12
Seferis won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963, Elytis in 1979.
model, like the Italian Cantacronache. While the collaboration with poets remained
a feature of éntechno until recently, the genre was transformed during the years
of the dictatorship (1967–1974) and especially in the late 1970s and 1980s, when
singer-songwriters emerged, such as Dionysis Savvópoulos, Nikos Xydakis,
Sokratis Málamas, Thanasis Papakonstantinou. All of them integrated models from
Anglo-American singer-songwriters, and at the same time opened éntechno to the
‘oriental’ (i.e. Eastern Mediterranean, Ottoman) flavours of early rebetiko, which
had been mitigated by the influence of Italian song, by pressure from nationalist
politicians, and by Theodorakis’s13 and Hadjidakis’s classical treatment. It is worth
mentioning, though, that in the 1950s and early 1960s rebetiko singer-songwriters
such as Vassilis Tsitsanis had already been influenced by various ‘oriental’ genres,
including the music of Bollywood movies (Pennanen, 1997, pp. 68–72). Another
source of influence on éntechno from the 1980s was world music: collaborations
with musicians from Turkey, Armenia, Serbia and other neighbouring countries
(and even Turkmenistan) became fashionable, (like elsewhere) digital recording
finally making the sound of old, faint acoustic instruments powerful and rich.
Influences from Outside Europe: A Summary
Europe is this book’s geographical and cultural focus, but – as some of the examples
I offered above demonstrate – it is clearly necessary to go beyond the continent’s
borders to acknowledge the full range of transnational influences. Although
singer-songwriters or functionally similar artists (performers of their own lyrics
and music) can be found across European history, stretching back to ancient
Greek oral epic poets (αοιδοί) and mediaeval troubadours, equivalent figures have
existed and still exist in other continents. Many of them can be related to ancient or
recent European influences, like Egyptian and Middle-Eastern entertainers in the
twentieth century; many others absolutely not, like Western African griots. In any
case, it would not be possible to write about European singer-songwriters without
taking into consideration examples from other continents, like the influence of
Bob Dylan and of the US folk revival scene (and also of North American pop-
rock singer-songwriters from the late 1950s to the 1980s) on British, French,
Spanish, Italian, German, Greek singer-songwriters, as well as influences by
Latin-American singer-songwriters – from bossa nova artists like Chico Buarque
and others, to Carlos Puebla, Daniel Viglietti and Víctor Jara – on Spanish and
Catalan cantautores, and Italian cantautori.
13
Theodorakis, in the 1960s, looked at the sound of current rebetiko, which had
become a music for night-clubs, with electrified and reverberated bouzoukis (among the
major stars there was a couple, Manolis Hiotis and Mary Linda, whose evident models
were Les Paul and Mary Ford). Although 1950s and 1960s rebetiko was still based on Greek
modes (dhromoi) and additive metres, it sounded tame compared to pre-war styles.
US Influences Before Dylan
‘La ballata del Cerutti’ (The Ballad of Cerutti, 1960), one of Giorgio Gaber’s early
hits, released when the term cantautore had not yet reached common usage in
Italian,14 begins with the line: ‘I have heard many ballads: Tom Dooley’s, Davy
Crockett’s. I would have liked to write one too … ’.15 In fact, the Kingston Trio’s
1958 hit (‘Tom Dooley’) had been a huge success in Italy and in France (where
it was covered by Les Compagnons de la Chanson, as ‘Fais ta prière’). Gaber’s
ballad, with its banjo and ‘cowboy’ sound, bears witness to the influence of the US
folk revival, even in its more commercial aspects, on Italian singer-songwriters,
some years before Bob Dylan became famous.16
Other North-American singer-songwriters became the models for European
colleagues before the mid-1960s, when Dylan’s influence became apparent
almost everywhere. Of course rockers had a strong impact, not only in England:
Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers (Don Everly and
Phil Everly) influenced exponents of local rock’n’roll scenes, some of whom
started composing their own material in that style. If this is common knowledge,
less known is the influence exerted by more pop-oriented singer-songwriters, like
Paul Anka and Neil Sedaka (Fabbri, 2008a, p. 103). Even Bob Dylan, after paying
his debt to ‘the workhorses there in the Brill Building … young songwriters like
Gerry Goffin and Carole King, or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, or Pomus and
Shuman, Leiber and Stoller’, admitted that Sedaka was ‘one of my favorites …
because he wrote and performed his own songs’ (Dylan, 2004, p. 227). Dylan’s
list of American songwriters from the late 1950s and early 1960s could be used
to comment on the musical style and sound of many European singer-songwriters
at that time. Many accounts of European ‘quality song’ in the 1960s (written
from the 1970s onwards) usually dismiss North-American influences and stress
the importance of the francophone auteur-compositeur-interprète model. Yet if
we listen, for example, to songs by early Italian cantautori, we find clear traces
of an American influence: often it seems that many songs were composed (and
arranged) with an ear to Anka or Sedaka, or the Brill Building, and with an eye
to Brassens’s or Brel’s lyrics. For example, some of Gino Paoli’s ‘great songs’,
14
The term cantautore (plural cantautori) was invented by Maria Monti, herself a
singer-songwriter, in the first half of 1960; adopted by RCA Italiana for the launch of singer-
songwriter Gianni Meccia during the summer, it appeared in magazines in September 1960,
and became common usage in 1961.
15
‘Io ho sentito molte ballate: quella di Tom Dooley, quella di Davy Crockett, sarebbe
piaciuto anche a me scriverne una così … ’
16
The lyrics for Gaber’s song were written by Umberto Simonetta, playwright and
journalist, and were inspired by the real story of a petty criminal who had stolen Gaber’s
Lambretta. Collaborations between lyricists and singer-songwriters were common in
Italy: among others, Franco Migliacci with Domenico Modugno, Giorgio Calabrese with
Umberto Bindi, Sergio Bardotti with Sergio Endrigo, Umberto Simonetta and, later, Sandro
Luporini with Giorgio Gaber, Mogol (Giulio Rapetti) with Lucio Battisti.
like ‘La gatta’, ‘Il cielo in una stanza’ (see Fabbri, 2005, pp. 118–33), ‘Sapore di
sale’, are American in their structure (I–vi–ii/IV–V turnaround in the A parts of
an AABABA form, or throughout the song) and French in their lyrics, sometimes
with direct ‘borrowings’ from Brassens.17 And Paoli is one of the ‘classics’
of Italian canzone d’autore: pop-oriented cantautori from the 1960s include
Gianni Meccia, Nico Fidenco, Pino Donaggio, Tony Renis and Ricky Gianco,
all affected by a clear addiction to the I–vi–ii/IV–V turnaround. Pop-oriented
singer-songwriters existed in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s as well,
although they are less easily categorized under the heading of chanson. Richard
Anthony is one such example, about whom Louis-Jean Calvet comments: ‘He let
himself be carried around by the yé-yé twist fashion, by bossa-nova, locomotion,
commercial protest-song, and accompanied all fashions … After the ebb of
yé-yé,18 he turned to quality love songs’ (Calvet, 2008, p. 41).19 Françoise Hardy
was initially associated with yé-yé, following her first hit ‘Tous les garçons et
les filles’ (1962), with its I–vi–ii–V turnaround. Hardy’s biographers suggest
influences by Paul Anka, Cliff Richard, the Everly Brothers, Connie Francis and
Charles Trenet.
Bossa Nova
Brazilian bossa nova (literally, ‘new bump’, or ‘new thing’) became world famous
as a genre between 1959 (when Marcel Camus’s film Orfeo Negro – with music
composed by Tom Jobim – won at the Cannes Festival, and received an Academy
Award for best foreign film) and 1963, when the album Getz/Gilberto featured
bossa nova songs as new jazz standards. Based on the collaboration between
poets, like Vinicius De Moraes, composers and singer-songwriters, it was the
result of multiple influences: from samba, Brazilian classical music (Heitor Villa-
Lobos), Tin Pan Alley standards, and French chanson. As a kind of sophisticated
‘dancing poetry’, arriving from a country that had not been touched by the war,
to a continent (Europe) where rubble was still visible, it was well received both
by night-club combos (drummers, especially, had to know how to play it) and by
singer-songwriters. To some extent, the success of Tom Jobim and Joao Gilberto
was instrumental in opening the doors of European publishing and recording
companies to new, unconventional singers and songwriters. Later, in the 1970s,
censorship and imprisonments by the Brazilian military dictatorship forced some
17
Once, during a seminar at the Sorbonne on Italian cantautori, when I played songs
from the early 1960s, audience members commented: ‘But this is not chanson, this is
musique de variétés’. As a theorist of musical genres, I was delighted.
18
Yé-yé (from the English yeah … yeah … ) was a term used in France from the late
1950s to indicate music derived from anglophone pop-rock models.
19
‘il se laisse porter par la vague yé-yé twist, bossa-nova, locomotion, protest-song à
la manière des promoteurs de maisons de disques, et accompagne toutes les modes’.
of the best-known bossa nova singer-songwriters to escape to various European

countries for a while (or for good), thus facilitating reciprocal influences (that of
British rock on tropicalists such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, for example).
Bob Dylan and Other Anglo-American Singer-Songwriters
Traces of Bob Dylan’s and the Beatles’ influence can be found in various European
countries at about the same time (1965), when their reciprocal influence started to be
manifest: at the beginning of Dylan’s ‘electric’ phase around Highway 61 Revisited,
and of John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s conversion to ‘personal’ songs. The
Beatles and other British groups had of course a great impact on European bands,
some of which composed their own material, while others covered existing hits in
their own language (Fabbri, 2014a). Such a phenomenon is relevant to our topic
not only because influence in all its articulations was very clear in that context (for
example, the aforementioned ‘reversed’ agency of the process), but also because
many singer-songwriters (former members of ‘beat’ bands) emerged from that
scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On the other hand, Dylan, as well as
other Anglo-American ‘folk’ or ‘folk-rock’ singer-songwriters, exerted a direct
and strong influence on their (continental) European counterparts, contributing to
a watershed between the early generation inspired by pop-rock models (and by the
French auteur-compositeur-interprète) and a new generation of Dylan’s emulators
or epigones. A good example of the latter is Gian Pieretti, author of a re-writing
of Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’ titled ‘Pietre’, which he sang at the
Sanremo Festival in 1967 (French singer-songwriter Antoine also sang the song
at the Festival, in Italian). Pieretti – and Antoine as well – was also considered a
follower of Donovan: his first hit, ‘Il vento dell’Est’, sounds very similar to ‘Catch
the Wind’.20 Of course, one cannot mention Sanremo 1967 without remembering
Luigi Tenco’s suicide (Santoro, 2006; Tomatis, 2014a). Tenco, one of the first
generation of Italian cantautori, had convinced himself that he could use Sanremo
as a platform to get access to massive television audiences. In a public discussion
in November 1966 he cited the example of Dylan, and of Barry McGuire, whose
‘Eve of Destruction’ had become popular thanks to the support of ‘a certain type
of society’ – that is, mainstream media and record companies (Fegatelli Colonna,
2002, pp. 170–71).
European protest singer-songwriters also followed Dylan, although their
models were closer to his early ‘finger pointing’ songs, like ‘Masters of War’ or
‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’; Dylan used the term ‘finger pointing’ in 1964,
referring to his earlier songs and to songs by protest singers then in fashion, in
a conversation with Nat Hentoff (Heylin, 2009, pp. 206–8). Hannes Wader, one
of West Germany’s left-wing Liedermacher, along with Italians Ivan Della Mea
20
Both ‘Il vento dell’Est’ and ‘Pietre’ were co-written with another singer-songwriter,
Ricky Gianco.
and Rudi Assuntino, wrote songs that can be traced to Dylan’s influence. Later
on, elements of Dylan’s musical and semantic idiolect, as well as covers, can be
found in the repertoire of very popular European singer-songwriters, like Italian
Francesco Guccini and Francesco De Gregori, and Greek Dyonisis Savvopoulos.
In 1966, Valencia-born Raimon (who sung in Catalan) was described in a document
by the information services of the Franco regime as ‘a Bob Dylan, a Peter Seeger
or a Joan Baez. A twenty-year old Brassens with a grave and youthful passion in
his voice who could sing poems comparable to those of Éluard and Aragon during
the Resistance’ (Ayats and Salicrú-Maltas, 2013, p. 32).
In the late 1960s and 1970s, many other Northern American singer-songwriters
became famous worldwide and were sources of influence on European colleagues:
Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Otis Redding, David Crosby, Neil Young, Joni
Mitchell (the paradigmatic model for most female singer-songwriters), Lou Reed,
James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and many others. A significant
literature about these well-known singer-songwriters already exists. Below,
therefore, I focus on lesser-known examples from outside North America.
Latin American (Hispanophone) Singer-Songwriters
In the early 1970s, especially after Pinochet’s military coup in Chile (1973), Latin
American singer-songwriters and groups performing their songs (such as Chilean
Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani) became popular in many European countries. In
Spain and Portugal they influenced local singer-songwriters during the final
years of the Franco and Salazar dictatorships (Ayats and Salicrú-Maltas, 2013,
pp. 37–9; Martínez and Sales Casanova, 2013, p. 198). In France and Italy their
records even climbed the charts: for a while, in 1974, RCA Italiana advertised
‘new’ or then scarcely known singer-songwriters on their roster – including Lucio
Dalla, who soon became one of Italy’s most popular singer-songwriters ever – as
members of an alleged nuova canzone italiana movement. This term consciously
resembled that of nueva canción chilena, known by all fans of Inti-Illimani and of
the late Víctor Jara. Even if there are traces of lyrical and/or musical influences –
such as in Paolo Conte’s ‘Alle prese con una verde milonga’ (1981), dedicated to
Atahualpa Yupanqui – the success of Latin American singer-songwriters in the
early and mid-1970s in Italy made its strongest impact on the record industry
itself, insofar as they showed that there was a huge market for ‘committed’ artists.
Rather ungratefully, Dalla included in his 1977 song ‘Il cucciolo Alfredo’ a line
which became almost proverbial: ‘Andean music, what a deadly bore, it’s been
repeating itself over and over again for more than three years.’21 Thus Dalla
sanctioned the end of the Italian mass audience’s love for this music. Even so,
21
‘La musica andina, che noia mortale, sono più di tre anni che si ripete sempre
uguale’.
the Tenco Prize (established in 1974) continued to be awarded to Latin American

singer-songwriters until the 2010s.22
Intra-European Influences
Intra-European influences include the widespread adoption of the Rive Gauche

auteur-composituer-interprète model from Spain to Russia (as well as Italy and
Germany), the long-standing influence of Brecht–Weill and Brecht–Eisler songs
on German, Italian, French, Russian political song and ‘committed’ rock, and the
way British folk revival (Ewan MacColl) and pop-rock singer-songwriters were
received in other European countries by lyricists, composers and singers.
The major influence has been, without any doubt, Georges Brassens. His
style, even his look (and the way he accompanied himself with a classical guitar,
standing still, or with a foot on a chair), was already being imitated outside France
by the late 1950s. Many of his songs were translated or adapted (like ‘Le Gorille’,
by Fabrizio De André, or ‘Chanson pour l’Auvergnat’, by Walter Mossmann).
Brassens’s influence in Spain was massive (see Marc 2013b, p. 122). Nearly the
entire corpus of his songs was translated into Milanese by Nanni Svampa, and
into the dialect of Piedmont by Fausto Amodei. Sometimes his work was blatantly
copied, on occasion entirely (again, De André, with ‘Città vecchia’, i.e. ‘Le Bistrot’).
When Philips released Brassens’s first LP in 1953, the album format was usually
reserved for classical music or compilations; record company executives thought
that popular music listeners wouldn’t want to listen to many songs by the same
artist in succession (Fabbri, 2008a, p. 75). Philips executives made an exception
for Brassens in the belief that the LP could recreate the atmosphere of a recital in a
cabaret. The formula worked, and the singer-songwriter album was born. Another
trace of Brassens’s (and his Parisian colleagues’) international fame and influence
is the very usage of the term chansonnier, almost everywhere, except for France.
Chansonnier was an old term, obsolete in France in the 1950s (it had been used
for author-interpreters – the likes of Xanrof or Bruant – in the nineteenth and
early-twentieth century). In other countries at this time, however, it still designated
singer-songwriters, not only French ones. It was used in Italy before cantautore
became of common usage, and in Catalonia and in Latin America before cantautor.
It was also used in Germany as a substitute for Liedermacher, and in the Soviet
Union, where Bulat Okudzhava was a follower of Brassens. Explicit reference to
Brassens as a model is made by singer-songwriters and music critics in almost
every text on the subject in non-anglophone countries. Brassens was a fond
22
Here’s a list of Premio Tenco awards for Latin American singer-songwriters, poets,
and singers (asterisks mark prizes for operatore culturale, cultural activist): Vinicius de
Moraes (1975), Atahualpa Yupanqui (1980), Chico Buarque (1981), Silvio Rodríguez
(1985), Caetano Veloso (1990), Tom Jobim (1990)*, Pablo Milanés (1994), Mercedes Sosa
(1999)*, Gilberto Gil (2002), Milton Nascimento (2008), Horacio Ferrer (2009)*.
reader of French poetry, and in 1967 was awarded a Grand Prix by the Académie
Française for his poetic oeuvre: his intense relationship with poetry and the quality
of his lyrics are at the origin of the continuing debate about singer-songwriters
and poetry (are they the ‘real’ twentieth-century poets?).23 Léo Ferré and Boris
Vian have been referred to as models for other singer-songwriters in a similar
fashion: when chansonniers are mentioned in accounts of politically committed
songwriting, these names are the implicit reference, along with Brassens. Charles
Trenet and Jacques Brel, on the other hand, have had an even wider influence on
singer-songwriters (and on lyricists and composers) of all kinds: their love songs
(like Trenet’s ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours?’ (1942) or Brel’s ‘Ne me quitte pas’
(1959)) became European standards, covered and imitated almost everywhere.
Bertolt Brecht’s songs, with music by Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler or Paul Dessau,
stem from French chanson via the tradition of German Kabarett, which had been
created with French cabaret in mind. In turn, they became a source for many other
songwriters. Il Cantacronache was established in the late 1950s after a visit by one
of its founders, Sergio Liberovici, to the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where he
attended a recital by Gisela May and Ernst Busch, Brecht’s favourite singer. With
the aim to ‘escape from escapism’, members of Cantacronache looked at both
German and French examples (Pestelli, 2014). The influence of Brecht’s lyrics
on Bob Dylan was commented on at the beginning of this chapter. In addition,
Brecht and other German politically committed poets like Kurt Tucholsky,
unsurprisingly, were the models for German poets and Liedermacher of the 1960s
and 1970s, such as Gerd Semmer, Dieter Süverkrüp, Franz Joseph Degenhardt and
Wolf Biermann. Vladimir Vysotsky, probably the best known of Russian singer-
songwriters (or bards) during Soviet rule, performed as an actor in Brecht’s
plays. As a politically committed actor and singer-songwriter, Ewan MacColl
could not ignore Brecht’s example either; as the leader of the post-war British folk
revival in the 1950s and 1960s he influenced similar movements in other European
countries, where some of his songs were translated and MacColl’s songwriting
and performing style imitated (Fabbri, 2014b).
Finally, the wider scene of British singer-songwriters should be considered.
These are certainly better known – and not only by anglophone readers – than
many of the names that were cited in this chapter because of their greater media
exposure and their success in the live music and record market since the 1970s.
Despite their importance, I will limit myself to name just a few of them, from
23
The debate went beyond French borders. It reached its peak in Italy in the years
that followed Fabrizio De André’s death (1999), and involved music and literary critics,
journalists, singer-songwriters, fans. Fernanda Pivano, a very well-known literary critic,
said that De André had been the greatest Italian poet in the twentieth century (one of the
most prestigious Italian prizes for poetry, the Librex-Guggenheim Premio Montale, had
included an award for song lyrics since 1991). For a critical commentary, see Fabbri, 2005,
pp. 161–9.
former members of famous bands24 – like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George
Harrison, Steve Winwood, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Morissey, Thom Yorke – to others,
be they still very well known (Elton John, David Bowie, Cat Stevens, Elvis Costello,
Kate Bush), or cherished by smaller audiences (Nick Drake, Richard Thompson,
Billy Bragg). As I said about North American singer-songwriters above, each of
them should deserve a paragraph, especially because of their influence on other
European singer-songwriters, many of whom, while listening to their records or
attending one of their concerts, at some point in their career thought: ‘The songs
I’d write would be like that.’
Conclusions
Influence is a concept that needs to be analysed, exploring below the surface of

common sense. It is contradictory, in the way it seems to imply some kind of
causality (the works of the influencer came before, and contributed to the creation
of the works of the influenced), while at the same time it is clear that the influenced
is the agent, who appropriates traits of the influencer’s works. Following Bloom
and Borges, it can be said that the influenced ‘creates’ his/her predecessors, in a
process that can also be described as an adaptation of the predecessor’s works in
a different time or cultural context. In any case, influence is a concept that works
pretty well to describe the intricate fabric of similarities and coincidences that
characterizes popular music history, and as such is widely used by historians as
well as by journalists. It is certainly a truism to point out that singer-songwriters
are not only authors, but also performers; however, it is probably not so banal
to observe that such superimposition of roles enhances and multiplies the ways
influence can be exerted by one artist on another, suggesting that we should
consider not only the influence of a singer-songwriter on another singer-songwriter,
but also the influence of a poet or a composer on a singer-songwriter, or any other
combination. Popular music history shows that this has always happened, and
continues to happen.
24
I assume that, conventionally, songwriters belonging to bands and performing their
own songs are not considered stricto sensu singer-songwriters. Otherwise, of course, artists
like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Ian Anderson and
many others should be added to the list.
Chapter 2
Politique des Chant-Auteurs: French
Auteur Theory and Italian Canzone
d’Autore Compared
Jacopo Conti
The importance and influence of French auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes and

Existentialism across Europe were undeniable from the 1950s to the late 1960s.
Italy’s cultural and geographical proximity to France meant this cultural osmosis
was particularly effective across the Alps, as it had been before the Second World
War.1 For this reason, the cultural role of the cantautore in Italy resembles closely
that of auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes: these French musicians constituted the
idealized model of what Papanikolau (2007) calls ‘singing poets’ in the eyes of
Italian fans and critics in the late 1950s, when the label ‘cantautore’ was coined
(even when the musical and lyrical references of such artists were patently North
American).2 Thus cantautore was originally used by the Italian press not so much
to describe someone who writes and sings his own songs, but more importantly
to distinguish him from the ‘highbrow’ – and politically oriented – chansonnier
(Fabbri, 2008b, pp. 94–8).3 And thus the term rapidly acquired ‘highbrow’
connotations of its own, associated with the figure of the author. This culminated
when the term canzone d’autore (literally ‘author’s song’) was coined at the turn
of the 1970s to refer to a certain kind of ‘art’ song, different from the ‘lowbrow’
or ‘facile’ songs that had circulated in Italian culture under many different names
since the mid-1950s (Tomatis, 2011).4
The figure of the ‘author’ is the idealized projection of the individual, whose
role in society was established during Romanticism (involving philosophical and –
following the introduction of copyright laws – legal and economic features), and
1
Many show business words from the pre-war period were/are Italianized versions
of French words, such as sciantosa (chanteuse). See De Angelis (2013) for further details.
2
On the birth of the label ‘cantautore’, see Tomatis (2010). As regards their musical
and lyrical influences, see Fabbri (2008a, pp. 258–9).
3
I write ‘his own songs’ and ‘to distinguish him’ because women writing their own
songs were quite uncommon. See Tomatis’s chapter in this book for further details.
4
Still today popular music in Italy is sometimes called ‘musica leggera’ (light
music), although popular music scholars – especially Franco Fabbri – argue that the term is
inappropriate, particularly because of its negative connotations.
which found in the bourgeois revolution the perfect environment in which to grow
strong. Whether left-wing cantautori like it or not, what they embody matches what
Philip Tagg writes with respect to the emergence of the melody–accompaniment
dualism in bourgeois society. The figure of the cantautore ‘implies a generally
monocentric socialisation strategy because the individual occupies – as portraited
figure, main character in a novel, or as foregrounded melody – a central position …
in the performance of human experience’ (Tagg, 2013, p. 433).5
The figure of the author was invoked to particular ends from 1954 onwards
by film critics of the journal Cahiers du cinéma in what came to be known as the
politique des auteurs (auteur theory).6 As André Bazin summarized a few years
later, ‘[i]t is evident that the “politique des auteurs” is simply the application
to cinema of a notion generally admitted in the individual arts’ (1957, p. 3;
my emphasis).7 By arguing that films were the creation of a single individual,
therefore, these critics hoped to ‘find the Shakespeares and the Rembrandts of
film’ (Staples, 1966–67, p. 3). The politique des auteurs also ‘materialized’ in the
nouvelle vague, in which many of the Cahiers writers participated.8
If we consider the cultural importance of the politique des auteurs in Europe
throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it is not surprising that it reached the sphere of
Italian popular music. The term canzone d’autore – inspired by cinema d’autore
(Tomatis, 2011, pp. 189–90) – was introduced at the end of the 1960s and the
beginning of the 1970s, some ten years after the neologism cantautore but now
with specific connotations of ‘art’ song as a genre.9 Nevertheless, canzone d’autore
is not just a simple translation of the concept of authorship inherent in the politique
des auteurs. There are differences between the two, not only because music and
cinema are not the same media, but also because of the different cultural contexts –
France in the second half of the 1950s, Italy in the first half of the 1970s – in
which the concepts of cinéma d’auteur and canzone d’autore were created and
developed. Yet there are also similarities: cinema and popular music originated
and ‘lived’ inside an industrialized environment,10 recorded music and cinema
5
See also Middleton (1990, pp. 247–94).
6
Truffaut wrote ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma français’ in that same year (1954).
As Susan Hayward writes about this essay, ‘although it should not be seen as the sole text
arguing for auteur cinema, none the less, it is considered the manifesto for the French New
Wave’ (2006, p. 32) and the same can be said of the politique des auteurs.
7
‘Il est évident que la “politique des auteurs” n’est ici que l’application au cinéma
d’une notion généralement admise dans les arts individuels.’
8
As pointed out by Susan Hayward (2006, pp. 31–8), but also by Fabbri (2005,
p. 259) and Tomatis (2010, pp. 65–6), the issue of authorship in cinema dates back to the
1920s in France (with the precedent of the Autorenfilm in Germany, 1913).
9
Since ‘d’autore’ was already a synonym of ‘artistic’, the first person to use this term
(Enrico De Angelis) probably did so unknowingly.
10
By ‘popular music’ I don’t simply mean music that rose to popularity thanks to
the radio and to recording industry in the twentieth century, but all those musics belonging
to the ‘third’ way of producing and consuming music described by Scott (2008): without
Politique des Chant-Auteurs 39
were introduced at more or less the same point in history (Pescatore, 2006, p. 14),
and both developed a concept of authorship in a system of collaborative creative
processes (which also gave rise to genre theory). By comparing and contrasting the
canzone d’autore with cinema during the 1970s, this chapter endeavours to shed
light on questions of authorship and authenticity as regards the singer-songwriter
in Italian popular music.
Movies v. Records 1: The Author in the Industry
One significant difference between the politique des auteurs and the canzone
d’autore concerns the worker’s relationship with the industry. Cahiers du cinéma
critics considered, for example, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks as ‘authors’,
even if they worked perfectly within the logic of the studio system, even if they
never wrote their own screenplays.11 Ignoring these details, as Bazin stated,
‘[t]he “politique des auteurs” consists, in sum, of selecting the personal factor
as the criterion of reference in artistic creation’ (1957, p. 10).12 This ‘personal
factor’, centred on the figure of the director and whose importance derives
from an Adornian view of the cultural industry and the mass media as enemies
of individual freedom and expression, exemplifies some essential differences
between the perception of the cinéma d’auteur and the canzone d’autore. Firstly,
there is the belief implicit in the politiques des auteurs that an author/director can
work and prosper inside the industry as long as his/her personality is recognizable
in his/her work. The author in film, therefore, is seen by looking at his work as a
whole: the focus is not the single movie, it is the personality behind all of them.13
the bourgeois revolution, the development of an industrialized environment and the mass
audience (and media) – along with the creation of a Euro-classical canon as ‘high art’ – such
a thing as ‘popular music’ would have never existed.
11
‘Hitchcock … was not regarded as a serious artist through much of his career’
(Kapsis, 1986, p. 31) because of this. Appreciating figures like Hitchcock, Hawks and
Ford as authors (i.e. ‘artists’) was ‘revolutionary’, at a time when ‘art’ or ‘authorship’ were
linked to cinema, especially when films were adaptations of famous literary ‘masterpieces’
by ‘great writers’ (e.g. Victor Hugo, Gabriele d’Annunzio) who were the real ‘artists’
(Pescatore, 2006, p. 18). Many other directors who worked after the creation of the politique
des auteurs, like Leone (Pescatore, 2006, pp. 107–27), Kubrick or Tarantino, are considered
authors still today, even though they work(ed) in the industry. The issue of quality was
central in the definition of the author in cinema (Staples, 1966, p. 2), but it was approached
from a particular perspective.
12
‘La “politique des auteurs” consiste, en somme, à élire dans la création artistique le
facteur personnel comme critère de référence.’
13
As Bazin himself noticed, many of the authors loved by the critics of Cahiers du
cinéma worked in Hollywood (Bazin, 1957, p. 11), home of the movie industry. From his
point of view, this might seem a paradox, but it shouldn’t be: the many rules of the industry
could help an individual genius to mark out his/her own creativity and personal view inside
Such a politique des auteurs did not apply to the concept of canzone d’autore.
Indeed, the opposite seems to have been the case. In the mid-1950s, before the
first wave of cantautori, a small group of Italian singers-songwriters called
Cantacronache released their records outside the mainstream music industry,
steadfastly refusing to be published by major labels.14 The idea of ‘escaping
from escapism’ (Pestelli, 2014) behind Cantacronache’s actions in opposition to
the industry and the Sanremo festival was deeply Adornian, although in a way
different from the politique des auteurs.15 In Straniero et al. (1964) and in Eco
(1964), writings influenced by the experience of Cantacronache, the yet-unnamed
canzone d’autore was called canzone diversa (different song) or nuova canzone
(new song). This music was ‘different’ and ‘new’ in comparison with a kind of
song – dismissively called canzone gastronomica (‘gastronomic’ song) – created
as what was seen as purely consumerist pleasure for a mass audience, exactly as in
Adorno’s view (Adorno, 1941). Similarly, at the ‘Congressi della nuova canzone’
(Conferences of New Song) in 1976 and 1977 – when the canzone d’autore as
a concept peaked in popularity – the new cantautori were proudly presented as
non-professionals (Tomatis, 2011, pp. 233–4). Their ‘quality’ and ‘honesty’, it was
implied, were untainted by commercial matters.
When the canzone d’autore was theorized, mainly by critics and journalists
(i.e. from an etic perspective),16 this was also done in opposition to a patently
industrial product. For this reason, the extremely popular singer-songwriter Lucio
Battisti was not perceived as a cantautore until the 1990s (although he is still not
accepted as such in all circles today). This seems to have been largely because
Battisti worked with Mogol (Giulio Rapetti), the most important lyricist in the
the strict boundaries of what was allowed and what was not. What appears to go beyond
single songs or records, rather than authorship, is the perception of a singer-songwriter’s
authenticity. Bruce Springsteen has been perceived as authentic throughout his whole
career, from his most pop (e.g. Born in the USA) to his most folk (e.g. Nebraska) records.
See also Laing (1971, pp. 58–9) and Frith (1988, pp. 94–104). I discuss authenticity in
greater detail below.
14
After Cantacronache, singer-songwriters belonging to the Nuovo canzoniere
italiano never released records with major labels. For more about Cantacronache, see
Pestelli (2014).
15
For more on the issue of Adorno and ‘art’ song in Italy, see Tomatis (2011, p. 61).
16
In social sciences and anthropology, the adjectives ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ refer to
different viewpoints: ‘emic’ stands for a perspective within the social group; ‘etic’ stands
for the observer’s perspective (that is, outside the group). In this case, the term canzone
d’autore comes from outside the group of people writing the songs, ergo is an etic term. On
the other hand, it can be considered an emic term if we consider it from the perspective of
those who recognize it as meaningful (the Italian people). Those terms were probably used
for the first time in Pike (1967, pp. 32–9). For more on this issue in anthropology, see Harris
(1968, pp. 568–96; 1976). For an application in a semiology of music, see Nattiez (1990).
I would like to thank Franco Fabbri, Marcello Sorce Keller and Marta Garcia Quiñones for
the references to Harris and Pike.
industry (for Ricordi) since the early 1960s, and because Mogol represented what
the canzone diversa, nuova or d’autore opposed: he was the industry, against
which the canzone d’autore stood by seeing itself as ‘art’.17 For example, while
organizing the first ‘Festival della canzone d’autore’ in the early 1970s, Amilcare
Rambaldi proposed they invite Lucio Battisti, but Ornella Benedetti (founder of
the Club Tenco in Venice) and journalist Enrico De Angelis refused. The former
explained her decision by writing that ‘The BATTISTI-MOGOL creative duo
churns out songs like a household appliance’ (quoted in Tomatis, 2011, p. 216;
original capitals),18 while De Angelis wrote: ‘I personally think that their
production does not correspond to those requirements of artistic value, sincerity
and purity that we want from a song’, adding that ‘his lyricist, Mogol, is the most
commercial living lyricist’ (quoted in Tomatis, 2011, p. 218).19
Movies v. Records 2: The Author in a Collaborative Process
In both the politique des auteurs and the canzone d’autore we can also observe a
sidelining of cinema and music as collaborative processes in favour of the single
author. Setting aside the large-scale influences upon cultural production (the notion
that ‘we are all composers’),20 let us briefly think of music-making by itself. It is
known, for instance, that most of the songs of Fabrizio De André – the epitome
of the cantautore as poet in Italy – were the result of a collaborative process (see
Fabbri, 2005, pp. 148–60; 2008b, pp. 246–64). Even if we go further and forget
such collaborations, in the record-making process there is no such thing as a lone
author. ‘The art of record production’, as Frith and Zagorski-Thomas title their
recent book (2012), needs to give up the single author; the studio ‘encourages
collective work, and particularly collective composition’ (Cutler, 1984, p. 287).21
De André’s recordings exemplify collaborative creative processes in the studio,
as shown by Errico Pavese (2003), yet De André is credited as ‘author’ of the
17
There are also musical and political reasons for Battisti not being considered a
cantautore (Conti, 2014). Not to be forgotten, the fact that Battisti did not write his own
lyrics made him unsuitable for the image of the ‘cantautore as a poet’.
18
‘La coppia BATTISTI-MOGOL sforna canzoni come un elettrodomestico.’
19
‘Personalmente ritengo che la loro produzione non risponda a quelle esigenze di
validita artistica, di sincerita e di purezza che noi invece chiediamo alla canzone’ and ‘il suo
paroliere, Mogol, è il più commerciale che esista’.
20
Sorce Keller argues that ‘surely Giuseppe Verdi, when writing his operas for Paris,
took into consideration the expectations of the Parisian public [and the] Bee Gees paid
attention to the reaction of their public all along their tormented career … so it is not far
from the truth to say that the public, to some degree, took part in the making of Verdi’s
operas and the songs of the Bee Gees’ (2012, p. 8).
21
Not just in records by such bands as Henry Cow or Cassiber, which were most
probably Cutler’s references while he was writing his article.
recordings, not Mauro Pagani, co-author of albums Crêuza de mä (1984)22 and

Le nuvole (1990), or Piero Milesi, producer of Anime salve. And the very same
applies to the output of every other cantautore. For example, early records by
Gino Paoli or Gianni Meccia would have been completely different without the
orchestral arrangements of Ennio Morricone (Fabbri and Plastino, 2014a).
Moreover, the production processes in both cinema and popular music share
the practice of editing. However, while editing is recognized as a fundamental part
in the productive process of a movie and can be one of the hallmarks of an author
(as in the case of Eisenstein), editing in music is sometimes regarded as ‘cheating’
because the idea of ‘high fidelity’ – that what we hear on a record is what happened
during an actual performance – is still strong (Sorce Keller, 2005, p. 162). It is as
if records were media solely for reproduction and not for production. This attitude
might have been similar for cinema had it been considered ‘filmed theatre’, yet
high fidelity is of relatively no importance in cinema.
As noted above, the author figure comes directly from Romanticism (and the
bourgeois revolution). The issue for film critics is not just finding authorship in the
culture (or entertainment) industry; it is also finding the author’s personality in a
collaborative task such as making movies. Record production is a collaborative
task, too. Yet the person who is recognized as the author in music might be the
individual who simply wrote early versions of the songs; those who later arranged,
played, recorded and mixed them are considered mere artisans. On the contrary,
writers of the story or the screenplay of a movie are not considered cinematic
authors, whereas the director is (if his/her personal view is deemed stronger than
the producer’s, in cases where producer and director are not the same person).
So, in music the author must be assumed to work at the beginning of the creative
process (even when this is not true), while in cinema the author is the one who
finalizes the movie. Ergo, an author in record production might work as a director
and finalize the record, as in the case of De André (Pavese, 2003, pp. 170–78), but
it is not essential for his/her identification as an author. This implies that, although
authorship in the very first politique des auteurs (in the 1950s) was still related to
an ‘old’ and Romantic conception of creativity, the role of the author was placed
at the end of the collaborative process – that is, recognizing its value. Conversely,
common sense in Italy about cantautori placed authorship before the collaborative
process. In other words, a cantautore, in order to be considered as such, must have
to the first word, not the last one.
Genre, Canon and Authorship in Cinema and Music
The ‘Festival della canzone d’autore’ – which also helped establish the term
‘canzone d’autore’ in everyday Italian language – was launched in 1974. This
came after a long intellectual struggle following the suicide of the cantautore
22
Later re-released under his name.
Luigi Tenco at the Festival of Sanremo in 1967, when his song ‘Ciao Amore Ciao’
was refused entry. Tenco’s death was interpreted as the rallying cry of a cantautore
against a system that rejected intellectual – albeit popular – songs, and led to the
lengthy debate about ‘new’ and political songs, triggering in turn the creation of
the concept of canzone d’autore. From the aforementioned perspective of an (as
yet unnamed) ‘art’ song independent from the industry, Tenco’s suicide was the
final act in the creation of an ideal singer-songwriter.
Actually, the roles of both Sanremo and the music industry in this process
are more complex. It is true that Tenco committed suicide in Sanremo because
of the Festival jury’s decision, but many other cantautori of the so-called ‘first
generation’ like him, such as Gino Paoli, Pino Donaggio and Sergio Endrigo,23
attended the Festival and enjoyed great success as a consequence. Moreover,
Domenico Modugno, one of the most iconic and successful cantautori of the first
generation, won the Festival in 1958 with ‘Nel blu di pinto blu’ (better known as
‘Volare’), which he wrote and sang.24 So it would not be incorrect to state that the
Sanremo Festival helped some of the first cantautori (and, like Modugno, many
other cantautori went to the Festival during this time) to establish their careers on
a national level (see Fabbri, 2008a, pp. 95–8). Moreover, and again considering
the role of the industry, it has to be noted that the most successful cantautori – of
both the ‘first’ and the ‘second’ generations – released most of their records on
major labels, even when they were ‘highbrow’ and politically (i.e. Left) oriented.
It is not true, therefore, that the industry rejected them tout court.
A number of cantautori and Cantacronache received awards at the first
‘Festival della canzone d’autore’ (some being given retrospectively). By doing so,
the Festival created a ‘canon’ of Italian and foreign authors from the past and the
present. And by establishing this canon, the Festival, with its musical and (above
all) paramusical norms, laid the foundations of a musical genre.25 A strange genre,
indeed, because it goes beyond what its name literally means. A cantautore should
be someone who sings his/her own songs; yet in Italy many who do so, such
as Peter Gabriel and Sting, are not necessarily perceived as cantautori (Fabbri,
2005, p. 144). This ostensible inconsistency derives from the fact that they do
not ideologically correspond to the image of the cantautore of the years when the
23
A good example of what is meant by ‘first generation’ and ‘second generation’ of
the Italian cantautori can be found in Fabbri (2008a, pp. 129–36), despite the fact that it is
uncertain if this is the first occurrence of the term. Italian cantautori (born in the 1930s) who
achieved success between the late 1950s and early 1960s belong to the ‘first generation’;
the ‘second generation’ is that of cantautori (mainly born in the 1940s) releasing their
first singles and albums between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Usually (as also stated in
Fabbri, 2008a), distinctions are made depending on their geographic origin. For more on
the ‘Genoese School’, see Bratus’s and Vultaggio’s chapter in this book.
24
Full credits: music by Modugno, lyrics by Modugno and Franco Migliacci.
25
Paramusical – such as economic, social, semiotic, ideological and behavioral –
norms are as important as musical norms in the definition of a musical genre: see Fabbri
(2012b).
concept of canzone d’autore was established, when rock and its many subgenres
were considered too ‘commercial’ to be qualitatively good.26
As already stated, the fact that canzone d’autore is perceived as a genre helped
to sell records by cantautori; when such artists were unusual for Italian audiences,
marking their ‘new’ character in this way helped them to be recognized. Moreover,
the perception of canzone d’autore as a genre is confirmed by Wikipedia, the
encyclopedia of common sense.27 Browsing the pages of several cantautori,
while we find different generic labels, such as ‘pop rock’, ‘rock progressivo’,
‘chanson’, ‘pop’, ‘jazz’, ‘beat’, ‘soul’, ‘musica leggera’ and so on, the inevitable
‘musica d’autore’ is always there. Additionally, the term ‘musica d’autore’
is directly linked to the Italian page ‘cantautore’, which also includes singer-
songwriters from all over the world, with an understandable predominance of
anglophone and francophone ones. Yet if we browse the Italian pages of those
non-Italian singer-songwriters, the presence of the genre ‘musica d’autore’ is not
consistent: we can find it on Jacques Brel’s or Neil Young’s pages, but not on
Georges Brassens’s or Joni Mitchell’s. Furthermore, Wikipedia pages in English
do not present ‘singer-songwriter’ as a genre, but as an occupation. This is likely
to be the reason why Italian cantautori and cantautrici are tagged as belonging to
the genre ‘musica d’autore’ in Italian-language Wikipedia pages, while the same
does not apply to foreign singer-songwriters. A Canadian or US singer-songwriter
might be ‘musica d’autore’, but only from an Italian perspective. This means
that ‘musica d’autore’ is absent from any generic categories on Italian Wikipedia
pages where the contributor considers a singer-songwriter from an ‘international’
perspective (or simply translates the page from another language).28 Wikipedia is
not a scientific source, but it tells us that maybe musica d’autore (a metonymy
including, of course, canzone d’autore) is perceived in Italy in a slightly different
way compared to the way ‘singer-songwriter’ (or its equivalents) is perceived
as a genre in anglophone common sense. Two of the main reasons might be the
‘Festival della canzone d’autore’ – its ‘official’ recognition of what is and is not
canzone d’autore in Italy – and the ideal image of the cantautore established in the
1970s: that is, most often a man, playing acoustic guitar – sometimes the piano – in
26
The concept of cantautore has changed through the years, and some singer-
songwriters – such as Lucio Battisti – can now be considered as such even if they were not
in the 1970s. At the same time, it seems hard, from an Italian perspective, to consider as
cantautori some foreign singer-songwriters who do not sound like the Italian cantautori of
the 1970s. From the broadest (Italian) possible perspective, Björk or David Sylvian might
be considered musica d’autore (although this can find some resistances in some circuits),
but I am quite sure that they would not be perceived as cantautori.
27
All references to Wikipedia were last accessed on 30 November 2014.
28
Ergo, on Italian-language Wikipedia pages, some international singer-songwriters
are tagged under the label ‘canzone d’autore’ and some are not: Jacques Brel and Bob
Dylan are ‘musica d’autore’; Georges Brassens and Leonard Cohen are not.
a predominantly acoustic setting, whose lyrics suggest a social/ethical/poetical

commitment, with a shy or moody attitude and very awkward showmanship.
It took at least twenty years to accept that canzone d’autore could be something
else – such as, for example, rock d’autore. Today singer-songwriters who enjoyed
great success in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Vasco Rossi, Gianna Nannini and
Ligabue (who sing their own songs), can be considered ‘authors’, even though
their musical genre is definitely rock. Even so, they are not considered cantautori
to the same extent as Francesco De Gregori, Francesco Guccini, Fabrizio De
André and Roberto Vecchioni because they diverge slightly from the original
ideology. This issue can be related to the francophone perspective, where the
chanson (française, of course) is more strictly perceived as a genre, not just as a
form. Canzone d’autore seems to cover the meaning of chanson as a genre in Italy:
‘d’autore’ covers that qualitative connotation implicitly underlined by the term
chanson for francophone speakers.29 For sure, the canzone d’autore is not meant
to be musique de variété,30 so it seems obvious that canzone d’autore was thought
of as the chanson italienne, the Italian ‘art’ song.
In contrast, the relationship between the author and genres in cinema seems to
be very different, both inside and outside Italy. I have already touched upon the
issue of authors and the industry in the politique des auteurs, but a brief exploration
of genre is required here since it is one of the main classificatory aspects of the
cinema industry. The politique des auteurs in the 1950s assigned the status of
authors to directors such as Hitchcock and Hawks because of what was perceived
as a personal style inside the logic of genre.31 It does not seem that subsequent
developments in the concept of authorship (such as the role of structuralism and
post-structuralism) influenced the development of the later concept of canzone
d’autore, even as this emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.32 Olivier Assayas has written
that, according to the double nature of the politique des auteurs, the author of films
does not make ‘auteur films’, because cinéma d’auteur was developed ‘after sound
film stopped being art and before it became art again with the Nouvelle Vague’
(Assayas, 2003, p. 195). According to Assayas, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock,
Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang were authors because they were
unaware of it: an author must not be obsessed by his/her own authorship in order
to be a real author. This concept might be questionable (Assayas denies the role
of real author to the nouvelle vague directors for this reason), yet it is true that – if
we now shift from cinema to music-making – cantautori do not often appreciate
being considered poets, and usually dislike the term canzone d’autore, precisely
29
All auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes on French-language Wikipedia pages have
‘chanson’ under the tag ‘genre’.
30
Musique de variété or variétés is usually associated with easy, banal, commercial
music in France, and is considered the opposite of chanson.
31
According to Bazin (1957, p. 11), ‘the tradition of genres is the fulcrum of creative
freedom’ (‘La tradition des genres est un point d’appui de la liberté créatrice’).
32
See Hayward (2006, p. 32).
because for a singer-songwriter it would mean defining himself (or herself) as

an ‘author’ – in other words, an ‘artist’. The definition of ‘author’ or ‘poet’ can
be ‘easily’ applied from an etic point of view (that of critics or audiences), but
not from an emic one (that of singer-songwriters).33 It seems, therefore, that the
topic of genre and its relationship with authorship took different paths in writings
on cinema and song, which in turn suggests that cinematic discourse was just a
superficial influence on early theorists of the canzone d’autore.
Authenticity and Performance
Another essential difference between authorship in cinema and music is

authenticity. This is implicit in the fact that authenticity in music is discussed in
depth by many, including Redhead and Street (1989) and Moore (2002), whereas
significantly fewer writings tackle it on film. This is most probably because songs
need to be performed – they require an embodiment – while movies do not.
Allan Moore identifies three different kinds of authenticity in pop-rock
music. First-person authenticity ‘arises when an originator (composer, performer)
succeeds in conveying the impression that his/her utterance is one of integrity, that
it represents an attempt to communicate in an unmediated form with an audience’
(Moore, 2002, p. 214); second-person authenticity ‘occurs when a performance
succeeds in conveying the impression to a listener that that listener’s experience of
life is being validated’ (Moore, 2002, p. 220); and third-person authenticity ‘arises
when a performer succeeds in conveying the impression of accurately representing
the ideas of another, embedded within a tradition of performance’ (Moore, 2002,
p. 218). These categories work perfectly for music, but not for cinema. Indeed,
for film critics, a director is usually defined as an author when he/she goes beyond
craftsmanship (Pescatore, 2006, pp. 14–18); there is nothing ‘unmediated’ about
it. In François Truffaut’s words:
the subjective camera is the exact contrary of the subjective film – since as soon
as the camera is substituted for a given person, it becomes impossible to identify
with him. A subjective film can only exist when the actor’s gaze meets that of the
spectator. Thus if the public of a film feels the need to orient itself (as happens
when the film is shot without any point of view imposed by the director), it
will automatically identify with the face it sees most frequently. (Truffaut and
Ronder, 1963, p. 8)
That is to say, the more mediated a film is, the more the audience will identify with
it (almost a form of second-person authenticity). But, of course, the main point
33
Actually, cantautori also made fun of their status, and their critical attitudes to
it fit perfectly with their intellectual – albeit ironic – position, making them appear more
‘authentic’. See Tomatis (2014a).
is the fact that a director does not perform physically, while a singer-songwriter
does. A director focuses on bodies, but not necessarily his/her own; that does
not define him/her as an author. To express it in other words: despite exceptions
(Orson Welles, Woody Allen), an author in cinema is not forced to be an actor to be
considered an author. In cinema, we see and listen to actors’ and actresses’ bodies
and voices, so the author is mediated twice: through the camera and through the
performer’s body. It is the way the author looks at things and represents them, not
his/her voice or body, that identifies him/her as such.
On the contrary, the concept of embodiment is essential to understand
authenticity in music: depending on the performer, the very same song can sound
inauthentic or authentic. In the case of the cantautore, songwriter and performer
must coincide in a single body, otherwise he/she would be a cantante or an autore
or autrice.34 This insistence that songwriter and performer coincide derived from
folk music,35 where
ideology works through a notion of a musician’s right to speak for a community

or people … Musicians function like elected politicians; they represent their
audience/constituency. Their authority is dependent on their ability to claim to
speak for those who follow. For this reason, they need to be deemed legitimate.
(Redhead and Street, 1989, p. 178)
The idealized image of Luigi Tenco led to the creation of the ‘pure’ figure of
the cantautore who refuses to compromise and rejects commercialism (since he
would then be too middle-of-the-road and not speak for, or to, a community).
The ideal cantautore acts as an individual, a perfect consequence of the bourgeois
revolution. If performer and songwriter are not the same person, if the songwriter
embodies neither his/her own songs nor the whole community, as a consequence,
he/she is not deemed legitimate.
It is not hard to understand that, from this perspective, the author in cinema
and in song could never be the same, because boundaries between songwriter
and performer in music are too blurred.36 A singer-songwriter, as an author, is
34
In Italian, the word ‘compositore’ is commonly associated with the Euroclassical
composer. It means that John Adams is a ‘compositore’, that Sofia Gubaidulina is a
‘compositrice’, while Georges Brassens and Joni Mitchell are not – they are an ‘autore’
and an ‘autrice’ ‘di canzoni’ (lit. ‘songwriters’), despite the fact that the verb compose
(or the Italian comporre) derives from Latin componere, which means ‘put together’ (con-/
componere). Although today performers might sing canzoni d’autore even if they did
not write them (but only if the songwriter is recognized as an author), the term canzone
d’autore originally corresponded to a song written and sung by a cantautore.
35
Folk music was mentioned as an essential source of authenticity when the ‘Festival
della canzone d’autore’ was originally held (Tomatis, 2011).
36
Not only the songwriter and performer, but also the person! Let us think about the
‘authentic’ Bruce Springsteen (Frith, 1990, pp. 105–14).
almost forced to be both a writer and a ‘musicking’ actor.37 According to Chris

Cutler, ‘recording places the emphasis firmly on performance, and optimally is
a medium of composition for performers’ (1984, p. 287). Thus records should
represent a performance as a composition, but being the ‘musicking’ actor is
not enough to embody authorship for cantautori: they must also write the songs
before they are recorded. The product of a cantautore is the recording as much as
the song, but this is not included in its ideology. Failure to include this dynamic
may further explain why singer-songwriters like Peter Gabriel or Sting, whose
work makes extensive use of the recording studio’s production techniques, are, as
already mentioned, not easily recognized as cantautori. This tendency to exclude
studio production authorship as one possible feature of song authorship marks
the definitive difference from cinema: ‘authors’ on film are directors, not writers
or actors.
Conclusions
The identification of a single author as the one and only ‘person in charge’, in
both cinema and record production is problematic. Looking for (or not looking
for) the ‘author’ among all the people who worked on a record or a movie is
ideological, but not necessarily wrong: it is not unusual for a director or a producer
to have the last word in creative collaborations (let us remember that they are most
likely to be ideologically oriented too), which does not erase the work of all other
contributors. Maybe the fact that cinema was born after Romanticism and was a
tangible product of technological developments freed it from Romantic ideals of
individualism. Even in the most Adornian theories of authorship, its nature as a
collective work is recognized – and the author can be considered as such when he/
she can be recognized despite the fact that it is collective work. The same does not
apply to cantautori and canzone d’autore. Although this second term was directly
inspired by cinema d’autore, the idea of a collective work, of shared authorship,
is yet to be acknowledged in such a highly ideological genre as canzone d’autore.
Records are still deemed media for musical reproduction, not for production:
the illusion of high fidelity still prevents producers and arrangers from being
acknowledged as authors, while those who write and sing the songs – who often
are responsible for a very small part of a record – are.
The same goes for the industrial character of movies and records. Films have
to be produced, edited and distributed. They have to pass through an industrial
process to reach the audience. All of the directors defined as ‘authors’ by the
critics of Cahiers du cinéma worked inside the industry; their authorship was
deemed not to be touched by it. On the other hand, the idea of the artist untainted
37
The term ‘musicking actor’ is used by Sorce Keller (2012, p. 8). For more about
‘musicking’ (the activity of giving a meaning to music not just through composition and
music-making, but also through the activity of listening), see Small (1998).
by commercial matters was at the very basis of the ideology of the cantautore.
Indeed, the fact that, nowadays, young authors considered to be new cantautori
are produced by indie labels confirms the staying power of a mistrust towards the
industry and major labels.
It is the duty of popular music studies to let people – not just scholars – know
how complex and ‘social’ the creative process is, and (by doing so) to advance
from a ‘musicology of the popular’ to a ‘popular musicology’ (see Tagg, 2011).
It wouldn’t just be fair; it would also help us appreciate records and songs more.
Chapter 3
‘Words Take the Place of Meaning’:
Sound, Sense and Politics in the Music of
Robert Wyatt
Richard Elliott
The body of work produced by British singer and composer Robert Wyatt over
the course of more than four decades shows a fascination with the ways in which
words, music and sound can be made to interrogate each other. While he has
been a writer of songs from his early days with the jazz-rock group Soft Machine
onwards, in his solo career Wyatt has used his song lyrics as ways of exploring the
borderlines between direct, ‘intimate’ address and more distanced, cryptic or coded
styles. His music, which has drawn on numerous genres and styles, has aided in
this blurring of boundaries, and Wyatt has often focused on sonic experimentation,
even at the seeming expense of conventional ‘songwriting’. Then there is Wyatt’s
voice. When we speak of singer-songwriters we tend to consider voice as both
literary tool and musical instrument, and of the resulting persona(s) of an author
and a vocalist. In Wyatt’s case, both writing style and vocal instrument are utterly
distinctive, and this combined ‘voice’ has served to mediate, and occasionally
muddy, the already playful relationship between words and music in Wyatt’s
work.1 Much of his own songwriting, with its predilections for nonsense and the
absurd, is articulated via a childlike sense of wonder at the world and a desire to
cling to domestic comforts. This is supplemented by a more explicitly political
body of work, reflecting Wyatt’s engagement with left-wing politics and an
ever-increasing geopolitical outlook. This political work takes the form of both
self-written material and cover versions of work by international singer-
songwriters, a process which contributes to a global network of committed music.
This chapter discusses songs from both these sides of Wyatt’s repertoire –
innocent playfulness and political engagement – to explore the relationships between
the cultural geographies of singer-songwriters and protest as articulated via words
and sound. I begin by considering Wyatt in light of dominant definitions of the
1
By using the word ‘muddy’ here, I am following Wyatt’s biographer Marcus O’Dair,
who refers to Wyatt’s singing and songwriting style as ‘muddy mouth’, after the title of a
song from Wyatt’s 1975 album Ruth Is Stranger than Richard. The song’s placing on the
album provides typical evidence of Wyatt’s verbal and vocal playfulness in that it follows
three shorter fragments entitled ‘Muddy Mouse’ (O’Dair, 2014; Wyatt, 1975).
singer-songwriter, particularly those that seek some kind of transparent mediation

between the artist’s life and their work. As I argue, Wyatt does at times seem close
to the popular notion of the singer-songwriter as a model of clear communication
and direct, personal (‘confessional’) address. More often, however, he challenges
this position by using word games, coded lyrics or languages that are foreign
to him and which arguably lack the sense of authenticity required for the direct
address of the confessional singer-songwriter or the protest singer. This raises
interesting questions about what Wyatt is showing fidelity to: his own vision, that
of other writers for whom he is a channel, or a politically committed aesthetic.
Furthermore, Wyatt’s art has been as much about sound in general as about music
(and in ways that challenge rather than reinforce distinctions between these
terms) and, to this end, I include a brief discussion of sound poetry as a way
of considering the sometimes problematic relationship between sound and sense.
I link this discussion to one of Wyatt’s political songs, ‘Gharbzadegi’, which takes
its name from an Iranian term meaning ‘Westernitis’ or ‘infected by the West’
but which Wyatt’s non-Iranian listeners are unlikely to make sense of without
additional guidance. A line from that song epitomizes, and acts as a reference point
for, my thoughts about the role of understandable communication in the art of the
singer-songwriter: ‘Gharbzadegi means nothing to me’, Wyatt sings, ‘words take
the place of meaning’ (Wyatt, 1985). This suggests a tension between language
terms and their meanings which is of interest to discussions of confessional or
political singer-songwriters, where we would probably expect there to be a more
transparent sense of meaning in the words being sung. This aspect of transparency
of meaning, also understood as direct communication, is key to the discussion
that follows.
Robert Wyatt as Singer-Songwriter
At a basic level it seems unproblematic to describe Wyatt as a singer-songwriter.

Since his departure from Soft Machine in 1971 and the dissolution of his
subsequent group Matching Mole two years later, Wyatt has been known primarily
for a series of records put out under his own name and on which he sings material
that has largely been written by him. Furthermore, although his work is marked
by collaboration, his most frequent collaborator in the writing of songs has been
his wife Alfreda (Alfie) Benge, allowing for a sense of personalization of material
that might be less easy in other professional writing partnerships; in terms of
artistic production, ‘Benge/Wyatt’ might be thought of as a unit (Alfie has also
provided the artwork for Wyatt’s albums since 1974). Wyatt’s songwriting is also
recognized through the respect shown it by other musicians whose cover versions
have enhanced his status as an author-figure. Yet in other ways Wyatt doesn’t
appear to fit the popular singer-songwriter image, especially that of the guitar-
toting, folk-based performer or the piano-playing, intimately confessional artist.
Even though Wyatt’s songs have a remarkable intimacy to them, they are presented
‘Words Take the Place of Meaning’ 53
in a manner that seems to be distinct from those of other singer-songwriters. This

may be due to his use of coding and symbolism in his lyrics, his emphasis on jazz
experimentation, or a whimsical approach to words and music that seems at odds
with the classic era of the American singer-songwriters around which the genre
has largely been defined.
Wyatt certainly seems to fulfil some of the criteria of the singer-songwriter
as defined by John Potter in Grove Online, such as political awareness and
introspection (Potter, n.d.). He is a socially aware performer whose politics have
influenced his music for a number of decades, even if his most ‘political’ work
has been, at times, his most elliptical. Introspection, meanwhile, can be found
in a number of his songs, from ‘O Caroline’ (a single released by Wyatt’s group
Matching Mole in 1972) to the existential meditation ‘Free Will and Testament’
on the 1997 album Shleep and ‘Be Serious’ from 2007’s Comicopera. There is
also the issue of the ‘symbiotic relationship’ between the singer-songwriter and
the instrument upon which their work is composed (Potter, n.d.). In the liner notes
to the 1998 reissue of his most acclaimed album Rock Bottom (originally released
in 1974), Wyatt writes of composing the songs in Venice, using ‘a very basic little
keyboard with a particular vibrato, that shimmered like the water that surrounded
us’ (Wyatt, 1998a, n.p.). This keyboard, elsewhere identified by Wyatt as a Riviera
toy organ, plays a vital role in creating the soundscape of Rock Bottom, a suite of
songs with very personal themes that create the impression, as with much singer-
songwriter material, of being ‘about’ the person who has composed and is singing
them. The sense of compositional intimacy and of the relationship between
composer and instrument is highlighted in another comment Wyatt makes about
the Riviera: ‘I was able to tune in with the kind of vibrato I wanted, and I was able
to play rather like I would sing if I could be a little choir. I could set my voice right
into it, and it was like stepping into a warm bath of sound. I felt really at home’
(Hoskyns, 1999, p. 45).
Another aspect highlighted by Potter in his description of the rock- or group-
based singer-songwriter is the extent to which the artist takes responsibility
for the whole concept and sound of a particular set of songs. Although Wyatt’s
authorship has often been dispersed in collaborative projects, there is still a sense
of creative control in his work after Soft Machine (including the first Matching
Mole album). The music produced during this period tends to be associated with
the authorial figure ‘Robert Wyatt’ even when it is collaborative; this extends to
the authorship of Wyatt’s songs, as evidenced in the way in which his material
has been anthologized. If two of the signs of having produced a significant body
of songwriting are its compilation in written form (as literature, or poetry) and its
interpretation by other musicians, then Wyatt scores again as an authorial figure.
His lyrics, along with those written by (or with) Benge, have been collected in
volumes published by Æncrages & Co (collected in Wyatt, Benge and Marchetti,
2009) and his work has formed the basis for a number of musical projects, including
those by trombonist and bandleader Annie Whitehead, rock group Mop Meuchine,
the French Orchestre National de Jazz, British folk group the Unthanks and the
group of covers compiled by members of Italian rock group Consorzio Suonatori

Indipendenti, or C.S.I. (Various Artists, 1998, 2000; Orchestre National de Jazz,
2009; Mop Meuchine, 2010; Unthanks, 2011). And while these projects may take
away from the crucial aspect of the singer-songwriter’s own performance, it should
be noted not only that Wyatt has been involved in some of these projects as singer
and/or advisor, but also that he is a valued guest vocalist on other artists’ projects
(the list is extensive, with examples including work with David Gilmour and Nick
Mason of Pink Floyd, jazz composer Michael Mantler, and British electronic music
duo Ultramarine). As vocalist, Wyatt has also performed memorable versions of
work by other singer-songwriters, a point to which I will return. In the case of the
1982 song ‘Shipbuilding’, Elvis Costello crafted a lyric for Clive Langer’s melody
with Wyatt’s voice in mind and, though Costello would record his own version, it
is Wyatt who has become most identified with the song, taking on an authorial role
through his interpretation.
These aspects of Wyatt’s art exemplify certain traits of the singer-songwriter
and/or are strongly connected to the genre through authorship, interpretation and
collaboration. Yet there remain crucial aspects that challenge such traits. One that
has already been noted is the tendency to define the genre in Anglo-American
terms. It is telling that many of the signs of Wyatt’s prestige – for example, the
aforementioned collection of lyrics and some of the musical projects based on
his work – have emanated from non-anglophone European countries. Wyatt is
a quintessentially ‘European’ singer-songwriter partly due to the fact that his
music exudes a distinctively non-Americanized Englishness, but also because he
is critically revered in other European countries such as France, Italy and Spain.
While many British and American singer-songwriters have been absorbed in the
pop-rock canon that emerged contemporaneously with the classic era of the singer-
songwriter genre, Wyatt has tended to be considered by the Anglo-American
music press as a revered British eccentric, not unlike his former bandmate Kevin
Ayers. It is not surprising to find Wyatt written about in Richie Unterberger’s
book Unknown Legends of Rock ’n’ Roll, where he appears in a chapter on ‘rock
enigmas’ (Unterberger, 1998). Wyatt’s enigmatic position outside the mainstream
rock canon means that even his most classic work is unlikely to be considered
alongside more knowable (because explicable) singer-songwriter albums, even
when the latter emanate from such ‘enigmas’ as Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell.
Part of Wyatt’s outsider status doubtless stems from the whimsical nature of his
lyrics, which have diverted attention away from the earnest and/or confessional
mode of address towards a sense of playful intimacy. Another important aspect
is Wyatt’s involvement in groups and collaborations. Even though, as already
noted, Wyatt has enjoyed a level of creative control in the various projects he has
been involved in, there is nonetheless a sense of his being ‘distributed’ across a
potentially confusing number of recordings, many of which feature significant
sonic experimentation that stretches the boundaries of traditional song forms. It is
easy to lose sight of Wyatt the singer-songwriter amidst the various sonic works
with which he has been involved.
Playing with Sounds
Although he had been a member of the 1960s group The Wilde Flowers, Wyatt
first came to wider attention as a drummer, singer and composer in the jazz-rock
group Soft Machine, with whom he appeared on four acclaimed albums. In 1971,
by which time he had already released his first solo album The End of an Ear,
Wyatt found himself at odds with the group and, following a period of increasing
acrimony, was forced out by the other members. He formed Matching Mole
(a play on the French for ‘Soft Machine’) and released two albums with them in
1972 (Matching Mole and Little Red Record) before disbanding. In 1973 Wyatt
broke his back in a fall and was confined to a wheelchair, ending his career as a
drummer. With the release of 1974’s Rock Bottom, he resumed his solo career,
releasing a series of solo albums that continues to the present day. These albums
saw Wyatt switching instruments to the keyboard (and occasional trumpet) and
focusing more on singing. While still often drawing on jazz and experimental
music, and engaging in lengthy instrumental sections, Wyatt started working in
more explicitly song-like forms to a greater extent than he had in his earlier work.
Even so, Wyatt’s love of sonic experimentation – which had become apparent with
the avant-garde sound collages of The End of an Ear and the second Matching
Mole album – suggested that he was unwilling to give himself over completely
to ‘song’. In contrast to those singer-songwriters for whom music was seen as a
relatively unimportant backdrop to the delivery of clearly enunciated lyrics, Wyatt
would tend to use words as just one element of a larger sonic palette, sometimes
by the use of extended instrumental sections, at others through the distortion
of the vocal itself. Because his paralysis had made touring impractical, Wyatt
became known predominantly as a studio artist, meaning that he changed from
being a highly energetic and visible ‘back seat’ musician (as a drummer) to a more
invisible ‘front man’. This lack of onstage visibility has no doubt further removed
him from consideration as a singer-songwriter, where onstage visibility is often
used to enhance the communicative channel between performer and audience.
Working primarily in the studio also enabled, and perhaps encouraged, Wyatt to
focus on sonic experimentation.
Even before this, however, Wyatt was fascinated by sound and often used the
concert stage and the recording studio as laboratories for experiments into various
sonic possibilities. In 1972, he told an interviewer that he considered songs he
was working on as ‘props for making noises’ and the words used in them as
‘outside intelligible conversation’ (Wyatt quoted in King, 1994, n.p.). The kinds
of noises Wyatt has made during his career have been varied, from extending
his singing via nonsense language, sound poetry, overdubbing, whistling and
scatting to placing his voice(s) alongside an eclectic mix of musical instruments
and studio technology. His contributions to Soft Machine included ‘A Concise
British Alphabet’, in which he sang the alphabet forwards and backwards, and
‘Dada Was Here’, where he sang and scatted in nonsense Spanish. The End of
an Ear, technically his first solo album, was an extended experiment in sound
collage, with conventional song form abandoned in favour of texture, layering and
what Wyatt calls ‘an aural wildlife park’ (O’Dair, 2014, p. 134). For Rock Bottom,
the album many consider to be the first of Wyatt’s real solo career, he found the
particular sound he was after with the Riviera keyboard and used the instrument
as one of many layers in the album’s dreamlike sonic palimpsest. Also important
to the album’s unique sound world were the use of peculiar lyrics that both harked
back to a tradition of nonsense literature (from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear
to Edward Gorey and Ivor Cutler) and incorporated the private language of
relationships via playful exchanges between Wyatt and Benge.2
One of the aspects of singer-songwriters highlighted in Potter’s Grove article is
the tendency to make private issues public and, in this sense, the release of an album
such as Rock Bottom, with its sense of exposed privacy and personal language,
seems to fit the bill. This singer-songwriter ‘type’ might be described as ‘stream
of consciousness’, as exemplified by Van Morrison. Comparisons have been made
between Rock Bottom and Morrison’s critically revered Astral Weeks, not only
in terms of shared intimacy, but also in the way that sound is used; Morrison’s
album, with its mix of jazz and rock styles, was reportedly an influence on Wyatt,
via Benge’s suggestion. As O’Dair writes, ‘Rock Bottom shared the unhurried
spaciousness of Astral Weeks: the willingness, in Robert’s words, to just let things
unfold’ (O’Dair, 2014, p. 205). On the one hand Wyatt’s album could be heard as
removed from the social world, with the singer addressing his partner rather than
us; at the same time he seems to be inviting us, via his soundworld, into the most
intimate of spaces, and we are drawn to witness as unique and affecting a world
as that presented on Astral Weeks. In songs like ‘Alifib’ the use of nursery rhyme
and nonsense language summons an intimacy that is enhanced by the realization
that the song is about Wyatt’s wife and that hers is the voice that can be heard
responding to and reproaching him later in the song.
In Lewis Carroll’s first Alice book, the Duchess advises Alice to ‘take care
of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves’ (Carroll and Gardner,
2001, p. 96). Carroll here makes a joke that itself relies on sound in the form
of rhyme (playing on the proverb ‘take care of the pence and the pounds will
take care of themselves’). As Mladen Dolar points out, the Duchess’s words seem
to be inverted, for her pronouncements, like many proverbs, ‘make more sound
than sense’ (Dolar, 2006, p. 147). There is a surfeit of what Jacques Lacan called
‘lalangue’, the ‘non-communicative aspects of language which, by playing on
ambiguity and homophony, give rise to a kind of jouissance’ (Evans, 2001, p. 97;
see also Lacan, 1999, pp. 138–9; Dolar, 2006, pp. 139–51). If, as Susan Stewart
2
As I have discussed elsewhere (Elliott, 2014), much of the imagery to be found in
Wyatt’s Rock Bottom bears a strong resemblance to the work of Carroll and Lear. Scottish
nonsense poet Ivor Cutler appears on two tracks, ‘Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road’
and ‘Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road’. Wyatt and Benge also collaborated with Michael
Mantler on his 1976 album The Hapless Child, which set the work of American nonsense
writer Edward Gorey to music.
has suggested, the fascination with nonsense resides in its being ‘language lifted
out of context, language turning on itself, language as infinite regression, language
made hermetic, opaque in an envelope of language’ (Stewart, 1989, p. 3), then
it is worthwhile considering the importance of sound in all these processes and
in sense-making more generally. It is striking how well Stewart’s description
would work as a description of sound poetry, of what might be called ‘vocable art’
(non-semantic singing, vocalese, scatting, some forms of rapping) or of the
manipulation of sonic communication by mechanical means (tape loops, sampling,
mixing and remixing). It is also notable how Stewart’s use of ‘envelope’ echoes and
anticipates work on what has been called ‘the sonorous envelope’ (Rosolato, 1974;
Silverman, 1988). One of the more focused applications of such ideas to music is
David Schwarz’s Listening Subjects (Schwartz, 1997), in which the author analyses
a range of twentieth-century musical examples from a psychoanalytic perspective.
At one point in the book, Schwarz explores the notion of the sonorous envelope
in an analysis of the early tape loops of Steve Reich, noting how the obsessive
repetition and breaking down of everyday language leads to an estrangement of
sense. Mechanical manipulation allows for a kind of reversal of the process by
which infants learn to make sense of the world, first as fragmented, non-meaning
and later as increasingly meaningful sound elements that can be combined in order
to communicate with others.
Such processes can also be detected in what has come to be known as sound
poetry, a world of verbal and sonic experimentation that Steve McCaffery
has divided into three main phases or ‘areas’: the first comprises ‘archaic and
primitive poetries’ employing incantation and ‘deliberate lexical distortions’;
the second includes the ‘diverse and revolutionary investigations into language’s
non-semantic, acoustic properties’ undertaken by the Russian and Italian Futurists
and the Dadaists; the third consists of mainly post-1950s explorations into ‘the micro
particulars of morphology, investigating the full expressive range of predenotative
forms: grunts, howls, shrieks, etc.’ (McCaffery, 1978, p. 6). For Dadaist Hugo
Ball, sound poems were ‘devices for inducing the dada state of mind’ (McCaffery,
1978, p. 6). Much like mantras where the repetition of magical words is affective,
moving someone or something from one state (of consciousness) to another, sound
poetry aimed to ‘free vowels from syntax and meaning’ and to find the ‘inner
essence’ of the word (Green, 1998, pp. 61, v; see also McCaffery, 2009). While
Dadaists like Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck and Kurt Schwitters helped to launch the
sound poem as performance art, the tendency was taken to more vocally ambitious
stages by poets such as Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne and Bob Cobbing.
Cobbing’s ‘ABC in Sound’, dating from around four years before the second
Soft Machine album, is anything but a ‘concise British alphabet’ being instead an
epic poem of more than twenty minutes’ duration in which Cobbing explores a
variety of unusual words, names and sounds as he progresses through the alphabet
(Cobbing, 2009). Beyond a shared interest in the lineaments of letters and the sound
of phonemes, Robert Wyatt is connected to Cobbing by the fact that they both
appear on Morgan Fisher’s 1980 album Miniatures (Fisher, 2008) This project,
which consists of ‘51 tiny masterpieces’, is an example of music-making under

constraint; each contributor was asked to record a piece of one minute’s duration,
which Fisher then edited into ‘bands’. Joining Cobbing, Henri Chopin, Ivor Cutler
and George Melly (reading Schwitters’s sound poem ‘Ursonate’), Wyatt provides
an excerpt of him singing the Frank Sinatra classic ‘Strangers in the Night’. His
recording is then looped and repeated until it leads, as with Steve Reich’s tape
experiments, to a breakdown of the message. The resulting piece is titled ‘rangers
in the nightst’ as a way of reflecting the reformulated phonemes, another signal of
the difficulty of matching the written word against the sounded word.
Politics and the Place of Meaning
If sound rather than sense has often seemed to drive Robert Wyatt’s songwriting, a
large part of his work has also dwelt on more semantically specific communication.
His work in the 1980s was dominated by explicitly political song choices, including
cover versions of other writers’ material, that reflected his active engagement
with left-wing politics. Early in his career, while still a member of Soft Machine,
Wyatt had included a section in ‘Moon in June’ that asked his band and listeners
to pause ‘before moving on to the next part of our song’ and to consider that
‘music-making still performs the normal functions – background noise for people
scheming, seducing, revolting and teaching’ (Soft Machine, 2007). This sense of
music as peripheral to activism was reiterated in later recollections of his time with
Soft Machine:
I don’t remember musicians being in the forefront of political consciousness … The

groups were reluctantly being dragged along in the slipstream of the audiences’
consciousness. On the Continent – particularly in Germany – we had to realize
that our function was to allow thousands of students to get together in a hall so
they could have a meeting. (Wyatt quoted in Denselow, 1989, p. 94)
Direct political commentary was still lacking by the time of Matching Mole,
despite the group’s second album being titled Little Red Record and bearing a
cover based on a revolutionary Chinese propaganda picture. The song ‘Gloria
Gloom’ contained a question about whether music was ‘more relevant than
fighting for a socialist world’ (Matching Mole, 2012) but there was little explicit
political language beyond this and the words were difficult to make out amidst the
sonic collage. Ruth Is Stranger than Richard, the 1975 Wyatt album that followed
Rock Bottom, contained a version of Charlie Haden’s ‘Song for Che’, which,
though wordless, was a more obvious connection to ‘political music’ than Wyatt’s
previous catalogue.
By the end of the 1970s, Wyatt had joined the Communist Party of Great
Britain and his music started to more transparently reflect his political views. This
development was most noticeable on a series of singles released on the Rough
Trade label and which were collected together as an album entitled Nothing Can
Stop Us in 1982. Among the songs Wyatt recorded were Violeta Parra’s ‘Arauco
tiene una pena’, a key song from the Chilean nueva canción catalogue, and a
version of the Cuban song ‘Caimanera’ with lyrics by Carlos Puebla, arguably the
chief pro-Revolution songwriter of the Castro era. The practice continued with the
1984 EP Work in Progress, on which Wyatt released two more Latin American
songs: ‘Yolanda’, written by the Cuban nueva trova composer Pablo Milanés, and
a version of Chilean cantautor Víctor Jara’s ‘Te recuerdo Amanda’. In a liner note
to the 1982 album, Hannah Charlton writes that the songs ‘bear witness to people
and events, they serve as a musical shorthand, a reminder of actions and emotions
as folk songs have done throughout centuries, carrying the communal experience
whether it was to mourn or celebrate’ (Charlton, 1998, n.p.). For his 2007 album
Comicopera, Wyatt recorded another song by Carlos Puebla about Che Guevara,
‘Hasta siempre Comandante’, placing it after other non-anglophone songs: ‘Del
Mondo’ by the Italian group C.S.I. and ‘Cancion de Julieta’ (sic), an adaptation
of a poem by Federico García Lorca. Wyatt has claimed that he enjoys singing in
other languages because it allows him a certain freedom from the words, giving
him the opportunity to focus on singing.3 That said, the foreign songs that Wyatt
has chosen – such as those by Parra, Puebla, Jara and C.S.I. – have been serious,
political works, originating in cultural contexts that place great emphasis on
poetic style and the clear communication of message. It is important to affirm that
Wyatt’s choice of material connects him to an international network of committed
performers involved in raising and maintaining public consciousness and political
conscience. Internationalism itself is another favoured theme of Wyatt’s in his
songwriting, public pronouncements and artistic collaborations, and he has been a
notable figure in this respect since the 1970s.
Between the Rough Trade singles of the early 1980s and Comicopera in 2007,
Wyatt recorded four ‘solo’ albums that mixed his longstanding interest in nonsense
and whimsy with the later desire to reflect his political opinions in song form.
Of these, 1985’s Old Rottenhat was the most consistently political, including
songs about US foreign and domestic policy, East Timor, class consciousness,
colonialism and the compromised merging of British political parties. Even here,
though, Wyatt playfully included a song entitled ‘P. L.A.’, whose two brief lines
referred to ‘poor little Alfie’ (his wife) trying to draw and sleep (Wyatt, 1985).
Noting the influence of Beckett and Mondrian on the minimal narratives of Old
Rottenhat, Wyatt said that he wanted to pare the material down to the ‘essential
song’, an exercise he admits was as much aesthetic as political (Cross, 1999).
Wyatt has made similar comments about singing in foreign languages (O’Dair,
3
Wyatt has shown a particular predilection for songs in Spanish, no doubt influenced
by time spent in Spain as a youth (when he stayed for a while with the poet Robert Graves – a
friend of his parents – in Mallorca) and later in the 1980s (when Wyatt and Benge spent two
winters in the Catalan town of Castelldefels). Wyatt has also claimed flamenco as a musical
influence. For more on Wyatt’s Spanish connections, see O’Dair (2014), pp. 41–3, 296–7.
2014, p. 254) but, as already noted, his selections have been politically meaningful
as much as they may have been aesthetically pleasing for the singer. In the case
of Old Rottenhat’s pared-down songs, it was at this point that Wyatt decided he
wished to make music that was ‘non-misusable’ (Cross, 1999) and that ‘couldn’t
be appropriated by the Right’ (O’Hagen, 1985). Whether he succeeded in this
is debatable given that the concision of his lyrics on the album, combined with
specific and unexplained references to hot political topics of the day, resulted in
a series of quite cryptic observations. As noted at the start of this chapter, this is
the album which contains the song ‘Gharbzadegi’, in which Wyatt uses a Persian
term to describe ‘Westernitis’ or ‘Westoxication’ (Hanson, 1983) and in which he
sings that ‘words take the place of meaning’. This last phrase becomes something
of a mantra as the song develops, with Wyatt repeating and layering the words
until they start making ‘more sound than sense’. They become ‘just’ words, part
of the toolkit that vocalists can use to make their creations sonically pleasing. The
repetition and layering of the words, combined with Wyatt’s high, gentle singing
and the woozy instrumental palette which he deploys, lead to a lulling, hypnotic
and rather beautiful sonic palimpsest in which it is quite easy to lose track of, or
altogether forget, the political commentary guiding the song’s lyrics. Here, then,
we see a synthesis of the clear message associated with the singer-songwriter and
the muddier aesthetic that Wyatt is drawn to as an artist in thrall to the play of
language, sound and sense.
One way to distinguish between the different subject matters Wyatt has sung
about, as well as the ways he has sung them, might be to claim some as nonsense
and some as absurd. While nonsense might more frequently be thought of as a
celebration of communicative play for the sake of it, the absurd could be seen as
more often focused on the real world, as reflecting a social disorder (Holquist, 1969).
At the same time, we might just say that disorder and the absurd are varieties of
nonsense, a claim made by Susan Stewart in her study of nonsense in folklore
and literature (Stewart, 1989). The closeness of the relationship can be seen and
heard in many of the songs on Wyatt’s recordings from the 1980s onwards as he
starts to mix the private nonsense language of his domestic material with left-wing
anthems and critical observations on global imperialism and the need for post-
colonial independence. Absurdity as non-meaning and nonsense is a theme of the
1991 album Dondestan, in particular its title track. ‘Dondestan’ is an orthographic
abbreviation of ‘dónde están’, the Spanish for ‘where are they?’ and a politically
loaded demand in many Latin American societies that have had to endure the
unresolved terror of political prisoners being ‘disappeared’. Wyatt has said that
running the words together creates a new word that sounds like it could be a
country (like Pakistan or Afghanistan). This would certainly fit the song’s content,
which concerns the plight of the displaced people of Palestine and Kurdistan. The
song proceeds via a childlike rhyme, with the trochaic meter often found in such
rhymes – ‘Palestine’s a country, or at least used to be’ – emphasized by a repeated,
one-finger keyboard line, its message drilling itself into the listener’s memory
(Wyatt, 1998b).
The song is given a more complex treatment on a later album which Wyatt
made in collaboration with saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and violinist Ros Stephen.
This version, titled ‘Where Are They Now?’, features Arabic rapping by two
Palestinians, Shadia Mansour and Abboud Hashem. The familiar ‘Dondestan’
melody is first rehearsed by Atzmon’s horns and Stephen’s strings in a distinctly
retro manner, the warm fuzziness suggesting jazz of a bygone era. This feeling is
then continued via the application of analogue hiss to the recording, a temporal
and spatial rejigging that in turn is displaced by the hip-hop beats and assertive
rap. ‘Palestine’s a country’ becomes a small, sample-like element in the mix, a
more subtle assertion of a country’s right to exist (Wyatt, Atzmon and Steven,
2010). For me, this track calls to mind the work of the Palestinian filmmaker
Elia Suleiman, who, like Wyatt, has made extensive use of absurdism as a way
of raising questions about particular political issues. For Suleiman, absurdity in
art is a valid political response to an absurd reality. In a discussion about the
open nature of his imagery and his minimal use of verbal narrative, Suleiman
makes a point that seems to confirm the difficulty of making ‘non-misusable’ art
but which, for me, seems close to the mark in describing both Suleiman’s and
Wyatt’s work:
I’m simply raising questions. If I had an answer to even one image when I
started making it, it would not be on the screen. If you have answers for an
image, there’s no poetic space for it – there’s already a closure of some kind. In
order to remain vital, I think that all art, not just cinema, needs always to exist in
a kind of present, so that you can come back to it, re-read it.
… Of course this also carries the risk that it might be misread, misjudged, but
this is what democracy always has, this risk. So this is one of the functions of
the images I try to create, which is not to have any kind of a linear reading.
(Suleiman, 2003, p. 66)
In his films Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention, Suleiman

presents a series of loosely connected scenes rather than straightforward narratives.
The scenes are often surreal or absurd in nature, such as the ‘ninja scene’ that comes
near the end of Divine Intervention and which offers to resolve the restriction
and oppression faced by Palestinians through the realization of the fantastic. It
is both humorous and deadly serious; as Linda Butler writes, ‘despite the humor,
moments of tenderness, and laugh-out-loud sight gags, the film presents an all-too-
realistic picture, pitiless and meticulous, of the devastating impact of occupation
on Palestinian society both in Israel and in the occupied territories’ (Suleiman,
2003, p. 64). Paralleling the ways in which Wyatt and Benge often seem to write
away from clear sense, Suleiman says, ‘I speak near the subject, I never really
talk about it’ (p. 72). This proximity to the subject allows scenes and vignettes
to be built up from impressions and perhaps to allow a narrative to emerge. For
Wyatt and Benge, the songs of Old Rottenhat and Dondestan seem to be scenes,
represented as much by imagery and wordplay as by music, and narratives emerge

at the level of the song, the album and the ongoing career.
Conclusion
Work by artists such as Suleiman and Wyatt forces us to ask questions about
whether linear narrative is the ideal form for the communication of meaning
or whether it is just as effective to have space left open for interpretation and
play, even in the most political of messages. Such questions seem relevant to
the consideration of the art of the singer-songwriter more broadly: are singer-
songwriters defined by the fact that they compose and sing their own songs, or are
there additional expectations concerning the directness of communication, of the
use of understandable words clearly articulated in the native language of the artist?
The explicitly political songs that Wyatt released as singles for Rough Trade
and the cover versions of songs by international political singer-songwriters that
he has released on EPs and albums since then could be heard to represent a kind
of antithesis of the more whimsical, domestic material that constitutes much of
his other work. It might seem a difficult task to reconcile the experience-born
political rhetoric of one part of Wyatt’s output with the dreamlike narratives
which have dominated the other. Indeed, if one of the key skills of the ‘classic’
singer-songwriter is to communicate in ways that allow the sharing of a group
consciousness – embodied forcefully in the clear enunciation of the Latin
American singer-songwriters Wyatt has been drawn to – what might it mean to
note the way that many of Wyatt’s messages seep rather than sear themselves into
a listener’s consciousness? Yet, like any good dialectical process, each side of
Wyatt’s output can be heard to contain its opposite and he succeeds in presenting
a uniform, committed persona that allows for both absolute clarity and muddiness,
clear political critique and domestic nonsense.
A seeming dispute between words and meaning lies at the heart of much
of Wyatt’s work, from public surrealism and private nonsense to the choice of
singing in languages other than English and even on to his most avowedly political
songwriting. On albums such as Old Rottenhat, Dondestan and Comicopera,
Wyatt and Benge often write away from what we might call ‘transparent sense’,
achieving instead more impressionistic effects. Such results sometimes impede
Wyatt’s stated desire for ‘non-misusable music’, and certainly offer challenges
to a common expectation of political and confessional song (in which clarity of
message is more important than aesthetic ambition). What we seem to hear on
these albums are snapshots of Wyatt and Benge’s very personal take on the world.
Throughout there is a sense of profound curiosity, wonder and surprise about the
world, mixed with hard-nosed condemnation of atrocity and injustice, a mixture
that suggests these are songs of innocence and experience. For Wyatt, whimsy and
politics are combined in a complementary relationship, as related by his biographer
Marcus O’Dair: ‘He lists Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – along with bubble
and squeak, the Spanish city of Granada, the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the
Morning Star newspaper – as one of the five things that make his world a better
place’ (O’Dair, 2014, p. 19). Thus Wyatt fashions a highly particular brand of
authenticity as singer-songwriter. This is captured and elaborated by O’Dair, who
describes the singer’s ‘conversational delivery’ (p. 313) as being key to the success
of his singing. Wyatt has a down-to-earth quality which removes drama while still
retaining absolute sincerity and which is playful rather than solemn. This quality
keeps him closer to Dylan than to the Latin American singer-songwriters whose
work he has covered. And, like Dylan, there is a realization that being ‘younger
than that now’ can actually be more effective than being ‘older then’. A youthful
sense of wonder and a willingness to underline the absurd can be as effective a set
of techniques for the singer-songwriter as the solemn condemnation of injustice.
Messing with the meaning of words can be a powerful reminder that, too often in
politics, words are all there are.
Chapter 4
Thinking the Canzone d’Autore
Rachel Haworth
The popular music genre of the singer-songwriter in Italy is known as the canzone
d’autore, and is associated with the figure and derived from the term cantautore,
or singer-songwriter in Italian. These labels were first used at the start of the
1960s, and while the genre experienced its golden age of production during
the 1960s and 1970s, it remains very popular today, still accounting for a large
proportion of record sales in Italy. However, it is impossible to simply equate
the canzone d’autore to other singer-songwriter genres from the UK, France or
Spain, for example, as to do so ignores the many contested meanings that the
term has come to embody in the Italian cultural context since the early 1960s.
Indeed, in his critical volume on the genre, Paolo Jachia points out that while the
canzone d’autore’s roots would suggest that the principal distinguishing feature
of this particular song form was that it merely constituted a break with what had
traditionally gone before, the genre has in fact progressed to such a point that a
poetics of the canzone d’autore is now discernible which is grounded in a certain
world view, specific stylistic markers and recurrent themes (Jachia, 1998, p. 11).
This in turn suggests that a legitimation process is at work which has enabled
the construction of a canzone d’autore style, complete with its own set of ‘genre
rules’ (Fabbri, 1982) associated with the cantautore, thanks to the prescriptive
discourse which surrounds the genre (indeed, it is for this reason that the terms
canzone d’autore and cantautore have not been translated in this chapter). As a
result of a Bourdieusian legitimation process, then, the terms canzone d’autore
and cantautore have become synonymous with high quality within Italian
popular music. The style represents a specific set of characteristics that have been
established and concretized by the constitutive discourse of the genre.
It is precisely this process and discourse that constitute the focus of the
present chapter. It does not seek to examine the discourse surrounding individual
cantautori artists as a way of exploring the significance of the canzone d’autore:
this has been done elsewhere, most recently by several contributors to the edited
volume Made in Italy: Studies in Popular Music (Fabbri and Plastino, 2014a).
Rather, this chapter traces the development and key preoccupations of the critical
discourse surrounding the song form in general, from the 1960s to the present, in
order to explore more fully the implications of the terms cantautore and canzone
d’autore in Italian popular music. The sources upon which the analysis is based
all concentrate on the place of popular music in Italy, and of the canzone d’autore
specifically, and are written in Italian. A contextualizing overview of these debates
will provide a clearer understanding of the cantautore’s value within contemporary

Italian culture, and beyond.
Establishing the Genre in the 1960s
Prior to the 1960s, the labels cantautore and canzone d’autore do not appear in
Italian popular music. In fact, ‘the name cantautore was coined, at the beginning of
the 1960s, by the music industry as a marketing strategy’ (Santoro, 2002, p. 113).
The establishment of the canzone d’autore can thus be viewed as a commercial
decision on the part of the RCA recording company, who at the time had signed
several artists who were both songwriters and singers and who could be used in a
bid to introduce a popular music innovation into the Italian market (the figure of
the cantautore) and thus sell more records. It is important to note that while the
figure of the singer-songwriter had of course existed in Italy prior to the 1960s
(examples include Berardo Cantalamessa and Domenico Modugno in the 1950s),
he had not been named as such.1 More significant, then, is the naming process,
which marks the beginning of a Bourdieusian process of cultural distinction. This
results in the setting apart of the genre from other, implicitly more inferior, forms
of popular music in Italy. The discourse constitutive of the genre quickly began to
identify a set of cultural and aesthetic criteria (or ‘genre rules’) that functioned to
establish and affirm the status of the canzone d’autore as a ‘better’, more valued
style of Italian popular music.
A number of publications contributed to this process of distinction in the
1960s (Ionio Prevignano and Rapetti, 1962; Eco, 1963; Galanti, 1964; Ionio
Prevignano, 1969). The volume Le canzoni della cattiva coscienza by a group
of Italian popular music activists led by Michele Straniero (1964) is arguably the
most important publication of the decade and best illustrates the various facets of
the discourse produced during this decade. The publication constitutes the first
in-depth analysis of the Italian music industry, and its authors adopt ‘an Adornian
model’ (Marconi, 2014, p. 100) and seek to critically evaluate what they see as
the shortcomings of Italian popular music. The four authors of the volume are the
sociologists and musicologists Michele Straniero and Emilio Jona, the composer
Sergio Liberovici, and the novelist Giorgio De Maria. All four were founding
members of the Cantacronache, a loose gathering of artists and intellectuals set
up in 1957, which positioned itself in opposition to the Sanremo Festival and to
the consumerism it embodied during this period. The group sought to develop the
social function of song, by promoting its use as a means of commenting on Italian
society and culture: for example, ‘La Zolfara’ (Straniero and Amodei, 1958)
1
In the context of the cantautore in Italy, we are talking about male artists; although
there have been significant female cantautrici, such as Giovanna Marini, they remain in the
minority and are thus often marginalized or ignored by the genre discourse: hence the use
of ‘he’. See Tomatis’s chapter in this book for further details.
Thinking the Canzone d’Autore 67
presents a fictitious account of the deaths of sulphur miners, inspired by the many
accidents and deaths in the mines during 1957 and 1958 in Sicily, and ‘Per i morti
di Reggio Emilia’ (Amodei, 1960) is dedicated to the protesters killed by police
during a demonstration in July 1960. With the Cantacronache also began the first
research into Italian political and social song.
Umberto Eco’s preface to Le canzoni della cattiva coscienza outlines some of
the key arguments put forwards by the four authors of the volume. Specifically,
he highlights the reasons why the volume and the suggestions it puts forward as
regards the necessity for developments in Italian popular music are fundamental
to the developing discourse constitutive of the canzone d’autore. Eco speaks
about the problems facing Italy in terms of the ‘song for consumption’ and ‘that
“gastronomic” music produced by the song industry’ (in Straniero et al., 1964, p. 5).2
The volume, he says, ‘accuses this family of “bad music”, aimed at satisfying
demands that are by definition banal, superficial, immediate, transitory and vulgar’
(p. 5).3 Thus it is that Straniero examines the history of popular song in Italy,
Liberovici explores the formulistic nature of the musical element in particular of
these popular songs, Jona analyses the conventionality of the lyrical component of
these songs, and De Maria surveys the place of the song industry in Italy within
the broader context of Italian cultural developments of the same period. Eco’s
conclusion is that, ultimately, the volume demonstrates that ‘song written for
consumption thus appears to be one of the most efficient means for the ideological
coercion of the individual in a mass society’ (Stranieri et al., 1964, pp. 6–7).4
But there is hope in the form of a new type of song: the canzone d’autore
(we infer from the rest of the volume). Eco is quick to praise the efforts of the
four authors as part of the Cantacronache, and thus establishes a link between
this movement and this new example of Italian popular music. The two types
of song are seen to share certain aims and objectives deemed necessary for the
improvement of popular music in Italy. Eco explains that:
The new song form that we have just spoken about has led its own debate with
‘gastronomic music’ by looking for new methods in folk music and even in
church music; it has argued with the ‘gastronomic’ rhythms by developing
the words and thus emphasizing the content, and by not seeking to grab the
listener’s attention with a fascinating primitive rhythm but rather by using
unusual concepts and invocations. The result has been a song form which
people come together to listen to. Often, songs for consumption are used whilst
2
‘canzone di consumo’, ‘quella musica “gastronomica” prodotta da un’industria della
canzone’.
3
‘mette sotto accusa la famiglia della “cattiva musica”, volta alla soddisfazione di
esigenze che per definizione sono banali, epidermiche, immediate, transitorie e volgari’.
4
‘la canzone di consumo appare allora come uno degli strumenti più efficaci per la
coercizione ideologica del cittadino in una società di massa’.
doing something else, like a backdrop; this ‘different’ song requires respect and
interest. (Stranieri et al., 1964, p. 13) 5
The way in which Eco describes here the canzone d’autore as this ‘new’ and
‘different’ form of song is symptomatic of the early features of the constitutive
discourse of the genre. The canzone d’autore is different from and thus better than
the other more commercial forms of song of this period because: it is musically
innovative when compared to the variety/pop songs of the period; it offers carefully
constructed lyrics to which attention has been paid during the writing process; its
aim is not merely to entertain but rather to engage the listener and make them
think; and it provides a group experience which is predicated on intellect rather
than emotion. It is for these reasons that it demands our attention and our respect.
Within the canzone d’autore discourse of the 1960s, these elements continue to be
repeated and thus reified as an intrinsic part of the rules of the genre. In particular,
innovation, the lyrics, and listener engagement (and even education) come to be
considered as fundamental aspects of the genre in this period.
Canzone d’Autore in the 1970s: Poetry, Impegno, France
Publications about the canzone d’autore during the 1970s continue to build on
the genre rules identified and codified as such by the discourse of the 1960s.
The fundamental importance of the lyric established in the 1960s results in
the discussion of the genre as a form of poetry in the 1970s. Mario De Luigi,
for example, in the edited volume Musica e parole: Il cantautore, la canzone,
l’industria discografica (1978), explores some of the ways in which the canzone
d’autore can be considered a form of poetry. But as editor of the journal Musica
e dischi, which reports on the music industry in Italy, De Luigi acknowledges the
paradox inherent to the canzone d’autore, which, he argues, can be viewed as both
a commercial product and a literary form of expression. Indeed, although the labels
‘poetic’ and ‘literary’ continue to be used during the 1970s to lend legitimacy and
status to the canzone d’autore, there is a greater awareness and acknowledgement
of the commercial nature of the genre in this period, and thus of the role and
influence of the music industry on its development. As a result, the discourse of
5
‘La canzone nuova di cui si è parlato poc’anzi ha condotto una sua polemica
contro la melodia gastronomica andando a cercare modi nuovi addirittura nella musica da
chiesa oltre che nella musica folkloristica; ha condotto una sua polemica contro il ritmo
gastronomico elaborando dei “parlati”, dei “continui” discorsivi atti a mettere in nuovo
risalto i contenuti, non cercando di attanagliare l’attenzione dell’ascoltatore mediante la
fascinazione di un ritmo primitivo, quanto piuttosto attraverso la presenza invadente di
concetti e di appelli inconsueti. Il risultato è stato quello di fornire una canzone che la gente
si raccoglie per ascoltare. Di solito, la canzone di consumo viene usata facendo altro, come
sottofondo; la canzone ‘diversa’ richiede rispetto e interesse.’
the 1970s is marked by the establishment of a hierarchy of value, whereby certain

cantautori and certain examples of canzone d’autore are perceived as ‘better’
than others.
The criteria against which such value is established vary across publications.
While the four most important volumes of this period (Bernieri, 1978; De
Luigi et al., 1978; Armellini, 1979; De Luigi, 1980) argue for the value of the
canzone d’autore, each writer employs a different set of criteria by which value
and superiority are established. De Luigi, for example, as we have already seen,
acknowledges the commercial influence at work on the canzone d’autore in the
1978 publication, but the ‘better’ canzoni d’autore according to his analysis are
informed by and borrow from poetry and literature. Thus he suggests that by the
end of the 1970s, sub-genres within the canzone d’autore are identifiable and
can be classified as the canzone d’autore colta (cultured), which has resisted the
recuperation of the music industry and is perceived as an important craft, and
popolare (popular) or di massa (mass), which has to a certain extent become
commercialized and is therefore not as valid (De Luigi et al., 1978, p. 220). The
use of the word ‘craft’ is significant here as the hands-on nature of songwriting
is emphasized and thus distinguished from the mass-market ‘conveyor belt’
production process associated with mass-produced songs (Haworth, 2015, p. 109).
In a similar way, Bernieri expresses concerns about the commercialization of
the canzone d’autore in his 1978 volume, referring in a telling manner to the way
in which the genre has become ‘a product/merchandise’ (Bernieri, 1978, p. 46).6
The commodification of the genre devalues it, in Bernieri’s analysis, yet there is
hope in the few, unnamed cantautori ‘who shun commercial success and instead
strive to make their songs an ‘authentic’ expression of life’ (Haworth, 2015,
p. 105). These figures, Bernieri argues, are perceived as the intellectuals, leaders
and gods. For example, he defends Francesco De Gregori’s impegno that fans
had called into question at a concert in 1977, by explaining that cantautori like De
Gregori are the embodiment of impegnati (socially/politically engaged) values,
and their songs and concerts function as vehicles and a forum for social change
and political contestation.
Such values need to be explored in the context of Italy in the 1970s. In his
analysis of impegno in contemporary cinema, O’Leary traces the accepted ‘leftist
character of impegno’ as it is defined in this period, as ‘a consequence of Italy’s
location as ideological battleground in the Cold War’ (O’Leary, 2009, p. 219).
He ultimately argues that Italian impegno in this period is ‘one of the generative
conditions of Italian intellectualism’ (p. 221). In other words, to be labelled an
intellectual in Italian culture requires impegno. Indeed, David Ward points to the
function of the Italian intellectual ‘to supply the nation’s agents for social change’
(Ward, 1982, p. 81). Impegno is thrust on the intellectual and the expectation is
that he will then be responsible for ‘defining the nation and its proper direction’
(O’Leary, 2009, p. 221). Bernieri’s decision to label the cantautori as intellectuals
6
‘una merce’.
and impegnati places them firmly within this tradition; his analysis legitimizes
them as cultural, social and political activists who can play an important role in the
process of defining appropriateness within the canzone d’autore initially but also
within Italian society more broadly.
By contrast, the criteria that Armellini employs to signify the value of the
canzone d’autore are not derived from an Italian context. As the title of the volume
suggests, Armellini instead looks to France for examples of paradigmatic singer-
songwriters who the cantautori should seek to emulate. His analysis suggests that
French chanson, as exemplified by Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré,
has its roots in a ‘national-popular’ tradition (as theorized by Antonio Gramsci),
and has developed as a politicized, erudite, folk movement. For Armellini, French
songs by these three singer-songwriters specifically provide a model by which
Italian songwriters and producers can be ‘educated’ and Italian popular music thus
improved. Significantly, however, Armellini’s analysis suggests that in fact, the
canzone d’autore is like chanson.7 Thus, references to France and to the chanson
française are used:
to legitimise Italian popular song, the argument being that if chanson is a higher-
quality cultural form, and if the canzone d’autore imitates or is influenced by
chanson, then the canzone d’autore, too, can automatically be considered
as a higher-quality cultural form. The authenticity embodied by the whole
chanson genre and its individual practitioners, such as Brassens, Brel and
Ferré, constitutes a form of legitimating authority for these Italian authors. The
cantautori who emulate the example provided by France can claim this authority
for themselves, or can have authority ascribed to them and their songs by the
Italian popular music critics. (Haworth, 2015, p. 116)
Cultural Histories and Academic Analyses of the Canzone d’Autore in the

1980s and 1990s
As popular music studies as a discipline became established and recognized as

such at the start of the 1980s, with the foundation of the International Association
for the Study of Popular Music in 1981 and the launch of the journal Popular
Music in the same year, so popular music studies in Italy underwent a similar
expansion and process of recognition. Franco Fabbri is an important figure in the
context of popular music studies in Italy. Originally a writer, singer and guitarist
for Stormy Six, a beat band from Milan formed in the late 1960s, Fabbri was one
of the founding members of IASPM, and has since held various posts within the
IASPM at national and international levels and also published widely on popular
music. Although he does not focus solely on Italian popular music, Fabbri’s article
7
See Haworth, 2015, for a more in-depth problematization of the alleged influence of
and relationship between the chanson française and the canzone d’autore.
‘A Theory of Musical Genres’ (1982) uses as an illustration the canzone d’autore.

Here, he explores the genre’s ‘rules’, which thus helps us to identify the extent
to which the cantautore/canzone d’autore discourse has become concretized by
this point.
Fabbri’s analysis of the canzone d’autore serves a dual purpose. It is one of
the first critical analyses of the genre, which, by outlining the rules of the genre,
reveals some of the specificities of the style that is the canzone d’autore. However,
he does not limit his analysis to this, and instead shows how the rules construct
and reconstruct the specificities of the cantautore, in order to legitimize the
genre. To summarize, Fabbri’s analysis identifies the complexities of the genre
from the point of view of: its rich lyrics; the range of instrumentation used by the
cantautori; the expected inaccuracies of the vocal performance; the identification
of the listener with the cantautore, who is thus perceived as a type of poet; and
the cultural capital of its community of listeners who are able to understand these
various complexities.
It soon becomes clear that Fabbri’s analysis plays a dual role in the discourse
which surrounds the canzone d’autore. On the one hand, his identification of the
characteristics of the style helps us to understand the signification of the label and
to judge the appropriateness of categorizing a piece of popular music as a canzone
d’autore. On the other hand, his analysis itself points us towards an understanding
of how value and, indeed, authenticity are constructed and situated within the
cantautore genre. For example, Fabbri explains that:
The listener must always remember that the song’s protagonist is another
person, and, if there is identification, it is directly with the singer, not with
the protagonist of each song. The cantautore is a poet with whom the listener
relates. (1982, p. 11)
We can thus infer that in order for a song to be an example of an appropriate and
authentic canzone d’autore, the listener must identify with the singer and not with
the individual characters in the songs. Similarly, the reference to the cantautore
as a poet, coupled with the analysis of the literary qualities of the vocabulary
used, would suggest that authenticity within the genre can be constructed around
a binary of literariness and erudition as opposed to banality. This theme is picked
up again in Fabbri’s analysis of the dissemination of the canzone d’autore. His
suggestion that television, as a stereotypical popular cultural tool for the coercion
of the masses, is not the forum for the dissemination of the cantautore’s work
reinforces the educational and even intellectual element of canzone d’autore, and
thus demonstrates the legitimation process of the rules of the genre.
Although Fabbri continued to write on popular music broadly speaking during
the 1980s, it is not until the 1990s that sustained analyses of the canzone d’autore
began to be published in Italy. Even in Storia della canzone italiana (1992), Gianni
Borgna only picked up in one chapter on the Italian singer-songwriters some of
the themes and signifiers of the canzone d’autore identified by Fabbri’s work. The
volume’s focus is clearly much broader than one specific genre, but it is perhaps
useful to point out that Borgna (1992, pp. 277–9) also refers to the cantautori as
intellectuals, and explains how they introduce innovation to Italian popular music,
and authentically represent the underlying feelings of existential crisis which he
suggests permeated the 1960s in Italy. His examples include Luigi Tenco, Sergio
Endrigo and Gino Paoli.
It is not until the end of the 1990s that volumes whose sole focus was the
canzone d’autore began to appear. Paolo Jachia’s volume La canzone d’autore
italiana 1958–1997 (1998), for example, appears once again to be a history of
the genre but in fact offers an in-depth analysis of the production of various key
cantautori during his period of focus. The Introduction is of most use to the
argument of this chapter, as it is here that Jachia explains his methodology and
thus demonstrates the extent to which the ‘genre rules’ of the canzone d’autore
have become accepted and even entrenched within popular music studies in Italy.
Jachia (1998, p. 9) explains that the term cantautore ‘has resulted in the coming
together of the authority of the author and the literary quality of the lyric. The
protests of those cantautori who – rightly – see themselves as musicians, do not
amount to much: the general tendency is to validate the poetic, to underline the
power of the language, the originality of the verses, and the determination of
the message’.8 While Jachia is demonstrating the tendency, then, of highlighting
the literariness of the canzone d’autore, and the importance of the lyric, the poetry
and the message, the suggestion here is that the music cannot be ignored. Yet
he goes on to say that, although his volume does not forget that there are three
components which make up song (words, music, performance), it is inevitable that
words come to signify the most significant element of the rupture with tradition
that the genre represents (Jachia, 1998, p. 10). Thus the volume focuses primarily
on the song lyrics of a range of cantautori, reaffirming the function of the text in the
legitimation of the genre, and its importance in the audience’s expectation of what
a cantautore should be. Significantly, Jachia also suggests another reason why the
text can be seen to be so important: the innovations represented by the cantautori’s
lyrics (in terms of themes and style, for example) represent a break with previous
traditions of songwriting in Italy, and thus demonstrate how the genre functions to
educate its listeners (as pointed out above by Fabbri). For example, he provides the
example of Fabrizio De André, whose songs, Jachia argues, bear witness to and
thus educate the listener about a wide range of recent historical events, covering
the deaths of Italian stars like Tenco and Pasolini, the marginalization of gypsy,
Palestinian and Sioux minorities, and the events of May ’68 in France, of Italian
terrorism of the 1970s, and of the political scandals and mafia activities of Italy of
the 1980s and 1990s (Jachia, 1999, p. 91).
8
‘ha finito per far coincidere l’autorevolezza d’autore con la qualità letteraria del testo.
Poco sono valse, nel tempo, le proteste di quanti fra i cantautori si sentono – giustamente –
musicisti: la tendenza generale è quella di avvalorare il poeta, di sottolineare la forza del
linguaggio, l’originalità del verso, l’arditezza del messaggio’.
Like Borgna’s volume, Felice Liperi’s Storia della canzone italiana (1999)
provides a history of Italian song from its origins to the present day, exploring
traditional, social and patriotic songs, the caffè concerto (cabaret) and variety
songs, the evolution of song under fascism, and the key developments of song
in the post-1945 period. The volume was commissioned by RAI, Italy’s primary
television network. Significantly, however, the ostensible aim of the volume
(at least according to its introduction by Gino Castaldo, well-known Italian
journalist and music critic) is not that of creating an official history of popular
music in Italy (endorsed by a commercial network, well placed to mediate access
to all forms of music covered by the volume). Rather, the aim is to chronicle
the feelings, tastes, myths, social legends, mass aspirations, frustrations, ironies,
shadows and conquests that appear in the canzone d’autore as a way of expressing
love (Liperi, 1999, p. 7). Thus as well as tracing the cultural history of the myths
and legends of Italian popular music (appropriate in the context of the canzone
d’autore, given the significance accorded to the genre outlined above), the volume
apparently focuses on the emotions attached to popular music in Italy. This focus
on emotion would appear a new direction in the context of critical writing about
the canzone d’autore, which has often sought to minimize emotions in order to
foreground the importance of intellect and talent, as we have seen.
Significantly, then, in his chapter outlining the history of the canzone d’autore
in the 1960s, Liperi (1999, p. 216) foregrounds the ‘passion’ of the early cantautori
for jazz, French chanson, classical music and folk. It is this emotion which drives the
revolution in language and content which Liperi identifies as marking the canzone
d’autore of the 1960s, which, he goes on to argue, makes reference to ‘romance,
with its rich melodic and rhetorical cadences of sentimentalism’ (p. 216).9 Such
analysis marks a new development in canzone d’autore discourse: evolutions in
language and content are usually testament to the use of the cantautore’s intellect
during composition, but Liperi’s acknowledgement of the influence of romance
and sentimentalism begins to redress the supposed hierarchy at work in canzone
d’autore discourse by according equal importance to feeling and emotion in the
context of the canzone d’autore revolution. Liperi (1999, p. 217) demonstrates the
ultimate significance of this by concluding that, during this period and thanks to
this revolution, song rediscovered the joys and disappointments linked to daily life.
The result of this revolution is that ‘the cantautori’s repertoire acquires
a dignity that lifts it to the heights of the theatre of Strehler and Dario Fo, the
literature of Fortini, Calvino, Eco, and the cinema of Pasolini and Risi’ (Liperi,
1999, p. 218).10 Such analysis appears to fall back on the now familiar hierarchies
present within canzone d’autore discourse: thanks to the revolution, the genre has
9
‘la romanza, con le sue cadenze ricche di melodia e retorica del sentimentalismo’.
10
‘il repertorio dei cantautori acquista una dignità tale da farlo uscire dall’alveo
della canzone per approdare al teatro di Strehler e Dario Fo, al mondo della letterature con
Fortini, Calvino, Eco, fino al cinema di Pasolini e Risi’.
escaped the world of the canzonetta (pop songs) and can be classified as a high
cultural product, of the same merit as theatre, literature, and art cinema.
Liperi’s history of the new canzone d’autore engages with another familiar
theme of the discourse: that of the presence of musical and textual influences
external to Italy. French chanson of the 1940s and 1950s and American jazz are
the initial sources of inspiration for the first generation of cantautori; the next
generation of the 1970s and 1980s instead looks to Britain and America, and to
singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. But Liperi concludes that:
in fact, the songs of our cantautori, with their stylistic link to Italian traditions, are
presented as the result of the transformation and stylization of all these musical
experiences, according to personal creativity. In light of this, every author is
seen to offer a subjective interpretation, even if there are some musicians in this
substantial group who have contributed in a particular way to the evolution of our
song form from the point of view of form as well as that of content. (1999, p. 408) 11
His analysis points to what David Forgacs (1990, p. 27) calls ‘Italy’s openness to
non-national culture as an index of cultural pluralism and vitality and a means by
which diverse lifestyles have been absorbed and creatively reworked’. Yet Liperi is
keen to stress the role of the individual and the importance of individual creativities
in this process of absorption and reworking of external cultural influences. The
canzone d’autore, then, is firmly Italian in the way in which the genre draws on,
adapts, absorbs, appropriates and reworks other musics from around the world.
Contemporary Developments
Publications on the canzone d’autore in the post-2000 period have continued to

develop and diversify, and can be divided into two broad categories which adopt
very different positions to the question of the status of the canzone d’autore in
contemporary Italy. The first category is best characterized by the several volumes
produced by Italian music journalists and published by the Bastogi publishing
house. Although these books often focus on specific cantautori (including Lucio
Battisti, Francesco Guccini, Paolo Conte and Giorgio Gaber), there are also
volumes which concentrate on the genre as a whole. Many of these are histories
of the development of the genre, which focus on particular time periods, including
Mario Bonanno’s Anni affollati: L’Italia e i cantautori 1973–1983 (2009) and
11
‘in effetti le canzoni dei nostri cantautori, pur nel loro legame stilistico con la
tradizione italiana, si propongono come risultato di tutte queste esperienze musicali
trasformate e stilizzate secondo la creatività personale. Alla luce di queste considerazioni,
ogni autore offre un percorso soggettivo, anche se ci sono, all’interno di questo nutrito
gruppo, alcuni musicisti che hanno contribuito in modo particolare all’evoluzione della
nostra canzone, sul terreno della forma come in quello del messaggio.’
Sebastiano Ferrari’s La prima generazione dei cantautori ‘scuola Genovese’

(2008). Yet some also aim to identify the predominant themes and approaches
of the cantautori, including Michele Antonellini’s Non solo canzonette: temi e
protagonisti della canzone d’autore italiana (2002) and Ernesto Capasso’s Poeti
con la chitarra (2004). Collectively, these publications demonstrate the accepted
status of the canzone d’autore post-2000, as illustrated by Bastogi’s decision to
launch in 2006 the journal Musica & parole, a quarterly publication that examines
the stories and themes of the canzone d’autore. The publisher’s website explains
the thinking behind this decision and neatly demonstrates the cultural significance
that the genre now represents within contemporary Italy:
the new magazine will scrutinize the aspects, characters and events linked …
to the Italian art song, adopting a critical/journalistic approach to analysis. It
is convinced of the close relationship between song and culture. … We believe
that, when at its best, Italian song has nothing to fear from its European and
Anglophone neighbours. And that, as a result, from Tenco onwards, it has
shown itself capable of producing musically and culturally significant ‘texts’
that are worthy of the close examination and analysis received by works of art.
(Anon., n.d.)12
The genre’s status as art is accepted and presented unquestioningly; but more
significant is the assertion that the genre is also a suitable subject for such in-
depth analyses to which other art forms are subjected. The canzone d’autore is
as important as other internationally recognized song forms and works of art,
and thus requires critical attention. Such a belief characterizes this first category
of publications and illustrates the extent to which the constitutive discourse of
the cantautore and the canzone d’autore has been successful in establishing this
particular view of the genre as a category of art, and thus of high or elite culture.
Marco Santoro’s L’effetto Tenco: genealogia della canzone d’autore (2010)
problematizes this unquestioning acceptance of the status of the canzone d’autore
and is an example of the second category of publications in Italy post-2000. His
academic volume explores the establishment and significance of the canzone
d’autore through the lens of one singer-songwriter, Luigi Tenco. Santoro is
Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna and has published
widely on Italian popular music in both English and Italian. The case study for
his 2010 publication is Tenco, a cantautore who rose to fame in the 1960s and
12
‘la nuova rivista ha l’intento di approfondire aspetti, personaggi, vicende legate …
alla canzone d’arte italiana, seguendo il “taglio” dell’analisi e dell’approfondimento critico/
giornalistico. Convinta com’è della stretta parentela della forma-canzone con la cultura. …
Riteniamo che, nella sua espressione migliore, la canzone italiana non abbia nulla da invidiare
a quella europea e d’oltremanica. E che, anzi, da Tenco in poi, sia stata in grado di scrivere
pagine significative – sotto gli aspetti musicali e culturali – degne di essere indagate con
l’attenzione e l’approfondimento dovuto alle opere d’arte.’
who committed suicide in 1967 during the Sanremo Festival, at which he was
performing. Santoro’s volume shows how this event is transformed into a kind of
collective trauma, the result of which is the establishment of the canzone d’autore as
an autonomous musical style, and the consecration of the figure of the cantautore.
Thus the volume explores the ‘intellectual and social recognition received by the
canzone d’autore in contemporary Italian culture as a culturally specific form’
(Santoro, 2010, p. 10).13 His highlighting of the processes of the fabrication of
the genre and of the consecration of the cantautore point to the culmination of the
constitutive process of the discourse surrounding the canzone d’autore, and reveal
its resultant effects on cultural perceptions of the genre in contemporary Italy. His
analysis of the genre identifies the oft-cited ‘artistic’ and ‘intellectual’ features of
the canzone d’autore, but does not overlook the ‘industrial’ features of songwriting
as represented by the nature of the production and mediation process (p. 26). He
instead explains that the constitutive discourse has always foregrounded notions
of art, the importance of themes which explore the difficulties of daily life, the
necessity to engage with debates on politics, literature and art, and the role of
the singer-songwriter as a ‘canonized’ artist who expresses cultural ‘authenticity’,
‘sincerity’ and even ‘reality’, whatever these terms may mean. The importance of
Santoro’s observations are clear: he explains that ‘artistic value is not something
intrinsic to a cultural object, but a quality that must be recognized by someone,
and often by many people, so as to exist as such’ (Santoro, 2010, p. 11).14 Thus it
is necessary to consider how the canzone d’autore has been and is spoken about,
in order to understand how its cultural value has been constituted, cemented and
accepted in Italy.
This, ultimately, has been the aim of the present chapter. As Simon Frith
(extrapolating from Bourdieu) points out,
[In order] to understand what’s at stake in arguments about musical value, we have
to begin with the discourses which give the value terms their meaning. Musical
disputes are not about music ‘in itself’ but about how to place it, what it is about
the music that is to be assessed. After all, we can only hear music as valuable when
we know what to listen to and how to listen for it. (Frith, 1996, p. 26)
That is to say, only once we understand what to listen for within music, how we
should be listening and where the music sits within a broader context, do we know
how to interpret the value of what we are listening to. The discourse that has
constituted the focus of this chapter has this precise function; it informs listeners
13
‘riconoscimento intellettuale e sociale che la canzone in quanto forma culturale
specifica ha acquisito nella cultura italiana contemporanea’.
14
‘il valore artistico non è qualcosa di intrinseco a un oggetto cultural, ma una qualità
che richiede necessariamente il riconoscimento di qualcuno, spesso di tanti, per esistere
come tale’.
of the canzone d’autore how to appreciate the value of this style by highlighting
the rules that govern its form.
Specifically, the discourse tells us that we should be listening for poetic lyrics,
literary references and style, socially and politically engaged subject matter, and
emotive performances, although the importance that each of these particular
elements is said to play in constituting the cantautore genre varies over time, as we
have seen. Knowing what we are listening to and how to listen for it (Frith, 1996,
p. 26) is intrinsically linked to a particular historical moment in the development
of the canzone d’autore discourse, and so it can be argued that literariness, for
example, is only really ‘listened for’ from the 1970s onwards. Nevertheless, the
discourse also suggests that all of these features combined together function to
produce a more cultured and ultimately ‘better’ form of song and to educate us as
listeners in how to appreciate it.
It is this discourse that dictates how value is attributed, and notions of quality
and superiority qualified and actuated in the context of the canzone d’autore. This,
in turn, impacts on notions of value in Italian popular music more broadly, due to
the status that the cantautore genre and the canzone d’autore style have acquired
as the best that Italy has to offer. Moreover, as Tomatis (2010, p. 3) explains,
‘the case of the cantautori is exemplary of the processes of ideological selection
by which we catalogue the musics that surround us, and of the means by which
we create labels to define and talk about them’.15 Understanding the constitutive
discourse of the canzone d’autore, then, allows us to begin to explore the broader
questions of how Italians listen to, describe and appreciate popular music. Perhaps
more significantly, however, this kind of analysis ultimately demonstrates some
of the ways in which cultural value is constructed, reified and shared as such in
contemporary Italy.
15
‘il caso dei cantautori italiani è esemplare dei processi di selezione ideologica
attraverso i quali cataloghiamo le musiche che ci circondano, e di come creiamo etichette
per definierle e per parlare di esse’.
Chapter 5
Rediscovered Sisters: Women (and)
Singer-Songwriters in Italy
Jacopo Tomatis
Introduction1
The figure of the singer-songwriter has been the focus of most discourses on
aesthetic values in Italian popular music since the early 1960s, when the genre
of the cantautore – the contraction of cantante (singer) and autore (author) – was
codified. Subsequently, what I have elsewhere called an ‘ideology of authorship’
(Tomatis, 2014b) has shaped the way music communities have made sense of
popular music in Italy. The perceived connection between the canzone d’autore –
literally ‘author’s song’ (a genre established in the 1970s and which included early
cantautori from the 1960s a posteriori) – and literature authenticated the former
as the quintessential Italian art song and the cantautori as ‘true poets’. While
authorship as a form of authentication is not exclusive to Italian popular music,
the canzone d’autore genre and the cantautori have been at the centre of the
canon of Italian popular music since the 1960s as a true Italian genre, a culturally
consecrated ‘indigenous and (national) popular form of song culture’ (Santoro and
Plastino, 2007, p. 386).
Despite the existence of a feminine counterpart to the cantautore (the
cantautrice), the canzone d’autore has always been a male genre. Men are
unquestionably the norm, while women are deviations from that norm, both in
the common sense and in the genre’s critical reception, including popular music
histories (see Borgna, 1992). Among the 417 solo artists or bands who attended
the most prestigious canzone d’autore festival (Club Tenco’s Rassegna della
canzone d’autore) between 1974 and 2014, only 67 were women.2 Only one
woman, Carmen Consoli, has won the prize for ‘Best Recording of the Year by a
cantautore’, in 2010. Yet women have won 16 of 31 awards for ‘Best Recording
1
I would like to thank Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino for their valuable
suggestions, and for their help in discovering – and eventually finding – several (nearly)
forgotten records by Italian cantautrici of the 1960s and 1970s, which turned out to be
essential for writing this chapter. Thanks to Rachel Skaggs for her help in revising the
English text.
2
This figure here refers to solo artists only, and not to singers of bands.
by a Performer’.3 This shows how gender inequalities shape the field of Italian
popular music, where only men are canonized as auteurs. Although a few records
by female singer-songwriters were released during the 1960s and 1970s, it is
only in recent decades that a solid tradition of women’s canzone d’autore has been
established. Yet cantautrici are still a minority and no critical attention has been paid
to this imbalance.
This chapter retraces the careers of some Italian women singers and singer-
songwriters, and their (sometimes complicated) relationship with the canzone
d’autore genre. This should not be read either as a (possibly poor) attempt to write a
feminist history of the canzone d’autore, or as an (even poorer) effort to provide a
feminist account of Italian popular music history. My more modest objectives are
a more attentive and conscious methodology for the study of canzone d’autore and
to shed light on how gender plays a role in the way people organize, make sense
of and value music.
Authenticity, Authorship, Gender and Authorship-Based Genres
Authenticity – as the concept according to which music communities measure

aesthetic value – has been a central topic in popular music studies since the
discipline’s establishment (Moore, 2002; Weisethaunet and Lindberg, 2010).
Authorship, on the other hand, has been a far less popular object of critical attention
(Ahonen, 2008), usually thought of as a petty side-effect of authenticity issues. As
‘The Author’ has been said to be ‘dead’ since the end of the 1960s, at least from a
(post-)structuralist point of view, why should we still care about Him? Indeed, it
may seem ‘perverse, in a “postmodern” world, to approach musical meaning from
the perspective of “authorship”’ (Middleton, 1995, p. 465). Yet, not only does
an ideology of authorship strongly connected to ‘romantic claims’ (p. 466) still
remain at the core of production in many popular music genres; for some of these
it is crucial in allowing any discourse on value to take place. The way authorship
is socially and culturally constructed is thus central to many aesthetics of popular
music. Obviously, ideologies of authorship are not free from gender bias.
In her ‘definitive history of women in rock, pop and soul music’, Lucy O’Brien
dedicates a chapter to female singer-songwriters. Yet, after stating that ‘women
excel at singer/songwriting for the same reason that they are good novelists,
because it is an easily accessible medium’ (2002, p. 179), she does not provide
further explanation on why female singer-songwriters have been a minority in the
popular music field. Obvious references to the exclusion of women from decision-
making positions in the music industry (Negus, 1992, pp. 126–7) seem to miss
the point, as they do not account for the ongoing centrality of the author as a
male figure.
3
These prizes – called Targhe Tenco (‘targa’ means ‘plaque’) – are awarded by a pool
of music journalists.
Rediscovered Sisters 81
Feminist approaches connecting authenticity and gender positions have often

considered rock the quintessential male genre, and addressed rock auteurs from
this perspective. Rock masculinity is thus metonymic with authenticity, while
‘pop’ stands for ‘feminine’ and ‘artificial’ (see, for example, Mayhew, 1999). Yet,
a narrative opposing ‘male’ and ‘rock’ to ‘female’ and ‘pop’ risks essentializing
music genres. ‘Rock’ and ‘pop’ are rather labels music communities (fans, critics
and academics) use to organize music, and which can include gender biases.
Defining ‘pop’ as the ‘fake’ (or ‘feminine’) inverse of ‘rock’ ends up in tautology,
and does not help to shed light on the gendered construction of aesthetics in
popular music, or to explain the predominance of male singer-songwriters. This
alleged ‘rock/pop divide’ is even less useful as regards music traditions other
than the ‘international’ pop/rock mainstream. Male artists equally dominate most
national traditions of singer-songwriters in Western culture, such as the auteur-
compositeur-interprète (Cordier, 2013).
The reasons for this gender ‘segregation’, then, must lie away from ‘cock
rock’ and ‘pop divas’. We should rather look into that ideology which allowed
‘the solidification of the creative subject as male’ (Mayhew, 2004, p. 150). Its
origins must be traced back to the Romantic emphasis on genius and original
expression (Donovan, Fjellestad and Lundén, 2008, p. 8). Scholars such as Peter
Jaszi (1991, p. 471) have connected the Romantic ideology of authorship to the
coeval development of copyright laws to protect authors’ work. According to
Susan McClary, the ‘Romantic genius’ was ‘a mythology thoroughly exploited for
purposes of marketing’ (1991, p. x). Authorship and ‘genius’ as we know them are
therefore best explained within the context of the capitalist mode of production
of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its power relationships.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, ‘Romantic genius’ was a gendered concept from the
very beginning, and common interpretations of ‘autonomy and agency have been
grounded in masculine stereotypes’ (Schmutz and Faupel, 2010, p. 690) ever
since. In popular music, references to the Romantic ideology of authorship have
served the purpose of legitimizing artists and works of art, at least since critics’
interpretations of popular music switched from entertainment to art, and since
‘auteurism’ (Toynbee, 2000, p. 30) emerged as a strategy to validate popular music.
Still now, ‘high art criteria [such as authorship] are most often invoked to legitimate
male musicians than female musicians’ (Schmutz and Faupel, 2010, p. 690).
This enduring ideology of authorship is at the core of authorship-based music
genres, such as the cantautori and the canzone d’autore, which are therefore
gendered. Franco Fabbri’s theory of genres can provide a useful framework for
conceptualizing issues of gender in authorship-based genres. According to Fabbri,
genres are ‘cultural units … rooted in history’ (Fabbri, 2012b, p. 180), and ‘set[s] of
music events regulated by conventions accepted by a community’ (p. 188). Ideologies
of authorship can be read as ‘hyper-rules’ (Fabbri, 1982, p. 55) creating hierarchies
among the other genre conventions. Many gender issues in popular music can thus
be explained in terms of genre conventions organized and governed by a ‘Romantic’
ideology of authorship. This gendered concept of the author became decisive in the
history of Italian popular music in the early 1960s, when the cantautori appeared,
and has conditioned the aesthetics of the canzone d’autore since then.
The Cantautore in Italy
In the 1950s, the Italian popular music industry developed in continuity with the
pre-war period: the national public radio station (RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana)
succeeded in maintaining its broadcasting monopoly, and most of the music
professionals who had started their careers during the fascist period remained
in activity (Fabbri, 2008a). A division of labour had always characterized the
industry, which was almost exclusively controlled by men, separating the tasks of
composers, lyricists, arrangers and performers. Normally, each song was performed
and recorded by several different singers, both women and men, allowing music
publishers to control most of the process. Those who composed and performed
their own songs, as Armando Gill, Rodolfo De Angelis and Odoardo Spadaro had
done in previous decades – although without meeting the criteria to be cantautori
avant la lettre – were exceptions to this model. Such a system easily managed
to control the content of songs in a form of censorship. Lyrics were typically
standardized. Feminine roles in those lyrics were no exception, the good and pious
mother being a common topos. References to sex – as well as any posture or vocal
inflection possibly alluding to it, especially by women – were censored.4
With the so-called economic boom (see Crainz, 1996), the Italian recording
industry expanded. In the late 1950s, a new generation of singers achieved success,
inspired mainly by the international diffusion of rock and roll. These so-called
urlatori (yellers) imported a new way of performing, which included dancing
and hip-shaking. Some female singers, including the future diva of Italian music
Mina, were associated with this trend. At this time, a handful of women were also
working as professional composers or lyricists (Famoso, 1960).
In 1959, shortly after the urlatori, a new group of singers debuted and hit
the charts. Influenced by rock and roll, crooners, jazz, bossa nova and French
chanson, most of these singers were authors of their own songs. This innovation
helped their social construction as a new genre, thanks to the introduction of the
catchy neologism cantautore in the summer of 1960. The cantautori were the
answer to an increasing demand for an Italian ‘art song’, which could possibly
rival the French chanson tradition as well as keep pace with recent developments
in Italian cinema and literature. Two recording companies competed in this new
market sector: Ricordi from Milan and RCA Italiana based in Rome. As soon as
the new word was launched and popularized by the latter’s marketing managers, it
started to be applied not to singers composing and singing their songs, but rather
4
Jula De Palma’s performance of the song ‘Tua’ (Yours) at the 1959 Sanremo
Festival generated television censorship, and a wave of moral panic, not because of the
(quite innocent) lyrics but by De Palma’s allegedly ‘sexy’ routine (Agostini, 2014, p. 32).
to those singers who challenged the clichés of the ‘traditional’ canzone. Soon the
neologism took on aesthetic connotations: a ‘true’ cantautore was supposed to sing
witty, clever lyrics with a ‘natural’ voice (Tomatis, 2010). ‘Real’ authorship was
thus not as decisive as perceived authorship. For example, all Umberto Bindi’s
lyrics were written by a professional lyricist, yet he – as composer of his music,
and singer of his songs in an innovative way – was fully considered a cantautore.
The most outstanding innovations of the early cantautori were their untrained
voices, which differed radically from typical Italian operatic singing, and a new
attitude towards song content, often including unconventional ways of treating the
topic of love. Both these features were soon established as decisive conventions of
the new genre. And as I show in the next section, both were perceived as marks of
authenticity and connected with gender issues.5
Gender in Genre: ‘Weak Masculinity’ and Authenticity
In his book about French chanson, Peter Hawkins connects the status of auteur
attained by some major French singer-songwriters to several features, including
the opposition between a ‘macho public image’ (2000, p. 35) – sometimes also
misogynist – and a feminine private one, expressed through lyrics. More recently,
Cordier has argued that the chanson as a genre ‘seems to require qualities that are
naturally masculine’ (2013, p. 38; original italics).
Yet, while these interpretations could be true at least for the most ‘classic’
auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes, and despite the influence exercised by several
such artists on the public image of the cantautori, early cantautori do not fit this
description, as their alleged ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characters (as understood
by Hawkins) overlap and appear to convey contradictory meanings. On one hand,
the natural voices of the cantautori, while openly challenging the bel canto tradition
and suggesting a more intimate connection between lyrical content and the singer’s
private life, were unequivocally male voices. As such, they carried sexual (as in
bodily) connotations, just as Richard Middleton notes regarding popular voices
in general (2006, p. 91). On the other hand, the voices of the cantautori also
challenged operatic tradition by withdrawing from the masculinity embodied by
the ‘tenor hero’ and his powerful voice (Jarman, 2013), as they sometimes sang
with a feeble voice. For example, a crucial vocal model for the early cantautori
was provided by Umberto Bindi, who had debuted earlier in 1959: it would be
problematic (to say the least) to explain Bindi’s unique vocal quality and his
influences (Nat King Cole among others) with reference to supposedly ‘masculine’
or ‘feminine’ characteristics – and not only because Bindi was homosexual.6
5
See Conti’s chapter in this volume.
6
Homosexuality has been a taboo topic in Italian society until recent times, to
the point that Bindi never came out publicly. Discrimination and prejudice had a role in
obstructing his career, which almost came to an end in the late 1960s (Tomatis, 2014a).
The vocal performances of cantautori can be coupled with their love lyrics,
which swung between expressions of emotional sensitivity and affirmations of
masculinity. A good example is ‘Viva Maddalena’ (Long Live Maddalena), one
of Sergio Endrigo’s most distinctive songs (1963). The song is structured around
two different verses and has no refrain. In the first verse, played in a minor key,
the singer recalls a gloomy moment of his past and addresses his former lover,
who made him cry ‘like a baby’ (‘come un bambino’). In Hawkins’s terms, this
verse would reveal Endrigo’s ‘feminine’ side. The second verse – a variation of
the first, in a major key – switches to the present. The singer now praises his new
lover Maddalena, who gives him ‘sleepless nights’ (a ‘masculine’ sexual allusion).
The two verses alternate towards a final climax, where the second verse is repeated
twice. Clearly, such a song cannot be explained in a satisfactory way by Endrigo’s
alleged ‘macho public image’ and private ‘feminine’ side (Hawkins, 2000, p. 35),
or masculine qualities (Cordier, 2013, p. 38).
Different degrees of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are also combined in the
public image of early cantautori. Press photos, LP covers and advertisements
often portray cantautori in a melancholic state, walking in natural landscapes or
playing an instrument in a meditative pose. The popular press often described the
male cantautore as decadent, sensitive and weak compared to the ‘traditional’
male singer. For example, Gino Paoli was criticized and mocked for his eccentric
outfits, and for refusing to wear a tuxedo when performing at the 1961 Sanremo
Festival, while a well-known lyricist said of him that ‘He’s a guy who will never
reach success, because he writes bad music, and obscure lyrics. Also, he must be
gay’ (in Romana and Vavassori, 1996).7
Clearly neither ‘masculinity’ nor ‘femininity’ alone explains anything as
regards the early cantautori. Characteristics of both are to be found in their singing
voices, lyrics and public images, rendering it pointless to try to interpret them in
terms of one or the other exclusively. Gender-related genre conventions, rather, are
better understood as a form of authentication. According to Sandro Bellassai, the
major transformations of Italian society between the 1950s and 1960s included a
shift in people’s moral values. As ‘traditional cultures’ slowly disappeared, young
people started to affirm their generational identity by challenging traditional
gender roles. Long hair, casual apparel and a new language, both ‘whimsical and
irreverent’ (Bellassai, 2005, p. 139), were some of these new identity strategies.
Early cantautori fully fit this description. The ‘weak masculinity’ of some of
them (especially Paoli and Bindi) was part of the representation of the early
cantautori as modern artists, and this representation eventually became a central
genre convention.
7
‘È uno che non avrà mai successo, perché scrive brutte musiche e versi
incomprensibili. E poi, dev’essere omosessuale.’
Where Have All the Cantautrici Gone?
The ‘original’ early cantautori genre, as it was understood in 1960, also featured
women such as Maria Monti, credited with inventing the neologism ‘cantautore’
with RCA artistic director Vincenzo Micocci (Cartago, 2005, p. 318; Tomatis, 2010).
Yet female singer-songwriters of the 1960s had only a brief period of relevance
among the cantautori. Although the neologism ‘cantautrice’ was introduced
shortly after ‘cantautore’, the popular press seldom used it, and when they did,
it was used sardonically. For example, in one of its earliest occurrences in a
popular magazine, ‘cantautrici’ (with quotation marks) were dismissed as ‘sheet-
music suffragettes’ (Anon., 1961b), in particular RCA’s singer-songwriter Daisy
Lumini. Some months later, Jeanine Deckers – better known as Sœur Sourire, or
‘The Singing Nun’, of the international hit ‘Dominique’ – was presented to the
Italian audience as ‘La cantautrice di Dio’, God’s cantautrice (Anon., 1962c).
Maria Monti and Daisy Lumini were launched by RCA in 1959. Several
articles in popular magazines in 1960 suggest that Monti was considered an
active member – if not the instigator – of the cantautori group (Anon., 1960a;
Tomatis, 2010). Yet she ceased to be perceived as a cantautrice soon after, as
male cantautori were placed at the centre of the new genre’s canon. Subsequently
she switched to a repertoire of folk and political songs. Ironically, despite her
long career as an author, singer, singer-songwriter, refined performer and actress,
nowadays she is sometimes remembered as cantautore Giorgio Gaber’s former
fiancée. Lumini debuted in the late 1950s with an urlatore-like style. Her first
single – ‘Whisky’ (1959), co-written with Aldo Alberini – was also recorded by
Mina, and featured in the hit film Urlatori alla sbarra (Lucio Fulci, 1960). After
releasing a number of singles in the early 1960s, Lumini released an album of
songs from the Tuscan tradition (Daisy come folklore, 1969), and became an
accomplished performer of folk tunes.
Like the songs by male cantautori, the handful of songs written or performed
by Monti and Lumini around 1960 avoided the clichés of the ‘traditional’ canzone.
These new cantautrici challenged traditional gender roles, as did their male
peers, but from a female perspective. If the cantautori sometime expressed their
sensitive (‘feminine’?) side in lyrics, the cantautrici adopted the opposite strategy,
performing the role of the modern, independent woman. This is shown by RCA
Italiana artistic director Vincenzo Micocci’s presentation of Monti on the back
cover of her first LP (1961):
Who’s behind Maria … ? It’s clear, I guess. It’s the modern girl, the woman of
our times, the one we love or despise, the one we appreciate, or pity. The woman
that we might someday marry, in spite of everything.
Sure enough, it’s not the same woman of some ten years ago, that woman of
Romantic fame, who we wanted to be pure and oblivious to everything, to be
used as a knick knack.8
The construction of cantautrici as modern women is found in most of their songs,

too. One of Monti’s signature tunes, ‘Zitella Cha Cha Cha’ (Spinster Cha Cha
Cha) – released as a single in 1960 and in a different version on her 1961 LP
Recital – is telling in this regard. The first line in particular must have sounded
challenging from the mouth of a woman: ‘In my life, those I loved / are now
more than a thousand.’9 Moreover, since Monti’s membership of the cantautori
group implied that she was the author of the song,10 such a message must have
struck listeners as even more provocative. In the song, Monti performs the role of
a spinster who lists her former lovers. The inventory includes a janitor, a boozer, a
criminal and – extremely shocking for the time – a married man. The general mood
is light and funny, as the song is based on a cha-cha-cha rhythm and because most
of the lovers’ names rhyme in couplets with their profession or qualities. Monti’s
way of singing, too, with a ‘natural’ voice, reinforces this interpretation.11 Yet RAI
did not broadcast the song, as it was considered ‘immoral’ (Anon., 1961a).
‘Benzina e cerini’ (Fuel and Matches) exemplifies how the cantautori
questioned traditional gender roles by challenging the stereotypes of love songs.
Gaber and Monti performed and released the song with two different – and
‘symmetrical’ – lyrics, one from the male perspective (Gaber), and one from the
female (Monti). Like ‘Zitella Cha Cha Cha’, the song is intended to be funny and
witty, as it narrates the paradoxical story of a girl whose pastime is to burn her
boyfriend. Gaber’s version includes the following lines:
My girlfriend … invented a new game / she sprinkles fuel on me and sets me on fire.12
8
‘Chi c’è dietro a Maria … ? È chiaro, mi sembra. C’è la ragazza moderna, la donna
dei nostri tempi, che noi amiamo o disprezziamo, che stimiamo o compiangiamo, ma che
forse, un giorno, nonostante tutto, finiremo per sposare. Certo non si tratta della stessa
donna di qualche decina d’anni fa, di romantica memoria, che si desiderava pura ed ignara
di tutto, da poter utilizzare come un soprammobile.’
9
‘Nella mia vita coloro che amai / son più di mille ormai.’
10
According to SIAE (Society of Italian Authors and Publishers), the music was
written by Giorgio Gaber and Renato Angiolini, and the lyrics by professional lyricist
Calibi. Yet many cantautori were not officially registered with the SIAE. The same song
was credited to Monti and Gaber in 1961. In any case, the question is whether performers
were ‘perceived’ as authors, and whether they were considered to be part of an innovative
trend in Italian popular music. This was the case with both Monti and Lumini.
11
The single, with a richer arrangement, reverberated voice, and more ‘artificial’
vocal interpretation (Monti, 1960), differed substantially from the more ‘natural’ version
on the LP (Monti, 1961), which was intended for a different audience.
12
‘La mia ragazza … ha inventato un nuovo gioco / mi cosparge di benzina e mi dà
fuoco.’
Monti, on the other hand, sings:
I invented a new game / I sprinkle fuel on him and set him on fire.13
Both versions of the lyrics use irony to overturn the typical clichés associated
with love songs and ‘traditional’ masculinity: the ‘weak’ male character accepts
passively his girlfriend’s abuse, while the girl cruelly punishes him by setting him
on fire. Both were presented at the 1961 Sanremo Festival. Yet, while Gaber’s
version is usually included in the numerous compilations of his early singles,
Monti’s recording has never been re-released.
The cantautrici also performed more pensive songs. For instance, Lumini’s
‘Tante piccole cose’ (Many Little Things; 1961a), co-written with lyricist Tritono,
is a ‘serious’ love song about a past relationship. The old lover is described with
tenderness, without any idealization, through simple, yet powerful, images, such
as ‘you were almost afraid of me / when we first met’.14 As a personal reflection
on a non-idealized love story, delivered in an intense yet (quite) natural voice,
‘Tante piccole cose’ sounds just like a typical song by a cantautore, except for the
fact that it is sung by a female voice and from a female point of view. Its refined
orchestration, scored by RCA’s resident arranger Ennio Morricone (a true signature
of many songs by cantautori in the early 1960s), reinforces this impression.
All of these songs by Monti and Lumini were fully inscribed in the new
cantautori trend, and certainly match the male cantautori’s output of that period in
terms of originality, quality of production and orchestration, and songwriting. Yet
the Italian audience forgot about them almost immediately. None of these songs
have ever been re-released, and even today they are only available on the original
records. Both Monti and Lumini continued their career as ‘normal’ singers while
their male peers were slowly consecrated as auteurs.
Cultural Consecration: Female Performers Versus Male Singer-Songwriters
The ‘cultural consecration’ (Bourdieu, 1983) of Italian singers in the 1960s clearly
followed gender-related patterns. As Schmutz and Faupel argue, ‘[p]rocesses of
cultural legitimacy and retrospective consecration in popular music are shaped
by gender’ (2010, p. 686). The rapid decline of the early cantautrici described
above suggests that in the field of Italian ‘art song’ female artists were consecrated
as performers rather than auteurs, whether or not they wrote songs. This was
despite the decisive part they played in the success of the early cantautori, as did
Mina and another of the most respected singers in the history of Italian popular
music, Ornella Vanoni. In 1961, Vanoni enjoyed great success with her recording
of Paoli’s ‘Senza fine’ (With No End), which was dedicated to her. Since Vanoni
13
‘ho inventato un nuovo gioco / lo cospargo di benzina e gli do fuoco.’
14
‘quasi avevi timore di me / quando ci conoscemmo.’
was considered to be an ‘intellectual’ performer (having collaborated with director

Giorgio Strehler, among others), her interest in Paoli’s songs endorsed him as an
author and introduced his work to the cultural élite from Milan. Two songs by Paoli
were included on Vanoni’s first LP (1961), along with songs by Fo, Strehler and
Mouloudji. A year earlier, Mina’s version of Paoli’s ‘Il cielo in una stanza’ (The Sky
In a Room; 1960) had achieved wider airplay than the ‘original’ version, becoming
one of the biggest hits of the summer (Fabbri, 1998) and boosting Paoli’s career.
Mina also contributed to the success of Fabrizio De André. De André released his
song ‘La canzone di Marinella’ (Marinella’s Song) – later to be considered one
of his classics – as a single in 1964. The song sold poorly until Mina recorded it
and performed it on TV three years later. In her long career stretching from the
late 1950s to the present, Mina has performed several canzoni d’autore (author’s
songs). Yet she has never been considered an exponent of the canzone d’autore
genre. Instead, since her debut she has been unanimously praised as Italy’s most
gifted singer (Fabbri and Pestalozza, 1998). That is to say, her ‘being an artist’ is
not rooted in an ideology of authorship.
In contrast, male artists were consecrated as cantautori even when they
performed songs by other authors. De André’s case is illustrative in this respect.
Having debuted on record with some singles in the early 1960s, and gaining
popularity over the course of the decade, De André came to be considered the
quintessential cantautore. He is also occasionally praised as ‘the greatest Italian
poet of the 20th century’ (for instance, by literary critic and translator Fernanda
Pivano; see Fabbri, 2005, p. 161). It is no secret that De André co-authored most of
his songs with other cantautori, composers and lyricists, sometimes contributing
only a few lines to the lyrics of a song and acting more as a sort of ‘director’ among
his collaborators than as a ‘proper’ singer-songwriter (Pavese, 2009). Equally,
De André is also known for several Italian covers of songs by Brassens, Dylan
and Leonard Cohen. Yet these issues are a thorny topic for many of De André’s
fans and scholars, as the image projected, especially after his death in 1999, is
that of ‘the solitary author-composer, creating his song in anger and distress …
something that De André probably did very few times in his life’ (Fabbri and
Plastino, 2014b, p. 85). Nobody would ever consider De André to be anything
other than a cantautore. To be praised as artists, therefore, Italian male singers
must be recognized as auteurs.15
Mina and De André are nowadays possibly the most prominent icons of Italian
popular music, and fully canonized as ‘national’ artists and part of the ‘high’
tradition of Italian music. Yet the process of their cultural consecration followed
different patterns. An ideology of authorship structured the canzone d’autore genre
conventions, and facilitated the consecration of De André and other male cantautori
as ‘true’ auteurs, regardless of collaborative authorship and occasional covers. On
the contrary, appraisals of Mina focused on her vocal skills, her ability to ‘own’
the songs she was singing, as if they were hers. Because she was consecrated as
15
Lucio Battisti’s case is also meaningful: see Conti, 2014.
a performer, she did not need to be the author of her songs to become an ‘artist’.
These gendered patterns of cultural consecration had a significant influence on the
rise and development of the canzone d’autore genre in the 1970s, preventing later
cantautrici from being included in the canon as before.
The New Cantautrici of the 1970s
In the late 1960s and especially in the 1970s, a new generation of singer-songwriters
emerged, triggering a renovation of the concept of cantautore and the ‘golden age’
of Italian cantautori. The canzone d’autore genre now became a ‘field of cultural
production’ (Santoro, 2006, p. 358), its boundaries partially re-negotiated by music
communities. At this time, the canzone d’autore merged with the tradition of protest
song; the cantautore started to be perceived as a political figure, and was asked
by his audience to act accordingly. The ‘prototype’ of the new singer-songwriter –
modelled on Dylan – shifted the boundaries of what could be considered canzone
d’autore musically, too.16 Since the late 1970s, many cantautori have included
rock instrumentation in their songs and performed in rock-like concerts, while
still being perceived as cantautori and as part of the canzone d’autore genre.
Additionally, the canzone d’autore went through a process of canonization which
eventually reinforced the set of conventions established during the previous
decade, including the centrality of male artists. The Club Tenco – an association of
music enthusiasts founded in 1972 – was central to the establishment of this canon
(Santoro, 2010; Tomatis, 2014b). In 1974, the Club hosted the first Rassegna della
Canzone d’Autore, an annual event featuring concerts, conferences and awards,
which since then has both documented the current ‘state of the art’ of the canzone
d’autore and helped crystallize some of its features.
Around 1975, the huge commercial success achieved by some cantautori
(Francesco De Gregori’s Rimmel was the best selling LP that year) persuaded
some recording labels that it might be the right moment to invest in female singer-
songwriters, too. This new context allowed some cantautrici to record their debut
albums. American female singer-songwriters and folksingers, such as Joan Baez
and Joni Mitchell, were a model for some of them, the emerging Italian feminist
movement providing their songs with the requisite ‘political’ frame.17 For example,
Antonietta Laterza’s first album, Alle sorelle ritrovate (To the Rediscovered
Sisters), released in 1975 by the iconic alternative label Cramps and produced by
16
This process worked retrospectively, and several artists (both male and female)
of the canzone politica (political song) of the 1960s who would have never been labelled
as cantautori before came to be associated to the field of canzone d’autore, among them,
Giovanna Marini and Margot.
17
In 1974, Italian civil rights movements (including feminists) had scored a major
victory in a referendum on the divorce law. Abortion became legal in Italy in 1978, after a
protracted debate. Yet it remained a controversial topic for years (and it still is).
the Collettivo Femminista Bolognese (Bologna Feminist Collective), dealt almost

exclusively with feminist topics including feminine identity, gender violence,
abortion and homosexuality. Some feminist organizations released records similar
in style and subject, under collective names, such as Amore e potere (Love and
Power) by Il Canzoniere Femminista (1977), and books on women’s singing were
published (Caldirola, 1977).
Feminist songs were not only to be found on records by alternative labels,
but also became common on major labels. For instance, Ricordi released Gianna
Nannini’s self-titled debut album in 1976, which featured an explicit lyric about
abortion (‘Morta per autoprocurato aborto’ – ‘Dead By Self-Induced Abortion’).
Through its subsidiary IT, RCA also launched new ‘feminist’ cantautrici,
produced (as before) by Vincenzo Micocci. Under the name of Le Cantautori
(‘le’ being the feminine article), Roberta D’Angelo, Nicoletta Bauce, Silvia Draghi
and the duo Simo (Valzania) & Susi (Bellucci) debuted with a concert in Rome
(Anon., 1975) and released a LP with the meaningful title of Settembre 1975:
Musica dal pianeta donna (September 1975: Music from Planet Woman). RCA
also released cantautrice Grazia Di Michele’s first album Cliché in 1978, which
contains another song about abortion, ‘Riso e coriandoli’ (Rice and Confetti), and
lyrics about feminist topics in general.
For a short period of time in the mid-1970s, the new cantautrici were fully
part of the canzone d’autore scene. Their songs dealt with political subjects, like
those of their male peers, and their albums sounded like any canzone d’autore
album of those years, as they often shared the same producers and personnel with
their male labelmates. And yet, as had happened to the cantautrici of the 1960s,
most of them never reached a wider audience and were soon forgotten, together
with their records. This is the case of both Antonietta Laterza and the members of
Le Cantautori. While lack of adequate promotion by labels possibly jeopardized the
careers of these artists, marketing issues alone cannot explain why many attempts
to launch female singer-songwriters in the 1960s and 1970s ended in failure.
Even the cases of the few successful cantautrici to emerge in the 1970s show
how gendered dynamics of cultural consecration prevented women artists from
being canonized as auteurs. Grazia Di Michele enjoyed some mainstream success
in the 1980s and 1990s, taking part several times in the Sanremo Festival (most
recently in 2015), while Nannini reached the charts in the 1980s with some
energetic rock songs. Nowadays, however, neither of them is part of the ‘classic’
canzone d’autore canon.
Conclusion: Looking for the New Cantautrici
Nevertheless, the number of active cantautrici in Italy has increased over the last
few decades, establishing a new tradition of female singer-songwriters. Carmen
Consoli, Nada, Cristina Donà, Ginevra Di Marco, Elisa and Paola Turci are among
the most important contemporary cantautrici, whose careers span from the 1990s
to the present day.18 Compilations have also been issued, and festivals dedicated
to emerging cantautrici created. In the late 1980s, the Club Tenco proposed the
(unfortunate) term ‘canzone d’autrice’, encouraging de facto the creation of a
canon of female singer-songwriters within the canzone d’autore. The wave of
anglophone female singer-songwriters of the 1990s (such as Alanis Morissette and
Tori Amos) has influenced many Italian cantautrici since then, providing a model
for both live performance and songwriting.
The growing number of cantautrici in the last few decades can arguably be
explained also by the loosening boundaries of the concept of canzone d’autore.
In recent times, ‘canzone d’autore’ has served increasingly as an umbrella term
to authenticate ‘quality music’, incorporating rock (especially indie) and other
genres under the same genre label (Tomatis, 2014b). Nevertheless, it seems that
contemporary cantautrici are more commonly associated with multiple genre
labels than their male peers. Carmen Consoli (possibly the most important Italian
cantautrice of the last 20 years) is certainly ‘canzone d’autore’, but also ‘rock’.
Yet nobody would ever define (for example) Vinicio Capossela, the most iconic
Italian contemporary cantautore, as anything other than a cantautore, despite
the fact he recently released an album played by Greek rebetiko musicians and
which featured some covers. Even in the present day, the cantautrici are more the
exception than the rule.
Thus gender imbalances still shape the field of Italian canzone d’autore, and
are broadly established as genre conventions. They are also embedded in the
topics of songs. Just as ‘male’ topics can serve the purpose of authenticating
the cantautore, women are more likely to address ‘feminine’ (if not feminist)
subjects. For example, several albums by Consoli have titles that refer to women:
Mediamente isterica (Typically Hysterical, 1998), Eva contro Eva (Eve Against
Eve, 2006) and Elettra (Electra, 2009). In her songs, Consoli also performs several
female characters: a prostitute (‘Elettra’, 2009), an AIDS sufferer (‘Per niente
stanca’, Not Tired At All, 1997) and an abused child (‘Mio zio’, My Uncle, 2009)
among others.
It is clear, therefore, that a gendered ideology of authorship still structures
values and meanings of Italian popular music, and affects the way Italian music
communities (its audiences, its critics, its industry …) categorize music. In the
research for this chapter, the cases of several women singer-songwriters – who
have been excluded from the canzone d’autore canon – have been discussed and
‘rediscovered’. Yet, rediscovering women artists from the past, rather than being
a mere ideological stance, must be understood, instead, as a methodological move
towards a more conscious approach to popular music histories. As authorship and
authenticity have a paramount role in the aesthetics of popular music, a critical
history of Italian popular music cannot avoid addressing gender issues any more.
18
Nada debuted as pop singer in 1969, and switched to being a cantautrice in the
late 1990s. Turci debuted in 1986. Di Marco was part of the iconic rock band C.S.I. in the
1990s, starting a solo career – as cantautrice and later performer of folk tunes – in 1999.
Part II
Politics
Chapter 6
‘I Write the Songs. He’s the Eye Candy’:
The Female Singer-Songwriter, the
Woman Artist-Producer and the British
Broadsheet Press
Paula Wolfe
Support from the media has historically formed an essential component of the
promotion process for the work of any popular music artist. For a woman artist,
however, disparity has existed between how she might view herself and her work,
and how the media has represented her. Helen Davies has addressed this in her
examination of ‘a range of tactics’ that she states have been used by the music
media ‘to obscure and denigrate the work of female artists’ (2001, p. 302). These
include being ignored completely, defined by gender only, described as female
equivalents of male stars, awarded unfavourable comparisons with men, placed
in competition with other female artists, asked questions in interview on subjects
that place emphasis on their femininity, insulted as women, depicted as physically
small and childlike, and appraised according to their appearance and clothing with
their sexuality foregrounded (pp. 302–3). Although these tactics are said to concern
‘female artists’ in general, they provide a useful context for this chapter in which I
examine the representation of the female singer-songwriter and the female singer-
songwriter/producer (or artist-producer) in an area of print media within the arts
sections of the British broadsheet press. I focus on two musicians, Thea Gilmore
and Isobel Campbell, examining their representation in three publications, The
Guardian, sister publication The Observer, and The Independent, between 2002
and 2010.
The constructed image of ‘the singer/songwriter/folkie lady – longhaired and
pure voiced, self-accompanied on the guitar’ (Frith and McRobbie, 1978, p. 377)
stretches back to the 1960s, and the impact of this stereotype on the representation
of women who write and perform their own music has not gone unnoticed by
feminist popular music scholars (see Bayton, 1998; Kruse, 2002; O’Brien, 2002;
Feigenbaum, 2005). This role is seen to affirm traditional ideas about femininity
and as such has presented no threat to established patriarchal frameworks of
creativity in music (see Green, 1997, p. 111). Between 2002 and 2005, however,
I discerned two distinct trends in the representation of the female singer-songwriter
in the broadsheet press associated with liberal and centre-left views which suggest
an interesting development. The first is acknowledgement of the historical gender

stereotyping that has taken place. This raises the question as to whether a shift
was taking place in which the work of a female singer-songwriter might precede
her gender in the media’s assessment of her. The second trend is the adoption of a
formula whereby a female singer-songwriter was assessed in terms of her success
or failure at having broken the mould of what is perceived to be a ‘typical’ female
singer-songwriter. Those women who, in the critics’ view, were typical were
dismissed. I argue in this chapter that these two characteristics position the media
representation of the female singer-songwriter in the early years of the digital age
in a transitional space whereby familiar gender stereotyping is employed alongside
some recognition (or at least knowingness), in this sector of print media, of its
potential redundancy. To illustrate this, I reference three features. A male journalist
wrote the first feature I mention in 2005, on the debut release of Canadian female
singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, Drowned in Sound (2005).1 The remaining
two features, written by female music journalists two years earlier, discuss the
work of the English singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore. In the first feature, John
Harris writes:
If Wainwright escapes all the assumptions bound up with her surname, however,
another trap awaits her: the iron rule whereby nine-tenths of solo females
are accorded the dread description ‘singer songwriter’, and thus boxed into a
stereotype from which there is no escape. From Tori Amos, through Nora Jones
and Beth Orton, and onto such left field talents as Laura Veirs, dozens of women
have been subject to exactly that kind of treatment and swiftly reduced to a
cartoon melange of flowing skirts, pre-Raphaelite hairdos, wicker chairs, eternal
comparisons with Joni Mitchell, and the recurrent and very sexist suggestion
that they might be slightly nuts. (Harris, 2005, p. 3)
Harris’s critique here usefully highlights the manner in which the only term that
exists to describe a woman who writes and performs her own songs has been turned
into a form of insult. It also serves to challenge what Mavis Bayton has described
as the ‘hegemonic masculine view’ (1998, p. 3) in popular music. My interest in
this chapter, therefore, is to consider whether Harris’s piece marked a palpable
shift to challenge what Norma Coates has described as ‘invisible yet potent rules of
power … to keep women firmly in their marginal place’ (1997, p. 53), or whether
it was simply a lone voice within music journalism that historically has written for
a male audience (see Kruse, 2002; McLeod, 2002).
In the first of the two Gilmore features, the critic openly acknowledges and
appears to condemn the music industry’s tendency to market a female artist
primarily by her sexuality. A closer inspection, however, reveals endorsement of the
1
Although Wainwright is not European, I include this sample to illustrate that the
stereotypes that have been imposed on female singer-songwriters are blind to influences
that geographical location or nationality may have had on an individual woman’s music.
‘I Write the Songs. He’s the Eye Candy’ 97
very values it purports to criticize. Based on an interview with the artist, the article
states that Gilmore refuses to be controlled and sexualized as a female artist and has
turned down numerous record deal offers by major labels based on these principles.
However, the notion of Gilmore’s potential sexuality precedes and even supersedes
any discussion of her work and adheres to the formulaic approach highlighted by
Davies (2001). The feature opens with direct reference to Gilmore’s appearance
and body, which is followed by some background on her career and only a brief
mention of the actual music. Inappropriate comparisons are made with other female
artists, and the article closes by emphasizing once again what Gilmore looks like
rather than what her music sounds like. The opening sentence reads: ‘Thea Gilmore
is a head turner. Money can’t buy that sort of long, leggy figure, or those angular
Liv Tylerish features’ (Sullivan, 2003, p. 17). Although it appears to challenge
sexualization, Sullivan’s assessment is so entrenched in the gendered constructions
historically used to define a woman musician’s identity that it is impossible for the
text to move beyond those parameters. The article suggests support for non-sexist
representation: ‘Without being all right on about it, Gilmore has no truck whatever
with image’ (p. 17). Yet the following sentence reads: ‘Yes, it’s easy to yap about
integrity when you’re pretty anyway’ (p. 17). The paragraph then states that ‘her
stance’ – that is, the desire to be judged by her music rather than her body – ‘makes
her unique among rising pop turns’ (p. 17). This positions Gilmore in competition
with other female singer-songwriters. More worryingly, it suggests that it is unusual,
and by implication suspect, that a woman artist should want to be represented in
a non-sexist manner. The containment of Gilmore’s achievements through their
placement within the boundaries imposed by the journalist’s conformity to gender-
based sexism, is cemented by the closing comments:
although half hidden in the corner of a King’s Road lunch joint, she is still given
the once over by every passing male, including Xavier the waiter, who plops
a bread roll on her plate with distinctly more zing than he did mine. (Sullivan,
2003, p. 17)
The article makes some reference to Gilmore’s work, but it closes as it opens,
with a depiction of her physicality, leaving the reader with a lasting image of
her body rather than an enduring idea about her music: ‘As she rises from the
table, all 5ft 11inches of her, people openly stare’ (p. 17). The same pattern is
repeated in a second feature that appeared in The Independent, also written by a
female journalist:
She wonders if it’s because she’s been too busy working on her albums … to
transform herself into a sex kitten: ‘The trouble is you walk into a record shop
and most of the pictures of women are in these coquettish, fuck-me poses. Just
what is that about?’
So Ian Brown, the veteran label boss who has created Hungry Dog Records
especially for Gilmore, hasn’t tried to sex her up? ‘Ian Brown wouldn’t be alive
if he tried to do that to me,’ Gilmore ripostes with the kind of throaty growl that’s
far sexier than any Photoshop-ed [sic] album sleeve. (Grey, 2003, p. 17)
In both articles, therefore, a tension exists between the reporting of Gilmore’s

rejection of sexism and a focus on the artist’s sexuality that neither of the
female journalists can avoid. This indicates an ongoing dependency on sexist
representation as the only ‘appropriate discourse for pop music writing’ (Davies,
2001, p. 304) alongside the desire to challenge the patriarchal and sexualized
objectification associated with such discourse. I draw attention to the gender of
the two journalists here as it has been suggested that the historical minority status
of women in music journalism is a possible reason for some female journalists’
employment of the ‘tactics’ outlined by Davies (also see Evans, 1997; McLeod,
2002; Kruse, 2002; Leonard, 2007). The stance adopted by Sullivan and Grey
might be read, therefore, as an example of the pressure imposed on women music
critics to become ‘one of the boys’ and to identify with ‘their male peers rather than
with the women on whom they comment’ (Davies, 2001, p. 304). Furthermore, I
would argue that evidence of such tensions within a liberal sector of the British
broadsheet press known for promoting women’s views simply serves to reinforce
the ingrained nature of the problem.
The acknowledgement of both critics of the sexism that pervades the
discourse in this period, along with the reporting of Gilmore’s objections to it,
might be seen as progress when viewed in isolation. That optimism is dampened,
however, by evidence two years later of a vitriolic reception to female singer-
songwriters in response to the use of personal experiences as subject matter for
their songs, or for simply calling themselves female singer-songwriters. Two
examples stand out. The first is taken from a Guardian review by a male critic
of an acoustic version of the album Jagged Little Pill, by the Canadian singer-
songwriter Alanis Morissette:
every song features at least one line so clumsy it makes you want to chew your
knuckles off … ‘Is she perverted like me?’ asks the album’s most famous lyric,
‘would she go down on you in a theatre?’ You start to wonder if the line stands out
not because of the shock value … but because the image it conjures up involves
Alanis Morissette having to shut up for five minutes. (Petridis, 2005, p. 20)2
The second example is taken from a feature in The Observer that considers what it
means to be ‘a woman and a pop star’ in Britain in this period, with female singer-
songwriters taking the brunt of the female journalist’s hostility:
2
Thematic use of ‘personal concerns’ has been associated with the female singer-
songwriter (O’Brien, 2002, p. 181) and used as a form of criticism in a way that has not
occurred in the case of male singer-songwriters (Grieg, 1997, p. 168). Although this book
is concerned with the singer-songwriter in Europe, I include this Morissette review as it
provides a particularly powerful illustration.
Now is not a great time to be British, a woman and a pop star … if they’re
brunette, take themselves a touch seriously musically and are determined to piss
me personally off – they can acquire an acoustic guitar, some whimsy, some
mindless rhetoric as lyrics and launch themselves as the latest spawn of Dido/
Melua/Norah Jones. (Vernon, 2005, p. 47)
An awareness on Gilmore’s part of this kind of media response to any open

admission to being inspired by her own emotional experiences is suggested by
her comment in the aforementioned interview that ‘I don’t write love songs’ (in
Sullivan, 2003, p. 17).
In the next section of the chapter I argue that the problematic representation
of the female singer-songwriter between 2002 and 2005 foreshadows the way
in which a woman is represented when she produces her own work from 2006
onwards. I also argue that the historic gendering that has taken place in the field of
music production itself has a considerable influence on this media representation.
To illustrate this, I present samples of reviews and features that assess three
albums written and produced by Scottish female singer-songwriter and producer
Isobel Campbell between 2006 and 2010. The samples reveal a pattern in which
the reliance on the conventions of gender stereotyping associated with the female
singer-songwriter lessens once Campbell states her intention to retreat as performer
and work as producer-writer only.
Campbell has performed a number of roles in her career: singer, cellist,
composer, singer-songwriter and artist-producer. She presents an intriguing
hybrid of the singer-songwriter to artist-producer career route in that she has
chosen a male vocalist to co-perform her music. Therefore, the production process
she navigates concerns not only the development of her own sound and voice,
both literally and figuratively, but also the achievement of the required vocal
performance from another artist. Mark Lanegan is former singer of the alternative
rock bands Screaming Trees and Queens of The Stone Age and was chosen by
Campbell specifically for the significant contrast that his vocals provide when
placed next to hers.
Below I argue that reviews of Campbell’s work struggle to represent her as
singer-songwriter/artist-producer and Lanegan as singer as these roles are at
odds with established gendered perceptions of creative control in a male/female
dynamic within a music production context (see Bayton, 1998; Mayhew, 2004).
Historically music production has been gendered as a masculine arena of creativity
(Empire, 2005, p. 14) as has songwriting (O’Brien, 2002, pp. 179–81) and creative
genius (Battersby, 1989, pp. 15–32). I posit that a woman in control of her own
creativity, as a producer as well as a songwriter, challenges such gendering and
introduces ‘complications into the patterns of exclusion’ (p. 32) that characterize
the situation of women artists in popular music. I also suggest that it is easy to
contain the achievements of a female singer-songwriter through gendered media
discourse because it is a role that historically she has been permitted to inhabit (see
Green, 1997, p. 113). Music industry discourses (which incorporate music media)
have constructed her image and can therefore control it. To be a female singer-
songwriter and producer, however, breaks the rules. It disrupts the established order
and is too much of an anomaly. Therefore her achievements must be skirted over,
ignored or awarded to any male figure that may have taken part in the production
process, such as an engineer.3 Emma Mayhew usefully clarifies the gendered
frameworks within which music production is positioned and foregrounds the
‘patriarchal assumptions’ (2004, p. 152) that Campbell challenges. However,
before the media can focus on her work rather than her gender, Campbell has to
abandon the outward marker of her gender, her voice. I also suggest that she has to
abandon the gendered description of female singer-songwriter. In other words she
has to remove both the female and the singer component from the female singer-
songwriter construction before she can be represented as songwriter and producer.
The first Guardian review, written by a female critic, assesses Campbell’s
2006, Mercury Prize nominated album, Ballad of The Broken Seas (V2). Focusing
on Campbell’s songwriting, it fails to mention her production work and uses the
familiar tactic of positioning her in competition with other artists (see Davies,
2001, pp. 302–3): ‘While the swarm of KT Tunstalls, Katie Meluas and Didos jostle
for the title of Queen of British Music, Isobel Campbell has been unassumingly
wearing the crown for some time’ (Barton, 2006, p. 18). In the same year this
review appeared, I witnessed the then editor of The Observer Music Monthly,
Casper Llewellyn Smith, openly acknowledge at the music industry conference
‘London Calling’ that men formed the target audience for music journalism. This
perhaps explains Barton’s use of the collective noun ‘swarm’ (that connotes danger
yet also uniformity) and the positioning of ‘jostle’, both of which suggest a manner
of musical catfight for the voyeuristic delectation of the targeted male reader.
Parallels emerge with Anna Feigenbaum’s study of the representation of singer
songwriter Ani Di Franco, in which she notes that focus on Di Franco’s guitar
playing increases the use of technical language that shifts attention away from her
gender but ‘at the expense of other women’ (2005, pp. 52–3). In Barton’s feature,
Campbell’s songwriting acts as the lever, but her production work is ignored.
While Bayton has stated that ‘Women are rarely asked about playing their
instruments and often presented in sexual terms, rather than as craftswomen
serious about their work’ (1998, p. 3), Barton’s representation of Campbell as
songwriter arguably goes some way to presenting her as a craftswoman serious
about her work. Yet that representation cannot stretch as far as portraying her also
as a music producer: directing, steering and controlling her craft. To do so would
shatter the patriarchal hegemony in popular music observed by John Shepherd
in which men control and women ‘must be controlled and manipulated’ (1991,
p. 156; my italics).
3
A parallel in the field of electronic music appeared when Björk (2008) posted a
blog on her website in which she expressed her frustration at the assumption in a music
press review that all the instrumentals on her album Vespertine had been written by Valgeir
Sigurðsson, one of the album’s programmers and engineers.
In Barton’s article, a play on the name of Campbell’s former band depicts her
working relationship with Lanegan: ‘From Belle and Sebastian to la belle and
la bête is a smart move for Campbell’ (Barton, 2006, p. 18). The reference to
the traditional fairy tale here invokes an image of the gendered role of passivity
awarded female characters in this genre whereby a young, beautiful girl is rewarded
for her kindness to the beast by love and marriage (see Haase, 2004). In Campbell’s
case the reward is ‘something of a musical transition’ (Barton, 2006, p. 18), and
the description of her choice to work with Lanegan as ‘a smart move’ suggests
a knowingness that further undercuts her achievements. Stating that Campbell
challenges the ‘tried-and-tested formula in rock music’ of ‘pairing innocent young
chanteuses with older, raddled ne’er-do-well male vocalists’, Barton clarifies that
‘[t]his album bucks the trend a little’ (p. 18; my italics) by Campbell’s composition
of all but one of the tracks on the album. What is not mentioned is that Campbell
also produced them. Instead, the statement is followed by the remarks that
‘[s]till, it displays an earthy sexuality’. In other words, the album is awarded such
a reading in spite of the songs being written by Campbell (a young female) as
opposed to Lanegan (an older male). The suggestion, therefore, is that Lanegan’s
performance lends the album this quality, and that music connoting ‘earthy’ (that
is male) sexuality is favoured. The critic may state ‘[i]t is, in short, Campbell’s
coming of age’ (p. 18), but the impression created for the reader is that it is thanks
to Lanegan.
Two years later, a Guardian review of Campbell’s second album with Lanegan,
Sunday at Devil Dirt (V2, 2008), also written by a female critic, completely ignores
her songwriting and production work and focuses entirely on the contrast in both
their vocals (Clarke, 2008). It fails to recognize that the contrast is the very sonic
effect that Campbell, as both songwriter and producer, sought in her juxtaposing
the two vocal styles. In accordance with John Shepherd’s observation that only ‘[s]
oft female timbres … are usually acceptable to male-dominated culture’ (1991,
p. 170), here the critic compares the two vocal styles and positions Campbell’s
as inferior: ‘she is a girlish presence rather than a partner’ (Clarke, 2008, p. 9).
Thus Clarke reinforces a masculine view of the world represented by the male vocal
(see Shepherd, 1991, p. 172) propped up by a status quo historically maintained
due to the male domination of music journalism (McLeod, 2002, p. 94). Moreover,
an illustration of Kembrew McLeod’s suggestion that employment of figurative
language to connote male-associated characteristics sustains gender inequality
within the music industry (2002, pp. 95–8) can be found in the opening description
of Lanegan’s voice with the repetition of the same adjective as in the review two
years previously: ‘Lanegan’s growl is an earthy joy’ (Clarke, 2008, p. 9). In contrast,
Campbell’s vocals are described as an ‘innocent whisper’ on ‘Salvation’ and as
‘cooing’ on ‘Seafaring Song’ (p. 9). An image of masculinity, therefore, is presented
against which Campbell cannot hope to compete. The only occasion when her voice
is viewed favourably is when she is described as ‘shedding her delicate skin’ in order
to become ‘Lanegan’s worthy soul mate’ on the ‘lusty’ and ‘smoky’ track ‘Come on
Over (Turn Me On)’ (p. 9). However, Campbell is portrayed as having to work to
deserve her position: the pre-modifiers once again present sexuality as a basis on
which to judge a vocal performance, and the only acceptable sexuality within the
constructed parameters is one that is ‘earthy’ and masculine.
Evidence of progress, however, appears in a feature in The Observer by
another female journalist in the same period. This includes a question posed by
the journalist that acknowledges the perception of disempowerment associated
with being a female band member: ‘Campbell left Belle and Sebastian because
she craved creative freedom … I asked if she felt like the girl in the band without
a voice and she says, “kind of”’(Raphael, 2008, p. 11). The journalist then states
that ‘[d]espite having complete creative control, little has changed’ (p. 11). As
with the Harris review, some progress might be read in the inclusion of this
acknowledgment and in the reporting of Campbell’s frustration at the assumption
expressed by a fan after a gig that both the songs and the band were Lanegan’s:
Mark and I played Newcastle, and afterwards this guy came backstage. He went
up to Mark and said, ‘Yeah mate, great songs, great band.’ Mark just nodded. I
was sitting there thinking, ‘They’re my fucking songs! It’s my band! I produced
the records!’ But I didn’t say anything. I just thought, ker-ching! I get the
publishing but I hate it. (Raphael, 2008, p. 11)
The reporting of both Lanegan’s and Campbell’s response, however, suggests

ambiguity. Is Lanegan’s nod a sign of his condoning the assumption or simply an
act of weary lip service to a fan? Does the implication that financial rewards do
not compensate for Campbell’s frustration at gendered assumptions about creative
control give her a ‘voice’ or reinforce a sense of powerlessness?
A more decisive shift can be detected two years later. A Guardian review
of Campbell’s third album with Lanegan, Hawk (V2, 2010), opens with direct
repetition of Barton’s (2006) suggestion that employing Lanegan to sing her songs
was ‘a smart move’ (Costa, 2010, p. 9). It also repeats the hierarchical positioning
of Lanegan’s vocals against Campbell’s. An interesting development, however,
lies in the suggestion that Campbell ‘might make an even smarter move, by hiring
another female vocalist as his foil’ (p. 9). Women artists are assumed to be ‘just
the singer’, until they state their positions as otherwise, and the positioning of
the singer and the ‘natural’ voice as less skilful than that of an instrumentalist or
songwriter or producer has been used to denigrate the woman singer’s role (see
Frith, 1988, p. 155; Bayton, 1998, p. 13). It is no surprise, then, that although
the critic rejects Campbell’s voice, once it is taken out of the equation, gender
is put to one side and the terms ‘songwriter, arranger and producer’ are used
as descriptors for Campbell’s work: ‘Hawk impresses instead with its signs of
Campbell’s increased confidence as songwriter, arranger and producer’ (Costa,
2010, p. 9). The very use of these terms challenges the ‘patriarchal assumptions’
(Mayhew, 2004, p. 152) associated with such roles. Furthermore, as the criticism
of Campbell’s vocals is couched within a production context, it is counterbalanced
by praise for her songwriting and production skills.
In a Guardian feature from the same period, Campbell’s production work

dominates the discourse, propelled by her stated intention to move from artist-
producer to producer. In an early section there is interesting use of a declarative
complex sentence with the main clause placed at the start: ‘She’s no muse, rather
the songwriter and producer of their records’ (Chick, 2010, p. 9). The syntactical
choice dismisses use of ‘muse’ as a gendered marker of female passivity, the object
of the male genius’s gaze. Instead, the following subordinate clause starting with
the subordinating conjunction ‘rather’ draws attention to the terms ‘songwriter’
and ‘producer’. The use of the possessive pronoun ‘their’ implies joint ownership
of Campbell’s and Lanegan’s recordings. However, the syntactical choices
preceding this description position Campbell as the figure of creative control. The
sentence that follows confirms her status, drawing on (as in previous reviews)
the perception of the producer/singer binary: ‘She’s the Lee to Lanegan’s Nancy,
the auteur directing the drama and setting the scene’ (p. 9). This time, however,
only first names are used, in implicit recognition that the targeted readership
understands the alignment that has been established between the music producer
and the film director (see Negus, 1992; Massey 2009) and with notions of authorship
(see Mayhew, 2004). The choice of ‘auteur’ subsequently adds weight to the
description of Campbell ‘directing the drama and setting the scene’ that follows.
Syntactically, these descriptions are incorporated within a compound sentence
structure. In both grammatical and semantic terms, therefore, both activities are
given equal weighting, an equality further augmented by the alliterative value
of each of the dynamic verb choices and paired compliments. The overall result
is a clear image presented to the reader of Campbell in creative control. The
sentence that ends this section starts with reported speech from Campbell: ‘He’s
the eye-candy,’ giggles Campbell. ‘I know many women who think he’s dead hot’
(Chick, 2010, p. 9).
This article thus subverts the way which ‘solo female performers’ have been
placed ‘in a creatively suspect position’ as a result of ‘patriarchal discourses’
(Mayhew, 2004, p. 152). It also communicates a sense of fun in Campbell’s
character rather than an attempt to undermine. A second paragraph in this section
offers Lanegan’s perspective:
‘It’s unique in my body of work,’ says Lanegan, who grins for the only time in
the interview when I suggest he is Clint Eastwood to Campbell’s Sergio Leone.
‘Usually I write the music, and am involved in the production. Here, my only job
is to inhabit these songs, relate to them, to express them. It’s a learning process,
a journey of discovery.’ (Chick, 2010, p. 9)
The inclusion of this paragraph in the feature acknowledges the patriarchal

positioning of the producer and performer: Lanegan is presented as stressing his
‘usual’ role in contrast to the one he performed for Campbell, thus avoiding the
problematic representation associated with being ‘just the singer’ as noted above.
Yet an unspoken fear can be discerned in Lanegan’s comment of being awarded
the same treatment. His closing comments, therefore, elevate his performative role
in the suggestion that he knowingly views his ‘job’ of ‘only’ performing the songs
as ‘a learning process’ and ‘a journey of discovery’ (p. 9; my italics). The question
that arises, however, is whether Lanegan would have felt the same need to justify
his position if Campbell, as songwriter and producer had been male, and whether
his justification would have been included in the piece.
In another section of the same feature, the distinction between the roles
performed by the two artists is emphasized. In the opening sentence, Campbell
is reported as stating: ‘My songs are drawn from my life, but his voice is perfect
at narrating them, at expressing them’ (Chick, 2010, p. 9). The repetition of the
possessive pronoun here, combined with her description of Lanegan’s voice,
confirms Campbell’s ownership of the work and positions her as both creator and
director. Her role as director is given further authority by the inclusion of the
comparison she draws between Lanegan’s voice and her instrument, the cello:
Campbell says Lanegan’s voice reminds her of her cello. So steeped in regret
and experience, it allows her to tap into a deeper blues than her own voice could
reach, an authentic conduit to the Americana her songs seek to evoke. (Chick,
2010, p. 9)
The reporting of her choice to use Lanegan’s voice for its lower registers
allows the critic to avoid derogatory descriptions of the limitations of Campbell’s
vocal range. Instead, Lanegan’s voice is awarded status as ‘an authentic conduit’
and Campbell’s authority is underlined by reporting her knowing use of it as
a vehicle to perform her work. Her authority is further reinforced when, in the
sentence that follows, the reader is told that Lanegan benefits from her artistic
vision and direction:
In return, she takes him outside of his comfort zone, with excellent results: casting
him as torch-song suitor on the sweltering Southern soul of Come Undone, or
calling upon him to deliver the sultry, sexual menace of Back Burner, she finds
hitherto-undiscovered nuances for him. (p. 9)
Later the piece states that ‘Campbell’s comfort zone, as she’s discovered,
is the recording studio’ (p. 9). To describe a work place normally gendered as
masculine (Cohen, 1991; Théberge, 1997; Bayton, 1998; Leonard, 2007) as an
environment where Campbell feels most at ease challenges the marginalization
of women in sound engineering and music production. The description of
‘Campbell’s comfort zone’ also provides a reference to the creative journey a
singer-songwriter undergoes as a result of the development of production skills:
‘For Hawk, as with their debut, she arranged and recorded the songs by herself first,
Lanegan adding his vocals later’ (Chick, 2010, p. 9). The journalist follows these
comments by highlighting the ‘creative freedom’ Campbell has enjoyed making
these albums, stating that it is ‘a far cry from her days in Belle & Sebastian, where
singer-songwriter Stuart Murdoch was the undisputed leader’ (p. 9). The creative
freedom that accompanies the self-production process is then emphasized by the
inclusion of Campbell’s statement: ‘I love the freedom, to do what I want. I know
I’m on the right path’ (p. 9). Moreover, a further passage reads:
She says she’s gained a lot of confidence from working with Lanegan. ‘I used to
maybe be a little scared of him,’ she grins. ‘Or maybe in awe of him. And it’s not
like I don’t still think he’s the bee’s knees, but I know what I can do now, I know
I can go head to head with him.’ (p. 9)
Here Campbell’s ‘confidence’ is not just a result of having created the music and
written the arrangements, but from having successfully directed and attained the
required vocal performance from Lanegan in order to execute the creative vision
she had for her songs. Arguably, this confidence influences Campbell’s expressed
desire to produce other artists.
In the paragraph that follows, the critic states that Campbell has ‘learned much
from Lanegan’s focus on the music for its own reward’ (p. 9). Such a remark begs
the question as to why the critic feels the need to raise Lanegan’s status in this way.
Surely Campbell would not have embarked on a three-album journey spanning five
to six years if she did not already have a ‘focus on the music for its own reward’?
It might be read that the journalist, although he has acknowledged Campbell’s
production skills, cannot quite relinquish full credit to her in his assessment of her
achievements. However, it remains a minor point in the context of the review as a
whole. The final section of the feature is composed entirely of reported speech in
which Campbell repeatedly expresses her desire to progress from being a singer-
songwriter to a producer:
I’d love to be a producer, because I’d love a backroom role. I like playing live,
but what I love, what has made me so happy in the past year, has been working
behind the scenes in the studio. I can live without the spotlight, I just love being
part of the hustle and bustle of making great music. I’d be happy to go into
the studio every day and roll my sleeves up and muck in. I’d have a lot of fun.
(Chick, 2010, p. 9)
The use of repetition in this remark emphasizes the joy of creativity and the sense
of ‘fun’ that working in a recording studio engenders for Campbell. These are,
significantly, the final impressions created for the reader.
Conclusion
In the digital age the music press continues to play a significant role in marketing
campaigns by record labels to promote the release of an album, despite online
marketing practices. In this chapter I have posited that the print media review and/
or feature, although only read by a small section of the music market (see Frith,
2001, p. 39), remains a powerful tool, and that historical stereotyping and sexism
continue to influence the representation of the female singer-songwriter alongside
evidence of progress. I have also argued that the difficulties accompanying the
representation of the female singer-songwriter turned artist-producer are due
to the historic gendering that has taken place in both music creation and music
production. As a result the representation that takes place is characterized by
tensions and contradictions.
The situation of Campbell as singer-songwriter and producer, therefore,
presents an example of what Holly Kruse has described as women living out the
contradictions arising from the positioning of their ‘personal narratives’ within
music cultures that have been defined by ‘discourses of masculinity’ (2002,
p. 151). Although Campbell is in control of the creative processes accompanying
her personal narrative (thanks to her production skills), that control ends the
moment her press pack arrives on the desk of a reviews editor where ‘patriarchal
assumptions’ (Mayhew, 2004, p. 152) surrounding songwriting and production
still have a stronghold. Campbell made three albums with Lanegan, all of which
she wrote and produced. It is not until the third album, however, that gender is
fleetingly placed to one side so that the work itself forms the primary focus of
assessment and the representation moves beyond the usual methods of containment.
This only takes place because Campbell stresses her future role as producer-writer,
enabling the singing component of her work, the mark of her gender, to be taken
out of the equation. In real terms, the notion of progress I attach to Campbell’s
representation over the course of three albums is only deemed so because it
approximates the media representation awarded the male producer.4 Campbell
may challenge the restrictions accompanying the media image of the female
singer-songwriter through her production practices, but the established gendered
frameworks in which that journey takes place remain unchanged. This is not to
negate the evidence of progress in this sector of print media in the representation
of women who created and produced their own music between 2002 and 2010, but
it is clear that the dominant models of representation have not gone away.
Perhaps if we change the way we think about the work of the singer-songwriter,
not least in light of the increasing numbers of this type of artist developing music
production skills, there might be some possibility of addressing those models.
With this in mind I would challenge the recent suggestion that the role of a singer-
songwriter is limited to thinking ‘just about songs’ rather than ‘thinking more
compositionally’ (Frith, 2013). I am not suggesting a value judgement of those
artists who prefer to think ‘just about songs’, but rather that we should not presume
that an artist who describes her/himself as a singer-songwriter is not also ‘thinking
more compositionally’ as part of their work, growing evidence of which among
female singer-songwriters I have presented elsewhere (Wolfe, 2012).
4
See for example the portrayal of producer Mark Ronson in Petridis (2007, pp. 20–29).
A final point concerns the role of the female music critic. I suggested in my
aforementioned article a parallel between women entering the profession of music
journalism and the growth of female singer-songwriters engaged in production
practices as a result of access to new technologies. I cited the (at the time of
writing) editor of music magazine NME, Krissi Murison, who has observed a
gradual correcting of the gender imbalance in the profession, and who believes this
is due to the impact of blogging between 2007 and 2012 (Wolfe, 2012). This raises
the question as to whether an increased number of women entering the profession
might result in female journalists no longer having to ‘to accept the assumptions
and prejudices’ (Davies, 2001, p. 304) associated with gendered discourse, and
thus avoid employment of ‘misogynist conventions’ (Feigenbaum, 2005, p. 53) in
their writing. This remains to be seen. Bayton noted nearly twenty years ago that
‘[f]ew established artists have managed to gain control over the process of their
presentation’ (1998, p. 5). More recently, music critic Angus Finlayson (2011)
has drawn a connection between marketing practices, the gender imbalance in
music journalism, and the marginalizing impact on women, an observation
unchanged from those made a decade earlier (see Bradby and Laing, 2001;
Johnson-Grau 2002; Kruse, 2002; McLeod, 2002). The need persists, therefore,
for the status quo to be challenged, not just by female singer-songwriters taking
control over their sound, but by the female music critic celebrating that control
(see for example Empire, 2005, 2008, 2012; Laverne, 2013; Rogers 2013). This
will in turn challenge the patriarchal frameworks within music media discourse
that historically have imposed constraints on the representation of the work of the
female singer-songwriter and on the work of the woman music critic alike.
Chapter 7
In Germany After The War: Broadening the
Discourse on the Liedermacher
Dietmar Elflein
The general definition of the German Liedermacher that emerged in the 1960s is a
singer-songwriter who prefers to accompany him/herself on the acoustic guitar, and
who should be aware of the long history of Lied (poems set to music) in Germany,
which can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Yet the discourse on the
Liedermacher is by and large limited to a discourse of political song. Consequently,
artists are included in or excluded from the canon according to their political
engagement and/or affiliation. In addition, histories of the Liedermacher are
dominated by men; female Liedermacherinnen are excluded either along political
lines (especially if of East German origin) or simply because of male (historians’)
chauvinism.1 This chapter seeks to broaden this view. I start by detailing the
normative discourse surrounding the Liedermacher and its three principal figures:
the West Germans Franz Josef Degenhardt and Dieter Süverkrüp, and the East
German Wolf Biermann. Counter to the aforementioned hegemonic discourse,
I then revisit the history of the West German and East German Liedermacher, in
order to provide a more nuanced approach to political song, calling attention to
a number of marginalized or forgotten artists in both German states, including
several women. In my conclusion I outline areas where further research is required.
The Discourse on the Liedermacher
The historical discourse on the Liedermacher is dominated by the writings of

West German academics and journalists. Before reunification almost all available
references to this figure were published in West Germany (Kaiser, 1967; Kröher
and Kröher, 1969; Hornig, 1974; Riha, 1979; Rothschild, 1980; Brigl and Schmidt-
Joos, 1985; 1986). Not until 1993 was the first popular study of the East German
Liedermacher tradition published – by founder member and former head of the
East German Oktoberklub (see below), Lutz Kirchenwitz. Even nowadays, hardly
1
I retain the German term in recognition of its differences from the anglophone
‘singer-songwriter’. I modify Liedermacher accordingly to indicate female artists (the
singular Liedermacherin, the plural Liedermacherinnen). The (implicitly) male term
Liedermacher does not change in the plural.
any academic work on the East German Liedermacher – with the exception of one
particular artist, Wolf Biermann – has been published. While it is true that East and
West German Liedermacher shared many opinions regarding their artistic work
and value, and similar ideals and role models, we must also recognize that they
worked in different states with different ideologies and different cultural policies,
and that this had several consequences for their artistic work. Nevertheless, West
German scholars continue to subsume the East German Liedermacher in their
writings, without acknowledging such differences.
This dominant (West German) discourse on the (mainly West German)
Liedermacher assumes that he/she is someone who not only writes and sings his/
her own lyrics in German,2 accompanying him/herself on an instrument of choice
(usually the acoustic guitar), but whose songs also explore explicitly social and
political subject matters (Kaiser, 1967; Kröher and Kröher, 1969; Hornig, 1974;
Riha, 1979; Rothschild, 1980; Kirchenwitz, 1993; Böning, 2004a; Götsch, 2007;
Löding, 2010; Kleff, 2013).
It is generally agreed that the Liedermacher emerged in both Germanies in the
1960s, although different events in each state are cited as foundational myths. It
is also generally agreed that the international folk revival and French chanson –
especially the work of Georges Brassens (Djagalov, 2013, p. 159) – played a crucial
role in the birth of the Liedermacher in both German states. Yet some disagreement
exists as regards when this term was coined. Rothschild (1980, p. 7), Kirchenwittz
(1993, pp. 21–3) and Götsch (2007, p. 9) erroneously credit the East German
Liedermacher Wolf Biermann with its ‘invention’. According to these scholars,
Marxist composer Hanns Eisler suggested the term to Biermann, who then adopted
it to describe his own artistic work. In fact, the term Liedermacher, as well as the
figure’s socio-critical and satirical functions, can be traced back to the songs of
farmers and craftspeople in the eighteenth century (Kleff, 2006, pp. 1–2). Other
scholars have drawn connections between the Liedermacher and the culture of
the Roaring Twenties: German chanson, satirical revues and cabaret populated by
composers like Mischa Spoliansky, Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Weill and Hanns
Eisler; lyricists like Frank Wedekind, Erich Kästner, Bertold Brecht and Kurt
Tucholsky; and singers like Trude Hesterberg, Rosa Valetti, Gussy Holl and
Claire Waldoff (see Riha, 1979; Robb, 2007; Stahrenberg, 2012). Such studies
suggest that Biermann’s use of the term is less an invention than a recovery of past
musical conventions.
This disagreement surrounding the term’s inception is not so much
historiographical as it is political. By crediting Biermann, Rothschild and others
endeavoured to underline the centrality to the new Liedermacher of a specific political
attitude. According to Rothschild (1980, p. 7) a ‘real’ Liedermacher is outspokenly
left-wing and stands in opposition to the authorities: West German Liedermacher
opposed the capitalist government of West Germany, and East German Liedermacher
2
The language of the lyrics has to be German, but the Liedermacher him/herself is
not necessarily a West or East German citizen: Austrian and Swiss artists are also included.
In Germany After The War 111
opposed existing socialism in East Germany. Indeed, Rothschild demands that such
a political standpoint dominates the artist’s musical output and personal life: a
Liedermacher’s authenticity derives from writing political songs from a left-wing
perspective. If any Liedermacher does not meet these standards, he/she is in danger
of being excluded from the canon for writing what Rothschild denounces – with
reference to the West German Reinhard May (1980, p. 10) – as neoconservative
lyrics, or for including too much sensitivity and emotional vulnerability – with
reference to the East German Bettina Wegner (Rothschild 1980, p. 8). Rothschild’s
twenty-three portraits of Liedermacher, which include only one East German (the
originator Biermann) and only two women (one solo artist and the female half
of a duo), continue to influence the canon for histories of the Liedermacher both
before and after reunification. The demand of a certain political correctness as
defined by journalists and academics like Rothschild restricts the discourse on the
Liedermacher to a discourse on left-wing political song.
Yet this restriction is not Rothschild’s invention; it was part of the zeitgeist
of the Cold War and the student protests of 1968, in tune with the tone of earlier
publications, such as Kaiser’s journalistic summary of the folk movement and the
birth of the Liedermacher (1967), Hornig’s dissertation on the subject (1974), and
Riha’s history of the engagierten Liedes (politically engaged song) (1979). Almost
all these authors reference the same two or three artists as being synonymous
with the German Liedermacher tradition: the East German Wolf Biermann, who
criticized the East German version of socialism from a communist perspective,
and the West German communists Dieter Süverkrüp and Franz Josef Degenhardt.
For this reason, the uncritical and affirmative standpoint of the latter two artists as
regards the politics of the East German government is usually hidden away in a
footnote. Such an exclusivist approach continues to hinder contemporary studies of
the Liedermacher: Götsch (2007) compares Degenhardt and Biermann under the
label left-wing Liedermacher, while Kleff (2013) includes Degenhardt in the title
of his historic survey of the Liedermacher scene in a publication for the Federal
Agency of Civic Education. Likewise, authors such as Böning (2004a), Robb (2007)
and Löding (2010) write about German left-wing political song with reference to
this trio of Liedermacher. Academic writing that focuses on the Liedermacher
tradition irrespective of political song is extremely rare, if not nonexistent.
Biermann, Degenhardt and Süverkrüp dominate the aforementioned histories
of the Liedermacher because they meet every criteria of the hegemonic definition:
all three are highly talented lyricists and songwriters, play the acoustic guitar, had
started their career by the early 1960s, were influenced by Georges Brassens, are
(or have been) communists, and have created a significant repertoire of political
songs. And crucially, they are believed to be true to their political beliefs in their
everyday lives. This fidelity to one’s own views and opinions is what Allan Moore
labels ‘first person authenticity’ (2002, p. 14).
The idea of authenticity that is an important part of the Liedermacher discourse
is perfectly exemplified by Biermann. Born in Hamburg, West Germany, Biermann
moved to East Germany (GDR) because of his communist beliefs in the early 1950s.
Yet his constant problems with East German authorities resulted in a ban from public
performance and recording in the GDR from 1965 onwards, culminating in his
expatriation in 1976.3 Biermann was therefore a prominent victim of the socialist GDR
government’s ostracism of committed communists. During his ban he compounded
his subversive actions by smuggling home recordings of songs to West Germany
for release,4 even though he was (or should have been) under constant surveillance
by the East German state security STASI. From the 1960s onwards, Biermann was
a celebrity in both East and West Germany. To West Germans, Biermann appeared
a lone fighter against the East German version of socialism, while to East Germans
he was an outstanding part of a new generation of artists and a link with the older
generation of Brecht and Eisler. Biermann owed his fame in East Germany to his
activities until his ban in 1965, and his fame in West Germany to the ban itself.
Biermann’s fame overshadows the fact there was a Liedermacher scene
beyond him in East Germany. A broadening of the picture of the East German
Liedermacher is therefore required, and not only to prove wrong Rothschild’s
argument (1980, p. 8) that these other Liedermacher did not oppose East German
authorities like Biermann.
Süverkrüp’s authenticity, on the other hand, stems from being an outspoken
orthodox Marxist from the very beginning of his career in the 1950s and, therefore,
from his opposition to the anti-communist West German political discourse during
the Cold War. He released what is now widely seen as the first record of what
was soon to become the West German Liedermacher genre, Ça Ira: Lieder der
französischen Revolution (Ça Ira: Songs of the French Revolution) in 1958, sang
at the Easter marches for peace from 1960 onwards, and performed at the first Burg
Waldeck Festival, Chanson Folklore International: Junge Europäer singen (Young
Europeans Sing), in 1964. All histories agree that this festival is the starting point
of the West German Liedermacher (as a revitalization of past musical tradition).
In addition, Süverkrüp was important as an entrepreneur: he was co-founder of
the pläne (plans) publishing company, which developed into an independent label
devoted to political song until its closure in 2011.5 Because of his political beliefs,
3
Biermann’s ban was a decision of the 11th Assembly of the Central Committee of the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED. Many beat bands were also banned or were forced to
stop playing because of their perceived promotion of western decadence. The 11th Assembly
ended a short phase of greater cultural freedom in the GDR that resulted from the closing
of the borders between the two German states (including the erection of the Berlin Wall in
1961) as the carrot to isolationism’s stick. Biermann’s expatriation followed the first concert
of the West German tour he was allowed to do, because GDR authorities wanted to get rid
of him. The concert was broadcast by West German TV and is available on YouTube: www.
youtube.com/watch?v=NPLrl_Z4Bf8 (accessed 4 January 2015). Biermann’s expatriation is
documented in detail by Berbig et al. (1994).
4
1968 EP 4 neue Lieder (Four New Songs) (Biermann, 1968) was the first release of
this kind.
5
The company was responsible for the first German releases of Mikis Theodorakis
and Víctor Jara, besides several Liedermacher and folk singers.
the West German Süverkrüp was a member of the German communist party DKP
loyal to Moscow, and supported the GDR authorities until reunification. For this
reason, he defended the invasion to end the Prague Spring and shunned Biermann
after his expatriation.
Biermann and Süverkrüp were therefore politically opposed from the start of
their careers. Yet histories of the Liedermacher do not treat them as such. Instead
they are held up as prototypical examples of left-wing opposition to the authorities
of the German country in which they worked. Rothschild paints Süverkrüp as an
unparalleled political hawk (1980, p. 170), but includes him in his publication
all the same, while excluding several East German Liedermacher who shared
Süverkrüp’s attitude regarding the Prague Spring.
Because of Süverkrüp’s orthodox political beliefs, Franz-Josef Degenhardt
is usually cited as the prototype of a more flexible left-wing West German
Liedermacher. Degenhardt’s authenticity not only stems from his status as the only
artist to perform at all six Burg Waldeck festivals, but also from his opposition to
the West German authorities. At the beginning of his career in the first half of the
1960s, Degenhardt was praised because of his poetic depictions of a sclerotic,
conservative, authoritarian and dull everyday life in West Germany. During the
student revolts of the late 1960s, however, he developed ever more orthodox
communist beliefs (see Riha, 1979; Götsch, 2007; Kleff, 2013). His lyrics changed
as a consequence, too. In 1968 he released a song called ‘Zwischentöne sind bloß
Krampf im Klassenkampf’ (Nuances are a Drag in Class War), and started to work
as a lawyer to defend protestors who had been arrested. Having been a university
lecturer beforehand, he also became renowned as an intellectual. In consonance
with his more orthodox later beliefs, Degenhardt joined DKP in 1978, two years
after Biermann’s expatriation.
Degenhardt and Biermann, therefore – like Süverkrüp and Biermann – were
also political opponents, but the vast majority of the discourse on the Liedermacher
endeavours to deny this fact by highlighting Degenhardt’s early and/or more
poetic work (Hornig, 1974; Riha, 1979; Götsch, 2007; Kleff, 2013). After
reunification, Degenhardt’s apparent authenticity – what was perceived to be
his construction of a unified body of artistic work, political beliefs and personal
attitude – became an additional point of reference for singer-songwriters mainly
influenced by British and American artists, many of whom rose to prominence
within the former West German independent or post-punk scenes and avoided
the term Liedermacher to describe their artistic work. These artists reacted to the
rise of neo-Fascism in Germany and found Degenhardt’s anti-Fascism and poetic
depictions of everyday life appealing.6 Yet they too – as former West German
6
The Hamburg-based independent Band Blumfeld played at Degenhardt’s 65th
birthday in 1996: www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/946489.der-staat-ist-kein-traum.html
(accessed 4 January 2015). Blumfeld stated in interviews that Degenhardt’s songs are a
common denominator for the band’s members: www.gaesteliste.de/texte/show.html?_
nr=297 (accessed 4 January 2015).
citizens – ignored his problematic attitude regarding Biermann and the politics of
the former GDR authorities.
Broadening the Discourse in West Germany: Burg Waldeck and Beyond
An evaluation of the artists performing at the Burg Waldeck Festivals shows that
the discourse on the West German Liedermacher needs to be broadened just as the
discourse on the East German Liedermacher needs to be broadened. A much greater
variety of artistic and political attitudes than those represented by Degenhardt and
Süverkrüp was to be found at the six Burg Waldeck Festivals held annually for
much of the 1960s and which were so crucial in the emergence of this scene.
According to the 10-CD boxset and book Die Burg Waldeck Festivals 1964–1969
(Kleff, 2008), the festivals featured 19 artists who could be labelled Liedermacher.7
The Burg Waldeck festival programme mixed folk traditions of national and
international origin with performances by emerging Liedermacher (see Kleff,
2008). In 1968 the festival organizers shifted the focus from to folklore to political
song, including rock bands in the programme of the last two festivals. The
festival thus lost its unique appeal and closed down. Although the first festival
is regarded as the starting point of the return of the Liedermacher figure, only
four Liedermacher actually performed at this particular festival: Degenhardt,
Süverkrüp, Reinhard Mey and Fasia Jansen. As I show below, Mey is usually
excluded from the discourse because of the supposedly non-political character of
his lyrics, while Jansen is simply ignored.
The number of performances by Liedermacher at the festival increased to 10
in 1965, and reached 13 in 1968. While, as mentioned before, Degenhardt is the
only Liedermacher that performed at every Burg Waldeck festival, several others
appeared more than once. Mey was at four festivals, and Jansen played three times
(as did Süverkrüp). In addition, the duo Schobert & Black and Walter Mossmann
appeared at five festivals, Hannes Wader and Kirstin Bauer-Horn at four, while
four other Liedermacher played three times.
If presence at the Burg Waldeck festivals serves as an indicator of importance
and appreciation within the Liedermacher scene, 10 artists share the importance
of Süverkrüp and 5 are very close to Degenhardt. Seen from this perspective, the
restriction of the discourse on the West German Liedermacher to Süverkrüp and
Degenhardt is quite surprising. In particular, artists like Mossmann and Jansen
enjoyed similar levels of appreciation by the festival crowd. They also display many
of the characteristics valued by journalists and academics: both were outspoken
7
Of the 39 artists (of a total of 70) of West German origin who performed at these
festivals, 16 mixed international folklore, folklore of one specific region, German folksongs,
and Yiddish songs. Of the 23 artists who performed original songs, four were groups – two
were devoted to agitprop, one was a comedy group, and the fourth played experimental
music – leaving 19 that could be labelled Liedermacher.
left-wing sympathizers, even if their work is much more closely connected to

grassroots movements than to orthodox Marxism and the long march through the
institutions of power, as promoted by leader of the 1960s student protests Rudi
Dutschke. All these artists, and their bearing on what is understood by Liedermacher,
thus deserve critical attention in order to broaden the discourse on this figure.
From 1967 to the mid-1990s (when cancer of the throat meant he could no
longer sing), Walter Mossmann released at least seven original albums,8 and
participated in a huge number of collaborations. Heavily influenced by French
chanson music and lyrics, during his whole career Mossmann also published books,
films and radio plays, and worked with theatre groups. He was closely connected
to the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s, had contacts with GDR dissidents,
and expressed solidarity with Biermann regarding his expatriation. The discourse
on the Liedermacher regards Mossmann as an integral part of the Liedermacher
scene, but refuses to dig deeper: no case study on his work is available.
Born in 1929, Fasia Jansen was the illegitimate daughter of the Liberian consul
general and a German maid. During the Third Reich she suffered as a consequence
of not being Aryan and was forced to work in a concentration camp in 1943 (see
Achenbach, 2004). This caused a cardiopathy that finally led to her death in 1997
(Kleff, 2008, p. 148). Jansen released only few records, such as Portrait (1975),
but regularly played live, accompanying herself on an acoustic guitar. Besides
the Burg Waldeck festivals, Jansen sang at several Easter marches, accompanied
strikes and performed at the UN International Women’s Conference in Nairobi in
1985. In 1991, Jansen was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of Germany. She
is a marginalia in published Liedermacher histories with the exception of Kleff’s
festival documentation (2008, pp. 148–9).
The absence of Jansen from the discourse on the Liedermacher exemplifies the
fact that this particular discourse is a male narration. Documentations of festivals
like Kleff (2008) are incontestable evidence that a considerable number of female
Leidermacherinnen were active members of the scene from the very start. Almost
a third of the soloists that performed at the six Burg Waldeck festivals were female
artists and in part Liedermacherinnen. Besides Jansen and the already mentioned
Kirstin Bauer-Horn, other Liedermacherinnen from the 1960s include Eva Vargas
and Johanna von Hancke. None of them have been considered in the academic
work on the Liedermacher so far.
The exclusion of Reinhard Mey from this discourse exemplifies the narrow
and politically orthodox character of the Liedermacher definition as commonly
accepted. Mey accompanies himself on an acoustic guitar, as do the canonical
Liedermacher, but instead of writing overtly socio-critical songs, his songs are more
subtle, sometimes containing ironic undertones. His oeuvre also contains several
romantic songs. Besides chanson, he is also influenced by country music.9 Another
8
Such as Flugblattlieder (Leaflet Songs) in 1975.
9
With regard to the importance of the influence of French chanson on the Liedermacher
revival, it is nevertheless astonishing that Mey, the only West German Liedermacher with
feature of Mey’s work that differs from that of the aforementioned canonical
figures is the fact that Mey is the most prolific and commercially successful
Liedermacher in Germany: between 1967 and 2014 he released a total of 41 studio
and live recordings,10 of which 17 were entries in the official annual West German
album charts.11 This contrasts vividly with the virtual absence from the charts of
the canonical Liedermacher: Süverkrüp never had a hit album, and Degenhardt did
so only once, with Wallfahrt zum Big Zeppelin (Pilgrimage to the Big Zeppelin) in
1971.12 Indeed, the only Waldeck veteran besides Mey with more than one chart
entry is Hannes Wader, with three between 1973 and 1975.13 Yet only one study – a
university thesis (Sygalski, 2011) – includes Mey in its discussion of West German
political song. Although ignored by the discourse, Mey became the archetype of
a new Liedermacher scene called Liedermaching that emerged during the 1990s.14
These artists stay explicitly away from the traditions of political song developed
in the 1960s and 1970s, but insist on being part of the Liedermacher tradition, a
matter which has received no critical attention so far.
Given the relatively low sales figures of Liedermacher, their cultural impact
has to be measured by looking at concerts and especially media presence.
Conveniently, West German radio and TV stations were present at the Burg
Waldeck Festivals from the very beginning (see Kaiser, 1967, p. 35; Böning 2004b;
Kleff, 2008) transmitting performances to the wider population. The West German
Liedermacher scene was, therefore, far from being an underground movement; it
is more appropriate to see it as a bourgeois scene striving for a moderately left-
wing modernization of West Germany. This made the Liedermacher natural allies
a parallel and successful career in France, is not appreciated in the original discourse. In
France, Mey released seven studio and two live recordings under the pseudonym Frédérik
Mey. He has also released a record in English (One Vote for Tomorrow, 1970), and four in
Dutch between 1975 and 1987.
10
Mey’s 1967 debut was called Ich wollte wie Orpheus singen (I Wanted to Sing like
Orpheus).
11
www.chartsurfer.de/musik/album-charts-deutschland/jahrescharts/alben-2014.
html (accessed 2 February 2015). In West Germany and Germany, record sales by units
are not published at all. Since 1959 there have been official West German charts. Between
1965 and 1989 the German album charts were officially based on records sales only. Radio
airplay was added from 1989 to 2001. However, all charts provide unverifiable data in
terms of absolute sales.
12
Böning (2004b) claims that Degenhardt sold 200,000 copies of his second album
Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern (1965) (Don’t Play with the Urchins), but the album
does not appear in the album charts of 1965 or later.
13
For example, 7 Lieder (Seven Songs) (1972). Wader also joined the DKP in the late
1970s. In addition comedy acts with acoustic guitar accompaniment were hugely successful
in the 1970s. Some of these like Insterburg & Co. were also a part of the Waldeck schedule.
German adaptations of country and western songwriting that were usually classified as pop
and not Liedermacher also worked well during the same decade.
14
See, for example, Joint Venture’s 1999 album Extremliedermaching.
of the 1960s student protests. As a consequence of the long march through the
institutions of power promoted by Dutschke, the discourse on the Liedermacher
emerged in the institutions and feuilletons of West German media, since a lot of
former protestors started careers in this profession. Other protestors joined the
social democratic party or forged academic careers, while a more radical minority
continued to fight for revolution in countless antagonistic communist associations.
The rigid association of the Liedermacher with political song and the sole focus
on a small number of particular veterans of the 1960s in dominant discourse also
excludes the slightly younger generation of Liedermacher – who did not attend the
Burg Waldeck festivals – from the canon, and hinders critical examination of their
work. The majority of these artists do not limit themselves to political song. Nor
do they accompany their singing with the sound of the acoustic guitar alone: some
play the piano, some experiment with orchestral arrangements, and some even
work with rock backing bands using amplification. Chanson is still an important
influence for these musicians, but its significance has been surpassed by that of
singer-songwriters of the North American folk-rock tradition. Some of these
Liedermacher, such as Konstantin Wecker and Vienna-based artists Wolfgang
Ambross, Georg Danzer and Ludwig Hirsch enjoyed some chart success in West
Germany during the 1980s. Such is the critical ignorance regarding these artists
that the two books of interviews published at this time (Brigl and Schmidt-Joos,
1985; 1986) remain the major source of information on them.
In addition to accommodating these diverse practices within a more nuanced
understanding of the figure of the Liedermacher, we also need to recognize the
emergence of political song in genres other than that of the Liedermacher from the
1970s onwards. At this time, genre boundaries became permeable, as a minority
of rock artists such as Ihre Kinder, Ton Steine Scherben and Udo Lindenberg
started to use socio-critical – and even agitprop – lyrics in German. This fusion of
German language and rock idioms contrasts with the use of the English language
in West German beat and rock music during the 1950s and 1960s.15 The late 1970s
and early 1980s then was the moment in West German popular music history
when singing in German became a common feature of West German rock and
pop for the first time. This was a consequence of the German version of the punk
movement that gave birth to a new generation of (art) punk bands singing in
German, such as Fehlfarben, Trio and Einstürzende Neubauten (see Hornberger,
2010). During the same decade, a West German version of blues-rock called
Deutsch-Rock, practised by artists such as Peter Maffay, Herbert Grönemeyer and
15
Kaiser (1967, pp. 24–6) argues that at least parts of West German society associated
the end of the Second World War with defeat. As an ‘affirmative action’ form of music
education, choirs and some media tried to invent an idealized, romantic and apolitical pre-
war German folk-song tradition despite a possible fascist contamination of such songs.
Hence the vast majority of the West German rock and beat bands of the 1960s copied
English lyrics and/or used something they regarded as English in their original lyrics, because
English was the language of the liberators and a sign of modernity and cosmopolitanism.
Marius Müller-Westernhagen, became the biggest-selling national popular music

genre (see Elflein, 2014).
Liedermacher continued to tour and release records in this new musical
environment, but their media coverage gradually declined as their unique selling
point of socio-critical (and sometimes poetic) song lyrics in German ceased to
exist. The Liedermacher was revived somewhat in the 1990s with the emergence
of the aforementioned Liedermaching scene. These and related artists, such as Götz
Widmann and Funny Van Dannen, developed the original Liedermacher definition
by using the acoustic guitar, but in order to accompany ironic and humorous lyrics
instead of overtly political songs. Moreover, artists such as Rainald Grebe and
Hagen Rether revived the 1920s musical cabaret tradition around the turn of
the millennium. These new scenes appear to be predominantly male, although
academic work on these phenomena is scant.
Broadening the Discourse in East Germany: Beyond Biermann
In his aforementioned study, Kirchenwitz (1993, pp. 163–90) counts more

than twenty East German Liedermacher besides Biermann. Some of them had
parallel careers as functionaries within the system, some just supported the
GDR authorities, some came to terms with the GDR system, and some faced
the constant threat of suppression by opposing the system. Unlike the West German
Liedermacher, therefore, an East German Liedermacher according to Kirchenwitz
is just a singer-songwriter, no matter what kind of lyrics he or she wrote. This
distinction recognizes that the opportunity for a songwriter to write his/her own
lyrics was not as self-evident in East Germany as in West Germany. This is the
result of the differing political system in the GDR, and especially its cultural
policy (see Rauhut, 1993). In East Germany, the questions ‘what is a political
song?’ and ‘what is the relationship between political song and the Liedermacher
scene?’ are much more complex than in West Germany. To reduce the discourse
on the Liedermacher to a history of political song by applying Western standards
misses the point.
In order to perform in public (and, of course, to publish officially), all GDR
artists had to have a Spielerlaubnis (performance licence). In order to obtain a
licence one had to pass an official test called Einstufung (classification), which
included a performance, an interview and a discussion of song lyrics. There
were five grades of licence, and a distinction was made between amateurs and
professionals. Licences had to be renewed every two years and could be withdrawn
at any time. In addition song lyrics had to pass a process of censorship independent
from the licensing process (see Rauhut, 1993; Aehnlich and Meier, 2005).
This procedure had several consequences: if an artist failed the test or their
licence was withdrawn, he/she had to work off the official radar, underground.
Recordings of underground artists are usually rare or inexistent, since they were
not able to use high-quality recording equipment (having to make do with tape
if they were lucky). Performances of underground artists were clandestine and

in constant danger of being banned by the police. Artists took risks, used pseudonyms
and/or played in churches, since the church was sometimes able to provide a
secure environment.
If, in contrast, an artist obtained a professional licence, he/she could make
living as a professional musician since the licence regulated musicians’ fees
(Aehnlich and Meier, 2005). As a consequence of the licensing process and
censorship, the same lyrical subtlety that Degenhardt condemned in West
Germany in 1968 was extremely important if an East German Liedermacher
was to criticize political injustice without provoking open confrontation with
state authorities. Working in the shadow of censorship, it was sometimes easier
to give an existing international folk song a double meaning than to write a new
one, because the songs of the international folk revival were officially read and
approved as songs sung by people oppressed by capitalism (see Kirchenwitz,
1993). In addition, many East German musicians had to collaborate with
professional lyricists, either willingly or under order. It is said, for example,
that Kurt Demmler wrote more than 10,000 song lyrics for several rock bands,
with whom he worked simultaneously.16 At the same time, Demmler released six
Liedermacher albums on which he sings his own songs, such as his 1971 release
Lieder (Songs).
Of particular interest on the East German Liedermacher scene is Bettina Wegner,
who was marginalized by the authorities and official discourse for several reasons:
her gender, her chart success, and her cultivation of a lyrical style perceived by
Rothschild’s Western and male standards as saccharine and weak (1980, p. 8).
If Rothschild is correct regarding the character of her lyrics, why then did she
face so many obstacles to the performance of these lyrics in the GDR? And if her
lyrics are not the main reason for the problems she faced, might our understanding
of political song require critical acknowledgement of the political consequences
of performance? While Wegner’s 1979 debut Sind so kleine Hände (These Hands
are so Petite) indeed includes nursery rhymes, it also explores feminist and other
political themes. Nevertheless Rothschild excludes her officially from his book
because of the character of her lyrics, although she fulfilled his primary political
criterion to include any East German Liedermacher in the canon by opposing the
suppression of the Prague Spring.
Like several other East German Liedermacher, Wegner started her career as
part of the Hootenanny scene.17 Hootenannies were gatherings to sing folk songs,
international folklore and topical songs, and were brought to East Germany by
Perry Friedman, a Canadian folk singer deeply influenced by Pete Seeger and who
moved to East Berlin in 1959. In the mid-1960s, and because it was an autonomous
16
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Demmler#Leben_ (accessed 11 December 2014).
17
This information regarding Bettina Wegner draws on the work of Kirchenwitz (1993)
as well as www.bettinawegner.de (accessed 4 January 2015) and www.jugendopposition.
de/index.php?id=3402 (accessed 4 January 2015).
scene rather than a threat to their rule, state authorities tried to gain control of
the Hootenanny scene (Kirchenwitz, 1993). As the result of a campaign against
anglicism following the 11th Assembly in 1965,18 the Hootenanny club Berlin,
where Wegner and Kirchenwitz were members, was forcibly renamed Oktoberklub
(October Club), and the Hootenanny scene as a whole had to change its name to
FDJ-Singebewegung (Singing Movement of the Free German Youth, the official
youth organization of the GDR). On account of this political upheaval, Wegner
left the Oktoberklub soon after (while Kirchenwitz stayed). Wegner’s status as
a political dissenter was further demonstrated by her protest against the violent
repression of the Prague Spring, for which she was given a suspended sentence.
A further consequence of this was her suspension from the drama school that she
had attended before her conviction. Nevertheless, she was allowed a second attempt
at a musical education, and to restart her career as an independent Leidermacherin
in 1972. From 1974 onwards, however, Wegner’s activities were under constant
surveillance, some permitted, others prohibited because GDR authorities regarded
her as part of the opposition.
For example, Wegner was never allowed to perform at the Festival des
politischen Liedes (International Festival of Political Song) in East Berlin.
According to co-founder and early organizer Kirchenwitz (1993, pp. 67–82), this
festival – held on an annual basis from 1970 to 1990, initially by the Oktoberklub –
is unique in the history of the GDR. Starting as a grassroots initiative but later
developing into an official showcase of national music, the festival had an
extraordinary cosmopolitan atmosphere and many Western and international
artists were allowed to participate. However, like Wegner, not every East German
Liedermacher was allowed to perform. Even those who did reach the stage had to
endure censorship of their lyrics. While the songs of international artists did not
suffer censorship to the same extent, we cannot unquestioningly assume that songs
sung by the West Germans Degenhardt or Süverkrüp (who performed four and
three times at the festival respectively) could have been sung by an East German
Liedermacher at the festival.
Unlike Degenhardt and Süverkrüp, Wegner declared solidarity with Biermann
on his expatriation in 1976, as a result of which she found it increasingly impossible
to perform officially in East Germany. Yet in 1978, she unexpectedly rose to
prominence in West Germany following a programme on West German television.
At the same time as Wegner was experiencing problems performing in her home
country, therefore, the GDR allowed her to perform in West Germany and to sign a
recording contract with CBS in 1979. This paradoxical situation is most likely due
to the fact that the GDR, badly in need of foreign currency at this time, envisaged
that her earnings in the West would contribute towards solving this problem. In
addition, official STASI documents reveal that East German authorities hoped she
might leave the GDR voluntarily. Instead, Wegner continued to live in the GDR
for another four years while she recorded a number of successful albums in the
18
This was the Assembly in which Biermann was banned from public performance.
West, only moving to West Germany in 1983, when the threat of arrest in her home
country became too much.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have shown that the discourse on the Liedermacher in the two
German states from the 1960s onwards is hindered by a particularly partisan
understanding of these musicians’ politics. Any study of political song before
unification needs to bear in mind the very different political and cultural contexts
in which music was produced in West and East Germany. Moreover, we need to
nuance this exclusively political approach in order to obtain a fuller picture of
what was happening (and why) at this time. Humorous lyrics such as those written
by the current Liedermaching artists are an integral part of tradition which has
been wholly ignored in critical discourse on the Liedermacher. Another – and
particularly glaring – oversight resulting from this narrow perspective on the
Liedermacher concerns the work of the nationally and internationally renowned
Reinhard Mey. Artists preferring subtlety and indirect lyrics like Mey or Wegner –
excluded from the canon no matter what political consequences Wegner had to
face because of her art – need to be retrieved for deeper scholarly analysis.19 The
critical history of Wegner exemplifies how Liedermacherinnen – an integral part
of the history of the Liedermacher – have never been taken into account. The same
is true for academic understandings of the East German Liedermacher besides
Wolf Biermann.20 I am aware that I do not fulfil any of my demands here. This
chapter, therefore, should be read as an introduction to a story not yet told.
19
What is more, the history of the Liedermacher is only in part – that is, a part of – the
history of German political song. I have not had space to approach the Liedermacher from
this other perspective, although a few recent studies by academics such as Löding (2010)
have begun to take this fact into account when writing about the topic.
20
Kirchenwitz (1993) was an active participant who seeks to write history without
really reflecting on his own involvement.
Chapter 8
Judges, Guitars, Freedom and the
Mainstream: Problematizing the Early
Cantautor in Spain
Sílvia Martínez
Cantautor is the word in the Spanish, Catalan and Galician languages coined in the
1960s to refer to a politically engaged singer who performed his/her own songs. In
Basque, the term is kantari.1 The output of these musicians was labelled canción
de autor (literally author’s song), or sometimes canción protesta (protest song).2
This chapter deals with these early musicians and songs, from their emergence
until the death of General Francisco Franco – that is, the second half of the Franco
dictatorship (1959–1975). The context of late-Francoism is crucial in the birth
and rise of the canción de autor. This emerged as a political action and flourished
throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. It was mainly a form of protest against
the Franco regime and eventually declined in the 1980s with the consolidation of
the democratic process.3
This chapter is divided into two halves. The first describes the birth of the
cantautor, originating in Catalonia in 1959 with the Nova Cançó (New Song)
movement, and subsequently spreading to the rest of the country.4 Two particular
idiosyncratic aspects of the canción de autor are emphasized here: 1) its close
link to regional languages (in particular Catalan, Basque and Galician), and
the decisive role that cantautores played in the recovery of these languages –
heavily censored during the dictatorship – for public use; and 2) the complicated
relationship of cantautores with traditional folk music, whose close links to the
1
Although the Basque term ‘kantautore’ is sometimes used, this is a neologism
derived from Spanish that was not in use in the 1960s. Moreover, it has been openly rejected
by Basque singer-songwriters, who prefer to use the term ‘kantari’ or ‘abeslari’, synonyms
of ‘singer’ (personal communication from Karlos Sánchez Ekiza).
2
Other terms nueva canción (new song) or canción política (political song) were
used less frequently. Likewise cantante-autor (singer-author) was used occasionally.
3
A new generation of cantautores would appear from 1995 onwards (Pedro Guerra,
Rosana, Ismael Serrano etc.), claiming direct lineage from the pioneers of the 1960s and
1970s. Yet they would compose and sing in a hugely contrasting historical and musical context.
4
The term cantautor is used throughout this chapter to refer to those practitioners of
canción de autor across Spain. Geographical distinctions between its variants across the
various linguistic cultures of Spain will become clear over the course of this study.
canción protesta in other Spanish-speaking countries were hindered in Spain by

Franco’s nationalist cultural policies.
In the second half of the chapter, I explore a number of contradictions left
unaddressed by scholars,5 whose analysis of the canción de autor has tended to
describe it as a self-sufficient and self-managed scene, imbued with some sort of
moral supremacy that distanced it from ‘mere’ commercial objectives. I contend
that this vision – widely held at the time by audiences and musicians alike – is key
to understanding the boundaries of the Spanish canción de autor. I compare and
contrast the scene with other popular music practices and contemporary solo singers
in order to challenge the dualistic interpretations that underlie such critical discourse:
mainstream vs. underground, pro-Franco vs. anti-Franco, politicized vs. hedonistic,
committed vs. commercial, singers vs. cantautores. By comparing specific aspects
of the careers of renowned cantautores (such as Raimon, Mari Trini, Paco Ibáñez,
Maria del Mar Bonet, Lluís Llach, Mikel Laboa, Carlos Cano and Joan Manuel
Serrat) with other singers addressing very different audiences (Conchita Bautista,
Raphael, José Guardiola and Julio Iglesias), I construct a less monolithic, more
nuanced picture than the conventional view of the cantautor, one which is probably
more faithful to the actual complexity of this musical movement that would leave a
long-lasting mark on the relationships between music and politics in Spain.
The Initial Catalan Model under the Dictatorship
The establishment of Franco’s dictatorial regime from 1939 brought about terrible
social and political repression. Particularly brutal in the immediate aftermath of the
Civil War, the degree of that repression then varied with successive governments
over the course of a 36-year period. The social and linguistic uniformity of the state
was truly the obsession that haunted the dictator throughout his life. Depending
on one’s ideological viewpoint, Spain could be considered either a multinational
state or a single nation with strong historical and cultural ‘regional’ identities.
Despite the fact that languages other than Castilian have historically co-existed
within the administrative territory of the Spanish state, throughout the dictatorship
Catalan, Basque, Galician and other ‘minority’ languages were banished from the
administrative system, education and many other forms of public communication,
and severely restricted in cultural production. In his study of the Catalan language
and its repression during this period, Josep Benet mentions a pronouncement by
the dictator before the end of the war, in which he unequivocally claimed his
vision of the linguistic and cultural uniformity of Spain:
Spain is organized along broad totalitarian lines by means of national institutions

that ensure its integrity, unity and continuity. The character of each region will
5
The main references in this field are González Lucini (1989, 1998), Claudín (1981)
and García-Soler (1976). In English, see Boyle (1995) and Ayats and Salicrú-Maltas (2013).
Judges, Guitars, Freedom and the Mainstream 125
be respected, but without compromising national unity, which is to be absolute,

with one common language – Castilian – and one sole identity – the Spanish
one. (Franco, quoted in Benet 1979, p. 97) 6
The subsequent state policies promoting linguistic and cultural uniformity – strongly
backed by official censorship mechanisms and police repression – sidelined these
(what were referred to as) ‘dialects’ from cultural life and brought them to the
brink of extinction.
These policies were developed for nearly two decades in a rapidly changing
economic context. After the Civil War (1936–1939), 10 years of autarky and
isolation from the international community had led the country to the edge of
collapse by the end of the 1940s. Simultaneously, the Cold War powers were
laying down new geostrategic rules in which Spain gained a certain relevance
on account of its geographical position and fiercely anti-communist views. As a
result, the country was progressively reinstated on the international stage from
1950 onwards,7 without any significant change in its internal political system.
Yet this triggered a gradual evolution in Franco’s government (Townson, 2007,
pp. 11–12). The presence from 1957 of Opus Dei ‘technocrats’ in government
was part of an economic reform plan that would set the foundations for a free-
market economy. The economic prosperity of the 1960s quickly brought about
dramatic developments across society and culture in Spain, particularly in the
areas of tourism and the media, and in the aspirations of a new generation of
students and intellectuals (Iglesias, 2010, p. 228). This political context is crucial
to understanding the moment in which cantautores appeared, accompanying and
occasionally leading the budding democratic forces during the 1960s.
At the beginning of this period, a small segment of the Barcelona bourgeoisie
promoted an incipient artistic and political movement aimed at stimulating the
creation of original songs in Catalan: the Nova Cançó. The Nova Cançó, as García-
Soler notes, ‘was promoted from its birth as a movement of national resistance: it
started as a cultural and linguistic claim’ (1976, p. 31).8 This initiative was made
public in a manifesto entitled ‘Ens calen cançons d’ara’ (We Need Songs for
Today), written by Lluís Serrahima and published in January 1959:
6
‘España se organiza en un amplio concepto totalitario, por medio de instituciones
nacionales que aseguren su totalidad, su unidad y continuidad. El carácter de cada región
será respetado, pero sin perjuicio para la unidad nacional, que la queremos absoluta, con
una sola lengua, el castellano, y una sola personalidad, la española.’
7
For example, the regime signed in those years agreements with the USA for the
installation of military bases on Spanish soil (1953) and with the Vatican state (1953), and
Spain finally joined the FAO (1950), UNESCO (1952) and the UN (1955) while the country
was still subject to dictatorial rule.
8
‘La Nova Cançó va ser promoguda des del començament com un moviment de
resistència nacional, car ja de naixement partia d’una reivindicació lingüística i cultural.’
We have to sing songs but our songs, songs created today, relevant to us … Could
you imagine a situation in which we have bards such as the ‘chansonniers’ in
France and they would go to every town all over the country singing our songs?
(quoted in Ayats and Salicrú-Maltas, 2013, p. 31) 9
Serrahima’s publication was an open call for modern songwriters willing and able
to render the social and political concerns of the Catalan people in song form.
At the centre of the Nova Cançó movement was the collective Els Setze Jutges
(The Sixteen Judges, named after a popular Catalan tongue-twister), initially
a small group of amateur singers who presented their new songs in public. Its
founder members Miquel Porter i Moix, Remei Margarit, Josep Maria Espinàs
and Delfí Abella were gradually joined by others, such as Francesc Pi de la Serra,
Guillermina Motta, Joan Manuel Serrat, Maria del Mar Bonet and Lluís Llach,
until they reached the self-imposed target of 16 politically committed artists.10
Following initial performances in Barcelona in 1961, Els Setze Jutges
presented their work all over Catalonia and were immediately accepted by the
public. The songs of this collective were straightforward compositions with lyrics
inspired by everyday life, sometimes calling for togetherness and social solidarity,
or containing veiled allusions to the lack of freedom. No matter how innocuous
their lyrics were, however, these songs were important for their use of Catalan, a
rebellious act and a political statement in itself.
These singers found their musical inspiration in the French model of the
auteur-compositeur-interprète from the 1950s, embodied by Jacques Brel,
Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré and Charles Aznavour (Marc, 2013a). In a recent
interview, Joan Manuel Serrat mentions these figures when remembering his first
steps as a singer-songwriter:
When I started to write songs, my musical world passed through French song,
which at the time was going through a brilliant era. There were great masters,
Brassens, Brel, Léo Ferré and so many others. The French music movement
after the war was very influential. I embodied all that in my work. (Martínez and
Sales Casanova, 2013, p. 198)
Indeed, the first published record of the Nova Cançó consisted of covers in Catalan of
five Brassens songs by Josep Maria Espinàs (Espinàs canta Brassens, 1962). Despite
the openly acknowledged influence of French song on the whole, however, Catalan
cantautores employed a greatly simplified compositional framework (Espinàs, 1974,
p. 18). Music was deliberately relegated to a secondary role by early singers, who
9
‘Hem de cantar cançons, però nostres i fetes ara. Ens calen cançons que tinguin una
actualitat per a nosaltres … us imagineu si, com a França, tinguéssim aquesta mena de trobadors
com són els chansonniers, que anessin pels pobles i per tot el país cantant cançons nostres?’
10
Els Setze Jutges also included Enric Barbat, Xavier Elies, Maria del Carme Girau,
Martí Llauradó, Joan Ramon Bonet, Maria Amèlia Pedrerol and Rafael Subirachs.
often played no more than a few chords on a guitar, the most affordable and popular
instrument among Spanish youth (and thus emblematic of these early performers).
The performances of Els Setze Jutges and Raimon (a cantautor from Valencia
close to Els Setze Jutges and crucial in the diffusion of the Nova Cançó movement
outside Catalonia) were the most acclaimed embodiments of this musical model.
All these cantautores staged their songs simply, avoiding artificiality in their
performances (a bare stage, basic stage lighting, no orchestral backing or rhythm
section, amplification kept to a minimum), and employing static body language in
order better to deliver what they saw as their unequivocal message to the public.
Thus these musicians tried to be ‘the voice of the people’, to mediate between music
and audience, to enable the public to make their songs its own and use them as a
liberating weapon (González Lucini, 1998, p. 73). This orthodoxy was maintained
by means of auditions organized by the senior members of Els Setze Jutges, in
which many candidates were ruled out because their songs or performances did
not match the aesthetics and attitudes of the collective (Claudín, 1981, p. 67).
While the Nova Cançó also included aesthetic currents less influenced by French
song, such as Grup de Folk (a collective adapting North American folk songs and
whose wild irreverence sat uncomfortably beside Els Setze Jutges), it was these
16 ‘judges’ and their affiliates who would blaze a trail for those musicians soon to
emerge across the country.
Following the Nova Cançó Model: Political and Linguistic Claims
In the early 1960s, a few isolated kantari emerged who sang in the Basque
language, Euskara, such as the Basque-French singer Michel Labéguerie.11 But the
first concerted attempt to pick up Els Setze Jutges’ baton outside Catalonia was the
group Ez Dok Amairu (There Is No Thirteen, a reference to the bad luck associated
with that number). In 1966 this group evolved into a multidisciplinary artistic
collective led by Mikel Laboa and Benito Lertxundi. The musicians gathered
under this label promoted the creation of songs in Euskara. While they displayed
similarities with the Catalonian movement, they imprinted their own seal on
their work, producing elaborate staging that moved beyond a straightforward
performance. As they summarized later in interview: ‘The essence of our group
resides in popular songs, music and musical instruments. To develop this form of
expression we consider necessary the collaboration and understanding of other
related artistic forms such as dance, poetry and theatre’ (Ez Dok Amairu, 1970,
quoted in González Lucini, 1998, p. 96).12
11
Labéguerie’s first recordings were two singles, both entitled Labeguerie’ren Lau
Kanta, recorded in Bayonne and edited by Goiztiri en 1961 (Estornés Zubizarreta, n.d).
12
‘La base de nuestro grupo es la canción-música-instrumentos populares, y al
profundizar en esta forma de expresión pensamos que surtge la necesidad de una colaboración
y aprehensión de otras formas artísticas afines como la danza, la poesía, el teatro, etc.’
Also in the mid-1960s, the group Voces Ceibes (Free Voices) emerged in
Galicia from within a university environment.13 In 1968, a number of concerts
were organized on campuses despite government attempts to ban them. Audiences
at these concerts heard for the first time new songs in Galician by Benedicto
García, Xavier González del Valle and other founders of this movement, which
came to be known as the Nova Canción Galega (New Galician Song).
In both the Basque country and Galicia, the association between language
and political stance paralleled that found in Catalonia. Poetic lyrics or explicit
denunciations of the regime were not necessary because the context of their
performances, and the mere use of a language other than the official one of
the time, lent them a subversive power. Nevertheless, in other regions with a
language overshadowed by Spanish, protest songs were not initially associated
with the recovery and vindication of those languages. In Asturias, for example,
this association was only to develop in 1975 under the heading of Nueu Canciu
Astur (New Asturian Song), even if is not still clear whether more Asturian singer-
songwriters expressed themselves in their local language than in Spanish.14
Even in distant parts of Spain where these regional languages were not
spoken, most opponents of the regime during the 1960s regarded this commitment
to singing in ‘minority’ languages as a protest against the Franco dictatorship.
As noted by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1989, p. 8), in spite of linguistic
differences, the supportive efforts and mobilizing potential of those singers were
greatly appreciated in other regions. This is the most convincing explanation of
how Lluís Llach and other singers managed to organize concerts in Catalan in
Madrid during the mid-1960s, or of how Andalusian youth eagerly listened to
Raimon in a language they could hardly understand. The strong collective memory
of that period thus forged accounts for the fact that today, 40 years after the end of
the dictatorship, some of these songs in Basque and Catalan are still remembered
throughout Spain as hymns of the demand for the restoration of civil liberties and
democratic equality.15
13
In Galicia, as well as in other parts of the country, left-wing students of many colleges
and universities were at the centre of opposition to the regime from the 1950s onwards.
14
On Asturian cantautores, one can profitably consult a recent text written under a
pseudonym by one of its main figures, Manolín Fernández. In this text, the author explains
how he and his colleagues considered writing and singing in the local language about
political themes of local interest, but it was not widespread at that time – hence their choice
to sing in Spanish instead (Cimadevilla, 2010). Another approach to this phenomenon is
provided by Marcela Romano in her wide-ranging presentation of Asturian song, from its
origins to its present-day form (2009). I would like to thank Llorián García Florez for his
guidance on this subject.
15
See, for example, the use of Llach’s ‘L’estaca’ (The Stake), a hymn from 1968, as
the closing song at the 2014 national assembly of Podemos, the new political party born in
the aftermath of a wave of popular anti-austerity protests throughout Spain known as 15M
in reference to 15 May 2011 and the Indignados (Outraged) movement.
Of course, this does not mean that cantautores only flourished as a musical and
political phenomenon in regions with a minority language to defend. For example,
Canción del Pueblo was a Madrid-based collective founded in 1967 that brought
together Hilario Camacho, Elisa Serna and Adolfo Celdrán among others, and
which set classical Spanish poets to music in imitation of Paco Ibáñez. Still one of
the most influential Spanish cantautores, from exile in Paris during the early 1960s,
Ibáñez set to music poems by Federico García Lorca, Gabriel Celaya and Rafael
Alberti (among others) which resonated strongly in the context in which they were
performed.16 Later in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of individuals and artistic
collectives appeared across the country who drew on the same aesthetics and to
the same end: to create new, politically and socially engaged songs, performed on
stage by the songwriter him/herself. This would lead to the formation of a large
repertoire of protest song in Spanish.17
To sum up, it can be said that the vindication of minority languages is key
to understanding the rise of politically engaged cantautores in Spain. Yet this
linguistic commitment cannot be taken as self-sufficient, nor these singer-
songwriters as imbued with some sort of moral supremacy. On the one hand, this
was because there was a canción de autor in the Spanish language. On the other, as
I show below, this was because Catalan, Galician and Basque could also be found
in songs that lacked the political function of the canción de autor. This was the
case in traditional folk music, as well as in some modern popular music.
The Difficult Relationship Between the Cantautor and Traditional Folk Song
Besides their political protest and commitment to regional languages, cantautores

of the 1960s in Spain maintained a close relationship with traditional music from
different parts of the country. In addition to their original compositions, these
artists often performed cover versions of folk songs from their region. While
the link between the repertoires was often language, the cantautores’ cultivation
of folklore and traditional song was also part of a drive to get closer to popular
culture, as a number of French auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes had done
(Vázquez Montalbán, 2010, p. 62).
While the mining of popular musical roots as a source of inspiration was
epitomized by American artists – North Americans Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and
Pete Seeger, as well as Chilean Violeta Parra and Argentinian Atahualpa Yupanqui
were highly influential in 1960s Spain in this respect (González Lucini, 1998,
p. 57) – this practice was much more problematic on the Spanish scene, essentially
16
Paco Ibáñez, born in Valencia to a Basque mother, would record songs in Basque
many years after the kantari Imanol (CD Oroitzen, 1998).
17
A thorough account of the early canción de autor inititatives in Spain can be found
in Claudín (1981).
because of the connotations acquired by traditional music as the result of Franco’s

cultural policies.
From the end of the Spanish Civil War, the Franco regime endeavoured to
assimilate regional differences by depicting them as mere folkloric stereotypes.
Through ‘Coros y Danzas’ (Choirs and Dances from Spain), an institution dedicated
to the compilation and exhibition of regional music and dances, official culture
consisted of carefully staged folkloric artistic manifestations which represented no
threat to Spanish unity. Regional traditional music was thus included from the early
1940s in the regime’s symbolic system, and consequently marked with a strong
ideological, Catholic and traditional stamp (Pérez Zalduondo, 2006, p. 150).18 This
accounts for the difficulties of Franco’s opponents when incorporating folklore
into their music. As Claudín has remarked as regards the Galician Voces Ceibes:
They reject folklore as a mean of expression, a folklore manipulated at that time

by fascist ideology. They favoured other forms influenced by Raimon and other
Catalan singers … They set to music poems by well-known authors or by new
writers, disseminating the Galician literature of the time. And their intention is
to represent the social realities of their people. (1981, p. 117) 19
However, other cantautores openly resisted this misappropriation, and reclaiming

folklore became a distinctive mark of their output. This was the case of José
Antonio Labordeta, an emblematic Aragonese singer strongly committed to the
defence of folklore and individual liberties as inseparable acts; or the movement
called Nueva Canción Canaria (New Canarian Song), born in 1966 in the Canary
Islands, which focused on the recovery of local folklore with groups such as
Los Sabandeños and Taburiente. On some occasions, the work of these cantautores
turned out to be crucial for the preservation of a traditional repertoire. Such is the
case of Joaquín Díaz, a Castilian cantautor considered the Spanish Pete Seeger
and an unavoidable reference for present-day Spanish folklore studies.20
The relationship between canción de autor and folklore was particularly
problematic in Andalusia given that the Franco regime had been using flamenco
and other Andalusian genres in order to promote the country as a tourist destination
since the turn of the 1960s. This trend was not new and followed a nineteenth-century
discourse that had presented Andalusian pseudo-flamenco – just as the habanera
18
For a study of the manipulation of folklore during Francoism, see Ortiz (1999).
19
‘[Voces Ceibes] Rechazan el folklore como vehículo de expresión, manipulado
hasta ese momento por la ideología fascista, asumiendo nuevas formas influenciadas por
Raimon y otros cantantes catalanes … Musican poemas de autores conocidos o nuevos,
difundiendo la poesía gallega del momento. Y su pretensión es la del acercamiento a la
realidad social de su pueblo.’
20
The work of Joaquín Díaz as a researcher on folklore, including his first steps as a
folk singer, can be seen in the documentary El río que suena, reflejo del tiempo: Joaquín
Díaz (Inés Toharia Terán, 2014).
and the jota had been before – as the embodiment of Spanishness in musical
form.21 Nevertheless, Franco’s cultural policies fostered and reinforced this view,
in particular through Spain’s prolific post-war musical film production. When the
musical collective of cantautores called Manifesto Canción del Sur (Manifesto
Song of the South) appeared in Granada in 1969, its members stressed the fact that
the popular roots of their new songs were incompatible with the established moral
values and oppression of the dictatorship (González Lucini, 1989, pp. 155–6). Led
by Juan de Loxa, these musicians took part in performances all over Andalusia,
emphasizing their political dissent and their intention to reconnect with the
cultural roots of the region. The group’s most prominent member was Carlos
Cano, who, a few years later, became the first singer to overcome the historical
prejudice surrounding the copla – one of the most popular musical genres of the
first half of the twentieth century in Spain, but tainted on account of its association
with the official culture of the Franco regime.22 In this case, it was possible for a
cantautor to rescue the influence of a local musical practice, restoring the critical
and subversive capacity of which it had been deprived (Colmeiro, 2003).
Problematizing the Canción de Autor and Mainstream Music
In the previous section I summarized the main characteristics of the Spanish canción
de autor: its principal musical influence (the model of the French chanson of the
1950s), the cantautores’ anti-Francoist stance, their commitment to recovering the
country’s minority languages, and the controversial use of traditional music as a
base for the creation of new songs or as a complement to the canciones de autor.
There is scholarly agreement on all these points. Indeed, the difficulties in the
use of the term cantautor today in Spain are precisely related to these definitive
characteristics of the canción de autor of the 1960s and 1970s. As Diego Manrique
rightly points out, in contemporary Spain some cantautores have tried to cast aside
that initial politicization by promoting the idea of the cantautor as ‘anyone who
sings his or her own songs’ (2002, p. 3).23 The canción de autor of the 1960s does
not fit this definition, since no one back then found it problematic that one of the
21
Studies about the construction and manipulation of a stereotypical all-Spanish
musical style associated with flamenco can be read in Steingress (2006), Alonso (1998,
2010) and Washabaugh (2012) among others.
22
Copla, also called canción española (Spanish song), was deeply rooted in Spain
from the 1930s and remained very popular for decades. It always had a close connection with
flamenco because copla songs often utilized flamenco-inspired patterns. Cano showed from
the very beginning of his career a true commitment towards this genre, which inspired many
of his own songs, although those of his albums fully dedicated to copla were not to appear
until a decade after the death of Franco (Cuaderno de coplas, 1985). For more details about
these relationships and the recovery of copla by Carlos Cano, see Martínez (2013).
23
‘cantautor es todo el que canta sus propias canciones’.
pioneering and most respected cantautores, Paco Ibáñez, did not write the lyrics
of his own songs.
In contrast, Julio Iglesias, another singer who reached the top of the charts at
the end of the decade, is the author of the text and the music of his first LP; on Yo
canto (1969) all the songs bar one are penned by Iglesias (Juan Pardo’s ‘Alguien
que pasó’). In spite of this, Julio Iglesias was never labelled a cantautor. This
is due to the fact that, in addition to its strong political stance, the canción de
autor of that period was defined in opposition to the ‘other kind of song’, said
to be ‘a consumer product offering a form of superficial, unrealistic and vulgar
escapism’ (González Lucini, 1989, p. 28),24 a category in which many defenders
of the canción de autor would certainly place Julio Iglesias. According to this
dichotomy, a singer was able to offer either ‘beautiful consumer products’ or
‘sincere songs’; to be either a committed, struggling, anti-Francoist musician
or a hedonistic entertainer; either a singer for the unworried masses or a singer for
socially aware workers and bright students. However, as evidenced by Labanyi’s
Gramscian reading, such dualistic oppositions fail to explain the complexity of
appropriation and assimilation in the circulation of culture (2002, p. 212). This
dichotomous reading does not mirror a real division between mainstream and
underground or alternative music. Cantautores enjoyed a growing share of the
market from the end of the 1960s, establishing their own record labels (Edigsa,
Herri-Gogoa, Artezi etc.) and distribution networks to this end. Indeed, as sales
figures of the time show, Raimon, Mari Trini, Victor Manuel, Benito Lertxundi,
Cecilia and Joan Manuel Serrat, among other cantautores, were often the best-
selling artists from 1968 onwards (Salaverri, 2005).
Nevertheless, cantautores – even if they reached the masses – were usually
presented and seen by their public as honest authors of their own songs, without
commercial designs, and who delivered a direct and politically engaged message.
It was not so important to be completely responsible for the totality of the product
because one could set to music somebody else’s texts on the condition that the
poetic universe offered to the public was coherent, engaged and sincere. To be
considered a cantautor, it was more important to be a particular kind of creative
artist than the actual author of all the lyrics and music:
Against established song, imposed on and hammered into us through extensive

radio airing; against that giant … fabricated with money, began to emerge
from the weakest corners the canción de autor; this new canción de autor was
committed to social protest and serious, responsible cultural action, possessed
undeniable aesthetic qualities and reflected deeply human issues. (Claudín,
1981, p. 28) 25
24
‘La canción como simple producto para la evasión y para el consumo – con
frecuencia superficial, irreal y ramplona.’
25
‘Contra la canción establecida, impuesta, emanada a golpe de ondas radiofónicas,
frente a ese gigante … fabricado con dinero empieza a surgir, desde lo más débil y apartado,
According to such a dualistic view, there is no doubt about which categories singers
like Paco Ibáñez (or Raimon, Laboa and Labordeta, to name just a few pioneers),
and singers such as Julio Iglesias belonged to. The flaw is that these radical
divisions between ‘commercial’ and ‘committed’, ‘hedonistic’ and ‘responsible’
or ‘anti-Franco’ and ‘pro-Franco’ vanish as soon as these cantautores start forming
part of the music industry as professional artists.
As stated above, the dominant view of the early canción de autor tends to present
it as a self-managed scene, free from mainstream commercial considerations or
intentions. But we should not forget that, at the same time as their careers began,
important economic reforms were being implemented in Spain that would allow the
emergence of a free-market economy. The resulting incipient economic prosperity
would lead in these years, among other developments, to massive imports of
cultural products and a totally reinvigorated record industry. Despite freeing the
economy, however, the regime was still a fierce dictatorship keeping political
life under strict control and determining media content by means of ‘preliminary
censorship’.26 Radio, television and song festivals were the only platforms that
cantautores could look to if they wanted to become known to the general public.
For example, the Nova Cançó would never have gained popular attention without
the famous programme Radioscope; it was only with this programme, created in
1964 and hosted by Salvador Escamilla on Radio Barcelona, that these singers
were truly catapulted to fame.27
Moreover, music festivals thrived all over Spain throughout the 1960s in the
wake of the Sanremo Music Festival in Italy. More than radio, these were the main
promotional showcases for cantautores, essentially because they were broadcast
live and because the winning songs were guaranteed promotion and commercial
success. The most important festivals in Spain were the Festival Español
de la Canción de Benidorm, which first ran in 1959, and the Eurovision Song
Contest, the major European musical showcase. Although cantautores claimed
their creative freedom and independence from the music industry structure and
promotional machinery, in reality the only way to ensure a professional career
was to sing at such music festivals. Raimon, for instance, won the 1963 Festival
de la Canción Mediterránea in Barcelona with a romantic song in Catalan, ‘Se’n
va anar’ (She’s Gone Away). Lluís Llach, on the other hand, was awarded second
prize in the Festival de la Canción de Barcelona (1968) with the song ‘A cara o
creu’ (Heads or Tails). Curiously, these songs were not original compositions, but
written by Josep María Andreu and Lleó Borrell.
la canción de autor, comprometida, de protesta, de acción cultural, seria, responsable, de

calidad estética cierta y de problemática hondamente humana.’
26
Within this censorship programme, producers of cultural products had to obtain the
approval of the authorities before releasing their work.
27
Radio Barcelona was part of Cadena Ser, one of the few private media groups
authorized in the country.
As happened to other singers who were given a springboard by some of

these festivals, Llach’s success in 1968 led CBS records to offer him an enticing
contract. Llach’s decision to turn it down and keep working with a small local
company, Concentric, is still recalled as a legendary response to the pressure
endured by cantautores to build on their market share (most often by abandoning
their mother tongue). According to the internal logic of the canción de autor of that
time, resisting major record labels was one of the main signs of moral integrity.
‘Established’ singers, promoted by these major labels never received recognition
from cantautores, not even Josep Guardiola – a famous crooner who recorded
songs in Catalan before any member of Els Setze Jutges28 – or singers such as
Andrés do Barro and Juan Pardo, two composer-performers who occasionally
recorded songs in Galician around this time (González Lucini, 1998, p. 104).
The case of Joan Manuel Serrat, probably the most controversial cantautor
in Spain, shows better than any other the tensions between canción de autor
and mainstream music, between minority languages and official Spanish, the
resistance to and pressure from majors, the opposition to Franco’s policies, and so
forth. Serrat caused a tremendous uproar when he was chosen in 1968 to represent
Spain at the Eurovision Festival. He was a young and successful member of Els
Setze Jutges, admired throughout the country: his songs – romantic, intimate
and sung in Catalan – became popular in record time, breaking into the national
charts in 1967. In this period, singers could only perform at the Eurovision Song
Contest by direct invitation of Spanish Television, the festival being another cog
in the machinery of the government’s cultural policy. In an attempt to show a more
modern and friendly face in accordance with its supposedly more open economic
and cultural policies, Franco’s government believed that this young and cheerful
singer, appreciated by the public, would be a good choice in the campaign to
improve the country’s image. Serrat did not possess by then the expressive force
or the political clout of Raimon or Ibáñez, yet he was a successful singer and
offered a clear alternative to performers such as Conchita Bautista or Raphael,
his predecessors in the festival. However, a problem arose when Serrat refused
to participate in the song contest at the very last moment, arguing that he was
not allowed to sing the chosen song in Catalan. Yet at the end of that same year,
Serrat signed a contract with Zafiro-Novola, a mainstream pop record company, to
edit his own compositions in Spanish. His colleagues of the Nova Cançó severely
criticized him for that decision, while the official Spanish media banned him for
several years after what came to be known as the ‘Eurovision affair’.29
28
On his 1959 EP Piove (Chao, Chao Bambina), Guardiola sings several songs
translated into Catalan including one that won the Sanremo Festival.
29
A lot has been written about Serrat’s bilingualism and the 1968 Eurovision episode,
with divergent interpretations. A quite impartial summary can be found in Casas (1972,
pp. 139–57) and recent declarations of Serrat himself in (Martínez and Sales Casanova,
2013, p. 202).
Beyond his polemical bilingualism, Serrat’s success was due to the new trend of
his lyrics with poetic and modern stories about everyday life (Vázquez Montalbán,
2010, pp. 100–107), and to his musical flexibility, which made him quickly stray
from the stylistic models of Els Setze Jutges. Serrat introduced in his songs elements
of the modern Spanish melodic song (his arrangements were similar to those of
Julio Iglesias, Raphael and Nino Bravo), as well as borrowings from Latin American
pop ballads and African-American pop music. Even though Serrat’s songs followed
the French model in terms of text and melodic line, he soon handed over musical
arrangements and orchestration to a few trusted professionals from a variety of
musical backgrounds. For instance, Ricard Miralles and (more occasionally)
Francesc Burrull elaborated his songs with controversial jazzy and funky touches,
as can be heard in the bass lines and the brass orchestration of the LP Homenaje a
Antonio Machado (1969). Juan Carlos Calderón, an up-and-coming arranger by the
end of the 1960s, provided a peculiar quality inspired by the new pop ballad with
occasional winks to classic jazz, as in the hugely successful Mediterráneo (1971).30
Serrat’s songs never avoid addressing mass audiences, an attitude which went hand-
in-hand with an abiding commitment to freedom and opposition to dictatorship in
Spain and Latin America. Serrat’s songs and career thus challenged the idea that
‘commercial song’ and canción de autor were diametrically opposed concepts.
Coda
The Spanish cantautor came at a time of rapid socio-economic changes in the

country. The widely accepted historical narrative establishes a stark opposition
between canción de autor and commercial melodic song during the 1960s and
1970s. On the one hand, this narrative underplays the role of other options, such
as some rock bands (like Smash or Triana), who were equally opposed to the
dictatorial regime. On the other hand, the canción de autor did not grow outside
the industrial and media infrastructures of Francoist Spain, and participated
in official song contests, radio and television broadcasts, and so on. While
cantautores emerged with distinct political and aesthetic attitudes, the canción
de autor and the light melodic song scenes intersected and co-existed over and
above their ideological differences. That said, in Spain, cantautores would
be forever associated with the musical, ethical and aesthetic connotations they
possessed during the 1960s and 1970s. The deep and genuine political and social
commitment of these cantautores would make them heroes for the anti-Franco
movement. The recognition for its courageous social and political commitment
would be the canción de autor’s greatest strength. It would also be the movement’s
weakness, since neither its semantic connotations nor its aesthetic model would
survive the forthcoming democracy.
30
On the musical model of the new ballads emerging throughout Latin America and
Spain in the late 1960s, see Party (2003).
Chapter 9
Starting Over: Singer-Songwriters
and the Rhythm of Historical Time in
Post-Revolutionary Portugal
Luís Trindade
Introduction
One of the greatest symbols of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, along with
the carnation itself (placed in rifle muzzles and on uniforms of soldiers during the
relatively peaceful coup), is a song. ‘Grândola, Vila Morena’ (Grândola, Swarthy
Town), by José Afonso, was used as the signal for the troops to advance on
25 April 1974, and not only to topple the 48-year-old authoritarian regime of the
Estado Novo (New State), a late survivor of the wave of fascisms in the period
between the two great wars in Europe; this political development also brought
to an end the three-front colonial war the Portuguese had been fighting in Africa
since the early 1960s. The song did not just trigger the Revolution symbolically.
Right after the coup, ‘Grândola’ became ubiquitous as part of the ‘soundtrack’
to the revolutionary process that lasted until the end of 1975, when a counter-
revolution paved the way for parliamentary democracy. This process was marked
by the left-wing radicalization of the army and the emergence of a vast grassroots
movement challenging private property and capitalism (Ramos Pinto, 2013).
And yet, Afonso’s song’s historical role was more substantial than that of simple
accompaniment: the choice to broadcast a banned song suggests that, in spite
of censorship, ‘Grândola’ was recognizable as part of the subversive political
culture that had led to the Revolution in the first place. The song was thus ‘acting’
historically even before 1974, in the context of an intense renewal of Portuguese
music and politics that had been under way since the early 1960s.
This chapter explores this historicity. More specifically, songs are here seen
as complex narrative units that work as both actors in and documents of their
historical context. By analysing them, we can follow the social and political
transformation that took place in Portugal between the 1960s and the 1980s. In
fact, from the critique of folklore under authoritarianism to post-revolutionary
market expansion and the emergence in the 1980s of a new rock scene, popular
music in Portugal not only illuminates, but in many aspects seems to participate in
the process of ‘forging, fostering, solidifying and challenging’ social ‘values and
attachments’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2013, p. 146). More decisively still, the evolution of
songwriting allows us to illustrate internal transformations within the musical field

itself. In this sense, to focus on singer-songwriters José Mário Branco and Sérgio
Godinho at a particularly key moment in the recent history of Portuguese popular
music (henceforth PPM) – the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s – allows us
to connect the emergence of a new figure of singer-songwriter in Portugal with the
aforementioned changes in society and politics.
Both Branco and Godinho had already been influential figures in the renewal
of Portuguese popular music before 1974 and were heavily involved in the
revolutionary process. Despite their different relationships to protest song as such,1
the two were radical artists in the sense that music and the questioning of musical
creation always mediated their experience of history and politics. This is what
makes their work of the late 1970s and early 1980s so decisive: the defeat of the
socialist project in which both had been involved in 1974–1975 was experienced
not only as a dramatic setback with political and artistic consequences, but also
as an opportunity to rethink their songwriting practices. In these circumstances,
the way in which Branco and Godinho experienced the historical transition in
both political and creative terms appears, above all, in their songs’ structure.
Their songs thus become narrative forms that simultaneously participate in and
document the historical context. For what most strikes the listener of their albums
of the period, beyond the expression of the everyday life of a society undergoing
dramatic transformation through their lyrics, is the way historical temporality is
manifest in their narrative.
We here seem close to Hayden White’s theory of narrativity, according to which
different historical circumstances entail different narrative structures, and historical
breaks change the way we organize historical narratives (White, 1987). The profound
impact of the Revolution led to a questioning of history that resulted in a particularly
self-reflective moment in songwriting. Accordingly, the questioning of Godinho and
Branco marks a shift in the status of Portuguese singer-songwriters towards greater
autonomy. In other words, the emergence of a new singer-songwriter is discernible
less in the songs’ specific themes or even in the discourses these authors used to
describe their work, but rather in the ways in which their experience of the historical
moment can be grasped in the increasingly complex narratives of their songs. The
argument of this chapter, then, is as follows. I start with a narrative of the history
of PPM from the early 1960s to the late 1970s in the context of Portuguese social
and political history. Secondly, I focus on the works of the two singer-songwriters
1
The most familiar expression to describe singer-songwriters like Godinho and Branco
(and Afonso) in the 1970s would be ‘cantores de intervenção’ (‘intervention’ or ‘militant’
singers), which covers both the period when they ‘protested’ against the dictatorship and the
period when they ‘intervened’ in the Revolution (Côrte-Real, 1996). ‘Cantautor’, the literal
translation of singer-songwriter, is a neologism adopted only at a later period and its use
in the context of revolutionary and post-revolutionary PPM sounds slightly anachronistic.
Singer-songwriter is used throughout this chapter, as the term captures the authorial status
of Godinho and Branco in the period analysed.
Starting Over 139
from the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to show how historical awareness
permeated the structure of their songs. Thirdly, I interpret how the new historical
narratives emerging from some of these songs created a true dramaturgy of time.
The political consequences of this are assessed in a short conclusion by confronting
the self-reflexive songwriting of Godinho and Branco with the role of narrative in
Paul Ricoeur’s and Fredric Jameson’s perception of history.
Singer-Songwriters and Portuguese Popular Music (1960s–1980s)
The renovation of PPM before 1974 was somewhat paradoxical. While society
modernized, benefiting from the impressive performance of the post-war European
economy (Rollo, 1994), anti-fascist culture engaged in ethnographic research to
retrieve supposedly authentic forms of popular culture. The paradox was twofold:
political resistance tended to ignore contemporary historical phenomena, such as
urbanization and industrialization, while simultaneously insisting on the same
forms of cultural legitimacy that constituted the core of the dictatorship’s rural
imaginary. And yet, there was something subversive here. For while fascist
propaganda had aestheticized folklore and neutralized any inconvenient aspects
of it (Ó, 1999), anti-fascism focused on precisely those aspects less in tune with an
idealized picture of the country and its people.
In this context the research led in Portugal by Corsican ethnomusicologist
Michel Giacometti from the late 1950s would constitute a counter-canon to
musical nationalism, making a direct impact on many musical forms emerging
in the 1960s (Oliveira, 2003). The first experiments of José Afonso in reworking
several regional genres shares the impulse from ethnomusicological research that
would permeate all forms of popular music. Simultaneously, Branco and Godinho,
who had both moved to Paris to escape authoritarianism and the colonial wars,
were being exposed to very different traditions. In France, they shared not only the
political atmosphere of May ’68, but also musical influences as varied as French
chanson, Anglo-American folk and rock, and the new Brazilian popular music of
singer-songwriters such as Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque (Bebiano, 2003).
The latter were decisive in the emergence of Godinho and Branco as singer-
songwriters. Given the lack of any strong tradition of urban songwriting in Portugal
(the ideological connotations of Fado during the dictatorship could hardly provide
a frame of reference (Nery, 2004)), the example of the Brazilian singers confirmed
that it was possible to sing about social and political issues in Portuguese
(Trindade, 2014). The merger of this Parisian experience in all its political and
cultural aspects with the intense reinvention of folk music tropes by the likes of
José Afonso back in Portugal triggered a break with nationalist folklore, Fado and
the romantic tradition of crooners derogatorily known as nacional-cançonetismo
(national-crooning). Indeed, all these elements coalesced in 1971, when Godinho’s
Sobreviventes, Branco’s Mudam-se os Tempos, Mudam-se as Vontades and José
Afonso’s Cantigas do Maio were released almost simultaneously.
Despite the formal and lyrical differences of their works, the three singers
present several similarities: Godinho and Branco collaborated on each other’s
albums and both bore the influence of Afonso’s previous work. This proximity
was also visible in the way Branco’s contribution to Cantigas do Maio, recorded in
France, broadened both the range of musical references and instrumental options
(Côrte-Real, 2010). Consequently, a hybrid fusion of musical influences and
historical references resonates in the three: the mediation of a strong commitment
to the present – fractured by sarcasm and irony – was combined with a return to
the sources of Portuguese folk. Moreover, better recording facilities than those
previously found in Portugal enhanced ‘the descriptive character of musical
composition’ (Tilly and Roxo, 2010, p. 170), which reinforced the ability of
popular music to participate in the political radicalization that paved the way
for the Revolution. Contemporary Portuguese society, in the throes of the end of
empire and dictatorship, seemed to have found its musical voice here. As in other
areas of Portuguese culture, it can be said that a revolution occurred in the realm
of popular music before 1974.
This explains why ‘Grândola’ and other songs pervaded the everyday life of
the Revolution. And yet, while their persistence in the social memory of the period
is easily understandable, it is perhaps less obvious how these authors also stood for
musical modernity at the time: the combination of the renewal of folk forms with
revolutionary politics gave these singer-songwriters an aura of ‘progressivism’
that was both political and musical. Accordingly, they were all soon engulfed in
political events, and the 18 months from April 1974 until the end of 1975 were
taken over by activism. The presence of these songs on the radio, at demonstrations
and at militant concerts was to a large extent a celebration of a political culture
shared by artists and the public. Again, this helps explain the significant symbolic
status of singer-songwriters and their music.
With the development of the revolutionary process, political polarization
forced artists to rally to specific parties and ideologies. This was apparent in the
breaking up of the Colectivo de Acção Cultural (Cultural Action Collective), which
had brought singer-songwriters together in the initial months of the revolutionary
process. Different singers declared allegiance to different groups such as the Canto
Livre (Free Chant), which was closer to the Communist Party, and the more Maoist
Grupo de Acção Cultural (Cultural Action Group) (GAC), whose leading figure
was Branco, and to cooperatives, such as the Toma Lá Disco, Cantabril and Era
Nova. Still, it would be a simplification to reduce these groups to partisanship, for
they were also collective responses to a lack of resources, and attempts to improve
the technical conditions available to musicians. Some worked as true ‘centers for the
production of records and the organization of shows’ (Côrte-Real, 1996, p. 160).
With the end of the revolutionary process and the demobilization of many activists
after November 1975, musicians continued to collaborate with these groups and
cooperatives. And although their proximity to political movements was still
visible, their specific role in the professionalization of the music business became
more relevant.
Starting Over 141
In the second half of the 1970s, singer-songwriters had to readjust to new

circumstances. While the frantic rhythm of revolutionary politics stabilized with
parliamentary democracy, society underwent an ambivalent transformation.
Towards the end of the decade, the country’s economy was on the verge of
collapse, and the International Monetary Fund intervened in a context of severe
austerity (Franco, 1994). Simultaneously, political freedom and negotiations with
the European Economic Community created a new demand for foreign cultural
goods that could respond to the rising aspirations of more sophisticated lifestyles
(Almeida, 2011). This latter development was clearly visible in the intense drive
towards Anglo-American culture, in particular rock music, by a younger generation
eager to erase the memory of authoritarianism and revolution (Dionísio, 1993).
The emergence of a wave of Portuguese rock bands in the early 1980s with
less political lyrics, expressing rather a tension between social dissatisfaction and
new forms of personal desire, bears witness to this (Trindade, 2013). Branco and
Godinho experienced these changes as a challenge, but also as an opportunity.
The defeat of the socialist projects in which they had been involved during the
Revolution (especially Branco with his Maoist activism) forced both to rethink
their artistic practice. This was noticeable firstly in a thematic shift in their songs
from the overtly ideological lyrics of the revolutionary period to new forms
of social agency and personal subjectivity in tune with what was happening in
Portuguese rock. But it could also be seen in the loss of protagonism of protest
song and the figure of the cantor de intervenção. After an intense period of research
into folk music, Branco left GAC, frustrated with the group’s lack of political
impact (Macedo, 1980). Godinho, on the other hand, expressed his fatigue at the
constant lack of technical resources for all aspects of his work (Galopim, 2006).
His involvement with the cooperative Era Nova, along with José Afonso and
others, aimed to improve the quality of their concerts and recordings and thus
reach wider audiences. This process would have formal consequences, which will
be analysed in greater detail in the following sections.
In these circumstances, the transition between the 1970s and the 1980s is
arguably one of the most creative and experimental periods in the careers of Godinho
and Branco. They were still seen as two of the most innovative singer-songwriters
in the recent history of PPM, combining impeccable political credentials with high
cultural status. In 1978, Godinho performed ‘Sete Anos de Canções’ (Seven Years
of Songs), produced by the Era Nova collective and probably the first tour by a
single artist with his own band after 1974. The tour, as the title suggests, was also
an opportunity to reflect upon his work since Sobreviventes and was later seen by
Godinho as the beginning of a new concert culture in Portugal (Galopim, 2006).
In a 1979 interview, Branco remarked how Godinho’s tour epitomized the
technical improvements of musical productions in Portugal and displayed a
higher level of professionalism at all levels of performance. The main topic of
this interview, however, was the show ‘Ser Solidário’ (Being Solidary), Branco’s
own post-revolutionary moment of self-reflection. According to Branco, ‘Ser
Solidário’ came out of the need to explain his ‘political, ideological, moral and
cultural choices’, now that he felt ‘confronted by new problems’ and a need to ‘go
deeper and find more solid foundations’ (Martins, 1979, p. 5). It took three years
for the songs in the show to be released on the double LP Ser Solidário (Branco,
1982). Despite all the album’s formal innovations – the influence of jazz, the
reconciliation with the accursed tradition of Fado – Branco still had a reputation
as a left-wing activist, which sometimes made his relations with labels difficult.
As for Godinho, the four records he released between the late 1970s and early
1980s enjoyed both critical and commercial success. Despite the differences in
the public reception of their work, both Branco and Godinho seem to have felt
a common need to engage more deeply with their approach to musical creation.
A decade after their debuts, they still appeared at the forefront of the main changes
in PPM. Yet, whereas in 1971 popular music had to be reinvented to fight cultural
isolation and political authoritarianism, in 1980 the challenge was to rethink the
political questions of the revolutionary period without falling into depoliticization
(like so many other sectors in Portuguese society and culture) and to continue
composing complex compositions at a moment saturated with punk and post-punk
rock music (a moment quite distant and distinct from the 1960s rock traditions that
Godinho was close to).
In short, both Godinho and Branco came to musical and political maturity
around the time of the Revolution, and both became singer-songwriters with
distinctively recognizable styles. This is what makes the albums they both released
between the late 1970s and the early 1980s so decisive in their careers and so
important in our understanding of the shifts in PPM during that period: a moment
when, for political, biographical and musical reasons, Godinho and Branco were
dramatically forced to face history and their role as musicians within it.
The Rhythm of History
Critics have noticed that Godinho’s work from 1978 onwards became more
‘musical’ than before (Duarte and Costa, 1981) – that is, that the meaning of his
songs was now more dependent on musical composition than on lyrics. Different
musicians were becoming increasingly influential in these compositions, something
Godinho himself was happy to admit. In fact, the singer would collaborate with a
wide range of musicians and composers, such as violinist Carlos Zíngaro (by then
very close to free improvisation) and João Paulo Esteves da Silva, a young pianist
influenced by Keith Jarrett. The impact of these collaborators was perceptible in the
formation of a musical atmosphere combining aspects ever-present in Godinho’s
work – folk music, guitar ballads – with jazz and other genres. Godinho never
really reached a settled musical idiom, and his albums must be heard as a constant
search for new solutions to problems posed by his narrative structures. As for the
lyrics, Godinho seemed to produce a much more consistent imaginary. And yet,
the two aspects cannot be simply separated, not only because there is a clear effort
to work with the words in musical composition, but also because his writing, with
Starting Over 143
all its syntactical and metaphorical resources, allows his songs to reach a ‘singular
aesthetic unity in which music also goes through the making of the word’ (Sardo,
2010, p. 572), something to which we will return later in this chapter.
The same could, to a large extent, be said of Branco who, referring to the
composition of Ser Solidário (the 1982 album based on the show with the same
name), defined the song as an autonomous form:
For me, the most important thing in this work is the way the song is treated as
a specific art form … . This is the ‘message’: the song is a specific art, maybe a
minor one and, also because of that, essentially popular. It is not music with a
‘little help’ from words, nor the other way around. (Macedo, 1980, p. 14)
Ser Solidário’s opening theme, ‘Travessia do Deserto’ (Crossing the Desert) is a

good example of this form of composition. The song initially sounds like a lament:
‘que caminho tão longo / que viagem tão comprida’ (what a long way / what a long
journey).2 Branco’s voice is at a very low pitch, accompanied by a lone guitar. In
the second verse, backing vocals join the singer while his own voice seems to gain
dramatic expressivity. The lament becomes a hymn. And yet, nothing prepares us for
what comes next: halfway through, with all the lyrics seemingly already sung and
the song apparently heading to its conclusion, electric guitar, drums and saxophone
make their entrance. The singer and the backing vocals repeat the lyrics but their
pitch is now higher. What initially sounded like a lament, now gains the strength of a
celebration. By the end, the song is unrecognizable and its energy, rather than turned
towards the past, sounds as if it is heading decisively towards the future.
Dramatic as this sudden shift of rhythm and expression may be, it is not
particularly subtle. The song is explicitly divided in two; the electric guitar and
drums only emerge after the initial part has already faded out. The feeling one
has is of hearing two songs rather than one divided into two parts. I insist on
this point in order to suggest this was deliberately intended to convey a specific
experience of time. In fact, there is a pattern here, with the use of similar breaks
in other songs. One particularly clear example is found in ‘Ser Solidário’, the
song that closes the album. Here too, Branco follows the same initial structure –
voice and instrument – only this time with an accordion (a common instrument in
Portuguese folk music) rather than guitar. As before, halfway through, the song is
filled with drums, electric guitar and piano. For four long minutes we hear a lively
jazz beat with a female choir. The singer returns near the end, to repeat the first
stanza: ‘Ser solidário assim pr’além da vida / Por dentro da distância percorrida /
Fazer de cada perda uma raiz / E improvavelmente ser feliz’ (To join hands, like
this, till the far side of life / Within the distance travelled / Turn each defeat into a
root / And be improbably happy).
2
Lyrics of songs by José Mário Branco are kindly reproduced by permission of the
author.
Some tropes of ‘Ser Solidário’ are already present in ‘Travessia do Deserto’ –

life as a path, the end of something as the beginning of something else – but what
should be noticed, not only in these two songs but in Ser Solidário as a whole,
is how Branco engaged with his own definition of the song as a composite form
to convey meaning through composition. These songs are about a temporal
break between two different moments that can be read both historically and
biographically, but this is achieved within the song, which shows how important
rhythm is to historical narrative. In other words, the link between the two moments
within the song is achieved not only by making elements unfold over time, like
in every narrative, but also, and more decisively, through the way in which the
development of rhythm accelerates the perception of time.
The affinities between the two singer-songwriters are here apparent, as the same
structure can also be found in Godinho. Two of his songs – ‘Os Conquistadores’
(The Conquerors) and ‘Mudemos de Assunto’ (Let’s Change the Subject) from
Campolide (Godinho, 1979) – are particularly interesting as each addresses the
two aspects, the historical and the biographical, that were entangled in Branco.
‘Os Conquistadores’, like ‘Travessia do Deserto’, starts with a very simple
structure of voice and guitar. Here too, the melancholy tone also evokes a journey,
but this time the historical reference is more explicit: ‘Lá vais, caravela, lá vais /
E a mão que me acena do cais / Dará a esta mão a coragem / de em frente, em
frente seguir viagem’ (There you go, caravel, there you go / And the hand that still
waves from the quay / Will give courage to this hand / In order to continue, to
continue its journey).3
Godinho’s critical stance towards the national imaginary of maritime
discoveries starts in the title, where he replaces the auspicious ‘discovery’ with a
reference to the bellicose ‘conquerors’. This distinction between a romantic picture
of the past and a post-colonial re-interpretation of the discoveries as conquest
(Ribeiro and Ferreira, 2003) is further enhanced by the same kind of break that we
have already seen in Branco, with the sudden appearance of a much faster rhythm,
in which both the guitar and the drums accelerate the nostalgic ballad. However,
whereas Branco uses this to give the same words a different musical atmosphere,
music and words in Godinho ‘sing’ the shift together. There is a moment when
the song stops and, just before restarting with a new rhythm, the lyrics confirm the
tune’s dramatic change: ‘Mas parai, trago notícias horríveis / Parai com tudo / Já
avisto os conquistadores’ (Stop, I bring terrible news / Stop everything / I already
see our conquerors). From that moment on, the song engages in a new narrative
of violence, exploitation and, eventually, indigenous rebellion – a reference to the
colonial wars and decolonization in the 1960s and the 1970s.
This ability to narrate through rhythm reaches a peak with ‘Mudemos de
Assunto’. This song is more personal than the others as it seems to deal with a
romantic break-up. However, it never becomes melancholic, as each verse ends
3
Lyrics of songs by Sergio Godinho are kindly reproduced © EMI Music Publishing
Portugal Edições Musicais, Lda.
Starting Over 145
with an optimistic line hinting at an open future. The real shift between the two
moments, however, occurs once again through both melody and lyrics. Here, the
music practically stops before resuming with a line that announces, along with the
drums, a new rhythm that supposedly corresponds to a new phase in life: ‘Mas isto
é um canto / e não um lamento / já disse o que sinto / agora façamos o ponto / e
mudemos de assunto / sim?’ (But this is a chant / not a lament / I already said what
I feel / now let’s give it a rest / and change the subject / OK?).4
This pattern reinforces the proximity we have been analysing between the
two singer-songwriters in relation to a particularly important aspect of their work.
More than a thematic or melodic insistence on the same tropes, there seems to be
a structure articulating past and present through both music and lyrics. Here, a set
of issues related to their work, but also to the historical moment and their lives
in it, is being negotiated. In this sense, it can be suggested that a new historical
narrative emerges from the way the structure of these songs enacts a tension
between different social and individual temporalities.
Musical Narratives
My insistence on the meaning of these narrative shifts and rhythmic breaks in the
post-revolutionary work of Branco and Godinho does not require much insight,
as both clearly assumed a relation between their work and their own personal and
historical situations. Branco in particular was very clear about the meaning of
Ser Solidário as an evaluation of the cycle that started with the revolution, whose
defeat ‘forced us, into not exactly inactivity, but into a much more serious inquiry
into how one transforms life’ (Duarte, 1982, p. 14). In 1980, a 20-minute live
performance titled ‘FMI’ (IMF) – a reference to the intervention of the International
Monetary Fund in the Portuguese economy in the late 1970s – can be seen as a
good example of what such an inquiry would look like. ‘FMI’ is a long satire
on post-revolutionary Portugal, presenting a gallery of revolutionary figures, the
depoliticization of those who had once been committed to social transformation,
and the first signs of consumerism. The text unfolds in a dramatic crescendo.
At its climax, Branco undergoes an emotional collapse on stage. Subsequently
he completely changes his mood from irony to lament. From this moment on,
the monotonous guitar chords are replaced by a much more melodic flute, and
the text re-enacts exactly the same tension of death and rebirth we have seen in
other works: ‘Assim te quero cantar, mar antigo a que regresso … . Neste cais eu
encontrei a margem do outro lado, “Grândola Vila Morena”. Diz lá, valeu a pena a
travessia? Valeu pois’ (This is how I want to sing you, old sea to where I return … .
On this quay I found the other shore, “Grândola, Vila Morena”. Tell me, now, was
4
The Portuguese original is very ingenious in the way it rises to a climax by using the
five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) to conclude each of the lines (canto, lamento, sinto, ponto, assunto)
before cutting the phrase with ‘sim’.
it worth the crossing? Of course it was) (Branco, 1982). Right at the beginning,
Branco explains to his audience that ‘FMI’ had been written on a February night
in 1979. It is, it seems, his effort to come to terms with history. This is a good
way to see Ser Solidário (based on the aforementioned 1979 concert) as an album
that intervenes (as per the cantores de intervenção), not so much in politics but in
history and in the perception of historical time as such.
‘Eu Vim de Longe, Eu Vou para Longe’ (I Came a Long Way, I’ll Go Far
Away), one of the most popular songs on the album, uses the repetitive rhythm of a
northern folk dance, the Chula (whose popular origins reinforce the legitimacy of
the song’s political message) to narrate in eight verses the history of the revolution
and its defeat up to the moment when the song was written and sung. The story
is told in the first person and starts with the singer’s arrival from exile to be part,
with his ‘hymns’, of the intense celebration. Afterwards, when ‘November took
revenge’ (a reference to 25 November 1975, the date of the counter-revolution) he
saw the weapons turning against him and his revolutionary ideals. The narrative,
however, does not stop here (the end of the revolution) and continues to yet another
moment of rebirth, with Branco’s promise to continue to participate with his songs
in ‘what my people are going to do’.
To bring the narrative of the recent past all the way to the moment of
composition does not only situate his work in the present. By situating himself
in the historical continuum, he also opens it up to the future. Such a temporal
structure is consonant with Marxism’s philosophy of history as a progression
towards communism. Branco’s engagement in Maoist movements matches the
way he conceived the narrative of history. Yet the consonance between political
ideology and musical narrative is not enough to materialize the communist
utopia, for that historical progression depended on a specific ‘intervention’ –
history as the history of class struggle – in order to move forward. This is why
it was so decisive to end ‘FMI’ and ‘Eu Vim de Longe, Eu Vou para Longe’
with interpellations to the audience and reiterations of the singers’s public
commitment to continue the struggle. It is also why it was so important to engage
in formal experimentation. At a moment when PPM was suffering another
internal revolution with the emergence of a new rock scene, singer-songwriters
had to open their compositions to formal solutions that allowed them a purchase
on the present.
The combination of historical awareness and formal experimentation was even
more urgent in Godinho, who was never as committed an activist as Branco.5 In
interviews, he insisted on the need to permanently question his work. When asked
whether such self-reflexivity would not risk becoming a form of individualism,
he replied that the better he managed to express his own subjectivity, the better
his music would reach other people. This entailed, he added, a focus on the
everyday and a particular sensitivity to social change. Accordingly, by the early
5
Despite his collaboration with various political movements, Godinho was never a
member of a political organization (Trindade, 2014).
Starting Over 147
1980s Godinho was able to reassess his work and argue that the reason why his
recent albums seemed less political was because society itself had experienced a
process of depoliticization. He had always focused on the everyday, but while the
quotidian in 1974 and 1975 was filled with collective politics, by the later period
people had turned towards new forms of subjectivity (Macedo, 1978; see also
Duarte and Costa, 1981).
In an interview about Coincidências (Godinho, 1983), the album that closes my
chronological frame, Godinho reiterated how this perception of change and a new
focus on the individual worked as a guiding principle in both his life and work:
‘I’m a very restless guy who permanently tries to redefine my daily relation with
politics, the present, the future’ (Teles, 1983, p. 16). In this sense, his definition
of Coincidências as ‘the contradiction between … the desire for peace and the
desire for struggle’ can be read as a statement about the need to transfuse his songs
with that personal experience of historical transition. The opposition between anti-
fascism and dictatorship in this context undergoes a shift towards more intimate
conflicts. Godinho’s commitment to using his songs to ‘develop a specific form
to express [his] everyday relation to politics’ (Teles, 1983, p. 16) exemplifies his
way of coming to terms with history and of responding to a transitional period in
the history of Portugal. This experience of transition impacted on his songwriting,
particularly the dynamic relation between music and lyrics. As the expression of
such a temporal intersection, it could be argued that the song’s specific politics lies
in this dynamic.
It is impossible to give a comprehensive picture of the most decisive aspects
of Godinho’s songwriting. As we have already seen, the music in his songs often
played a key role in the constitution of meaning. The ‘musical character of his
language’ was noticed as early as 1977 in its ‘repetitions’, ‘rhymes’, ‘dialogues’,
‘colloquialisms’, ‘everything that facilitates the suggestion of orality and the
intervention of the musical instrument’ (Saraiva, 1983, p. 31). In other words,
his lyrics are filled with literary and linguistic resources: some are true short
stories with plot and characters; rhetorical devices and the presence of the narrator
interpellate the listener; the popular and the banal intersect in constant wordplay
and syntactical turns. Moreover, these narratives are particularly suited to the
structure of the lyrics, not only in his skilful use of rhyme and metre, but above
all in the dialogue (explicit repetitions or more subtle semantic and rhythmic
connections) between verses.
This narrative structure formed by the dynamic relation between different
verses and lines is particularly important, as it often becomes what I would like
to call a dramaturgy of time. The number of songs evolving along the temporality
of transition I have been insisting on – a dramatic crescendo towards a climax
followed by a retreat that prepares a peaceful outcome – is truly remarkable.
A particularly relevant example is ‘Primeiro Dia’ (First Day), from Pano-Cru
(Godinho, 1978) – probably Godinho’s most emblematic song. ‘Primeiro Dia’
can be read as a short Bildungsroman, starting with the protagonist’s coming of
age and progressing to the moment when, after all sorts of journeys and struggles,
there is finally time to stop and start all over again.6 The song is composed of six
verses of six lines. The two last lines in each are identical, working as a short
chorus of sorts: ‘E vem-nos à memória uma frase batida: / “Hoje é o primeiro dia
do resto da tua vida”’ (And a worn-out sentence comes to mind: / ‘Today is the
first day of the rest of your life’). The casual detachment of the first line contrasts
with the way the second pauses and punctuates the narrative with temporal self-
reflexivity, by situating that particular day in a broader biographical narrative.
Such repetition slows down the pace of the narrative and reinforces the tension
between progression and repetition. This tension, however, is already at work in a
certain affinity between the roles played by each line in the different verses within
the song.
In this sense, it is possible to identify an affinity between how each first
line defines the temporal pace, how each second line situates the narrative, how
the third line designates the situation, and finally how the fourth uses different
drinking situations in order to create a metaphorical image of each stage of life.
For example, whereas enthusiasm is drunk from a bottomless glass in the second
verse (when the narrator is still full of youthful energy), in the fifth, courage has
already to be drunk from an empty glass:
Pouco a pouco o passo faz-se Step by step, the pace begins to drift
vagabundo
dá-se a volta ao medo, dá-se a volta ao you go around fear, you go around the
mundo world
diz-se do passado, que está moribundo you say the past is at death’s door
bebe-se o alento num copo sem you drink your spirit from a bottomless
fundo … glass …
Enfim duma escolha faz-se um desafio You turn your choice into a challenge
enfrenta-se a vida de fio a pavio you face your life end to end
navega-se sem mar, sem vela ou navio you sail without sea, or sail or ship
bebe-se a coragem até dum copo vazio you drink your courage from an empty
glass
(Godinho, 1978)
While these lines are sung, the rhythm of the piano and the tone of the choir grow
louder and gather pace, thus reinforcing the song’s mounting tension towards a
climax in the fifth verse. But this is not where the song ends; Godinho employs
one last verse to conclude with the guarantee that things inevitably will start all
over again:
6
‘This is a song that speaks about the regeneration of affections and strength in a
situation of break. It could be the end of love, or have a wider interpretation, the end of
any cycle. There’s a break, … a new challenge and then a sense of peace that brings a new,
clearer, consciousness’ (Sérgio Godinho in Galopim 2006, p. 76).
Starting Over 149
E entretanto o tempo fez cinza da Meanwhile time turned embers into

brasa ashes
e outra maré cheia virá da maré vaza Another high tide will come from the
low tide
nasce um outro dia e no braço outra asa Another day is born, and in the arm
another wing
brinda-se aos amores com o vinho da We toast to love with the house wine
casa
Godinho’s voice, by now, sings rather melancholically, but the new ‘wing’ and the
new ‘tide’ are there to reassure the listener that time will keep going. Rather than
the object of a statement, the flow of time is enacted throughout the narrative: the
listener is not told, but invited to verify that history, grim as it might look at times,
will continue, and that Godinho, just like Branco promised at the end of ‘FMI’,
will also keep on singing.
Conclusion
‘Primeiro Dia’ is just one of the many examples one could present to illustrate
Godinho’s experience of the late 1970s and the early 1980s as a historical
transition, when different ‘times’ intersected and the game between change and
continuity, end and rebirth, seemed tense and permanent. Yet what is decisive here
is how such historicity not only entails a political stance: ‘Viva quem muda / sem
ter medo do escuro / o desconhecido é o irmão do futuro’ (Long live those who
change / Fearless of darkness / The unknown is the brother of the future), in ‘O Rei
vai Nu’ (Godinho, 1981). It is also one that involves the singer himself: ‘Como o
pano-cru eu ainda estou por acabar / … Estou entre aquilo que já fiz e aquilo que
fizer’ (Like a raw fabric I’m yet unfinished / … I’m between what I’ve done and
what I’ll do) (Godinho, 1978) in ‘Pano-cru’. We have seen as much in the songs of
Branco, in the way the singer-songwriter’s temporal awareness is reflected in both
the lyrics of his songs and in his political commitment.
Such an insistent repetition of the same temporality is of course no
coincidence, but a discursive formation (Foucault, 2002) where individual creation
simultaneously becomes an aspect of biography and a generational trace. And the
fact that, as we have seen, this historical continuum pervades the structure of so
many songs also suggests we may have touched here on a key element of the
period’s political unconscious, which, according to Fredric Jameson, reveals itself
precisely through the work’s formal procedures, rather than through the content
as such (Jameson, 1982). In this sense, more than a group of singers acting in a
specific historical context, it could almost be said that it is the period’s political
unconscious that was really ‘acting’ on them.
This chapter’s thesis is thus rather simple: after a major historical break such as
the Carnation Revolution – an event in which songwriters like Branco and Godinho
were deeply involved – came the need to stop, reflect and start over. But what is
interesting here, as we have seen, is the way in which the constant references to
time and to a dialectic of the past, present and future crystallized in the songs’
musical and narrative structures, and not in just the themes and plots. When these
songs take us through their own temporality, they establish a perception of time
through narrative, which, for Paul Ricoeur, is exactly where any sense of history
lies in the first place. In other words, historical time can only be perceived through
the time of the narrative (Ricoeur, 1990).
But these songs do more than just give us a historical perception of the flow of
time. With their intersection of different temporalities and the complex narrative
structure from which they emerge, they also evoke still another historical role
ascribed to narratives: what Fredric Jameson, taking Ricoeur’s thesis further,
defined as the ability of narrative to make history appear by disclosing its
contradictions (Jameson, 2009).7 The internal dynamics of the songs of Branco
and Godinho (their specific politics), with their rhythmic contrasts, melodic
discontinuities and the tension between music and lyrics, were thus political by
refusing the closure of history at a moment when any horizon of transformation
seemed unthinkable.
7
‘We must therefore retain this violence and negativity in any concept of intersection,
in order for this dissonant conjunction to count as an Event, and in particular as that Event
which is the ephemeral rising up and coming to appearance of Time and History as such.
Nor is this a purely textual or philosophical matter: for it is the same discordant conjuncture
that constitutes the emergence of time and of history in the real world’ (Jameson, 2009,
p. 544).
Part III
Place
Chapter 10
The Re-Invention of the French
Singer-Songwriter in the Liberation Years:
Léo Ferré and the French Poetic Heritage
in Popular Song
Peter Hawkins
The close association between poetry and popular song has been a constant
feature of French culture for a thousand years, since the troubadours, and the
relationship has taken many different forms at different periods of French social
history (Looseley, 2013, pp. 52–5). In the twentieth century this association has
taken on a new lease of life thanks to the proliferation of electronic media, leading
to what has been described as a ‘golden age’ of the French singer-songwriter in
the decades after the Second World War (Calvet, 1995, p. 58; Hawkins, 2000,
pp. 213–18; Cordier, 2014, pp. 167–80). The purpose of this chapter is to outline
the origins of this renaissance, focusing mainly on the figure of Léo Ferré, who
embodies in the clearest way the dynamic interaction between a literary tradition
of poetry and a current of popular music amplified by the mass media. The career
of Ferré will be situated in relation to his contemporaries Charles Trenet, Georges
Brassens and others who contributed to this evolution in decisive ways. These
figures appear to have offered role models for similar, later careers of singer-
songwriters in other European countries. A final section will attempt a comparison
of these developments with analogous trends in Anglo-American popular music,
with particular reference to the role of the singer-songwriter, briefly exploring the
differences of conception between them.
By general assent, it was Charles Trenet who initiated the recent current of
French singer-songwriters in the 1930s.1 For several decades French popular music
had sidelined singer-songwriters in favour of revue artists such as Mistinguett
and Josephine Baker, melodramatic realist singers such as Damia and Fréhel, or
crooners like Jean Sablon and Maurice Chevalier, who did not usually write or
compose their material (Hawkins, 2000, p. 215). Trenet embraced the American
jazz rhythms and dance band styles of that decade and added to them poetic lyrics
inspired by his contacts with the literary avant-garde of the time, notably the
influential figures of Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob. Trenet’s lyrics were most often
1
Brassens, Brel and Ferré all agree about Trenet’s significance as a precursor.
light and playful in tone, with an undercurrent of seriousness that gave them a
greater weight than the conventional popular lyrics of the time (Hawkins, 2000,
pp. 85–94). Although he was clearly influenced by literary models, he did not draw
directly on the poetry of the period, with one exception, a setting of a poem by
Paul Verlaine that used the name of its author as its title.
During the same period some of the poets associated with the Surrealist
movement broke with its uncompromising avant-garde artistic principles and
moved in the direction of popular culture. Jacques Prévert joined the agit-prop
theatre company the Groupe Octobre and became the author of film dialogues for
the director Marcel Carné, in a series of classic films including Le Jour se lève of
1939 and Les Enfants du paradis of 1945. Robert Desnos wrote La Complainte
de Fantômas and produced it for the radio in 1932; and Raymond Queneau
published the first of his populist novels, Le Chiendent, in 1933. In the years after
the Liberation, at the end of the Second World War, these poets, drawing on their
own popular poetic collections, the most famous of which is Jacques Prévert’s
volume Paroles of 1946, would go on to provide successful song lyrics for the
artists associated with Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Parisian Latin Quarter.
Well-known examples (in Various Artists, 1976) include Juliette Greco (‘Si tu
t’imagines’ by Raymond Queneau, ‘La Fourmi’ by Robert Desnos), Yves Montand
(‘Barbara’ and ‘Les Feuilles mortes’ by Jacques Prévert) and the group Les Frères
Jacques (‘Inventaire’ by Jacques Prévert). Whereas the norm of the time was a
separation of the roles of singer, lyricist and composer, this established a context
favourable to the singer-songwriters of the post-war years, analogous to poets and
writers, and set the tone for poetic lyric-writing. This development was chronicled
in detail by Lucienne Cantaloube-Ferrieu in her groundbreaking doctoral thesis of
1981, Chanson et poésie des années 30 aux années 60: Trenet, Brassens, Ferré –
ou les ‘enfants naturels’ du surréalisme.
This was the milieu in which Léo Ferré made his first tentative steps as a singer-
songwriter from 1946 onwards, some years before Georges Brassens’s stage debut
in 1952. Ferré’s early career was that of a bohemian cabaret performer, and it took
a decade before he achieved wide popular success, whereas Brassens’s career took
off more rapidly, fuelled by the scandal and controversy of his bawdier songs, such
as ‘Le Gorille’ (Brassens, 1993, pp. 11–13). For many of his early songs Ferré
provided the music for lyrics by fellow bohemian poets such as Francis Claude
(‘L’Île Saint-Louis’ in Ferré, 2013a, pp. 221–2 and Ferré, 1953), René Baër (‘La
Chambre’ in Ferré, 1993) and Jean-Roger Caussimon (‘Monsieur William’, in
Ferré, 1953, 1993). His earliest success was as a songwriter interpreted by other
artists: Edith Piaf, by then a major star, included one of his songs ‘Les Amants
de Paris’ (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 219–20) in her repertoire, and Catherine Sauvage
gave him his first hit song with ‘Paris Canaille’ in 1952 (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 48–51;
Sauvage, 2009). His own early recordings, with the company Le Chant du Monde,
were first issued on 78rpm singles, and then re-issued as one of the first vinyl long-
playing records in 1953 (Ferré, 1953). This represents one of the earliest examples
of an ‘album’ of poetic songs analogous to a collection of poems, a format that
The Re-Invention of the French Singer-Songwriter 155
would go on to provide a perfect vehicle for the work of several generations of

singer-songwriters. Ferré then joined the Odéon recording company and produced
a string of LP albums and 45rpm Extended Play recordings of his own songs that
accompanied his growing success as a live performer (Estienne, 1962, pp. 183–4;
Belleret, 1996, pp. 737–8). In 1954 he featured for the first time at the major
Parisian music hall L’Olympia, as a support act for Josephine Baker: although his
bohemian appearance was off-putting for the audience, he achieved for the first
time a moderate level of popular and critical appreciation that he was able to build
on in subsequent years (Belleret, 1996, pp. 229–31).
It is during this period that Ferré began to turn his attention to poetry. In 1954
he adapted the celebrated poem by Apollinaire ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ as a popular
song, on one of his early Odéon releases (Apollinaire, 1913; Ferré, 1993). The
following year he merged two poems by the thirteenth-century poet Rutebeuf to
produce the lament ‘Pauvre Rutebeuf’ (Ferré, 1993). At the same time he began
work on an ambitious oratorio setting of Apollinaire’s long poem ‘La Chanson du
Mal-Aimé’ (Apollinaire, 1913). This work of classical orchestral composition was
rejected by the French state radio, the ORTF, but found an unexpected champion
in Prince Rainier of Monaco, who invited Ferré, a Monégasque, to conduct his
work at its première in Monte Carlo in 1954 (Belleret, 1996, pp. 220–25). The
work was subsequently recorded on the Odéon label in 1957 (Ferré, 1993) and
Ferré re-worked and re-recorded it in 1972 for the Barclay label, at the peak of
his popularity.
At around the same time, Ferré embarked on another interpretation of a major
poetic work, but this time in a popular musical style. The year 1957 saw the
centenary of the publication of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire, 2006),
and Ferré celebrated it with an album of popular versions of a selection of his
poems (Ferré, 1993). These were accompanied by a small orchestra and included
some of the best-known texts, such as ‘Harmonie du soir’ and ‘L’Invitation
au voyage’. For the latter Ferré used that distinctively popular instrument, the
accordion, far removed from the choral and symphony orchestra treatment used
for Apollinaire’s ‘La Chanson du Mal-aimé’.
In the mid-1950s, Ferré came to the attention of the post-war Surrealist group,
and became friendly with its leader, the poet André Breton. One of his poetic lyrics,
‘L’Amour’ (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 126–7) was included by the Surrealist Benjamin Péret
in his Anthologie de l’amour sublime (Péret, 1956) and the group made no secret
of their admiration for some of his songs. Ferré wanted to publish a collection of
his own poetic texts, Poètes, vos papiers (Ferré, 1956 and 2013a, pp. 87ff.) and
asked Breton for a preface. Having read the collection, Breton admonished him
never to publish it (Belleret, 1996, pp. 244–7). This was the motive for a durable
quarrel and Ferré decided to write his own Préface, a manifesto of his own poetic
principles (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 87–91) that he later adapted as a text to be declaimed
against an orchestral accompaniment, on the album Il n’y a plus rien of 1973 (Ferré,
2013a, pp. 443–4). He subsequently turned many of the poems into song lyrics in
his later albums. Breton never gave an explanation for his rejection, but it seems
likely that it turned on Ferré’s extensive use of popular slang and scatological
allusions, closer to Dada sensibilities than Surrealist ones. Ferré’s own Préface in
particular championed the role of live performance of poetic texts and condemned
any form of restriction on the type of vocabulary to be used (Hawkins, 2005).
It is clear from the development of Ferré’s career in the 1950s that he wanted
to achieve a synthesis between the high culture represented by Surrealism and
the modernist heritage in poetry, as well as classical music, and the popular
culture of the music hall and the electronic media. He sought the recognition
of the cultural establishment of the period and at the same time courted popular
and commercial success. This strategy continued into the next decade with some
striking successes that confirmed his status as a major figure of post-war French
culture (Hawkins, 2003).
In 1960 Ferré joined the Barclay record label, which at the time was recruiting
many of the most successful and well-established singer-songwriters of the post-
war years: Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and Jean Ferrat. His first album for
Barclay was a runaway popular success, with a series of poetic and satirical songs
that included ‘Les Poètes’, a tribute to the bohemian poets of the early years of
the century (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 235–6). Prior to joining Barclay, he had worked on
popular settings of the poems of the former Surrealist, Resistance poet and literary
figurehead of the French Communist Party, Louis Aragon. These were drawn from
a 1956 collection of poetic reminiscences of his early years, Le Roman inachevé.
This led to a highly successful album, Les Chansons d’Aragon chantées par Léo
Ferré of 1961, which paved the way for subsequent albums of poetic adaptations
and perhaps provided a model for similar popular interpretations of Aragon texts
by Jean Ferrat (Ferrat, 1968). Later in the decade Ferré went on to devote double
LP albums to the poems of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud in 1964, and a
further double album of versions of Baudelaire in 1967.
It is interesting at this point to compare the career of Georges Brassens over
a similar period. Brassens first began performing his bawdy and poetic songs
in 1952, and by the end of the 1950s was a controversial but very successful
recording artist and live performer. Alongside his own often provocative and
subversive lyrics, in all his long-playing albums Brassens included at least one
musical setting of a traditional poem, as if to underline his connection to a heritage
of folk songs and marginal poetic writing. These poetic texts included pieces by
Villon (‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’), Paul Fort (‘Le Petit Cheval’ and
‘La Marine’), Victor Hugo (‘Gastibelza’), Aragon (‘Il n’y pas d’amour heureux’),
Francis Jammes (‘La prière’), Verlaine (‘Colombine’) and so on (Brassens, 1988).
His choice of poetic texts was more eclectic than that of Ferré, and included some
fairly little-known figures, such as Jean Richepin (‘Le Vin’) and Antoine Pol (‘Les
Passantes’). Brassens was a great reader of obscure poetic anthologies and he also
alluded in many of his own lyrics to traditional folksongs, as in ‘Dans l’Eau de la
claire fontaine’ (Brassens, 1993, pp. 118–19) and ‘La Route aux quatre chansons’
(Brassens, 1993, pp. 146–8). Ferré, on the other hand, draws predominantly on the
modernist poetic canon of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire and Aragon,
with occasional borrowings from medieval poets, such as Villon and Rutebeuf.
He clearly identifies with the marginal, bohemian and anti-establishment figures
of the French poetic heritage, those who were in some respect at odds with the
society of their times.
Apart from their renditions of classic poetic texts, what are the common
characteristics of Ferré and Brassens in their own output, which may have served
to define the role of the French singer-songwriter in the post-war years? Both were
clearly situated on the left of the French political spectrum, but not associated with
any of the established factions such as the Communist Party. Both had declared
sympathies with the Anarchist Federation, and quite explicitly promoted libertarian
ideas in their songs. Typical examples might include ‘Graine d’ananar’ by Ferré
(Ferré, 2013a, pp. 59–60) or ‘La Mauvaise Réputation’ by Brassens (Brassens,
1993, pp. 9–10). Both singer-songwriters combine social satire and a personal
lyricism that celebrates love and sexual freedom, as in ‘Les Amoureux des bancs
publics’ (Brassens, 1993, pp. 17–19) and ‘Paname’ (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 233–5).
Both celebrate generosity and friendship, usually but not exclusively between
men: ‘Les Copains d’abord’ by Brassens (1993, pp. 134–5) is the classic example
of this, and corresponds to Ferré’s ‘Les Copains de la Neuille’ (Ferré, 2013a,
pp. 121–2) some six years earlier. These common characteristics are not shared,
however, by Charles Trenet, who included very little social or political comment
in his lyrics, and if occasionally satirical most often shows a lightness of touch
which is rarely subversive, as in ‘Le Serpent Python’ (Trenet, 1993, pp. 241–3).
Ferré was often associated with the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the Existentialist
years (as in Ferré’s song of the same name: Ferré, 1953; Ferré, 2013a, p. 33); and
his political stance is associated with that of Jean-Paul Sartre in ‘Le Conditionnel
de variétés’ of 1971 (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 428–9), referring to Sartre’s public selling
of the Maoist journal La Cause du peuple. This explicit left-wing political stance,
even if not aligned with any institutionalized party, is one of the elements that
distinguishes the post-war generation of singer-songwriters from their pre-war
equivalents, and it continues in many subsequent figures influenced by them, such
as Renaud, Bernard Lavilliers, Maxime Le Forestier and others.
It would be much more difficult to identify common elements in the musical
styles they deploy, however. Ferré in particular used a wide range of musical
genres, from the accordion to the symphony orchestra by way of chamber music
and ‘easy listening’ styles, including a brief flirtation with rock music in the early
1970s. Brassens, on the other hand, remained faithful to the folk-song style, using
a simple guitar and bass accompaniment, even if inflected by the influence of jazz
harmonies of the ‘swing’ era. Trenet’s musical style was initially that of the ‘swing’
of the dance bands of the 1930s, and in his later work tends to use an American-
style big band of the 1950s. There appears to be no clear common denominator
to these musical styles, perhaps because for these French singer-songwriters the
musical accompaniment is usually subordinated to the lyrics.
The contrasting musical styles of Brassens and Ferré lead one to examine
the effect that their recorded versions produce on the poetic texts they interpret.
The musical colour of Ferré’s treatments varies quite widely in style and atmosphere,
whereas those of Brassens remain within the fairly consistent parameters of his
folksy musical style. Ferré’s earliest recording of a well-known poetic text was
‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ by Apollinaire in 1954 (Ferré, 1993). The orchestral texture
is similar to a chamber ensemble, and Ferré’s vocal is light and wistful, as befits
the melancholy tone of the poem. The melody is a strong and memorable one,
which serves the lyrical lament very well. Some years later, in the early 1960s,
tackling the Resistance poetry of Aragon in ‘L’Affiche rouge’, Ferré adopts a full-
throated dramatic rendition, almost operatic in tone, supported by a women’s choir
and punctuated with percussion effects. For Verlaine’s plaintive lament ‘Chanson
d’automne’ in the mid-1960s, Ferré deliberately undercuts the melancholy of the
text with a jazz violin arrangement reminiscent of Stéphane Grappelli, producing
an effect of tongue-in-cheek irony. Finally, his treatment of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’
poem in his 1967 album sets against the morbid melancholy of the text a soaring
string arrangement that suggests the desperate aspiration towards an ‘idéal’ of
escape and transcendence. When interpreted in concert in the aftermath of the
May 1968 political upheaval, this text took on an unexpected political dimension
of disappointment at the failure of the revolutionary movement, crystallized in
the reference to the ‘black flag’ of despair at the end of the poem, and alluding
to the involvement of the anarchist groups. It is clear from this that Ferré’s
very diverse interpretations of his poetic texts add a considerable dimension of
irony and dramatic effect to the poems, as well as memorable melody lines and
ambitious orchestrations, and these are capable of transforming their significance
in unexpected ways.
In 1962, first Ferré and then Brassens were included in a prestigious series of
monographs on contemporary poets, the Poètes d’aujourd’hui series published
by Pierre Seghers (Estienne, 1962; Bonnafé, 1963). This represented a kind of
consecration of the quality of their own poetic lyrics, which were reproduced in an
anthology, accompanied by a critical essay. It became a journalistic commonplace
to refer to them as poets, and in 1967 Brassens was even awarded the ‘Prix de la
Poésie’ by the august Académie Française (Papanikolaou, 2007, pp. 30–1). Such
was the prestige and popularity of the post-war generation of singer-songwriters
that Seghers decided to launch a new series called ‘Poésie et chansons’, with Ferré
as No. 1, Brassens as No. 2 and Jacques Brel as No. 3. Ferré was not happy with
this, however, and regarded it as less prestigious than his previous position as
No. 93 among the ‘poets of today’ (Estienne, 1962): it is clear that he wanted to be
considered as a literary figure and suspected the new series of being commercially
motivated (Belleret, 1996, pp. 336–7).
In his later career, Ferré returned sporadically to settings of poetic texts by his
favoured authors. He recorded versions of ‘L’Adieu’ and ‘Marie’ by Apollinaire
in the 1970s,2 and embarked on an orchestral setting of Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau
2
The ‘flipside’ of his single releases were ‘Avec le temps’ (Barclay, 1971) and ‘Je
t’aimais bien, tu sais’ (Barclay, 1973).
ivre’ in a triple album of 1982. His 1986 album On n’est pas sérieux quand on a
dix-sept ans, whose title he borrowed from Rimbaud, also included several texts
by Verlaine,3 Baudelaire4 and Apollinaire.5 The last recording published before
his death was a performance of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer (Ferré, 1991)
and after his death in 1993, his son Mathieu released some working recordings of
further settings of Baudelaire (Ferré, 2008). One of his later concert residencies
in 1986, at the Parisian libertarian theatre the TLP Dejazet, was devoted entirely
to his settings of poems, and was recorded and subsequently released as a DVD
(Ferré, 1996).
The blurring of any distinction between his own lyrics and those of his
preferred poets, particularly in his later albums, suggests that he is making an
implicit claim to be their equal, and that popular musical settings are not to be
regarded any differently from those of so-called ‘serious’ music. For Ferré, the
singer-songwriter is entitled to be considered as the modern equivalent of the
poet of earlier literary periods. At his death in 1993, the journalist Hélène Hazéra
observed that Ferré’s recordings of earlier poetic texts were the first experience of
poetry for a whole generation that had grown up with audio-visual media and were
unable to quote the name of a contemporary, living poet (Hazéra, 1993). The poets
of the French resistance to the German occupation, such as Aragon and Eluard,
had been widely read in the post-war years, as had the poets of the Liberation years
mentioned earlier, like Jacques Prévert; but the subsequent generation of post-war
poets, such as Yves Bonnefoy or Michel Deguy, were much less well known to
popular audiences.
Such was the prestige of the French singer-songwriters by the end of the 1960s
that they provided a model for similar movements in other European countries,
and even further afield. Jacques Brel’s songs were the inspiration for the New
York off-Broadway show Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, with
English adaptations by Mort Shuman and Eric Blau (Shuman and Blau, 1968) and
its London performances exerted an influence on the young David Bowie6 and
the solo career of Scott Walker.7 In Greece similar national movements of singer-
songwriters developed, as traced in Dimitris Papanikolaou’s study Singing Poets
(2007). Even before the collapse of the Franco regime in Spain in the mid-1970s,
singer-songwriters such as Paco Ibáñez and Javier Krahe, as well as Joan Manuel
Serrat and Lluís Llach in Catalonia, from being figures of cultural resistance, were
able to develop careers comparable to those of Ferré, Brassens and Brel (Marc,
2013a; and 2013b, p. 122). Ferré’s recordings were banned in Spain under the
3
‘Colloque sentimental’ and ‘Si tu ne mourus pas entre mes bras’.
4
‘Je te donne ces vers’ and ‘Bien loin d’ici’.
5
‘Les Cloches’, ‘La Tzigane’ and ‘Marie’.
6
Bowie interpreted two Brel songs in English versions in the early 1970s:
‘Amsterdam’ and ‘My Death’.
7
Scott Walker recorded several hit singles of English adaptations of Brel, including
‘Mathilde’ and ‘If You Go Away’ in 1968.
Franco regime, because of his overt criticism in several songs8 and his declared
anarchist sympathies, but after 1975 there was a resurgence of interest in his work,
notably in Catalonia (Belleret, 2013, pp. 101–2). In Italy, on the other hand, his
influence has been less strong than that of Brel and Brassens, in spite of taking
up residence in Tuscany from 1972 onwards, regularly using the ‘Symphony
Orchestra of Milan’ to interpret his arrangements, and issuing two albums of songs
adapted into Italian. Jacques Vassal attributes his limited appeal in Italy to his
explicit attacks on the Catholic Church (Vassal, 2013, pp. 223–4).
Some twenty years after his death in July 1993, the music and the career of
Léo Ferré have been extensively celebrated in the French printed and audio-
visual media. The authoritative national newspaper Le Monde devoted a special
supplement to him, including a selection of his best-known lyrics, interviews,
and articles by his admirers and biographers (see Plougastel, 2013). Several
commemorative television programmes were broadcast in France in July 2013,
the anniversary month, some as re-issued archive recordings and some as new
creations.9 In October 2013 France-Musique, the French classical music radio
station, broadcast two hours of archive recordings of his live performances, mostly
from the late 1950s and early 1960s.10 In 2013, the Barclay label issued a boxed set
of CDs of his complete output from 1960 to 1974. Also in 2013 there were several
new biographical studies from Robert Belleret, Ludovic Perrin and Jacques
Vassal, and a personal memoir by Annie Butor, the daughter of Ferré’s second
wife, Madeleine. Finally, his complete writings – poems, song lyrics, discursive
texts and ephemera – have been re-published in a single volume by the prestigious
literary publisher Gallimard, in collaboration with his son Mathieu Ferré and
his publishing house La mémoire et la mer (Ferré, 2013a). Taken together, all
these manifestations indicate an acknowledgement of his cultural importance and
suggest that he has finally achieved the recognition that he sought as an artist
not restricted by the conventions of genre that operated during his lifetime. He
is celebrated principally as a major singer-songwriter, but also as an influential
literary and ideological figure who marked several generations of French culture
in the second half of the twentieth century.
To situate the significance of this consecration in a broader international context
is not an easy task, however. French culture has always been a rather introverted
and self-contained ‘field of cultural production’, in terms of Bourdieu’s frame of
reference, to which it is eminently well suited. We have already suggested the
European dimension of the influence of the French model of the singer-songwriter,
but to extend the comparison to include the dominant and proliferating world of
Anglo-American popular music, and in particular the figure of the anglophone
8
‘Le Flamenco de Paris’ (1948) in Ferré, 1953 and ‘Franco la muerte’ (1964).
9
For example, Génération Ferré, a documentary by Jorge Amat on Arte TV channel,
14 July 2013.
10
‘Hommage à Léo Ferré’ in Les Greniers de la mémoire, France-Musique, 12/19
October 2013.
singer-songwriter, is a daunting proposition. This field has its own very different
parameters, its own debates and a multiplicity of dimensions, so any comparisons
will necessarily be more tentative. In terms of chronology, for a start, the French
singer-songwriter would appear to be an earlier phenomenon than any directly
comparable movement in North America, unless one includes blues and folk
singers such as Woody Guthrie. The beginnings of Guthrie’s career are broadly
contemporaneous with those of Charles Trenet’s solo career, but in a very different
context and with a contrasting political and social ethos. The recognizable
influence of poetry on the role of the North American singer-songwriter seems
to begin much later, with the adoption in the early 1960s by Robert Zimmerman
of the pseudonym Bob Dylan, probably borrowed from his early hero, the poet
Dylan Thomas. The American ‘Beat poets’ obviously provided a role model
perpetuated by subsequent figures such as Patti Smith, but there is little evidence
of the wholesale appropriation of the poetic canon by these artists of the kind Ferré
has undertaken. The acknowledgement of the literary and poetic merits of songs
by singer-songwriters also seems to be a later phenomenon, with the publication
of Bob Dylan’s collected lyrics. The political role of the singer-songwriter, on
the other hand, is clearly shared by both the French and the American traditions
from the 1940s onwards: Ferré’s earliest political songs date from his very first
recordings of the late 1940s, with attacks on the wartime role of the Catholic
Church in ‘Monsieur Tout-Blanc’ and on Franco’s Spain in ‘Le Flamenco de
Paris’ (Ferré, 1953; Ferré, 2013a, pp. 38, 39). But not all French singer-songwriters
take on an explicitly political stance: in the same period, Charles Trenet and
Charles Aznavour avoid such controversial subjects, and even Jacques Brel in his
wide-ranging social satire rarely makes his political points explicit. In the realm of
personal lyricism and the expression of sexual relationships, as early as the 1950s
the French singer-songwriters were more frank and more daring than anything that
was attempted by their Anglo-American equivalents until at least twenty years later,
in the 1970s. Prostitution, pimping, sexually transmitted diseases, homosexuality,
adultery, sado-masochism, illicit affairs and under-age sex all feature in the
work of French singer-songwriters in the mid-century decade, alongside more
conventional expressions of love and sexual relations. Examples might include
‘Le Mauvais Sujet repenti’, ‘Une jolie fleur’ and ‘Trompettes de la renommée’
by Brassens (1993, pp. 32–4, 39, 124–6), ‘Fais-moi mal, Johnny’ by Boris Vian
(1968), ‘L’Inconnue de Londres’ and ‘Petite’ by Léo Ferré (Ferré, 2013a, pp. 23–5,
404–5). In the field of personal lyricism, it is interesting to speculate as to whether
this explicitness had any effect, however indirect, on the subsequent generation of
singer-songwriters from Canada: Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young.
There seems very little tangible evidence to support the proposition, but it does
seem clear that Leonard Cohen, for instance, growing up in Montreal in the 1950s,
was well aware of the strong francophone tradition of singer-songwriters that
blossomed in Quebec, as epitomized by Félix Leclerc (Brierre and Vassal, 2014,
pp. 114–15). The francophone tradition has always foregrounded the lyrics of the
song and the music has usually been secondary, even when, as often in Ferré’s
recordings, the melody is subtle and the orchestration elaborate and sophisticated.
This produces a different balance between the two principal aspects of the song,
and often a different way of joining them together, including the development
of the verbal musicality of the lyric, inspired by poetic models such as Verlaine,
and this alternative aesthetic may well have inspired figures such as Leonard
Cohen. By contrast, since the arrival of rock music in the mid-1950s, Anglo-
American popular music has most often sacrificed the audibility of the song lyric
to effects of sound and rhythm, and this also applies to many anglophone singer-
songwriters, even including Bob Dylan, who enjoy a reputation as lyricists. The
singer-songwriters of the USA in the 1970s, such as those associated with Laurel
Canyon in Los Angeles, may well have been in search of authenticity in reaction
to the excessive commercialization of rock music (Barker and Taylor, 2007,
pp. 201–27), but this debate has little relevance to figures such as Ferré or Brassens,
who have from the first been seen as touchstones of artistic integrity (Looseley,
2003b, p. 68; Cordier, 2014, p. 19) even when they have had to come to terms
with the pressures of commercial interests, in the form of record companies and
concert promoters.
In the light of this discussion, it seems possible to advance the proposition
that the French singer-songwriters were precursors in most aspects of the
contemporary definition of the role of the singer-songwriter, whether in Europe
or elsewhere, by virtue of the ancient legacy of interaction between poetry and
popular song in France that can easily be demonstrated. Léo Ferré is one of the
most striking examples of the re-invention of this tradition in the light of modern
electronic media, but his artistic significance goes much further than this and
makes a major contribution to the ‘cultural capital’ of the international field of the
singer-songwriter (Hawkins, 2003). Even if his work is little known in the
anglophone world, it deserves greater attention as a pioneering example of many
of the themes of the genre.
Chapter 11
Transitions of the Cantautor: Aesthetics,
Politics and Authenticity in Spanish Popular
Music from the Late Franco Dictatorship
to the Present Day
Fernán del Val and Stuart Green
Introduction
The death of General Francisco Franco on 20 November 1975 ushered in a period

of uncertainty in Spanish politics. Over the previous decade, Franco had groomed
Juan Carlos de Borbón – grandson of the monarch deposed by the Second Republic
in April 1931 – to succeed him as head of state. Fears that Franco’s ‘heir’ would
extend the authoritarian rule that had followed the Civil War (1936–1939) were
allayed when, in early 1976, the recently crowned King Juan Carlos I ordered
the creation of a government to oversee the establishment of parliamentary
democracy. This early period of the current constitutional monarchy, up to the
overwhelming success of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in the 1982
general elections, soon came to be known as the ‘Transition’.
Yet mindsets had already begun to transform in Spanish society prior to the
advent of formal democracy. This development is often traced to the economic
modernization of Spain following the 1959 Stabilization Plan, and the cultural
apertura (opening) in 1962, which exposed Spaniards on a far greater scale than
before to the outside world and its values. As Nigel Townson summarizes: ‘between
1960 and 1975, Spain underwent the greatest period of economic upheaval in its
history while experiencing vast social and cultural changes. The ossified nature
of the political system … contrasted starkly with the fact that political attitudes
and values, within the regime as well as within Spanish society as a whole,
were changing too’ (2007, p. 1). Jordi Gracia and Domingo Ródenas label this
transformation ‘the break ahead of time’ (2011, p. 160),1 and see it as an instance
of broader, more international developments: ‘Many of the hot spots of Spanish
culture during late-Francoism are not the legacy of the past: they developed
as instances of a progressively globalized world from the end of the 1960s’
1
‘[l]a ruptura adelantada’.
(2011, p. 161).2 Ramón Buckley explicitly harnesses this transformation to Spanish

historiography of the twentieth century:
The entire West was in full and silent transition, a transition towards a new post-
industrial … era. A transition which reached us [Spaniards] prematurely, given that
we were still to undergo our own transition – that is to say, a transition to democracy.
We were in a post-Franco era but with Franco still alive. (Buckley, 1996, p. xi)3
For this reason, Buckley refers to a ‘double transition’ in Spain, one cultural and
the other political.
It is this cultural transition, initiated in Spain towards the end of the 1960s
and strongly influenced by anglophone America, in which we locate the first of
a number changes to the figure of the cantautor in Spain that blossomed after
1975.4 While the vast majority of cantautores assumed an oppositional role during
the Franco dictatorship – singing about freedom and/or in non-official languages
such as Catalan and Basque – and were strongly influenced by French and Italian
musicians, we show that the period preceding Franco’s death saw the emergence
of Anglo-American models of the singer-songwriter alongside what now became
the ‘classic’ cantautor, and which were embraced after 1975 (although not always
under the rubric of ‘cantautor’). We also highlight the new conceptualizations of
authenticity that this transformation entailed. The chapter then analyses how more
recent artists who compose and perform their own songs experiment with certain
features of the classic cantautor within contemporary musical formats.
Pre-Transition Transitions
As Sílvia Martínez notes in her chapter above, the majority of cantautores during
the Franco dictatorship shared a number of characteristic features. Little attention
was paid to musical sophistication (Gómez Font, 2011, p. 26) since their political
function was of primary importance: lyrics about freedom, singing in non-official
languages, and setting to music the work of poets marginalized during the regime
2
‘Muchas de las zonas calientes de la cultura española tardofranquista ya no son
herencias del pasado porque germinan como testigos de un mundo progresivamente
globalizado desde finales de los años sesenta.’
3
‘Occidente mismo estaba en plena y silenciosa transición, la transición hacia una
nueva era posindustrial y por tanto posmoderna. Una transición que nos llegaba a nosotros
a destiempo porque nosotros todavía no habíamos hecho nuestra transición, es decir, una
transición hacia la democracia. Estábamos en el posfranquismo, pero Franco todavía no
había muerto.’
4
Despite the fact Buckley sees this post-industrial era as the advent of post-modernity
in Spain, we argue that his notion of a transition prior to 1975 can still be applied to what we
deem the modern figure of the cantautor given that he also views this period as a precursor
to the later political transition.
Transitions of the Cantautor 165
(Vázquez Montalbán, 1972, p. 38; González Lucini, 2006, p. 98; Ayats and
Salicrú-Maltas, 2013, p. 29).
These features of the classic cantautor make the figure an example of what
Pierre Bourdieu called ‘social art’, a conception of cultural production centred
on political commitment and an adherence to the aesthetic principles of Realism
to this end (1995, p. 143). The cantautor’s social function was also exemplified
by his/her creation of a sense of community at concerts, which often resembled
political rallies.5 The political solidarity engendered in concert was reinforced by
frequent reference in the lyrics of the cantautor to the first person plural (Fouce,
2006, pp. 124, 126), use of local languages and borrowings from local musical
genres and instrumentation. The role of the musician as the voice of a community
and aesthetic simplicity are crucial elements in what Lawrence Grossberg (1993,
p. 202) and Keir Keightley (2006, p. 186) call ‘romantic authenticity’ with reference
to folk music. An example of the cantautor as social art is Raimon’s ‘Al vent’
(To the Wind). The song uses the wind as a metaphor of freedom, its title being
repeated at the end of every sentence so it can easily be sung in unison. Musically,
the song is simple, dominated by three chords (Am, Dm and E) and the sound of
his strummed acoustic guitar and occasional cello. While this simplicity might be
ascribed to Raimon’s lack of musical experience (he was 19 when he composed
‘Al vent’ in 1959), it is more likely that he was looking to write an accessible song,
one that could be sung and played by anyone with a basic knowledge of the guitar.
From within this traditional paradigm of the cantautor, a few musicians
emerged who experimented with different aesthetic and political content before
1975. The best example is Joan Manuel Serrat. While he sang in Catalan and set
poetic texts to music,6 Serrat tended to explore in his lyrics personal feelings rather
than political or social questions. In his early albums, Serrat touched upon diverse
topics, such as his childhood haunts (‘El meu carrer’, 1970) (My Street) and lonely
women (‘La tieta’, 1967) (Spinster Aunt). Serrat also adopted a more democratic
European vision of romance and love, as opposed to the intense suffering and
jealousy which characterized the Latin love song (Vázquez Montalbán, 1972,
p. 42). In songs such as ‘Ella em deixa’ (1965) (She Left Me), and ‘Adeu, adeu,
amor meu i sort’ (1970) (Bye bye, Love, and Good Luck), Serrat adopts the point
of view of a man abandoned by his partner, revealing an emotional fragility that
broke with the officially promoted stereotype of masculinity of the time. Thus he
achieved what Elisabeth Eva Leach calls an authenticity of ‘ordinariness’ (2001,
p. 150), one based on the ability of the musician to show his/her normality as
(or despite their role as) pop star.7 This ordinariness is highlighted in Vázquez
5
See, for example, Joan Manuel Serrat’s comments in Trecet and Moreno (1978, p. 421).
6
Serrat also sang in Spanish. In this sense, he was an exception within the Nova
Cançó (Catalan New Song).
7
Leach applies her concept to the Spice Girls, explaining that ‘the traditionally authentic
rock band speaks for their audience (who feel truly understood and that they truly understand).
The Spice Girls speak as their audience and with their audience’ (Leach, 2001, p. 150).
Montalbán’s comment that Serrat’s ‘sentimentality and language were organized

to assist the ungainly sentimentality of the common man, with his weakened
skills of expression. And this he achieved because he was familiar with all that
was common’ (1972, p. 29).8 Serrat’s songs also differed from those of his fellow
cantautores in their musical complexity. This is evident in his most famous song,
‘Mediterráneo’ (1971) (Mediterranean), which features Juan Carlos Calderón’s
orchestral arrangements and a peculiar rhythm for a pop song (6/4), as well as
string and wind instruments and a piano.
Two other artists who differed from the classic cantautor paradigm in the
first half of the 1970s were Jaume Sisa and Pau Riba, members of the Barcelona-
based Grup de folk (Folk Group). As in the case of Serrat, this difference was
both musical and political. The influence of American folk rock, for instance, can
be heard in the adoption of Dylanesque nasal singing and vocal phrasing, in the
guitar-playing, and in the use of the harmonica, in Riba’s ‘L’home estàtic’ (1970)
(The Static Man) and Sisa’s ‘Carrer’ (1971) (Street). On albums such as Riba’s
Dioptría I and II (1970 and 1971) and Sisa’s Orgía (1971), these artists were not
merely the first to try to incorporate the sounds of rock and progressive rock in
the cantautor movement. Their lyrics were also very different from the norm of
the time. According to musician and writer Sabino Méndez, Sisa and Riba were
the first artists to construct a personal poetic in Spanish rock (2010, p. 23). In
reference to the former, Méndez points out that he created a personal universe
by means of his surreal and ironic lyrics with echoes of Bob Dylan and David
Bowie (2010, p. 25).9 Likewise, Silvia Grijalba argues that Riba and Sisa were the
first musicians in Spain to draw on the legacy of North American counterculture,
the Beat Generation, and psychedelia, incorporating a surrealist element in their
lyrics (2010, p. 273). Thus the political impact of their lyrics was directed beyond
Spain’s borders: ‘our fight was against worldwide dictatorship and not against the
Franco dictatorship (Riba, quoted in Gómez-Font, 2011, p. 41).10
A final and slightly different instance of the cultural transition in Spain within
the genre of the cantautor before the death of Franco is Cecilia (Evangelina
Sobredo Galanes). Educated in (among other places) the UK and USA as she
followed her diplomat parents around the world, Cecilia was heavily influenced
by Anglo-American folk-rock musicians of the late 1960s and early 1970s (many
of whose songs she covered live). Indeed, her stage name was taken from the title
of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1970 hit. On her 1973 album Cecilia 2, her fusion of
8
‘su sentimentalidad y su lenguaje estaban organizados para abastecer la
sentimentalidad deslenguada del hombre común con los atributos de expresión atrofiados.
Y esto lo consiguió porque nada de lo común le era ajeno.’
9
As regards the diffusion of Dylan’s work, it is important to note that the journalist
Jesús Ordovás published a hugely successful book about him in 1972 (Gracia and Ródenas,
2011, pp. 199–200).
10
‘la nuestra era una lucha contra la dictadura mundial y no contra la dictadura
franquista’.
political and personal matters proved contentious. On the one hand, her reflection
on the Spanish Civil War ‘Un millón de sueños’ (A Million Dreams) was banned
from the radio. On the other, her record company CBS – afraid of possible
repercussions for its own enterprise – did not allow her to name the album after
its second track, the feminist statement ‘Me quedaré soltera’ (I’ll Remain Single),
or to use a photograph of a clearly pregnant Cecilia as the album cover (Madrid,
2011, pp. 119–20).
Between the late 1960s and 1975, therefore, we can observe a tentative shift
in the Spanish cantautor scene away from the classic model towards Anglo-
American conceptualizations of the singer-songwriter. This is exemplified by
two concert performances around this time. At the Canet Rock Festival in July
1975 (four months before Franco’s death), Riba performed with a rock band,
clearly stoned, wearing just a shirt and underwear, his voice hoarse and out of
tune.11 This contrasts vividly with Lluís Llach’s 1976 performance of ‘L’estaca’
(The Stake) at the Palau dels Esports, Barcelona. Wearing black clothes, intensely
focused, and alone on stage except for his Spanish guitar, Llach is accompanied
loudly by the audience as they sing along to one of the hymns of the opposition to
the dictatorship.12
Disenchantment and New Forms of Authenticity during the Transition
Following the death of Franco, a mood of desencanto (disenchantment) spread

across much of the Spanish population – most significantly among those who had
actively opposed the regime – as people realized their expectations were never to
be met: the possibility of social revolution faded from view as established parties
took the reins of the Transition, and civil society was marginalized from political
debate (Lorente Arenas, 1981; Vilarós, 1998).
During this period, the relation between politics and culture underwent a
permanent change, too. Culture rapidly lost its contestatory political function
as Spaniards could now have their say via the ballot box, at least in theory. In
the case which concerns us here, the classic cantautor was deemed no longer
necessary: people were free to talk about politics and participate in democratic
elections, the state censorship apparatus had been dismantled, and minority
languages were no longer sidelined as dialects. What is more, with the appearance
of punk and new wave bands, Spanish popular music was virtually unrecognizable
to those whose listening habits had been formed in the 1960s and early 1970s
(Val Ripollés, 2011).13 In a country in search of modernity, Raimon, Llach and
others appeared to younger generations as boring and old-fashioned, out of place
11
Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIy5my5HSnM (accessed 9 January 2015).
12
Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNSKik-Tuv0 (accessed 9 January 2015).
13
For more information about pop-rock music in Spain during the Transition, see
Fouce (2006) and Val Ripollés (2014).
and time. The protest song no longer appealed to the wider public. As one of those
who personally experienced such a rejection recounted: ‘the eighties was a time
of great negativity shown towards this genre, [a negativity] encouraged even by
parties on the Left, because the audience did not want sermons’ (Luis Pastor in
Petit, 2012).14 The rejection of the classic cantautor is abundantly clear in the
drop in their output during the Transition: from 108 albums in 1977 to 26 in 1982
(González Lucini, 2006, p. 145).
In this context of political disaffection and even depoliticization, a new
generation of musicians began to pay attention to both rock music and anglophone
singer-songwriters. Thus the new model of cantautor marked out by Riba and
Sisa was consolidated. The figure of Bob Dylan was of crucial importance in this
respect, particularly for his rejection of the folk scene by going electric at the
Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan’s symbolic break with the past by embracing
the electric guitar gave rise to a new form of authenticity, labelled ‘modern’ by
Keightley (2006, p. 187) and ‘aesthetic’ by Grossberg (1993, p. 203). In opposition
to the aforementioned ‘romantic authenticity’, ‘modern’ or ‘aesthetic’ authenticity
is based on the idea of the artist, of the musician as a unique figure who acts upon
his/her feelings and interests alone. For the new cantautores, the figure of Dylan at
Newport embodied many of these ideas: an artist focused on himself, who rejected
political song in favour of songs about his personal life, and who embraced rock
music instead of folk music in order to do so better.
One of this new generation, Hilario Camacho, had started out as a classic
cantautor during his membership of the collective Canción del pueblo (Song of
the People) in the final years of the Franco dictatorship. With his 1975 debut album
De paso (Passing Through), however, he distanced himself from this paradigm,
his complex finger-picking on bluesy songs such as ‘Volar es para pájaros’ (Flying
is for Birds) reminiscent of James Taylor and Cat Stevens, and very different from
the rather amateurish guitar technique of classic cantautor Raimon. Most likely
as a consequence, he explicitly rejected the label of cantautor in interview soon
after (Job, 1977). Camacho was also significant in that he was the first to embody
a feature of the new paradigm of Spanish singer-songwriter that would become
a characteristic: the labelling of the cantautor as poet, exemplified by Ángel
Galván’s question in a book on his music: ‘someone who loves and who exposes
himself in his lyrics to show himself without altering anything, who reveals the
way he feels, his fears and anxieties, is he not a poet?’ (1998, p. 5).15 Camacho’s
metaphor-laden love song ‘Princesa de cera’ (Wax Princess) and his adaptation
of the Allen Ginsberg poem Howl as ‘El peso del mundo’ (The Weight of the
World) from this time are instances of such lyrical poetry. The likening of the new
14
‘Los ochenta suponen una etapa de negatividad hacia este género, fomentada
incluso desde la izquierda porque el público no quería sermones.’
15
‘alguien que ama y en sus textos se desnuda para mostrarse tal cual sin amañar
nada, que descubre su manera de sentir, con sus miedos y ansiedades ¿no es un poeta?’
cantautores to poets on account of their romantic subject matter and emotional

honesty was central to their modern/aesthetic authenticity.
A further shift towards the paradigm of the Anglo-American ‘singer-songwriter’
was taken by Moris (Moris Biravent), a musician from Argentina. A well-known
rock musician when he decided to flee Jorge Rafael Videla’s military dictatorship
in 1976, Moris caught the attention of journalists in Spain such as Jesús Ordovás
and Diego Manrique on account of his use of the electric guitar (unaccompanied
in his first concerts) and his frequent use of rock’n’roll rhythms. As Juan Puchades
notes in a newspaper article (2008), his songs were interspersed with Elvis Presley
covers when played live. On his debut album in Spain, Fiebre de vivir (1978) (Lust
for Life), Moris was also one of the first musicians to sing about the modern city
space: in ‘Balada de Madrid’ (Ballad of Madrid), for example, Moris describes the
Spanish capital and its people through the eyes of a foreigner. Moris’s influence in
this latter respect has been acknowledged by the best-known chronicler of Madrid,
and the artist who epitomized the new model of cantautor in the 1980s, Joaquín
Sabina (Sabina and Menéndez Flores, 2008, p. 85).
Although he belongs to the same generation as many of the classic cantautores
of the Franco dictatorship, Sabina only released his first album in 1978. This
delay was a consequence of his escape to London as a political exile in 1970
(following his involvement in student protests in Granada), an experience which
exposed him to a very different set of musical influences from his contemporaries.
As he later reflected: ‘I would have been a singer as Frenchified as the rest of
my generation … but in London I began to listen to Dylan, The Stones. I think
that lent my compositions a rockier sound’ (in Menéndez Flores, 2003, p. 35).16
While a French influence is noticeable on songs such as ‘1968’ and ‘40 Orsett
Terrace’ on his 1978 debut album Inventario (Inventory), from his 1980 follow-
up Malas compañías (Bad Company) onwards these disappear. On this second
album, the influence of Dylan can be observed in his avoidance of the chorus in
‘Calle melancolía’ (Sorrowful Street) and ‘Qué demasiao’ (Too Much),17 and his
rasping voice. The rock of The Rolling Stones is prominent from his next album
Ruleta rusa (1984) (Russian Roulette); J.J. Cale’s guitar sound can be heard on
many of Sabina’s compositions such as ‘Conductores suicidas’ (Suicidal Drivers)
and ‘Ganas de’ (Feel Like).
Sabina distanced himself from his contemporaries in lyrical terms, too. As he
remarked not long after the release of Malas compañías:
[T]here had to be another way, not strictly political … times have changed
and in some way we have to engage with the difficulties of daily life, with the
16
‘yo habría sido un cantante tan afrancesado como los de mi generación … y en
Londres empecé a escuchar a Dylan, a los Stones, lo cual creo que le dio a lo que compuse
después un aire más rockero’.
17
Sabina uses this structure in later songs such as ‘¿Quién me ha robado el mes de
abril?’ (1988) (Who Stole My Month of April?).
difficulties of life with a partner … we’ve been trapped in a kind of very narrow
river, so we now have to write songs about many other things. (in Claudín, 1981,
p. 203)18
Consequently, Sabina wrote lyrics populated by characters familiar to rock fans.

Many of his songs, such as ‘Pacto entre caballeros’ (1987) (Gentlemen’s Pact),
feature drug addicts, urbanites and the suburban poor, whose miserable lives
frequently play out at night; regular use is made of slang. In parallel, Sabina
proved himself an exceptionally skilled descriptor of matters of the heart, such as
in ‘Y sin embargo’ (1996) (And Still … ), an unflinchingly sincere exploration of
love, jealousy and infidelity.
The label given to this new model of cantautor by many critics of the time
was cantautor eléctrico. For Matías Uribe, Sabina was ‘the most representative
practitioner in Spain of the North-American electric singer-songwriter, who has
most successfully fused hot guitars with the poetic and contestatory ambitions of
the cantautores’ (Uribe, in Manrique, 1986, p. 564).19 While a handful of artists
such as Rosa León and Luis Eduardo Aute valiantly continued to work broadly
within conventional paradigms – political subject matter (albeit alongside more
personal topics), an acoustic folk idiom (sometimes with orchestral flourishes)
and a classical singing style – this new model of cantautor epitomized by Sabina
was taken in a slightly different direction by the next generation of musicians.
Antonio Vega’s and Enrique Urquijo’s poppier variant of the cantautor – although
neither embraced the term – sounded the death-knell for the classic cantautores of
the Franco dictatorship, whose political compromise in the mid-1980s appeared
terribly po-faced.20
Vega and Urquijo made their name in pop-rock bands Nacha Pop and Los
Secretos as part of La Movida madrileña, the underground movement based in
Madrid during the early 1980s. In their bands and then as solo artists, both were
able to cultivate a persona similar to the new cantautor, influenced by figures who
had risen to fame over the course of the late 1970s, such as Tom Petty and Elvis
Costello. Their songs were consequently short and punchy, compositionally more
complex and generically more diverse than Sabina et al. Crucial to their appeal
was the extreme emotional sensitivity and melancholy expressed in their lyrics,
rendered more powerful still by their plaintive vocal style (Bargueño, 2005, p. 21).
18
‘tenía que haber otra alternativa diferente, no tan estrictamente política … los
tiempos han cambiado y de algún modo hay que plantearse contradicciones de la vida
cotidiana, contradicciones de la vida con la pareja … estábamos encerrados en una especie
de río muy estrecho, y ahora hay que hacer canciones de muchas cosas más.’
19
‘el mejor representante en España del cantautor eléctrico norteamericano, quien
mejor ha puesto aquí guitarras calientes a la voluntad poética y contestataria de los
cantautores’.
20
Since the mid-1980s, Rosa León has been a far less prolific songwriter than in the
1970s, her oeuvre from this point dominated by albums of children’s songs.
As García Alonso notes (2010, p. 174), Vega’s and Urquijo’s image of tortured
artists was further underscored by their heroin addiction, about which they
sometimes sang, most notably in Vega’s ‘Se dejaba llevar’ (She Surrendered
Herself to Me). Yet both had a complex relationship with the label cantautor they
found themselves given. The former rejected the term outright on account of the
ongoing association of this term with the classic paradigm: ‘I am not a friend of
the social and political commitment that goes with the concept of cantautor.
I prefer to say I’m a guitar player who performs his songs’ (Vega, in García
Alonso, 2010, p. 177);21 at most, he acknowledged that ‘mathematically I am an
urban cantautor. That is obvious because I was born in Madrid and I’m a city boy’
(in Manrique y Rodríguez Lenin, 1993, p. 15).22 This is probably why Urquijo
never employed the term to speak of his output, even though he often performed
as a solo artist in spaces associated with the cantautor scene in Madrid and is
considered as such by subsequent generations of cantautores.
The Re-Politicization of the Cantautor
While Sabina and Urquijo experimented with non Anglo-American sounds on

their releases in the 1990s,23 the emotional content of their lyrics meant they
continued to be considered cantautores of the kind that had emerged during the
1970s and early 1980s. Yet at this time, a new generation was shifting the relation
between personal issues and politics within the figure of the cantautor back in the
opposite direction.
This was assisted by a development in the kinds of venues where musicians
performed. Since the end of the 1980s, many bars and small concert halls had
sprung up in Madrid. In venues such as Sala Galileo Galilei, Sala Clamores and
Libertad 8, musicians were guaranteed an audience almost every night. Given
the intimacy of these venues, it comes as no surprise that they fostered a new
generation of solo cantautores. These musicians drew on the legacy of classic
predecessors such as Serrat and Aute, as well as the Cubans Pablo Milanés and
Silvio Rodríguez. Even though the subject matter of these cantautores’ lyrics was
varied, combining political claims with personal or emotional stories, they were
21
‘no soy amigo de los compromisos sociales y políticos que acompañan al concepto
de cantautor. Yo prefiero decir que soy un guitarrista que interpreta sus canciones.’
22
‘matemáticamente soy un cantautor urbano. Eso está claro porque he nacido en
Madrid y soy carne de ciudad.’
23
Many of these new influences are Latin American: in the case of Sabina, he already
explored Cuban sounds in ‘Círculos viciosos’ (1980) (Vicious Circles), but in the 90s the
influences are more systematic: ‘Y nos dieron las diez’ (1992) (And the Clock Struck 10) is
a Mexican ranchera, ‘Como un explorador’ (1994) (Like an Explorer) a Cuban bolero, and
‘Dieguitos y mafaldas’ (1999) an Argentine tango. On the two albums released by Urquijo’s
folk band Los Problemas one can find rancheras alongside polkas.
labelled cantautores políticos (political). Ismael Serrano is a good example of this

development: his debut album, Atrapados en azul (1997) (Trapped in Blue), includes
‘México insurgente’ (Rebel Mexico) about the Zapatista movement and the title
track about police violence, alongside love songs such as ‘Vértigo’ (Vertigo). This
combination of the personal and political sometimes has led to some confusion
about Serrano’s stance. The album’s best-known song, ‘Papá cuéntame otra vez’
(Tell Me Again, Dad), has been described by Serrano as a ‘generational scolding’
(in Serrano, 2014) 24 aimed at his parents, part of a generation of Spaniards that
failed to achieve revolutionary change around the time of Franco’s death. Yet,
as Serrano notes in the same article, the song has been interpreted by others as a
celebration of the classic cantautores of the 1960s, and a nostalgic look back at
the Franco dictatorship (and other social injustices) against which they sang. On
the one hand, this ‘misinterpretation’ is due to Serrano’s espousal in other songs
and in interview of an art of political commitment. On the other, it might be said to
be an inevitable consequence of the overlap between the singer and the apparent
speaker of songwords.25
Musically the first album of Serrano is marked by the sound of the Spanish
guitar, with some echoes of a rumba guitar style – as in the already mentioned
‘Vértigo’ and ‘La extraña pareja’ (The Odd Couple) – and musical arrangements
with violins and keyboards in ‘Caperucita roja’ (Little Red Riding Hood).
Serrano also looked to Latin America in the ranchera ‘México insurgente’. Other
generational partners, such as Javier Álvarez and Pedro Guerra (influenced by
North-American folk-rock, Spanish folk musics and even hip-hop), included
new political topics in their lyrics, such as antimilitarism in the former’s ‘1, 2,
3, 4’ (1994) and gender discrimination in the latter’s ‘Hijas de Eva’ (Daughters
of Eve) from 2001. Thus was resurrected the notion of the cantautor’s ‘romantic
authenticity’, of the musician as the voice of the people.
The best-selling singer-songwriter of this generation in Spain, however, was
Rosana, a cantautora from the Canary Islands, who sold more than three million
copies of her debut album Lunas rotas (1996) (Broken Moons). Rosana’s personal
voice and optimistic lyrics on hits such as ‘Sin miedo’ (Fearless) and ‘El talismán’
(The Talisman) stand at one remove from her contemporary cantautores políticos.
While for this reason Rosana has tended to be dismissed by critics, her music’s
potent combination of pop-rock, rumba, world music and bolero shows that she,
too, was moving the genre forward in ways that merit scholarly attention.
In the past few years, the re-politicization of the figure of the cantautor
undertaken by Serrano and others has accelerated and transformed as a result
of developments in Spanish politics and society. Having forged careers writing
apolitical music about personal issues in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Quique
González and Nacho Vegas have recently begun to tackle political questions in
their work. Furthermore, they did so from a different perspective from that of their
24
‘bronca generacional’.
25
See the introductory chapter ‘More Than Words: Theorizing the Singer-Songwriter’.
predecessors on account of the seismic impact of Los Indignados (The Outraged),

the social movement born in Madrid in mid-May 2011. Rapidly spreading to the
rest of the country, this grassroots youth movement became famous the world
over for its occupation of the Puerta del Sol in the centre of Madrid. In this climate
of political transformation (Corsín and Estalella, 2011; Sanz and Mateos, 2011;
Likki, 2012), some singer-songwriters that had not yet dealt with politics in their
songs began to do so. The most interesting case is that of Nacho Vegas, idol of a
Spanish indie scene which has paid little attention to political issues.
Following stints in a number of post-rock bands during the 1990s, in 2001
Vegas recorded his debut solo album. While this and other early releases were
characterized by distorted guitars and borrowings from artists such as Nick
Cave and Leonard Cohen, more recently Vegas has drawn inspiration from the
figure of the classic Spanish cantautor: while the cantautores of the Transition
were ‘urban singer-songwriters’ (to use Antonio Vega’s term mentioned above),
since 2011 Vegas – from the northern region of Asturias – has looked back to the
protest song, folk music and to the act of singing in regional languages (in his
case Asturian/Bable). If in previous works he talked about sexual ambiguity or
drug consumption, as on Cajas de música difíciles de parar (2003) (Unstoppable
Musical Boxes), since 2011 Vegas has been writing explicitly political songs,
heavily influenced by the ‘Indignados’ movement: ‘the eruption of the 15M
[15 May] movement has changed my perception, and the perception of some
members of my generation … my pessimism about Asturias has disappeared’
(Prieto, 2012, p. 64).26 Thus Vegas came to write the song ‘Cómo hacer crac’
(2011) (How to Make Crack), a metaphorical lyric about how politics in Spain
has changed. His most recent album, Resituación (2014) (Resituation) includes
songs about the social crisis in Spain, condemnations of Spanish conservative
people, and calls for the population to mobilize against the crisis and the current
political system. This political songwriting has not been understood by audiences
pejoratively as a messianic message – as the classic cantautor figure was viewed
in the late 1970s and 1980s – but as a process in parallel with the re-politicization
of Spanish society after the ‘Indignados’ movement.
A different political stance can be found in the work of Quique González,
who has displayed very strong views about the commercialization of music.
From the very beginning of González’s career in the late 1990s, the influence
of Urquijo, Vega and Sabina was very clear, as well as his partiality for North
American singer-songwriters such as Ryan Adams and alternative rock bands
like Wilco. As in the case of his Spanish influences, González’s lyrics comprise
personal confessions, romantic failure and melancholy. Yet, like Vega and others
before him, González has expressed reservations about being labelled a cantautor:
‘in formal terms, I am a cantautor, because I am a guy that sings the songs I
make, but I do not feel comfortable with the commitment implicit in that term’
26
‘la eclosión del 15M ha cambiado mi percepción y la de muchos miembros de mi
generación. Se me ha quitado el pesimismo sobre Asturias.’
(in Izquierdo, 2011, p. 26).27 Instead, González considers himself a cancionista

a term that encompasses songwriting but with no political or other connotations.
Yet González does not reject the idea of commitment in music, approaching such
an enterprise in a different way: ‘I believe it is important to talk about things that
have never been spoken of and which are much closer to us than Chiapas. I believe
in commitment, but in your own home there might well be messed-up stories
that should not be forgotten’ (in Izquierdo, 2011, p. 113).28 A good example of
this approach is ‘73’ (2005), which talks about the story of his neighbourhood’s
drug addicts, a generation ensnared by heroin during the Transition to democracy.
As in the case of Nacho Vegas, Gonzalez included some songs on his last album,
Delantera mítica (2013) (Legendary Frontline) about the financial crisis and
against corruption, such as ‘Tenía que decírtelo’ (I Had to Tell You) and ‘¿Dónde
está el dinero?’ (Where’s the Money?).
Nevertheless, the most obvious instance of González’s political commitment
is expressed in the way he conceives the labour of a musician and in the way
he defends his profession. For this reason, González has often clashed with
the record industry, refusing to mime on TV or to allow his music to appear in
advertisements. In 2003, González decided to leave his record company, Universal,
because he did not agree with various financial matters, such as the royalties they
paid. Subsequently, he decided to set up his own, independent record label. He
explained his reasons for doing so in an open letter:
Music is prejudiced by the system. We have reached a situation where the

lack of respect, ruthless marketing and unscrupulousness make it difficult to
find any truth in the panorama. I never understood music as a competition. …
In conclusion, I will try to edit my own records, humbly, with the spirit of an
artisan … . We were inculcated with the wrong idea of associating musician with
millionaire; if you do not sell a lot, the idea of failure hovers above. For me, the
only failure would be to make a shit record. (Izquierdo, 2011, pp. 74–5) 29
In the career of González we see a different kind of connection between authenticity

and politics. If, in the case of the cantautores of the 1960s – and with Serrano and
27
‘en la forma soy cantautor porque soy un tío que canta los temas que hace, pero no
me acabo de sentir cómodo con el compromiso que supuestamente implica’.
28
‘creo que es importante hablar de las cosas que nunca se hablan, que están mucho
más cerca de nosotros que Chiapas. Creo en el compromiso, pero también debajo de tu casa
puede haber historias jodidas que no deben ser olvidadas.’
29
‘La música está perjudicada por el sistema. Hemos llegado a una situación en la que
la falta de respeto, la comercialización salvaje y la falta de escrúpulos hacen difícil encontrar
algo de verdad en el panorama. Nunca entendí la música como una competición. … En
conclusión, voy a intentar editar mis propios discos, sin grandes pretensiones, con el
espíritu de un artesano … Nos educaron con la idea equivocada de relacionar músico con
millonario, si no vendes mucho sobrevuela la idea del fracaso. Para mi el único fracaso sería
hacer una puta mierda de disco’.
Vegas more recently – authenticity was based on lyrics about social inequality or
public statements in support of socio-political movements, González’s attitude as
regards the music industry, and as regards how these entities have commercialized
popular music, suggests a kind of authenticity linked to the idea of a commercial
integrity, of not selling out, of being true to one’s principles within a (more responsible)
capitalist system. González showed also that politics is not just party politics and
social movements, but that it is also expressed in power relations in everyday life.
Conclusion
This chapter shows, with reference to the figure of the cantautor, how the ambivalent
relationship between politics and culture forged during the Franco dictatorship
continued to shape responses to cultural production during and after the Transition
to democracy. While the classic model epitomized popular music’s potential as a
vehicle for (veiled) political dissent before 1975, we observe a transition in the late
1960s towards more personal and confessional songwriting and North American folk
and rock, which accelerated upon the death of Franco and the political Transition.
Corresponding shifts in perceptions of authenticity – from romantic/ordinary to
modern/aesthetic – were required to this end. Despite these developments within
the figure of the cantautor, however, the original political connotations of the
term continue to resonate for many. Hence musicians like Camacho (at the time of
the Transition itself), Vega (during La Movida), and González (this decade) have
refused to be defined as such. These tensions within the figure of the cantautor are
displayed nowadays by Nacho Vegas’ revitalization of the classic paradigm at the
same time as a new generation, such as Luís Ramiro and Marwan, has emerged,
singing about more personal, emotional topics (Casteleiro, 2013).
The large number of women in this new generation and previous ones, such
as Virginia Labuat and Zahara (María Zahara Gordillo Campos), reminds us
of how the figure of the cantautora has been marginalized in both the history
and practice of popular music in Spain. While the premature death of Cecilia in
1976 means we can only speculate as to how she would have responded to the
new political and cultural environment of the Transition, the gradual withdrawal
from the commercial music scene of Rosa León (in sharp contrast to her early
collaborator Luis Eduardo Aute), and the status of Rosana during the 1990s and
early 2000s as sole cantautora of any significant degree of commercial success in
Spain,30 suggest that the field of popular music in Spain (both its producers and
consumers) prevents women from reaching a wide audience with their own songs.
30
From its inauguration in 1997 until the final ceremony in 2003, Rosana was
awarded the Premio Amigo prize for Best Female Solo Artist three times. None of the
other winners – Mónica Naranjo (1998), Luz Casal (2000), Marta Sánchez (2002) and
Pasión Vega (2003) – would be classified as cantautoras (even if Naranjo and Sánchez have
composed a number of their own songs).
The impression is that media discourse values male artists as agents of their own
universal appeal and dismisses women as a minority market. Record companies
seemingly do not trust in the talents of such artists, and are unwilling to promote
women in ways which do not sexualize them or do not divest them of claims
to authorship. These factors appear to play down or actively impede women’s
contributions to popular music. It is ironic that their contribution to the genre of
the cantautor is most widely recognized and highly esteemed vis-à-vis the Franco
dictatorship: most obviously Maria del Mar Bonet but also Guillermina Motta. New
research, therefore, is needed to recognize and examine the work of figures such
as Christina Rosenvinge (who collaborated with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and
Steve Shelley in the early 2000s), Bebe (whose 2004 hit Pafuera telarañas (Away
Cobwebs) experiments with folk, rock and loops), and the curious appearance
around 2008–2009 of several women who sing in English (including Russian Red
(Lourdes Hernández González), Alondra Bentley and Anni B. Sweet), in order to
assess the ways in which these women challenge and transform the figure of the
cantautora and the field of the cantautor more generally.
Chapter 12
When Jake Met Georges:
The Chanson across the Channel
Mark Goodall
Brassens, Chanson and Thackray
Georges Brassens was one of the foremost auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes,

singer-songwriters who in the post-war period helped create ‘what is now widely
regarded in France as the golden era of la chanson française’ (Tinker, 2005, p. 22).
Brassens, along with Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré, can be viewed as forming ‘a
national signifier, a benchmark not only of their aesthetic excellence but also
of authenticity and truth, against which other French artists must be measured’
(Looseley, 2003a, p. 68). By the time of Brassens’s death in 1981, he had become
a French ‘cultural hero, a symbol of the typical Frenchman … universally admired
and respected’ (Hawkins, 2000, p. 124). His influence has stretched from fellow
auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes to songwriter Maxime Le Forestier, so-called
‘world music’ (the group Brassens en Afrique), and even techno music (the
compilation CD Brassens chante encore!).
Brassens is the modern auteur-compositeur-interprète who most successfully
synthesized an old-fashioned sensibility, one Colin Evans describes as
‘dominated by nostalgia for the past and hostility to the present’ (1973) with a
more contemporary cabaret one. Brassens’s intention as a young man was to be
a writer and poet. As Evans, the university lecturer who persuaded Brassens to
come to Cardiff for a one-off concert, noted: ‘he had the poet’s fascination for
language and preference for imaginary worlds’ (1973). Brassens issued distinctive
but low-key and somewhat repetitive recordings which sold in the millions.
His live shows were equally austere and refuted the traditional notion of ‘show
business’, and yet were packed out year after year (his favoured theatre in Paris,
Bobino, holds 1,500 people). Brassens epitomizes the solo auteur-compositeur-
interprète, eschewing the rock’n’roll ‘gang’ principle and working almost alone.
His lyrical preoccupations were shocking, strikingly modern and anarchistic,
dealing with humanistic dimensions such as death, ‘diversion’ (religion and faith),
relationships, politics and identity (Tinker, 2005, p. 6). He also drew on ancient
and contemporary poetic sources for inspiration, setting sections of Villon’s
1461 text Le Testament and the work of Paul Fort and Louis Aragon to music.
In terms of musical style, Brassens ‘mixed traditional folk French song with the
swing influences of the 1930s and 1940s’ (Tinker, 2005, p. 4). Brassens’s songs
were unique, remediating as they did certain ancient traditions into a thoroughly
modern and unique style. Brassens’s huge commercial and critical success at home
resulted in him becoming the ‘archetypal Frenchman’ (Evans, 1973) and ‘France’s
greatest and wisest singer’ (Barnes, 2002, p. 33).
The mode of musical expression Brassens operated within, chanson, has been
defined in English by many. Sarah Poole defines chanson as a form where singing
and poetry ‘were indeed synonymous’ (2001, p. 62). Historically, this tradition
goes back to the Middle Ages ‘and probably beyond’ (Hawkins, 2000, p. 3).
David Looseley notes that the chanson more recently has been practised by white,
male solo performers ‘leading somewhat bohemian Parisian lives, accompanying
themselves on guitar or piano’ (2003b, p. 68). However, he also notes that while
‘on the surface, chanson is a straightforward generic category … it also connotes
a web of assumptions and expectations relating to the core notion of authenticity’
(p. 65). These include the assumption that chanson is somehow more ‘authentic’
than forms such as easy listening and pop, and the idea that chanson is an
industrious ‘craft’ of the people opposed to the music trade and ‘showbiz’. The
auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes liked to project themselves as more than simply
entertainers, possessing more in common with the notion of the literary auteur
(p. 78). Yet Brassens operated within a contemporary form of the chanson, where
the work becomes part of a mass culture, a ‘consumer product’ (p. 79). Brassens’s
songs have been translated into many languages including Spanish, Italian and
Hebrew. The influence of Brassens (and of the auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes
in general) on the English-speaking music worlds is less tangible. One particular
instance of this transcultural process is the work of the English singer-songwriter
Jake Thackray (1938–2002), who translated several Brassens songs into English
and to a large degree adapted Brassens’s style into his own. It is this process that
I wish to focus on here.
Transcultural processes have grown at a fast rate in European popular culture
since the early days of the recording industry. Martin Stokes notes, for example,
that in the early twentieth century, the music of opera star Enrico Caruso was
marketed ‘translocally’ via the first record discs (2007, p. 2). Stokes also notes that
‘[a]dvances in communication technologies … have wrought fundamental changes
in the way music circulates. Music once confined to localities now circulates the
globe’ (p. 3). Cultural exchange can, on the one hand, suggest a ‘two-way process
that both dilutes and streamlines culture’ and yet at the same time ‘provides new
opportunities for cultural enrichment (Wallis and Malm, 1987, p. 131). The work
of Wallis and Malm documents the transcultural processes involved in Swedish
pop culture in the 1950s and 1960s. In this same period French culture began to
absorbing Anglo-American pop and rock forms. Looseley identifies this process as
part of a ‘wider logic of economic Americanisation’ of France stretching back to
the First World War, manifest in the subsequent creation of the French ‘teenager’
(2003b, p. 22). Critics have been somewhat disparaging about this period in
French popular music. Larry Portis describes it as exemplifying ‘the poverty of
French rock’n’roll’ (2004, p. 123). Yet Looseley notes that, for a time at least, such
When Jake Met Georges 179
French rock ‘was thought to be seat of social dissidence’ (2003a, p. 34). Thus it is
possible to view this music less dismissively.
I hope, by addressing how Thackray translated Brassens into English and how
they once (somewhat incredibly) performed together in the UK, to contribute to a
case study of how this transcultural process worked positively for an English singer-
songwriter. As we shall see, Thackray marvelled at the success Brassens achieved
in France by being his own man, as opposed to being a puppet of the entertainment
business, and tried to base his own working practices on this methodology.
The Yorkshire-born Thackray, almost uniquely, tried to emulate Brassens, to
create an Anglo-Saxon version of the chanson to tell English stories and critique
the English sensibility. Thackray had studied French at Durham University, after
which he spent four years teaching English in Lille, Brittany and the Pyrenees, and
six months in Algeria at the height of the war for independence (1961–1962). Like
Brassens, he began as a writer, hoping to publish poems and prose, and only much
later did he introduce the guitar to his lyrical repertoire. Thackray was familiar
with the comic traditions of Chaucer, Campion, Thackeray and others. Despite
being defined as a ‘modern minstrel’ (Bosman, 1979, p. 27), with this unique
style he had mixed commercial success. When Thackray died in Monmouth,
Wales, on Christmas Eve in 2002, he had been declared bankrupt and had been
ill with alcoholism. The performer who had delivered ‘more than 1000 radio and
TV appearances during his lifetime’ (Newell, 2005) had lost his way. Brassens,
who projected an image of ‘public reticence’ (Barnes, 2002, p. 28) despite his
enormous commercial success, liked to characterize himself as a ‘humble faiseur
de chansons’ (‘maker of songs’)’ (Jacobs, 1999, p. 15). The same can be said of
Thackray, who frequently and dismissively referred to his carefully crafted and
intelligent songs as ‘ditties’ (as did publicist John Carlsen in the sleeve notes for
his first LP recording), and has been described as the ‘archetypal show business
anti-hero, despising most of the trappings that go with his job’ (Bonner, 1981, p. 6).
Yet while Brassens in France was ‘regarded as a poet rather than a singer, with
all the weight of cultural superiority that this implies’ (Hawkins, 2000, p. 23),
Thackray was remembered (if at all) as ‘that bloke off the telly that sang the funny
songs – a bit unhip but well worth watching’ (Newell, 2005).
Thackray was inspired by Brassens’s songs on his commercial recordings,
and it is worth exploring how Thackray achieved this transcultural feat, for once
bucking the trend for anglophone cultures to be the exporter of cultural forms.
Evans noted that ‘[h]is [Thackray’s] translations are easily the best in English
because he himself was a songwriter of genius’ (2003). For Evans, Thackray was
‘the English Brassens – the same humanity, the same humour, the same way of
telling a story, the same mastery of language and the same liberties taken with
words’ (2003). Describing Brassens’s clever songs as ‘poetry with a human face’
(1973), Evans notes how Thackray was able to link popular and high literary
forms, too. The problem for Thackray was that Brassens ‘operated within a long,
uninterrupted tradition’ (2003), often referencing the French folk-song. His song
‘Je rejoindrai ma belle’, for example, draws on ‘the metamorphosis song … in
which the lovers change form’ (Evans, 1977, p. 674). On the other hand, Thackray,
‘in England, worked against the grain’ (Evans, 2003).
Thackray’s English Chanson
Translating songs, the making of a singable text, is one of what Peter Low calls the
‘special tasks’ of the translator (2003, p. 87). Low notes that ‘[i]n song translation,
the constraints are imposed by the pre-existing music: a translator must bear in
mind its rhythms, note-values, phrasings, and stresses’ (p. 87). Many translations
fail as ‘they are often marred by forced rhymes and unnatural language, so that
performers simply cannot sing them with conviction’ (p. 87). As Andrew Kelly, a
translator of Brassens from French into English, notes ‘[the translation of] poetic
songs is even harder since the music states the rhythms more precisely and the
sound and sense must be pleasing when sung’ (1982, p. 1). Brassens’s tendency to
use ‘French poetical style interspersed with everyday speech’ (p. 4) must also be
somehow rendered.
Thackray was shrewd (and respectful) enough to recognize the problems of
straight translation; of Brassens he observed: ‘You can’t export him … All you can
do is stand under the great oak tree and watch the acorns fall’ (Evans, 2003). His
versions of Brassens transpose the original meaning into another different cultural
setting. They imagine another world, but one which the spirit of the original can
inhabit. The Brassens songs become, in the hands of Thackray, ‘marvellous English
songs’ (Evans, 2003). Thackray himself described this method as ‘not so much
translating the songs, as making them happen again, in England’ (Evans, 1977,
p. 675). He thus hoped that ‘the thrust and the vigour of the originals will shine
through’ (Thackray, 1977, p. 11). What Thackray attempted with his translations
of Brassens ‘invites us to think about how people in specific places and at specific
times have embraced the music of others, and how, in doing so, they have enabled
music styles and musical ideas, musician and musical instruments to circulate
(globally) in particular ways’ (Stokes, 2007, p. 6). It can be seen as an example of
what Stokes calls ‘multi-directional kinds of musical circulation’ (p. 4), an attempt
at bringing from the French tradition a style of music and representing it for an
English-speaking audience, regardless of whether that audience is aware of its
provenance or not.
Although Thackray made an early aborted recording of ‘Isabella’ (‘Marinette’),
the first Brassens song he released did not appear officially until 1972 on his third
LP Bantam Cock. However, there are echoes of chanson on his first LP The Last
Will and Testament of Jake Thackray (1967). ‘Country Bus’, for example, with its
cast of village bumpkins utilizing their old vehicle for a range of activities including
drinking, fighting and frolicking, re-imagines a French pastoral grotesque, while
‘Scallywag’ recounts the misdemeanours of a local village outcast, treated with
suspicion by the male paragons of the town, but who ‘services’ the various sexually
frustrated women of the area. ‘Jumble Sale’ juxtaposes the mundane with the
romantic and combines lyricism with bawdy humour, a strategy which Thackray
clearly borrowed from Brassens (Hawkins, 2000, p. 130).
In actually translating Brassens, Thackray tried to retain the directness and
frankness of the subject matter. As Kelly notes, ‘[i]n English we prefer not to
mention (or only refer indirectly to) things about which French speech can be
rather direct’ (1982, p. 15). Yet Thackray does not shy from using such shock
effects, and in doing so – Kelly claims (1982) – harks back to a time when the
English were perhaps not always so cautious. Bantam Cock includes Thackray’s
version of ‘Le Gorille’, one of Brassens’s earliest and most infamous songs. Evans
described ‘Brother Gorilla’ as ‘one of the best translations of another language song
I’ve ever heard’ going as far as claiming that ‘it’s actually better than the original,
even funnier than the original’ (in Brown, 2001). Thackray captures the essence
of Brassens’s satire on capital punishment and hypocrisy, retaining the jaunty 2/4
beat of the original – thus acknowledging that, in translating poetry and song,
‘rhythm is fundamental to both forms’ (Kelly, 1982, p. 2) – while cleverly adapting
Brassens’s savage critique and surreal comic imagery for an English ear. In the
original version we see Brassens attacking those institutions represented by judges,
policemen and priests who dress up in fancy robes to indicate their authority over
the lives of their fellow humans. Thackray preserves the humorous register of the
source text by utilizing English phrases and patterns (‘cock-up’, etc.). Thackray
frequently explored Brassens’s critical tendency in original compositions, such as
‘The Little Black Foal’, ‘The Bull’ and ‘The Brigadier’. ‘The Bull’ in particular
has been connected to anarchism.1 Thackray extended his dislike of the rich and
powerful to the paragons of the mass media (‘telly folk’, in his words) describing
them on the Jake Thackray and Songs live LP cover as ‘prats’.
Thinking further about Thackray’s translation of ‘Le Gorille’, we can refer to
a translator of Schubert’s songs, Richard Dyer-Bennet, and his four guidelines
for translating (in Low, 2003). These are: singability, musical veracity and rhyme
scheme, and diversion from literal meaning when the first three requirements
cannot be met. Low considers the second guideline to be problematic, at least for
translators of Lieder (German-language poems set to music). And yet Thackray
preserves carefully Brassens’s music while fitting his English words into the
soundscape of the original song. He did not copy Brassens’s lyrical rhymes, but
created his own new ones.
On Thackray’s final studio LP On Again! On Again! (1976), he tackled two
Brassens originals ‘Marinette’ (as ‘Isabella’) and ‘Je rejoindrai Ma Belle’ (as,
somewhat confusingly, ‘Over to Isobel’). ‘Isabella’ is a fairly faithful translation
of Brassens’s original, a comic song about a young man in love with a beautiful
girl who is out of his class in every way. While he incorporates the very English
‘cod and chips’ into the verse about food, Thackray tones down the lyric for his
target audience, using ‘pillock’ for the French ‘con’ (literally ‘cunt’). ‘Over to
1
A thesis on the subject of anarchism by Wilson (2011), for example, begins by
quoting two verses and the chorus from the song.
Isobel’ is more interesting in terms of transcultural exchange. By side-stepping

the transformation elements of the original (knowing that English-speaking
listeners will miss the nuances of the original), Thackray offers instead a panoply
of haunting and strange images, highly poetic and surreal in form. Here, Thackray
delivers a kind of magical fairy tale. Introducing the song live, he described it as a
love song that is ‘mysterious and odd’. Thackray’s adaptation of this song can be
viewed partly within the British tradition of the sea song relating tales of mermaids
and sailors, although removed from the usual context of these kinds of songs as
‘people’s folklore’ (Howes, 1969, p. 209).
In addition, ‘The Last Will and Testament of Jake Thackray’, written at the
start of his career, is essentially an English version of Brassens’s ‘Testament’.
Brassens’s title for his song reuses the major poetic work of François Villon. As
Villon adopts the device of a pretend will in these poems (popular in French poetry
of the Middle Ages), it is clear that both Brassens and Thackray are transposing
this technique.
Thackray’s technique of creating ‘stylistic similarity in place of linguistic
difference’ (Evans, 1977, p. 674) retains Brassens’s tendency to deploy everyday
speech, ‘what we remember having heard rather than what we remember having
read’ (p. 674). Like Brassens, Thackray enjoyed mixing ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural
registers, both in the words used and in relation to the contexts of the songs.
Brassens and Thackray eschewed the tendency in popular songs to resort to cliché
and mindless repetition – there are very few choruses/refrains in the songs of either.
Both sang in their own way of society’s ‘little people’ or ‘marginaux’ (Pinet, 1982,
p. 282). Thackray was fascinated by Brassens’s tendency to ‘combine the pastoral
and the anarchic’ (Evans, 1977, p. 674) and it is this he tried to encapsulate in
his own compositions as well as those works of Brassens he translated. While
the language of Thackray’s translations is clearly different, his songs allow us to
reflect back on the original texts. As Stokes observes: ‘[t]ranslations not only live
their own life, but impinge on the way the ‘originals’ are read and understood’
(2007, p. 13).
Linguistically, Thackray also followed Brassens’s tendency to use archaic
language and ancient symbolism. Thackray would throw in a Latin phrase or two,
often accompanied by what producer Paul Thompson has called an ‘artful use of
vulgarity’ (2014). Examples of this can be found in ‘Jumble Sale’ on his debut
album (‘Iacta was my alea / my chips were down and numbered at the jumble
sale’) and in perhaps the most (in)famous instance from ‘On Again! On Again!’
(‘I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day / To me it is palpable proof of
God’s existence, a posteriori’). In the same way that Brassens sang in the pastoral
tradition of French folk song of love affairs with beautiful shepherdesses in
‘Brave Margot’ and ‘La Chasse aux papillons’ (Hawkins, 2000, p. 127), Thackray
expressed similar sentiments in his own ‘The Shepherdess’, an unissued recording
from 1970 filled with pastoral and rustic imagery, which musically and lyrically
is very Brassens-esque. The sophisticated ‘textual subtlety’ which Hawkins
observes in the approach of Brassens with the French language (2000, p. 61), is
here displayed by Thackray in English. Thackray worked hard to place what Low,
writing about translation, defines as ‘a premium on natural language’ (Low, 2003,
p. 95) in order to make his translations communicate effectively; Thackray knew
that ‘a singable translation is not worth making unless it is understood while the
song is sung’ (Low, 2003, p. 95).
Thackray also picked up on what Poole defines as the major themes in the work
of Brassens: the forces of law and order, money, jingoism and armchair generals,
religion, mortality, friendship and women. These preoccupations can all be found
in Thackray’s songs: (respectively) ‘Policeman’s Jig’, ‘Caroline Diggeby-Pratt’,
‘The Remembrance’ and ‘The Brigadier’, ‘Sister Josephine’, ‘The Last Will
and Testament of Jake Thackray’, ‘To Do With You’ and ‘The Castleford Ladies
Magic Circle’. Thackray’s friend Ian Watson once observed that Brassens’s songs
‘[w]ere poems … they show a tremendous sensitivity to things one tends not to
talk about’ (in Brown, 2001). His skills of reportage were echoed in the work of
Thackray, who explored aspects of Brassens’s world such as criminality, sex and
love and a celebration of the ‘downtrodden – cowards, pimps, tarts with ordinary
hearts, women with huge arses, traitors, shaven-headed collaborationists and older
women’ (Barnes, 2002, p. 29) – and gave them an English twist, praising dogs
(‘Dog’, ‘Ulysses’), the dying young shepherdess (‘Old Mollie Metcalfe’), the
rascal (‘The Ballad of Billy Kershaw’, ‘Scallywag’) and the ‘other’ (‘One of Us’,
‘It Was Only a Gypsy’). What Poole calls Brassens’s ‘cast’ (2001, p. 80) is echoed
in Thackray’s long list of equally vivid song characters.
Religion too played a role in both artists’ work. Thackray’s Roman Catholicism,
problematic for him and yet something he adhered to and grew closer to later in his
life, runs all the way through his songs, be it a gentle comedic representation of
religion (‘The Vicar’s Missus’, ‘Sister Josephine’ and ‘On Again! On Again!’) or
the heartfelt celebrations of Christian faith in his ‘Christmas’ songs (‘Joseph’ and
‘Remember Bethlehem’). The savage attacks on organized religion in Brassens’s
material, reflecting the ‘secularisation and liberalisation of the 1960s’ where
‘traditional bourgeois notions of the family and the authority of the Catholic
church’ (Tinker, 2005, p. 130) were challenged, are largely absent from Thackray’s
version of chanson.
Through all this we can see Thackray reflecting the influence of English writers
in the manner in which Brassens drew on French literature and poetry. In parallel,
Brassens absorbed certain English writers, too.2 William Makepeace Thackeray’s
Book of Snobs – with the wry self-mocking subtitle ‘By One of Themselves’,
which Jake Thackray often adhered to – was a Brassens favourite, for example.
This non-conformist dimension of Brassens and his ‘brand of individualism’
(Pinet, 1982, p. 291) was celebrated in France, while Thackray’s scandalous songs
made a much smaller impact. The modest audiences who came to see Thackray
perform certainly laughed heartily at his texts, but he was, in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, ‘effectively removed from the airwaves’ (Lewis Smith, 2006).
2
Evans noted he ‘developed a taste for English and American literature’ (1973).
The romantic but rebellious ‘anarchic naturalism’ found in the work of both
singer-songwriters did not impress mainstream culture in equal measure. It is this
aspect of Thackray’s transcultural exchange that ultimately was problematic for
him. I feel that his version of Brassens’s songs sounded, to Anglo-Saxon ears,
‘strange and exotic … an unfamiliar world expressed in a familiar language’
(Evans, 1977, p. 675).
Cardiff, 1973: A Transcultural Performance
On 28 October 1973, a concert featuring Georges Brassens and Jake Thackray

was held to inaugurate the Sherman Theatre, a new premises built by Cardiff
University. The concert was arranged by Colin Evans, a lecturer in French at the
local university assisted by, among others, Jake Thackray. Four hundred and fifty
fans from all over Europe travelled to see the show. The concert was recorded by
a young documentary filmmaker Karl Francis, and transmitted in 1973 as part of
the ‘2nd House’ BBC arts TV series presented by Melvyn Bragg. The concert was
recorded by Philips and issued the following year as Brassens’s only official live
LP. The entire event was most unusual. Brassens rarely travelled outside France,
being ‘allergic to aeroplanes and abroad’ (Barnes, 2002, p. 33), and the filming and
the live LP were also exceptions to Brassens’s ‘rules’. Brassens himself appears
to have acknowledged this event as a transcultural experience, altering the list of
despots in his recent song ‘Le Roi’ to include the Queen of England, knowing it
would resonate in Wales.
If we look at the set list for Thackray’s 50-minute opening set we can see that
the singer had thought carefully about the material to be presented before Brassens
delivered his own set.3 The songs that Thackray played offered a partial glimpse
of what a transcultural interpretation (French/English) of Brassens’s chansons
would resemble. There were the songs satirizing the notion of ‘good breeding’ and
cultural superiority, central planks of the British class system even more so than the
French (‘The Little Black Foal’). Then there were the often comical dimensions
of rural life which have been examined by French and English poets and singers
(‘Country Bus’, ‘The Poor Sod/Rain on the Mountainside’, ‘Old Molly Metcalfe’);
Evans describes these songs as ‘an escape from the present into an idealized past,
a past incidentally when music and poetry were inseparably linked’ (1973). There
was the bawdiness of the miscreants (‘Family Tree’, ‘Grandad’). There was also
Thackray’s attempt, if not at a metamorphosis song, at least a text where impulsive
and ‘natural’ animal behaviour is morphed with human tendencies (‘Bantam
Cock’). There were the put-upon male characters that we are encouraged to feel
3
Thackray’s set comprised: ‘Family Tree’, ‘The Little Black Foal’, ‘Jolly Captain’, ‘The
Statues’, ‘Country Bus’, ‘Bantam Cock’, ‘The Poor Sod/Rain on the Mountainside’, ‘Brother
Gorilla’, ‘Isabella’, ‘Lah-Di-Dah’, ‘Old Molly Metcalfe’, ‘Sister Josephine’, ‘The Blacksmith
and the Toffee Maker’, ‘The Last Will And Testament Of Jake Thackray’, ‘the Granddad’.
sympathy for (‘Jolly Captain’). There was the song drawn from literary traditions,
‘The Blacksmith and the Toffee-Maker’, based on a short story in Laurie Lee’s
Cider with Rosie (an author who, like Thackray, frequently located his work in a
rural fantasy). And there were Thackray’s aforementioned direct translations of
Brassens. Furthermore, Thackray’s set opener, ‘Family Tree’, is a sly revisitation
of Brassens’s song ‘Auprès de mon arbre’. The narrator in the Brassens song looks
back at the simple life he used to lead, reflecting on the various mistakes he had
made: ‘Beside my old oak tree / I lived happily.’4 Thackray’s version instead lists
all the dubious characters forming up his lineage and plays on a much more vulgar
tone. ‘Sister Josephine’ one of Thackray’s most famous songs, echoes Brassens’s
‘La Religieuse’, albeit with a different sexual thrust.
Thackray’s politics – he was ‘a lifelong socialist – albeit a non-aligned
one’ (Lewis-Smith, 2006) – were also evident, despite suggestions he was not
a committed artist. Bosman, for example, argues: ‘Where Brassens’ music is
peppered with political comment, and veiled references to sex, Jake leaves politics
aside, and points to more carnal delights’ (1979, p. 27). I would argue that actually
Thackray’s politics are just less explicit than Brassens. Of the songs he played
in Cardiff, ‘The Statues’ is a Brel-like song mocking the monuments put up to
the powerful, ‘Old Molly Metcalfe’ leaves a bitter taste about the injustices of
contemporary life, while ‘Lah-Di-Dah’ mocks, albeit gently, the petty obsessions
of middle-England.
As Rachel Haworth has pointed out, the French term auteur-compositeur-
interprète suggests that ‘performance is just as integral an activity as writing
lyrics and composing music’ (2013, p. 73). The personal expression evident in
the chanson tradition echoes that of the Anglo-American singer-songwriter,
and suggests a distinction between the desiring machinery of commercial pop
music – often dismissed, according to Frith, ‘as a vehicle for pubescent fantasies’
(1988, p. 91) – and more ‘serious’ forms of expression. Haworth explains how
the reputations of Brel and Ferré were developed as much from their powerful
live shows as from their commercial recordings. Yet in the Brassens/Thackray
transcultural exchange, there is scope for a different kind of performance: almost
an anti-performance. Both Thackray and Evans expressed how ‘wrong’ and ‘anti-
commercial’ the performances of Brassens were (Brown 2001). Brassens was
notorious for his minimal stage performance, consisting of a single chair at the
front of the stage for him to raise his foot upon to support his guitar – a gesture
described as a ‘pose suggestive of amateurism’ (Looseley, 2003b, p. 79) – and a
single spotlight on the singer. His ‘band’ consisted of string-bass player Pierre
Nicolas, who remained at the back of the stage in the dark, plucking single notes
as accompaniment.5 Brassens arranged the lighting at shows so that he could not
see the audience, and footage of him performing, even in his later years, show
4
‘Auprès de mon arbre / Je vivais heureux.’
5
Julian Barnes notes how ‘seismic’ the effect was on the recording of ‘La Non-
Demande en marriage’ when Nicolas was finally allowed to bow his instrument (2002, p. 28).
him blinking into the light, head stooped to the microphone and performing the
simplest of uncomfortable waves to the inevitable applause (what Evans describes
as an ‘embarrassed Highway-code-slowing-down sign’ (1973)).
Thackray chose to mimic certain aspects of Brassens and shared the nervousness
of his performance style. Unlike many English singers of the time who adopted
American tones, Thackray sang in a strong Yorkshire accent – indeed he was an
‘exceptional exponent’ of this (Morrisey, 2008, p. 193). He also supported his
guitar by way of a chair and, until the Cardiff concert, performed alone.6 Thackray,
too, frequently looked uncomfortable in front of an audience, despite claiming on
the sleeve notes of the Jake Thackray and Songs LP, that ‘a singer’s place is on his
feet on public floorboards, taking risks in front of paying punters’ (Thackray, 1981).
Despite (or perhaps because of) playing in more intimate venues than Brassens,
Thackray rarely looked at the audience, stooping over the microphone like Brassens
and glancing around at the ceiling, the side of the stage, or (from 1973) at Alan
Williams. Wendy Foranow describes this as a form of ‘gaze strategy’ where the
performer suggests ‘that they do not see audience members’ (Foranow, 2006, p. 193).
Moreover, neither Brassens nor Thackray (unlike typical ‘showbiz’ performers)
attempted to hide the uncomfortable nature of their performance, gripping their
guitars tensely, sweating profusely and stepping back from the microphone after
each number almost in relief. If anything, it is in the live performances of their
songs that Brassens and Thackray conform more to the folk tradition, where
audiences are encouraged to concentrate (almost solely) on the words and to listen
intently to each number in order to discern them more clearly. This performance
style is an important aspect of authenticating the chanson (and Thackray’s English
version of it) as a serious and ‘high-quality’ form of expression. As Haworth points
out, this ‘foregrounding of the literary helps to legitimize Brassens as the creator
of quality songs’ (2013, p. 76). Thackray, who had occasion to perform on the
English folk club circuit, conformed to this, in contrast to Anglo-American music
where the tune and the general ‘sound’ is all important. Thackray’s performance
is therefore closer, we can argue, to this French tradition than to any anglophone
musical format.
The constructed appearance of the two singers was, similar too. Both, even on
stage, wore unremarkable clothing. Hawkins describes Brassens, with his black suit
or corduroy jackets and trousers in shades of brown or green, as ‘le français moyen’
(the average Frenchman), while Thackray, simply decked out in corduroy jackets,
open-necked shirts and jumpers, recalled the school teacher he had once been. It
is arguable that this bland exterior masks the subversive nature of their songs, and
makes all the more shocking the moment when profanities and obscenities flow
6
At this concert, Thackray met Alan Williams, who lent Nicolas his double bass and
who would become Thackray’s accompanist. Both Brassens and Thackray later augmented
this simple line-up with a second guitarist: Joel Favreau in the case of Brassens and John
Etheridge in the case of Thackray, both technically brilliant jazz players.
from such respectable-looking figures.7 Brassens perhaps adopted this dislike of

fame from one of his major influences, the poet Paul Valéry (also from Sète), who
‘knew that the mind which consents to fame is a mind flawed’ (Lawler, 1977,
p. vii). ‘Events are the froth of things, but my true interest is the sea’ (p. vii), Valéry
observed. Brassens and in turn Thackray followed this philosophy.
Thus, both Brassens and Thackray deliver somewhat muted performances of
their material, and yet despite being ‘natural and awkward’ are nevertheless in
their own radical way ‘theatrical’ (Haworth, 2013, p. 76). What we have here
is still a performance, an act. Thackray delivers the ‘performability’ that Low
defines as essential to a successful, singable song translation (Low, 2003, p. 93).
Thackray’s discomfort was palpable to those who saw him perform, appearing
‘embattled and in retreat’ (Male, 2015, p. 116).8 Further, this ‘naturalness and
awkwardness become the standard with chanson performances’ (p. 116); the anti-
showmanship of this musical genre becomes a statement of intent, a rhetoric of
non-conformity. Perhaps Thackray was drawn to Brassens because he was almost
alone in not dramatizing his songs on stage in the same flamboyant way as his
chanson compatriots such as Brel, Piaf and Barbara.
Thackray often spoke of the Cardiff concert with Brassens as the high point of
his career. He delighted in simple and touching moments such as when Brassens
handed Thackray his guitar while he adjusted his tie (with the words tien ça –
‘hold this’). The interview he conducted with Ray Brown for the BBC was almost
entirely devoted to his recollections and admiration for Brassens. Thackray
successfully assimilated aspects of the work of Brassens which incorporated into
chanson ‘a certain heritage of poetic diction without losing sight of its original
function as a popular expression of the values and aspirations of ordinary French
people’ (Hawkins, 2000, p. 133). In doing this, he spoke the language of ordinary
English people.
Conclusion
It remains unclear how profoundly the French chanson tradition has penetrated
English popular culture. Brassens, unlike Béranger, one of his predecessors who
did enjoy some success in England, has not once become the focus of ‘poetic and
cultural dialogue’ (Phelan, 2005, p. 6) between France and the UK. I feel that
Jake Thackray is a rare instance of such an exchange. Thackray was described
as the ‘founding father of English chanson’ (Clayson, 2002), yet not long after,
Peter Paphides stated that ‘the idea of a practitioner of specifically English
chansons had pretty much begun and ended with Jake Thackray’ (2014, p. 46).
7
There is a rationale for this technique: ‘obscenities’ according to Barthes have ‘no
real meaning, but they have significance’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 1).
8
Even Thackray’s televison succesful performances were problematic, Bonner
describing Thackray as ‘a television star who detests TV’ (1981, p. 6).
There have been other attempts at translating the songs of Georges Brassens into
English, most notably by the New Zealand singer-songwriter Graeme Allwright
(translations by Andrew Kelly) and the North American singer Pierre de Gaillande.
In fact, Hawkins suggests that French singers have perhaps embraced a form
of transcultural exchange more smoothly than is discussed here. The example
Hawkins offers is Francis Cabrel, who has roots in the lands of the troubadours but
incorporates American folk-rock into his compositions. Yet certainly, following
the Cardiff concert, the teaching of French in south Wales universities continued
to introduce a generation of students to the poetry of the chanson and ‘legitimized’
(Goodall, 2013) the teaching of songs in French culture.9 What happened with the
meeting of Brassens and Thackray, and Thackray’s borrowing from Brassens, also
exemplified an ‘adaptation of an ancient form to the demands of the modern mass
media’ (Hawkins, 2000, p. 8).
While most British musicians still look towards the USA for musical inspiration,
one recent successful rock star, Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys, has expressed
his admiration for Thackray’s mode of ‘English chanson’.10 Turner, initially, also
sang in a strong Yorkshire accent. With this kind of cool endorsement, the tiny but
influential transcultural moment held in Cardiff all those years ago may yet bear
musical fruit. There is quite some distance, geographically and culturally, between
Sète and Leeds, and yet to some extent Thackray, with his adaptations of Brassens,
bridged it. Both singers offered idealizations of places they once knew but had left
behind (Swaledale and Languedoc-Roussillon).
With twenty-first-century performers such as Franz Ferdinand and Arctic
Monkeys singing the praises of Brassens and Thackray respectively,11 will the French
tradition finally make its way into contemporary singer-songwriting, redirecting
the musical traffic thus far? It is clear that the ‘authenticity’ – ‘performing one’s
own material and valuing a working-class identity … motivated by concerns of
artistic expression rather than commercial acquisition’ (Fonarow, 2006, p. 188) –
of indie music chimes with that of the chanson. While sonically the indie rock of
such bands has very little to do with the French chanson, perhaps the ‘consistency
between personal experience and what is represented in performance’ (Fonarow,
9
Another legacy was that the team behind the Cardiff concert set up the Cardiff
University Film Society introducing European film culture to south Wales.
10
Turner observed: ‘[T]here is this guy called Jake Thackray and he writes these sort
of narrations that are kind of humorous. In some of his live recordings he will sort of pause
so that people can laugh. … In each verse he sort of starts the same way and describes a
different angle of it. And that sort of stood out to me in the way that you are always right
there with him. I guess that is sort of the opposite to something like “I Am the Walrus”. The
way you completely understand [each detail] of what he is writing. It’s sometimes hard to
do without being banal, I suppose’ (in Matheny, 2010).
11
In 2006, Alex Kapranos, Franz Ferdinand’s singer, observed that Brassens was
‘both a national outcast and hero in France, yet most of us don’t know him on this side of
the channel. His lyrics were more subversive than Dylan or the Sex Pistols and he wrote
better tunes than either’ (in Anon., 2006).
2006, p. 191), the lack of mainstream posturing and banal commentary, and the
themes within these songs can appeal to a new radical generation of expressive
singer-songwriters wanting to tell real stories using a tradition of art that began
hundreds of years ago, in another place, at another time.
Chapter 13
A Place for Us? Building the Sense of Place
in the ʻGenoese School’ of Cantautori1
Alessandro Bratus and Giuseppa Vultaggio
Genoa, in the Fifties. The history of Genoese cantautori came to life along two
streets: corso Torino and via Rimassa, that leads all the way to the sea. This is
where Bruno Lauzi and Luigi Tenco used to live and where they often got together
to play, at the Reverberi brothers’ house, nearby. Umberto Bindi also lived not far
away. These blokes were all brought together by their youth, their music and their
neighbourhood: the Foce. (Comandè and Bellantuono, 2014, p. 20)2
In 1959, having followed the Reverberi brothers to the industrial city of Milan,
Umberto Bindi, Gino Paoli and Luigi Tenco were the first Genoese cantautori
to sign a record contract with Ricordi. In 1961, another of their close friends,
Fabrizio De André, signed with Karim. The following year, Bruno Lauzi began
recording for CGD under the pseudonym Miguel e i Caravana. By the end of
1962, the expressions ʻGenoese schoolʼ and ‘school of Genoa’ had already begun
to appear in the music press.
The almost immediate appearance of this label, soon adopted in public
discourses and the press to refer to a specific group of musicians, emphasizes
the ease with which a number of shared characteristics can be observed in their
work: aside from their regional and cultural background, they shared above all the
influence of French auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes alongside jazz and South
American music, and a common interest in socio-political issues. And yet, over
the years, the protagonists themselves repeatedly felt the need to clarify that such
a school was never actually a concrete entity. As Lauzi said: ‘The Genoese school
never existed; it’s just a journalistic simplification. We were simply unn-a brancà
1
The Introduction, the section entitled ‘“An Idea, Like any Other”: “Genova per noi”’,
and ‘Conclusion: Local Characterization and Musical Analysis’ were written by Alessandro
Bratus; the sections ‘Inventing the School of Genoa’ and ‘Representing Genoa, or the Genoese
“Poetics of Space”’ by Giuseppa Vultaggio. Translation of this chapter by Brent Waterhouse.
2
‘Genova, anni Cinquanta. La storia dei cantautori genovesi prende vita intorno a
due vie: Corso Torino e via Rimassa, che porta fino al mare. È qui che abitano Bruno Lauzi
e Luigi Tenco, che hanno l’abitudine di suonare a casa dei vicini fratelli Reverberi. Poco
distante da loro, c’è anche Umberto Bindi. Questi ragazzi condividono la giovinezza, la
musica e lo stesso quartiere: la Foce.’
d’amixi, as they say in Genoa, a group of friends who got to know each other
thanks to the Reverberi brothers. Ours was mostly a personal kind of relationship,
not an artistic pact’ (in Comandè and Bellantuono, 2014, p. 23).3
The first part of this chapter provides a short history of the ‘Genoese school’
label, analysing in detail the music press in the 1950s and the 1960s, when the
expression came into use. We also reconstruct the critical debate surrounding
the label from the late 1970s to the present. We seek to show how the term ʻschoolʼ,
in reference to the Genoese cantautori, does not point to a shared process of formal
learning or the existence of established teachers, nor to their adherence to an artistic
manifesto; rather it refers to a group of musicians and songwriters born at the same
time and beginning their professional lives around the same place. However, the most
interesting point is that the expression ‘school of Genoa’ is relevant as an historic
label in popular music because it echoes cultural and literary trends of the time, such
as the renewed interest of poets and musicians in their local roots and folk traditions,
in opposition to the homogenizing rhetoric of progress and industrialization favoured
by the political forces and media who ruled Italy after the Second World War. In the
second section, we examine the Genoese ʻpoetics of spaceʼ – that is, how the city is
represented in the production of each of these cantautori. Our underlying hypothesis
is that the urban space allows them to inflect the description of Genoa with their
personal style of songwriting; in this process the city becomes a recognizable
rhetorical space, even though they never wished to be considered a coherent group.
In their songs, this urban environment exemplifies a specific ‘poetics of space’, a
space filled with positive values defined by Gaston Bachelard:
the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended
against adverse forces, the space we love. … Attached to its protective value,
which can be a positive one, are also imagined values, which soon become
dominant. Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain
indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has
been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.
(1994, pp. xxxv–xxxvi)
This definition of a peculiar ‘poetics of space’ that can be attached to a specific

geographical location was later taken up by Edward Said to describe the
‘imaginary geography’ on which the ideas of the Other and the Orient are based
(1994, pp. 54–5). Something similar can be seen in the discursive construction
of a label such as ‘Genoese school’, in which the space of the Ligurian city is
depicted as a place with unique features, a ‘nearby other’ within Italy. Genoa is
obviously not ‘Oriental’ properly speaking, and yet it becomes ‘orientalized when
its otherness as a special kind of space is brought to the fore; in this sense, it can
3
‘La scuola genovese non è mai esistita, è una semplificazione dei giornali. Eravamo
solo unn-a brancà d’amixi, come dicono a Genova, un gruppo d’amici che si erano conosciuti
dai Reverberi. Il nostro era più che altro un rapporto umano, non un patto artistico.’
A Place for Us? 193
be thought of as what Said has called a ‘strategic formation’ (1994, p. 20). In the
third section of our chapter, we employ this interpretative framework to show how
the transformative experience undergone by someone who ‘has been to Genoa’
is depicted in a song, ‘Genova per noi’, by the specific ‘Orientalist’ features of
both its lyrics and music. The relevance of this song is due to the fact that it was
written in 1974 – by which time the label had become widely accepted – by a non-
Genoese (Paolo Conte) for a Genoese singer-songwriter (Lauzi), and consequently
endorsed as a genuine expression of local identity; here Conte depicts the
experience of the city as a transformative one, capable of giving those who go
there a sense of community and shared belonging. The kind of otherness here
described is not imposed from the point of view of the Orientalist gaze. Rather it
results from a negotiation between the public discourse on these singers ‒ aimed
at finding a common definition for their art ‒ and their desire to stand apart from
mainstream Italian production in matters of personal taste and stylistic trademarks.
In this sense, ‘Genova per noi’ also acts as a meta-description of the influence
that the ‘Genoese school’ has had on subsequent generations of Italian cantautori,
including Conte himself. Lastly, we outline the main coordinates of the process
by which the statuses of cantautore and the ‘Genoese school’ are established,
referring to space as the primary criterion for collective identification.
Inventing the ‘School of Genoa’
Musica e Dischi was a periodical founded in 1945 and targeted mainly at record
dealers and music business professionals. Dominated by official advertisements and
news concerning each label’s roster (signings, releases, tours, sales information,
prizes and miscellaneous information), its Notiziari section was directly controlled
and written by the companies’ press offices, and can be considered an example of
corporate journalism. Between 1959 and 1963 ‒ when the first phase of ‘Genoese’
production at Ricordi can be said to have reached its conclusion with Paoli’s move
to RCA in August 1963 and Tenco’s relocation to Jolly in early 1964 ‒ the rhetoric
used by Ricordi in promoting Genoese artists such as Umberto Bindi, Paoli and
Tenco mainly draws attention to their ʻnewnessʼ, which was commonly associated
with a somewhat ʻeccentricʼ personality. Moreover, Paoli was defined as a ʻreal
artistʼ and praised for his originality and the eclecticism of his many artistic
interests (Anon., 1960c, p. 70). Another artist whose ʻfuture is guaranteed, and
who will have many new things to say in the extremely crowded world of Italian
popular musicʼ (Anon., 1960b, p. 62),4 was Tenco, who was also said to deserve
ʻseparate mention in the history of Italian songʼ (Anon., 1962a, p. 37).5
4
‘[Tenco] avrà un sicuro avvenire e saprà dire una parola veramente nuova nel super-
affollato mondo della musica leggera italiana.’
5
‘un capitolo a sé nella storia della canzone’.
It is in a ‘Notiziario Stampa Ricordi’ (Ricordi press release) celebrating Tenco

and his release of ‘In qualche parte del mondo’ (Anywhere in the World) in 1962
that the expression ʻGenoese schoolʼ occured for the first time:
[Born in Langhe, Piemonte,] Tenco moved to Genoa, where he met the other
members of the ‘Genoese school’: the ones who made it big in Milan before
him, and others again who still have some chance of having their songs recorded.
What, in the end, does Tenco have in common with his new fellow citizens of
Genoa, except for his love of those strange card games with even stranger names,
that come straight out of the narrow alleys of the area surrounding the port?
His new spirit, his taste for anti-conformism and a desire to speak a more
realistic contemporary language. The traits of Tenco’s personality are however
unmistakeable, as is his voice with its rugged but caressing timbre. (Anon.,
1962b, p. 21) 6
According to these few lines, Tenco and several unnamed others constitute
a group which shares first and foremost a common biographical, geographical
and cultural background – namely, Genoese citizenship, Genoa and its ʻnarrow
alleysʼ, the ʻcard gamesʼ and popular culture. Secondly, they ʻhave in commonʼ a
ʻtasteʼ and the ʻdesire to speak a … languageʼ – that is, an ideological, stylistic and
aesthetic sensibility. And yet, Tenco’s personality traits remain ʻunmistakeableʼ.
The ʻschoolʼ is thus revealed to be an ideal reference point, consisting of ‘earthly
affinities, having to do with roots, not fruit’ (Camon, 1965, p. 81).7
This first corporate occurrence of the expression ‘Genoese school’ already
contains in embryo the crucial points later developed in the critical reception of
the label: the specificity of the environment to which the Genoese cantautori refer,
and their alleged common aesthetic and stylistic programme. The latter idea is
at the core of the following reflection about the ʻschool of Genoaʼ proposed by
Gianni Borgna in one of the first histories of Italian cantautori:
Could it ever have been the cantautori’s fault, if in our neophyte zeal we took a
few lines such as: ʻFor her I want clear rhymes, / normal, like saying: chimes. /
6
‘Poi Tenco [nato nelle Langhe, Piemonte] è andato a Genova, ha conosciuto gli
altri della “scuola genovese” quelli che dovevano sfondare a Milano prima di lui, e gli altri
che ancora hanno qualche speranza di giungere al disco. Ma che cosa ha in comune Tenco
con i suoi nuovi concittadini, all’infuori della passione per quegli strani giochi di carte dai
nomi ancor più strani, estratti freschi freschi dall’angiporto? Lo spirito nuovo, un gusto
anticonformista un voler parlare un linguaggio più realistico contemporaneo. Ma i tratti
della personalità di Tenco sono inconfondibili, come lo è la sua voce, quel suo timbro un
po’ rugoso ma carezzevole.’
7
‘affinità terragne, di radice e non di frutto’.
A Place for Us? 195
Rhymes outside of the canon / but built in full abandonʼ and tried to pass them off
as the poetic manifesto of the Genoese school? (Borgna and Dessì, 1977, p. 14).8
Borgna makes an explicit comparison here between Italian songwriting and

contemporary literature: the quoted ʻmanifestoʼ is borrowed from Giorgio
Caproni, a poet originally from Livorno but Genoese by adoption, like many of the
school’s leading figures.9 According to Borgna, the manifesto ‒ and the ‘school of
Genoa’ ‒ is therefore not an act of self-representation, but the result of an external,
a posteriori interpretation.
Besides journalistic discourse, the ‘school of Genoa’ was also characterized
and to some extent determined by historical circumstances and literary trends
of the same years, above all the so-called Italian ‘economic miracle’ and the
acknowledgement of a common regional origin at the core of contemporary poets’
and writers’ output. Economically, the massive industrialization witnessed from
1958 to 1963 had enduring consequences for the country’s social and demographic
fabric, one of which was the uncontrolled growth of urban districts and the
devastation of rural areas. Against this backdrop, terms such as ‘local’, ‘traditional’
and ‘authentic’ were used by cantautori in direct opposition to categories such as
‘urban’, ‘contemporary’ and ‘global’. Thus they took a stand in solidarity with
those who were excluded from the material benefits of modernization. On the one
hand, therefore, the connection with a specific place provided by the ‘Genoese
school’ label strengthened the links of the cantautori with traditional cultural
practices associated with ‘folk music’. When viewed in opposition to ‘pop music’,
it also stood for a rejection of the ideology of modern industrial capitalism.
Besides economic matters, the term ʻschool of Genoaʼ echoes the main issues of
literary debate at the time, which paid close attention to geographical and regional
elements. Thus the vernacular (or local dialect) was opposed to the urban and
industrial (or national language). This was especially prominent in the debate in
the 1960s surrounding Dionisotti’s 1951 essay Geografia e storia della letteratura
italiana, a crucial contribution to Italian literary historiography in its combination
of historical and geographical perspectives, and the special attention it paid to
linguistic variety (Dionisotti, 1967). The emergence of critical approaches that
focused on location and geographical roots continued with Anceschi’s 1952
anthology Linea lombarda. Soon after, Caproni’s 1956 contribution to debate on
the ʻLigurian groupʼ argued that the deep connection between Ligurian landscapes
and poetry is one of the main traits developed by the twentieth-century Ligurian
8
‘Ma poteva essere una colpa dei cantautori se il nostro furore eroico di neofiti ci
portava a scambiare il “Per lei voglio rime chiare, / usuali: in –are. / Rime magari vietate, /
ma aperte: ventilate” per il manifesto poetico della scuola genovese?’
9
The lines cited here are the first four of Caproni’s poem ‘Per lei’. The English
translation quoted in the main text is from Ned Condini’s translation of selected poems
(Caproni, 2004, p. 75).
poets (Zoboli, 2006, pp. 81–102). Significantly, many of these were well-loved
literary sources of the Genoese cantautori.
On discussing the Genoese cantautori again a few years later, Borgna denied the
existence of a ʻproper schoolʼ (1985, p. 163), treating instead the Genoese origins
of a few members of the first generation of Italian cantautori as a simple historical
coincidence that had no consequences for their musical output: as a literary critic,
Borgna was aware that the concept of ʻschoolʼ – while often used casually as a
label in literary historiography and teaching – implies a cohesive identity built
around an official manifesto or leading figure when employed stricto sensu.10
This ambivalence towards the label’s critical value is also found in later
explorations: at the end of the 1990s, Paolo Jachia denied the de facto existence of
ʻa school of Genoa in a strict senseʼ (1998, p. 36), but acknowledged, at the same
time, the ‘usefulness’ of the label as a sign of their plural and inclusive ʻcollective
identificationʼ (Bratus, 2013, p. 380). The expression appears again in Franco
Fabbri’s Around the clock (2008a, pp. 94–100, 129), where it is, however, treated
as an established label drawn from the preceding literature about cantautori,
useful to define a specific phase in the history of Italian popular music (as part of
the ‘first generation’ of cantautori), but not a specific consistency in terms of style.
The main reason for the survival of such a label, we contend, is to be seen
in the peculiar ‘poetics of space’ that it affords. That is to say, this geographical
reference provided a readily available identification for the basic idea at the label’s
core, the ‘otherness’ ‒ in respect to both popular Italian mainstream production
and other regional traditions ‒ that was perceived to be the common denominator
of this ʻgenerationʼ11 of cantautori.
Representing Genoa, or the Genoese ʻPoetics of Spaceʼ
Another component that contributed to defining the peculiar characteristics

of Genoa as ‘other’ with respect to the rest of Italy was its position as a ʻhub
of human and intellectual experiences that happened to meet up at one single
pointʼ (Luzzatto and Pedullà, 2001, p. xx).12 The city was a gateway to the sea,
its port open towards other lands, cultural hybridities and dreams of escapism.
Moreover, it had a fascinatingly complex cultural and political life. On the one
hand, it was home to the political and cultural conservatism of Giuseppe Siri and
10
For a definition of ʻschoolʼ as a term of literary criticism, see Berardi, 1969, p. 199.
11
The meaning of ʻgenerationʼ employed here is different from the historical one
just seen in Fabbri, which is taken from the literature on Italian songs and which has
impeded use of this term as a synonym or as a substitute of ʻschoolʼ. Our use concerns a
group of people that collectively present themselves according to ʻshared experiences of
socializationʼ (Hammou, 2011).
12
‘Incroci di vicende intellettuali e umane che si trovano a convergere in un unico
punto’.
A Place for Us? 197
Paolo Emilio Taviani, respectively the cardinal and politician who most influenced
Genoa’s government, economy and press between the 1950s and the 1960s. On
the other, the city had a strong working class milieu, being ʻone of the corners of
Italy’s industrial triangle, at the forefront of its economic miracleʼ (Comandè and
Bellantuono, 2014, p. 16).13 In their portrayal of Genoa, the cantautori drew on
the imagery that was born out of such heterogeneous ingredients. The following
analysis of their recorded works traces the traits that Genoa takes on in their songs,
and explores whether such textual representations act as a unifying factor and
what relation they have with physical place.
Some of these songs display what could be called an ʻunder-characterizedʼ
approach, in which Genoa’s physiognomy is baldly sketched and can only be
recognized with some difficulty. In this group we find the production of Umberto
Bindi and Luigi Tenco. The former often depicts maritime landscapes as metaphors
of a soul in existential torment.14 Thus transfigured, these seascapes tend to be
outside any concrete geographical space, in the same way as Bindi’s classically-
inspired music places him at the margins of the production of his fellow cantautori
at the time. Unlike Bindi, Tenco claimed that his style represented the fruit of
a full (and fully intentional) recovery of Italian folk music;15 and yet Tenco’s
geography in his lyrics was controversial, at the same time heavy with cultural and
sentimental signification and difficult to pinpoint. The degree of realism in Tenco’s
descriptions may be greater – the rural areas and countryside in both ‘La mia
valle’ (My Valley, 1962) and ‘Ciao amore, ciao’ (Goodbye My Darling, Goodbye,
1967) – or lesser – the exotic backdrop to dreams of escape in the aforementioned
‘In qualche parte del mondo’ and the Atlantis-style island of ‘Io vorrei essere
là’ (I Wish I Was There, 1966) – but none are easily locatable. Thus, the strong
(socio-political) realism in Tenco’s lyrics is condemned to remain suspended in a
perennial utopia or non-place.
A greater sensibility towards a precise representation of Genoa can be found in
the work of Gino Paoli, Bruno Lauzi and Fabrizio De André. Their complete realism
comes through both in their use of dialect and toponymy, and in their borrowings
from local musical traditions. Genoa is interwoven throughout the entire artistic
career of Lauzi, from the use of dialect on his first EPs (Sto ciccheton de un Gioan /
O scioco, 1963), through his 1975 landmark single ‘Genova per noi’ (Genoa for
Us), to his celebration of Genoa as European Capital of Culture in 2004. Also in
1975, ‘Ciao, salutime un po’ Zena’ (Bye, Give My Love to Genoa) was recorded
by Paoli, whose recorded oeuvre treats the city as a beloved place, always deeply
13
Genoa is defined as ‘uno dei vertici del triangolo industriale italiano e capofila del
miracolo economico’. For a complete and updated overview of the political and cultural
situation in Genoa in the early 60s, see Comandè and Bellantuono (2014, pp. 15–23).
14
See, for example, Bindi’s 1976 album Io e il mare (Me and the Sea).
15
See liner notes on Tenco’s first LP (1962). On the role of folklore in Tenco’s music,
see Marini (2007).
connected with the cantautore’s biography.16 Fabrizio De André’s music stands

in sharp contrast to Bindi’s and Tenco’s in that Genoa is ʻover-characterizedʼ
as a result of De André’s deeper, extremely refined, and intellectual creative
process. A song such as ‘La città vecchia’ (The Old City, 1974), for example,
is of particular interest for its portrayal of Genoa by reusing not only Georges
Brassens,17 but also words and images with which the poet Saba had described
Trieste (Saba, 2004, p. 81).18 However, the best textual articulation of De André’s
ʻpoetics of spaceʼ can be found, undoubtedly, in his 1984 album Crêuza de mä
(Track that Leads to the Sea), that brings together many diverse geographical and
cultural elements not only from Genoa, but from the Mediterranean more broadly.
As Cosi and Ivaldi argue (2011, pp. 154–65), this is true for both his linguistic
(a Genoese dialect which is not ʻpureʼ but includes many Arabic words) and musical
expression (a ʻmixʼ of various traditional instruments from the Balkans, Turkey
and Algeria, and ʻWestern timbresʼ). Moreover, De André’s choice from the late
1970s to sing not only in Genoese, but also in ʻsecondʼ and ʻthirdʼ dialects such
as Sardinian and Neapolitan, reveals his grand ambition to place the sociological,
moral and political significance of spoken dialects in service of his work inspired
by his empathy with what Cosi and Ivaldi call social, economic, racial, sexual and
religious ʻmarginalitiesʼ (2011, pp. 45–8).
The range of approaches in song to Genoa outlined thus far shows that these are
individual tactics and do not stem from a group dynamic, making it problematic
even to reconstruct a homogeneous Genoese ʻpoetics of spaceʼ claimed by its
alleged members and practised in the manner of a ʻschoolʼ.
‘An Idea, Like Any Other’: ‘Genova per noi’
The difficulties involved in outlining a shared idea of local belonging found in

these individual poetics raise a further question: how do the ideas around the
Genoese origins of those cantautori ‒ thematized in journalistic and critical
discourse and filtered throughout individual stylistic choices ‒ retrospectively
build the image of the city as the catalyst for a sense of group identity? This
section attempts to extrapolate from a single song, ‘Genova per noi’, some of
the coordinates that might help us to understand how the idea of a ‘school’ tied
to the city continued to act as a ‘strategic formation’ regardless of historical facts
and the widely recognized heterogeneity of its protagonists. Written by Paolo
Conte – that is, by a non-Genoese – and recorded in 1975, first by Bruno Lauzi
16
This appears clearly when Paoli reuses Ligurian literary sources, which he
considers a vital part of the local historic and cultural heritage, as evident in ‘Zena’ (1981)
and ‘Genova non è la mia città’ (1984), both modelled on Caproni’s poem Litania.
17
The chanson in question is ‘Le bistrot’ (The Bistro) (1958) (see Jachia, 1998, p. 96;
Cosi and Ivaldi, 2011, p. 37).
18
See also Jachia (1998, p. 96).
A Place for Us? 199
and then by Conte himself, this song is a source of interest above all for the type
of images pertaining to Genoa that circulate within it. The song was written from
an external (and retrospective) point of view – by a cantautore who acknowledges
the experience of ‘having been to Genoa’ as a key part of his human and artistic
formation. In our analysis below, we contend that Genoa – one of the cities that
symbolized industrialization – is associated in the song with some of the typical
traits of an ‘Orientalist’ otherness, and that the experience of being there enabled
the ‘eccentric’ behaviour associated with the figure of the cantautore to emerge
more forcefully. This depiction reflects the crystallization of the ‘school of Genoa’
label, by which the so-called ‘second generation’ of singer-songwriters (Conte
among them) had come to be known in public discourse from the beginning of
the 1970s, as they rose to prominence as a driving force in the panorama of Italian
popular music.
In his extensive survey of the musical signs of Orientalism in popular music,
Markus Henrik Wyrwich provides a useful list of the musical elements associated
with ‘unusual’ inflections, among which are three elements that will be crucial in
the analysis that follows (2013, pp. 63–113). First are the chromatic movements
with harmonies that employ a modal mixture of minor and major scales. Secondly,
Wyrwich identifies unconventional forms with respect to the most common forms
of popular music (AABA, Verse–Refrain, etc.) – one famous example is the chorus
in Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia’ (1942) – and iterative forms borrowed
from Eastern, in particular Indian, music. The third and final elements are those
instruments clearly connected with musical traditions outside Western art music,
such as the sitar or tabla.
In ‘Genova per noi’, the first notes of the melody constitute an ascending
chromatic movement from A2 to C3, against a harmonic background of F major
(Figure 13.1) (in Lauzi’s original recording; Conte’s version is in C major). This
movement is repeated three times in the first half of the verse, and is then taken
up by the movement F–G–G#–A at the beginning of the section that we will call a
‘bridge’ (see Table 13.1). A semitone ascent is thus the melody’s most characteristic
element from the first few bars, in+ opposition to the second part of the verse. This
musical feature is paralleled by the rhyme scheme of the two halves of each verse,
AAB–CCD. What is more, such a subdivision is mirrored by the song’s harmonic,
lyrical and narrative aspects. The first three lines form a unit that is distinguished
by its ascending melodic profile over harmonies in F major (I–V7–I–IV). This
contrasts with the second part of the verse, which begins with a similar melodic
movement ‒ though not chromatic ‒ and the minor inflection of the chord of B-flat
at line 4, ‘Che ben sicuri mai non siamo’ (We’re never quite sure). Note here the
musical portrayal of insecurity in accordance with the narrative content of this
passage, the first sign of the change in tone that continues in the descent from
B-flat3 to F3 over the fifth and sixth lines: ‘Che quel posto dove andiamo / Non
c’inghiotta e non torniamo più’ (That the place we’re going to / Won’t swallow us
up, and we’ll never come back).
Figure 13.1 Melodic cells in the first verse of ‘Genova per noi’ (Lauzi, 1975)
A further series of structural elements is revealed by analysis of the song’s

overall form. These constitute another of the dimensions identified by Wyrwich
as characteristic of an ‘Orientalist’ expression. Table 13.1 outlines the form of
Lauzi’s version (entirely similar to Conte’s, which followed shortly thereafter).
Table 13.1 Structural outline of ‘Genova per noi’ (Lauzi, 1975)
Time First words of lyric Section

0′00″ Introduction [A]
0′07″ Con quella faccia... Verse 1 [B]
0′22″ Eppur parenti... Verse 2 [B’]
0′40″ Genova per noi... Chorus [C]
1′10″ Ma quella faccia... Verse 3 [B’’]
1′27″ Macaia... Transition 1 (variant of the Chorus) [C’]
1′43″ E intanto... Transition 2 (variant of the Introduction) [A’]
1′58″ Lasciaci... Transition 1 (variant of the Chorus) [C’’]
2′13″ In un’immobile... Bridge [D]
2′28″ Con quella faccia... Verse 4 (variant of Verse 1, first 3 verses sung) [B2]
2′44″ Con quella faccia... Verse 4 (variant of Verse 1, first 3 verses sung) [B2]
3′00″ [vocalization] Coda [B’’’]
Two factors stand out in this formal construction. The first is the de-functionalization
of the chorus (or of that which at first sight might serve as a chorus, in the sense
of a culminating section that contains the title of the song). Strictly speaking, this
chorus is only presented once, and is then transfigured into variants that make it
less and less recognizable. The second factor is the re-elaboration of the chorus
within a ‘nested’ structure of transitions (indicated in the table as C′AC″), whose
A Place for Us? 201
function is to present a contrasting interpretation of preceding sections – recalling

the formal function of a bridge – as a sort of macroscopic anacrusis, before the
song’s actual bridge (2′13″) marks a real departure from the ideas heard until that
moment.19 We label the sequence C′AC″ ‘transitions’, because their function is to
mark musically the passage and the transformative experience felt by someone
who ‘has seen Genoa’ by loosening the syntactic, verbal, rhythmic and musical
structures established by the opening verses and chorus. In the lyrics as a whole,
this is particularly clear in the shift from the point of view expressed in the
third line of each verse, with the use of different verbal tenses: ‘prima di andare
a … ’ (before going to …) (Verse 1), ‘mentre guardiamo … ’ (as we look at …)
(Verse 2) and ‘che abbiamo visto Genova’ (now that we have seen Genoa) (Verse 3).
In contrast with the verses, the first chorus of the song and the bridge are entirely
focused on how Genoa is seen from the point of view of the small-town inhabitant
who has never been to the city, and who associates it with the realm of dreams
and (almost mystical) visions. The third line of this last section, ‘i gamberoni
rossi sono un sogno’ (red prawns are a dream) is particularly indicative of the
overwhelming mixture of sensorial and intellectual stimuli that a visit to the city
provides. The divide between the city space as a space of change and mobility, and
the contrasting inaction – physical and above all spiritual – of the people living in
the surrounding rural areas, is central to the narrative structure of the song.
The idea of otherness in the song is also found in another of its structural
details retained in both Conte’s and Lauzi’s versions, the habanera rhythm (in 2/4,
dotted quaver-semiquaver-quaver-quaver).20 This rhythm evokes the archetype (as
found in Bizet’s Carmen) sedimented in the popular imagination as a sign of an
otherness that was ‘nearby’ (although no less problematic in the way it expressed
a cultural distance between the forces of reason, legality and rationality and those
of passion and instinct).21 The same logic appears to be at work in some aspects of
the instrumentation, such as the inclusion of a mandolin during the verse, a timbral
allusion to Neapolitan song, yet another ‘elsewhere’ with which the audience was
well acquainted and which had similar connotations in terms of passion. The
‘Spanish’ melodic and performative traits of rasgueado strumming found in the
guitar part on the right channel in the chorus is another example of this otherness,
which is familiar and distant at the same time.
19
In this case, rather than a formal label, the term ‘bridge’ indicates a function whose
principal aspects are a more emphatic vocal performance, a harmonic shift, a suspended
quality that prepares the final return of the first verse, in the ‘collective’ double-voice
variant that is, however, incomplete as regards the verbal text.
20
This can be noted in particular in the groove that emerges from the rhythmic combination
of the bass and the guitar in Lauzi’s version, and in the piano part in Conte’s recording.
21
Such rhythms were part of the stylistic vocabulary of Genoese song as found in
Genova canta, released after the second edition of the annual ‘Festival della canzone genovese’
(Anon., 1957; Anon., 1958), whose four songs are three tangos and a ‘beguine song’.
Conte’s choice to use a sitar alongside the voice and the piano in the third
verse of his version (1′05″) is, if anything, even more radical. As the song unfolds,
this instrument is given an increasingly prominent role in the mix, contributing
significantly to the listener’s gradual disorientation, its sound lingering on as the
only instrument heard in the last few seconds of the song. The representation
of the city’s otherness with respect to the rural areas from which the song’s
main character comes could not be clearer: the sound of the piano is gradually
overwhelmed by the Indian instrument – as threatening as it is unknowable and
opposed to Western musical organization based on the rational order of equal
temperament and proportional duration – just as the main character of the song is
affected by an Oriental space. The sitar, with its sliding notes and even more so
with its complex timbre, in which plucked strings and effects of resonance blend
together in a way that is unusual for Western listening habits, is thus offered as a
further sonorous sign of the transformation for which the city acts as a catalyst.22
Conclusion: Local Characterization and Music Analysis
The idea of the city that emerges from our analysis of ‘Genova per noi’ allows
us to specify at least one important feature to frame a critically informed inquiry
into the cultural dynamics at play in the construction of the ‘strategic formation’
named ‘school of Genoa’. Faced with the objective difficulties involved in finding
historical validation for such a label, in this chapter we decided to explore how it
acts as a matrix around an idea primarily involving the urban space of Genoa as
first depicted in the production of the ‘local’ cantautori, and then in a song that
retrospectively attempts to capture and describe the ‘spirit’ of the city from the
point of view of someone who ‘has not yet been to Genoa’ and is subsequently
transformed by this experience. In the songs of Bruno Lauzi, Gino Paoli, Luigi
Tenco, Fabrizio De André and Umberto Bindi we find different approaches to the
description of the city’s space ‒ from the option of under- to over-characterization ‒
that cannot be reduced to a unifying framework, but that can only be connected
to their desire to claim their own (personal, not collective) otherness in respect
to mainstream Italian song.23 Our analysis of ‘Genova per noi’ helps to clarify an
unspoken issue at the core of the critical discourses leading to the formation of the
label ‘school of Genoa’: the characterization of the urban space as a ‘nearby’ other,
in both the lyrics of the song and its ‘Orientalist’ inflections in formal, melodic,
stylistic and even sonic terms. In this process, locations and especially urban
22
This discrepancy is articulated in a ‘tactile’ manner, rather than intellectually, above
and beyond the instrument’s later psychedelic connotations, established internationally by
The Beatles (Leante, 2000).
23
In this respect, Marco Santoro (2002) employs Bourdieu’s category of ‘distinction’ as
the basic strategy to define the figure of cantautore in the context of Italian contemporary culture.
A Place for Us? 203
environments acquire a specific ‘ethos’ that becomes the symbol for a community
gathered around a common aesthetics and a collective identity:
The urban ethos is thus not a particular representation but rather a distribution of
possibilities, always having discernable [sic] limits as well as common practices.
It is not a picture of how life is in any particular city. Instead, it distils publicly
disseminated notions of how cities are. (Krims, 2007, p. 7) 24
What is more, historically speaking ‘Genova per noi’ is significant insofar as it

canonized the identity of a city so important in the history of popular music in Italy,
right after the foundation of the Club Tenco, the first institutional attempt to foster
and promote the canzone d’autore as a specific typology of cultural production
opposed to the mass-marketed, conventional, mainstream song epitomized by the
Sanremo Festival. In such a context, Genoa became a symbol for this new phase
of Italian songwriting, with its focus on ‘quality songs’ paying special attention
to verbal texts as examples of what the Club Tenco webpage refers to as ‘artistic
dignity and poetic realism’ (Anon., 2014).25 Not at all ‘un’idea come un’altra’
(an idea, like any other), as its chorus says, the city’s unique, unmistakeable
character becomes in ‘Genova per noi’ the centre for a number of intertwined
connotations and textual and meta-textual references that shape the narrative level
of the main character, as well as a meta-narrative regarding the transformation that
the ‘school of Genoa’ effected in the realm of Italian popular song.
Methodologically speaking, our approach underlines the inseparability of text
and context in an overall interpretation of cultural objects. Geographical elements
in popular music have often been associated with discursive constructions
revolving around the idea of a ‘local scene’ (Inglis 2009), and critical discussions of
such issues have often been centred around sociological and reception categories.
The alternative which we have essayed here, in which music and its specific
features are the starting point for a critical discussion, is still to be fully developed
and tested under different circumstances and contexts. Our discussion of the
‘Genoese school’ has led us to believe that such a reversal in perspective, when
looking at local scenes, can lead to results that help interpret cultural phenomena
from a broader point of view, beyond the inevitable misunderstandings that any
approach to music that treats it as an ‘inscrutable black box’ (Covach, 2001,
p. 455) might produce. We believe this to be important, first and foremost because
it stems from the disciplinary specificity of an approach to music that highlights its
specific qualities as a form of communication, and from this unavoidable premise
moves towards a reconstruction of its social effects, as an historical witness and
an instance of change as regards its surrounding reality. In this way, the interest
presented by music as an object of historical enquiry can be transformed into
24
Connell and Gibson refer to this process as the ‘mythologization’ of places (2003,
pp. 110–12).
25
‘dignità artistica e poetico realismo’.
a way of interrogating history itself, enabling us to view music studies as a tool

of knowledge which thus participates in a truly interdisciplinary epistemological
process.
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De André, F., 1974. Canzoni. [Vinyl] Milan: Produttori associati.
——— 1984. Crêuza de mä. [Vinyl] Milan: Ricordi.
Degenhardt, F.-J., 1965. Spiel nicht mit den Schmuddelkindern. [Vinyl] Hamburg:
Polydor.
——— 1968. Zwischentöne sind bloß Krampf im Klassenkampf. Degenhardt
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Demmler, K, 1971. Lieder. [Vinyl] Berlin: Amiga.
Di Michele, G., 1978. Cliché. [Vinyl] Rome: It.
Endrigo, S., 1963. Se le cose stanno così / Viva Maddalena. [Vinyl] Rome:
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Espinàs .J.M., 1962. Espinàs canta Brassens. [Vinyl] Barcelona: EDIGSA.
Ferrat, J., 1968. Ferrat chante Aragon. [Vinyl] Paris: Barclay.
Ferré, L., 1953. Premières Chansons. [Vinyl] Paris: Le Chant du monde.
——— 1983. Ludwig, L’Imaginaire, Le Bateau ivre. [Vinyl] Paris: RCA.
——— 1986. On n’est pas sérieux quand on a dix-sept ans. [Vinyl] Paris: EPM.
——— 1991. Rimbaud: Une saison en enfer. [CD] Paris: EPM.
——— 1993. Les Années Odéon (1954–60). [CD] Paris: Sony/Columbia.
——— 1996. Léo Ferré chante les poètes. [DVD] Paris: EPM.
——— 2008. Ferré Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal – suite et fin. [CD] Monte
Carlo: La mémoire et la mer.
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Fisher, M., 2008. Miniatures One & Two. [CD] London: Cherry Red.
Godinho, S., 1971. Sobreviventes. [Vinyl] Lisbon: Philips.
——— 1978. Pano-Cru. [Vinyl] Lisbon: Orfeu.
——— 1979. Campolide. [Vinyl] Lisbon: Orfeu.
——— 1981. Canto da Boca. [Vinyl] Lisbon: Polygram.
——— 1983. Coincidências. [Vinyl] Lisbon: Polygram.
Guardiola, J., 1959 Piove (Chao, Chao Bambina). [Vinyl] Barcelona: Regal.
Ibáñez, P. and Imanol, 1998. Oroitzen. [CD] Barcelona: Flor de Tiempo.
Iglesias, J., 1969. Yo canto. [Vinyl] Madrid: Columbia.
Jannacci, E., 1981. E allora … concerto. [Vinyl] Milan: Ricordi.
Jansen, F., 1975. Portrait. [Vinyl] Dortmund: pläne.
Joint Venture, 1999. Extremliedermaching. [CD] Munich: Capriola.
Laterza, A., 1975. Alle sorelle ritrovate. [Vinyl] Altavilla Vicentina: Cramps.
Lauzi, B., 1963. Sto ciccheton de un Gioan / O scioco. [Vinyl] Milan: Galleria del disco.
——— 1975. Genova per noi. [Vinyl] Milan: Numero Uno.
——— 2004. Tra cielo e mare: la Liguria dei poeti. [CD] Milan: Pincopallo.
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——— 2000. Soupsongs Live: The Music of Robert Wyatt. [CD] Vigatto: Jazzprint.
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Wegner, B., 1979. Sind so kleine Hände. [Vinyl] Frankfurt: CBS.
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Index
Adorno, T.W. 40 Basque language (Euskara), kantari 127

Afonso, José; Cantigas do Maio 139, 140; Battisti, Lucio 40
‘Grândola, Vila Morena’ 137, 140 Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du mal 155
Anka, Paul 29 Bayton, Mavis 96, 100, 107
Anthony, Richard 30 Bazin, André 38, 39
Antonellini, Michele, Non solo canzonette: Beat Generation 14, 166
temi e progagonisti della canzone Beatles, influence of 31
d’autore italiana 75 Bécaud, Gilbert 25
Aragon, Louis 14; Le Roman inachevé 156 Beck; Morning Phase 1; Wikipedia entry 2
Armellini, G. 70 Bellassai, Sandro 84
Assayas, Olivier 45 Benet, Josep 124
Aute, Luis Eduardo 16 Benge, Alfreda (Alfie) 52, 56, 59n3, 61, 62
auteur theory see politique des auteurs Bernieri, Claudio 69
auteur–compositeur–interprète (Fr) 1, 3, Beyoncé 1; Beyoncé 15
6, 8, 10, 13, 15; emergence of 11; Bierbaum, Otto Julius, Deutsche
gender bias 81; influence of 29, 33, Chansons 27
37, 159–60, 162, 191; performance, Biermann, Wolf 109, 110, 111–12
importance of 185; self-analysis 14 Bindi, Umberto 83, 191
authenticity; discourse, Liedermacher Bizet, Georges, Carmen 27
111–12; in film 46–7; and folk Björk; Vespertine 16, 100fn3; Vulnicura 15
music 11; and gender 81; González, Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence 25
Quique 174–5; and lyrics 175; and Bonanno, Mario, Anni affollati: L’Italia e i
performance 46–8; in pop-rock 46; cantautori 1973–1983 74
in popular music 80; Serrat, Joan Borgna, Gianni 194–5, 196; Storia della
Manuel 165; singer-songwriter 8, canzone italiana 71–2
11, 12–13, 63 bossa nova, influences on 30–31
author/authorship; and collaborative Bourdieu, Pierre 165
songwriting 41–2; concept 37, 38, Brackett, David 7, 12
48; and editing practices 42; film Bragg, Billy; Life’s a Riot with Spy Vs Spy 13;
directors as 39, 42, 45, 48; gender ‘To Have and To Have Not’ 13; ‘To
bias 80; Romantic origins 81; Milman of Human Kindness’ 13
singer-songwriters as 47–8 Branco, José Mário 138; albums; Mudam-se
Ayers, Kevin 54 os Tempos, Mudam-se as Vontades
Aznavour, Charles 126, 156, 161 139; Ser Solidário 142, 143, 144,
145, 146; Godhino, comparison
Bachelard, Gaston, on poetics of space 192 143–5; ‘Ser Solidário’ show 141–2;
Baez, Joan 16, 89 singles; ‘Eu Vim de Longe, Eu Vou
Ball, Hugo 57 para Longe’ 146; ‘FMI’ 145–6; ‘Ser
Barker, Hugh & Taylor, Yuval 7 Solidário’ 143–4; ‘Travessia do
Barton, Laura 101 Deserto’ 143, 144
Brassens, Georges 1, 6, 32, 70; career Campbell, Isobel 95; albums; Ballad of the
154; chanson exponent 178; Ferré, Broken Seas 100; Hawk 102, 104;
comparison 157–8; influence Sunday at Devil Dirt 101; cello
of 25, 33–4, 110, 126, 177; on playing 104; production work 100,
Thackray 178, 179, 180; musical 101, 102–3, 106; singles; ‘Come
style 177–8; poetry, song versions on Over (Turn Me On)’ 101;
156; singles; ‘Auprès de mon ‘Salvation’ 101; ‘Seafaring Song’
arbre’ 185; ‘Ballade des dames 101; stereotyping of 99–105, 106
du temps jadis’ 156; ‘Colombine’ canción de autor (Sp) 15, 129; emergence
156; ‘Dans l’Eau de la claire 123; and mainstream music 131–5
fontaine’ 156; ‘Gastibelza’ 156; Canción del Pueblo collective 129
‘Il n’y pas d’amour heureux’ 156; Canetti, Jacques 10
‘Je rejoindrai ma belle’ 179–80; Cano, Carlos 131
‘La Marine’ 156; ‘La Mauvaise Cantacronache 28, 34, 40, 43; ‘La Zolfara’
Réputation’ 157; ‘La prière’ 156; 66–7; ‘Per i morti di Reggio
‘La Religieuse’ 185; ‘La Route Emilia’ 67
aux quatre chansons’ 156; ‘Le Cantalamessa, Berardo 66
Gorille’ 154; ‘Le Mauvais Sujet Cantautor/es (Sp/Cat); Anglo-American
repenti’ 161; ‘Le Petit Cheval’ singer-songwriter, emulation
156; ‘Le Roi’ 184; ‘Le Vin’ 156; of 167; best-selling artists 132;
‘Les Amoureux des bancs publics’ characteristics of 132–3, 164–5;
157; ‘Les Copains d’abord’ 157; definition of 123; eléctrico 170;
‘Les Passantes’ 156; ‘Paname’ new model 168–70; as poet 168–9;
157; ‘Trompettes de la renommée’ re-politicization of 171–5; social
161; ‘Une jolie fleur’ 161; stage function 165; and traditional folk
performance, minimalist 185–6, song 129–31
187; Thackray; comparison with cantautora (Sp), marginalization of 175–6
185–7; joint concert 184–7 cantautore/i (It) 10, 14, 16, 28, 30, 38, 49;
Brecht, Bertolt; influence on Dylan 23, 26; concept changes 44n26; emergence
The Threepenny Opera 23 66, 82–3; Genoese 192–3, 194,
Brel, Jacques 10, 70; influence of 34, 126, 196, 202; see also Genoese School;
159; ‘Ne me quitte pas’ 34 ideal image 44–5; ideological
Breton, André, quarrel with Ferré 155–6 issues 43–4; as intellectual 72;
Brill Building (New York), song factory 29 male bias 88; as poet 71; vocal
Buarque, Chico 139 model 83–4
Buckley, Ramón 164 Le Cantautori, Settembre 1975: Musica dal
Burg Waldeck Festivals 112, 113, 114, pianeta donna 90
115, 116, 117; Die Burg Waldeck cantautrici (It) 66n1; 1970s 89–90;
Festivals 1964–1969 (CDs) 114 emergence 85; feminist 90;
Butler, Linda 61 increase in 90–91; as modern
woman 86–7
Cabrel, Francis 188 canzone d’autore (It) 15, 37, 38, 41, 45–6,
Cahiers du cinéma 38 203; 1960s 66–8; 1970s 68–70;
Calvet, Louis-Jean 30 1980s/1990s 70–74; academic
Calvino, Italo, Nonexistent Knight 26 studies on 71–3; chanson model 70,
Camacho, Hilario; De paso 168; ‘El peso del 74; cinéma d’auteur, comparison
mundo’ 168; ‘Princesa de cera’ 168; 39–40, 42; commodification 69;
‘Volar es para pájaros’ 168 concept creation 43; as cultural
Index 231
product 74, 75, 76, 89; emergence De Angelis, Rodolfo 82

66–8; as genre 44; as male genre de Gaillande, Pierre 188
79; as poetry 68; publications De Gregori, Francesco 45, 69; Rimmel 89
on 74–5; sub-genres 69; value De Luigi, Mario 69; Musica e parole 68
hierarchy 69, 73 De Maria, Giorgio 66, 67
Canzoniere Femminista, Il 90 De Palma, Jula, ‘Tua’ 82n4
Capasso, Ernesto, Poeti con la chitarra 75 Degenhardt, Franz Josef 109, 111, 114;
Capossela, Vinicio 91 Wallfahrt zum Big Zeppelin 116;
Caproni, Giorgio 195 ‘Zwischentöne sind bloβ Krampf
Carné, Marcel 154 im Klassenkampf’ 113
Castaldo, Gino 73 Demmler, Kurt 119
Cecilia (Evangelina Sobredo Galanes); Desnos, Robert 154
Cecilia 2 166; ‘Me quedaré soltera’ Deutsch-Rock, Germany 117–18
167; ‘Un milló de sueños’ 167 Di Franco, Ani 100
chanson 27, 34, 45; English, and Thackray Di Michele, Grazia, Cliché 90
180–84, 187; influence on Díaz, Joaquín 130
Liedermacher 117; masculine bias Díaz, Manolo 10
83; tradition 82, 178, 185, 187, 188–9 discography 225–8
chansonnier 33, 34, 37 Dolar, Mladen 56
Cherhal, Jeanne 1 Dominique A 1
Chevalier, Maurice 153 Donaggio, Pino 43
cinéma d’auteur, canzone d’autore, Drake, Nick 1
comparison 39–40, 42 Dyer-Bennett, Richard 181
Coates, Norma 96 Dylan, Bob 1, 11, 28; Brecht, influence
Cobbing, Bob, ‘ABC in Sound’ 57 of 23, 26; Chronicles, Volume
Cohen, Leonard 32, 161 One 23; Genet, influence of 23;
communicative functions, Jakobson 5 Highway 61 Revisited 31; influence
Consoli, Carmen 1, 79; albums; Elettra 91; of 31–2, 168; singles; ‘A Hard
Eva contro Eva 91; Mediamente Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ 23; ‘It’s
isterica 91; singles; ‘Mio zio’ 91; alright, Ma’ 23; ‘Masters of
‘Per niente stanca’ 91 War’ 31; ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ 23;
Conte, Paolo; ‘Alle prese con una verde ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ 23;
milonga’ 32; ‘Genova per noi’ 19, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie
193, 197, 198, 202–3; melodic Carroll’ 23; ‘The Times They
cells, music example 199, 200; Are a-Changin’’ 31; ‘Who Killed
otherness in 201, 202; sitar 202; Davey Moore’ 23
structural outline 200–201
Costello, Elvis 12; ‘Shipbuilding’ 54 Eco, Umberto, preface, Le canzoni della
Cutler, Chris 48 cattiva coscienza 67–8
Els Setze Jutges collective; founder
da Silva, ‘Lula’ 1 members 126; influence of auteur-
Dadaists 57 compositeur-interprète 126
Dalla, Lucio, ‘Il cucciolo Alfredo’ 32 Elton John, Empty Sky 9
dance music, and neglect of words 16 Endrigo, Sergio 43; ‘Viva Maddalena’ 84
Davies, Helen 95, 97 éntechno laikó traghoudi 23, 27–8
De André, Fabrizio 33, 34n23, 41, 45, 72, Era Nova collective 141
88, 191, 202; albums 42; Crêuza de Espinàs, Josep Maria, Espinàs canta
mä 198; ‘La città vecchia’ 198 Brassens 126
Europe artistic production, shared folk music; and authenticity 11; and the
attributes 4; definition of 4; cantautor/es 129–31
extra–European influences 24, folk revival; UK 11; US 28, 29
26–7, 28–9, 31, 32; intra–European Forgacs, David 74
influences 17, 24, 26–8, 33–5 France, Americanisation of 178
Eurovision Song Contest 133, 134 Friedman, Perry 119
Evans, Colin 184 Frith, Simon 6, 7, 12, 15, 185; on musical
Ez Dok Amairu group 127 value 76
Fabbri, Franco 5, 6; ‘A Theory of Musical Gaber, Giorgio; ‘Benzina e cerini’ 86; ‘La
Genres’ 70–71; Around the clock ballata del Cerutti’ 29
196; genre theory 70–71, 81 Gainsbourg, Serge; ‘Le Poinçonneur des
Fabbri, Franco & Plastino, Goffredo, Made Lilas’ 13; ‘Nazi Rock’ 13
in Italy: Studies in Popular Music 65 Galician language, songs 128, 130
Fado tradition, Portugal 139, 142 gender; and authenticity 81; bias; auteur-
Farina, Richard 10 compositeur-interprète 81; and
Feigenbaum, Anna 100 genre conventions 81; see also
Ferlioso, Chicho Sánchez, ‘Gallo rojo, singer-songwriter(s), female
gallo negro’ 13 Genet, Jean, influence on Dylan 23
Ferrari, Sebastiano, La prima generazione Genoa; cantautori 192–3, 194, 196, 202;
dei cantautori ‘scuola Genovese’ 75 otherness of 192–3; and poetics of
Ferré, Léo 34, 70; albums; Il n’y a plus space 192, 196–8
rien 155; Les Chansons d’Aragon Genoese School; invention of 191–2,
chantées par Léo Ferré 156; Une 194–6; record label 191
Saison en enfer 159; Brassens, genre; canzone d’autore as 44; categories of
comparison 157–8; career 154–6; rule 5–6; as discursive construct 5;
influence of 126, 159–60, 162; musical, and paramusical norms
oratorio, ‘La Chanson du Mal- 43; singer-songwriter as 5–9, 15;
Aimé’ 155; poetry, song versions theory, Fabbri 70–71, 81
155–6, 156–7, 158; quarrel with Germany; Deutsch-Rock 117–18;
Breton 155–6; singer-songwriter Festival des politischen Liedes
154, 159; singles; ‘Chansonne 120; Hootenanny scene 119–20;
d’automne’ 158; ‘Graine d’ananar’ Liedermacher 109, 112, 118–19;
157; ‘Harmonie du soir’ 155; punk movement 117
‘L’Adieu’ 158; ‘L’Affiche rouge’ Giacometti, Michel 139
158; ‘Le Conditionnel de variétés’ Gil, Gilberto 1
157; ‘Le Flamenco de Paris’ 161; Gilberto, Joao 30
‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ 155, 158; Gill, Armando 82
‘Les Copains de la Neuille’ 157; Gilmore, Thea 95; sexual stereotyping of
‘Les Poètes’ 156; ‘L’Inconnue 96–8
de Londres’ 161; ‘L’invitation Gilmour, David 54
au voyage’ 155; ‘Marie’ 158; Godinho, Sérgio 138; albums; Campolide
‘Monsieur Tout-Blanc’ 161; 144; Coincidências 147; Pano-
‘Pauvre Rutebeuf’ 155; ‘Petite’ Cru 147; Sobreviventes 139,
161; ‘Spleen’ 158 141; Branco, comparison 143–5;
film directors, as authors 39, 42, 45, 48 musical development 142–3;
Finlayson, Angus 107 singles; ‘Mudemos de Assunto’
Fisher, Morgan, Miniatures 57–8 144, 144–5; ‘Os Conquistadores’
Index 233
144; ‘Primeiro Dia’, analysis Thackray 178, 179, 180; Brecht,

147–9; ‘Sete Anos de Canções’ 141 on Dylan 23, 26; Brel’s 34, 126,
González, Quique 172, 173–4; attitude to 159; categories of 25; chanson,
music industry 174–5; authenticity on Liedermacher 117; concept 24,
174–5; as cancionista 174; 35; Dylan’s 31–2, 168; of French
Delantera mítica 174; singles; ‘73’ singer-songwriters 159–60, 162;
174; ‘¿Dónde está el dinero?’ 174; Genet, on Dylan 23; intra-European
‘Tenía que decírtelo’ 174 33–5; of iTunes Store 24; literary
Greco, Juliette; ‘La Fourmi’ 154; ‘Si tu 25; poietic aspects 25; on Serrat
t’imagines’ 154 135; transnational 26–8; Trenet’s 34
Greenwich Village 11 Italy, popular music industry 82
Griffiths, Dai 16 iTunes Store, influence of 24
Grijalba, Silvia 166
Grönemeyer, Herbert 5, 117 Jachia, Paolo 65, 196; La canzone d’autore
Guardiola, Josep 134 italiana 1958–1997 7
Guccini, Francesco 45 Jakobson, Roman, communicative
Guilbert, Yvette 27 functions 5
Guthrie, Arlo 10 Jameson, Frederic 150
Guthrie, Woody 6, 161 Jansen, Fasia 114; Portrait 115
Jara, Víctor 1, 32, 59, 112n5
habanera 201; as model 26–7; and Jaszi, Peter 81
Spanishness 130–31 Jobim, Tom 30
Hadjidakis, Manos 27, 28 Jona, Emilio 66, 67
Hancke, Johanna von 115
Hardy, Françoise 30 Kabarett 27, 34
Harris, John 96 kantari, Basque language 127
Harvey, P.J., Let England Shake 14 Kelly, Andrew 180
Hawkins, Peter 83, 188 Kingston Trio, ‘Tom Dooley’ 29
Hawks, Howard 39, 45 Kirchenwitz, Lutz 109
Haworth, Rachel 185, 186 Kruse, Holly 106
Hewitt, Nicholas 12
Hitchcock, Alfred 39, 45 Labéguerie, Michel 127
Holt, Fabian 5 Laboa, Mikel 127
Labordeta, José Antonio 130
Ian, Janis 10 Lacan, Jacques 56
IASPM (International Association for the Lanegan, Mark 99, 101, 102, 103–4, 105
Study of Popular Music) 70 Lang, Fritz 45
Ibáñez, Paco 129, 132, 133 Laterza, Antonietta 90; Alle sorelle
Ice Cube 16 ritrovate 89–90
Iglesias, Julio 133; Yo canto 132 Lauzi, Bruno 191; EPs; O scioco 197;
Ihre Kinder 117 Sto ciccheton de un Gioan 197;
impegno 69 ‘Genova per noi’ 193, 197, 198
Indignados movement, Los 173 Leach, Elisabeth Eva 165
influence(s); American, on Paoli 29–30; Lebrun, Barbara 14
auteur-compositeur-interprète Lee, Laurie, Cider with Rosie 185
29, 33, 37, 191; Beatles’ 31; Lertxundi, Benito 127
Brassens’s 25, 33–4, 110, 126, Les Frères Jacques, ‘Inventaire’ 154
177; on Liedermacher 110, 111; on Liberovici, Sergio 66, 67
Liedermacher (Ger) 3, 5, 18, 33, 34; and Milesi, Piero 42

American folk–rock tradition 117; Mina 82, 87; ‘La canzone di Marinella’ 88;
authenticity discourse 111–12; ‘Whisky’ 85
Brassens’s influence on 110, Mitchell, Joni 10, 16, 32, 89
111; chanson influence 117; and models; artistic 23–4; habanera 26–7;
the Cold War 110–11; cultural opera 26
impact 116–17; definition of modernity, and the singer-songwriter 12
109; discourse on 109–14, 121; Modugno, Domenico 66; ‘Nel blu di pinto
East Germany 109, 112, 118–19; di blu’ (‘Volare’) 43
emergence 110; female 115, 121; Mogol (Giulio Rapetti) 40–41
origins of term 110; and political Montalbán, Manuel Vázquez 128, 165–6
song 117; publications on 111; Montand, Yves; ‘Barbara’ 154; ‘Les
revival, 1990s 118 Feuilles mortes’ 154
Liedermacherin/nen (Ger) 109, 115, 121 Monti, Maria 85, 85–6; ‘Benzina e cerini’
Liedermaching 116, 118, 121 86, 87; ‘Zitella Cha Cha Cha’ 86
Ligabue 45 Moore, Allan 5, 11, 46
Lindenberg, Udo 117 Moris (Moris Biravent); ‘Balada de
Liperi, Felice 74; Storia della canzone Madrid’ 169; Fiebre de vivir 169
italiana 73 Morissette, Alanis, Jagged Little Pill 98
Llach, Lluís 10, 128, 134; ‘A cara o creu’ Morricone, Ennio 42, 87
133; ‘L’estaca’ 167 Mossmann, Walter 115
Lomax, Allan 11 music; globalization of 178; and
Looseley, David 178–9 historical inquiry 203–4; popular,
Lumini, Daisy; Daisy come folklore 85; Orientalism in 199
‘Tante piccole cose’ 87; ‘Whisky’ 85 music festivals, Spain 133–4; see also
lyrics and authenticity 175; importance Burg Waldeck Festivals; San Remo
of 2–3, 7; literary status, claim 4; Festival (1967)
nonsense 55–7; personal 19, 165; music journalism 18, 24; female 107; male
poetic 77, 128, 135, 153, 155, 158; domination of 98, 101; male target
political 13, 60, 141, 172 audience 96, 100
Musica & parole, journal 75, 193
McCaffery, Steve 57 musica d’autore 44; examples 44n26, 28
McClary, Susan 81 Musica e dischi, journal 68
MacColl, Ewan 34 musical value 77; Frith on 76
McGuire, Barry, ‘Eve of Destruction’ 31
McKuen, Rod 10 Nannini, Gianna 45, 90
McLeod, Kembrew 101 narrativity theory, White 138
Manifesto Canción del Sur 131 Neruda, Pablo 14
Manrique, Diego 131 Newman, Randy, ‘Short People’ 13
Mantler, Michael 54 NME, magazine 107
Mason, Nick 54 Nova Cancíon Galega movement 128
Matching Mole 52, 55; Little Red Record 58 Nova Cançó movement 125–6, 127, 133,
Mayhew, Emma 100 134; see also Els Setze Jutges
Meccia, Gianni 42 Nueu Cancin Astur 128
Melody Maker 10 Nueva Canción Canaria 130
Méndez, Sabino 166
Mey, Reinhard 114, 115–16, 121 O’Brien, Lucy 80
Middleton, Richard 83 Ochs, Phil 10, 11
Index 235
O’Dair, Marcus 51n1, 56, 62–3 Reverberi brothers 191, 192

O’Leary, Alan 69 Riba, Pau 167; Dioptría I/II 166; ‘L’home
estàtic’ 166
Pagani, Mauro 42 Ricoeur, Paul 150
Paoli, Gino 42, 43, 84, 191, 193; American rock music, and the singer-songwriter 10
influence 29–30; ‘Ciao, salutime un Rolling Stone 10
po’ Zena’ 197 Rosana; Lunas rotas 172; singles; ‘El
Papanikolaou, Dimitris, Singing Poets 159 talismán’ 172; ‘Sin miedo’ 172
Paphides, Peter 187 Rossi, Vasco 45
Parra, Violeta 1
performance; auteur-compositeur- Sabina, Joaquín 169–70; albums;
interprète 185; and authenticity Inventario 169; Malas compañías
46–8; style; Brassens 185–6, 187; 169; Ruleta rusa 169; singles;
Thackray 186, 187 ‘40 Orsett Terrace’ 169; ‘1968’
Piaf, Edith, ‘Les Amants de Paris’ 154 169; ‘Calle melancolía’ 169;
Pieretti, Gian 31 ‘Conductores suicidas’ 169; ‘Ganas
poet, cantautore/i as 71 de’ 169; ‘Pacto entre caballeros’
poetics of space; Bachelard on 192; 170; ‘Que demasiao’ 169; ‘Y sin
Genoa 192 embargo’ 170
poetry; canzone d’autore as 68; and popular Sablon, Jean 153
song, France 153; and the singer- Said, Edward 192
songwriter 14; songs based on 27; Sanremo Festival (1967) 31, 43, 76
sound 57; and Surrealism 154 Santoro, Marco, L’effetto Tenco:
poets, rappers as 16 genealogia della canzone d’autore
politique des auteurs 38, 41; personal 75–6
factor 39, 42, 45 Sartre, Jean-Paul 14
Popular Music, journal 70 Sauvage, Catherine, ‘Paris Canaille’ 154
Portugal; Carnation Revolution (1974) Schwarz, David, Listening Subjects 57
137, 150; Fado tradition 139, 142; Sedaka, Neil 29
rock bands, 1980s 141; singer- Serrahima, Lluís 125–6
songwriters, and popular music Serrano, Ismael; Atrapados en azul 172;
139–42 singles; ‘Caperucita roja’ 172;
postmodernity 13 ‘La extraña pareja’ 172; ‘México
Potter, John 53 insurgente’ 172; ‘Papá cuéntame
Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection 3 otra vez’ 172; ‘Vértigo’ 172
Prévert, Jacques, Paroles 154 Serrat, Joan Manuel 126; albums;
punk movement, Germany 117 Homenaje a Antonio Machado 135;
Mediterráneo 135; authenticity
Queneau, Raymond, Le Chiendent 154 165; influences on 135; polemical
biligualism 134–5; singles; ‘Adeu,
Radioscope programme 133 adeu, amor men i sort’ 165; ‘El meu
Raimon 32, 124, 127, 128, 130; ‘Al vent’ carrer’ 165; ‘Ella em deixa’ 165;
165; ‘Se’n va anar’ 133 ‘La tieta’ 165; ‘Mediterráneo’ 166
rappers; as poets 16; as singer-songwriters 16 Shepherd, John 100, 101
Rassegna della Canzone d’Autore 89 Singer Songwriter Project Album 10
Regev, Motti 6, 12 singer-songwriter(s); authenticity 8,
Reich, Steve 57 11, 12–13, 63; as author 47–8;
Renoir, Jean 45 autonomy 15–16; cross-cultural
approaches 4–5; definitions of 2, Surrealism, and poetry 154

6–7, 9; designation; coining of 10; Süverkrüp, Dieter 109, 111, 112–13;
international 11; use of 9; female; Ça ira: Lieder der französichen
anglophone 91; negative perception Revolution 112
of 15–16, 80; stereotyping of Swift, Taylor, 1989 15
95–9, 106; see also cantautora;
cantautrici; Liedermacherin/nen); Tagg, Philip 38
folk music roots 10; French model, Tenco, Luigi 31, 47, 75, 191, 193; ‘Ciao
influence of 159–60, 162; as genre amore, ciao’ 43, 197; ‘In qualche
5–9, 15; Latin American 32–3; parte del mondo’ 194, 197; ‘Io
and lyrics 7–8; and modernity 12; vorrei essere là’ 197; ‘La mia valle’
origins 9–13, 161; and poetry 14; 197; suicide 43, 76
political role 161; and Portuguese Tenco Prize 33
popular music 139–42; protest Thackray, Jake; albums; Bantam Cock 180,
songs 31–2, 123, 128, 129, 138, 181; Jake Thackray and Songs 181,
141, 168, 173; publications on 2–3; 186; Last Will and Testament of
rappers as 16; and rock music 10; Jake Thackray 180; On Again! On
self-referentiality 13; socio-cultural Again! 181; Brassens; comparison
status 14; songs, subject matter 13; with 185–7; influence of 178,
and technology 12; and troubadour 179, 180; joint concert 184–7;
legacy 6, 28, 153, 188; see also subject matter, adaptations 183;
auteur-compositeur-interprète; translations from 180–83; career
canción de autor; cantautore/i; 179; and English chanson 180–84,
canzone d’autore; Liedermacher 187; influence of 188; performance
Sir Douglas Quintet 27 style 186, 187; politics 185; Roman
Sisa, Jaume; ‘Carrer’ 166; Orgía 166 Catholicism, influence on work
Smith, Patti 1 183; singles; ‘Bantam Cock’ 184;
Soft Machine group 51, 52, 53, 55 ‘Brother Gorilla’ 181; ‘Caroline
sounds; sonorous envelope 57; Wyatt’s Diggeby-Pratt’ 183; ‘Country Bus’
projects 55–8 180, 184; ‘Dog’ 183; ‘Family Tree’
Spadaro, Odoardo 82 184, 185; ‘Grandad’ 184; ‘Isabella’
Spain; Civil War (1936–39) 125; cultural 180, 181; ‘It Was Only a Gypsy’
transition 163, 164, 166, 167–8, 175; 183; ‘Jolly Captain’ 185; ‘Jumble
economic prosperity 125; Franco Sale’ 180–81, 182; ‘La-Di-Dah’
regime; oppression under 124; 185; ‘Old Mollie Metcalfe’ 183,
regional differences, assimilation 184, 185; ‘On Again! On Again!’
130; minority languages, status 182; ‘One of Us’ 183; ‘Over to
124–5; music festivals 133; protest Isobel’ 181–2; ‘Policeman’s Jig’
songs 129; song, and linguistic 183; ‘Scallywag’ 180, 183; ‘Sister
nationalism 127–9 Josephine’ 183, 185; ‘The Ballad
Spanishness, and the habanera 130–31 of Billy Kershaw’ 183; ‘The
Stewart, Susan 56–7, 60 Blacksmith and the Toffee-Maker’
Stokes, Martin 178 185; ‘The Brigadier’ 181, 183;
Straniero, Michele, Le canzoni della ‘The Bull’ 181; ‘The Castleford
cattiva coscienza 66, 67 Ladies Magic Circle’ 183; ‘The
Suleiman, Elia; films; Chronicle of Last Will and Testament of Jake
a Disappearance 61; Divine Thackray’ 182, 183; ‘The Little
Intervention 61 Black Foal’ 181, 184; ‘The Poor
Index 237
Sod/Rain on the Mountainside’ Wall, Tim 6

184; ‘The Remembrance’ 183; Ward, David 69
‘The Shepherdess’ 182; ‘The Wegner, Bettina 120–1; Sind so kleine
Statues’ 185; ‘To Do With You’ Hände 119
183; ‘Ulysses’ 183 Welles, Orson 45
Theodorakis, Mikis 27, 28 West, Kanye 1, 16
Ton Steine Scherben 117 White, Hayden, narrativity theory 138
Townson, Nigel 163 Whitehead, Annie 53
Trenet, Charles 25; influence of 34; literary Williams, Raymond 14
contacts 153–4; singles; ‘Le Wilson, Brian 12
Serpent Python’ 157; ‘Que reste-t-il Winehouse, Amy 1
de nos amours?’ 34 Wise, Tim 5
troubadours, legacy, and singer-songwriters Wyatt, Robert; albums; Comicopera 53, 59,
6, 28, 153, 188 62; Dondestan 60, 61, 62; Nothing
Truffaut, François 46 Can Stop Us 59; Old Rottenhat 59,
Turner, Alex (Arctic Monkeys) 188 60, 61, 62; Rock Bottom 53, 55,
56; Ruth Is Stranger than Richard
Ultramarine duo 54 51n1, 58; Shleep 53; The End of
Unterberger, Richie, Unknown Legends of an Ear 55, 55–6; authenticity 63;
Rock ‘n’ Roll 54 EP, Work in Progress 59; musical
The Unthanks 53 projects 53–4; outsider status
Urquijo, Enrique 170, 171 54; politics 58–61, 62; as singer-
songwriter 52–4, 62; singles; ‘A
Valéry, Paul 187 Concise British Alphabet’ 55;
Van Morrison, Astral Weeks 56 ‘Alifib’ 56; ‘Arauco tiene una pena’
Vanoni, Ornella, ‘Senza fine’ 87 59; ‘Be Serious’ 53; ‘Caimanera’
Vargas, Eva 115 59; ‘Cancion de Julieta’ 59; ‘Dada
Vecchioni, Roberto 45 Was Here’ 55; ‘Del Mondo’ 59;
Vega, Antonio 170; ‘Se dejaba llevar’ 171 ‘Dondestan’ 60–61; ‘Free Will
Vegas, Nacho 172; albums; Cajas de and Testament’ 53; ‘Gharbzadegi’
música dificiles de parar 173; 52, 60; ‘Gloria Gloom’ 58;
Resituación 173 ‘Hasta Siempre Comandante’
‘Cómo hacer crac’ 173 59; ‘O Caroline’ 53; ‘P.L.A.’ 59;
Veloso, Caetano 139 ‘Shipbuilding’ 54; ‘Song for Che’
Vian, Boris 34; ‘Fais-moi mal, Johnny’ 161 58; ‘Strangers in the Night’ 58; ‘Te
vocal style, cultural variations 15–16 recuerdo Amanda’ 59; ‘Where Are
Voces Ceibes group 128, 130 They Now’ 61; ‘Yolanda’ 59; sonic
Vsotsky, Vladimir 34 projects 55–8
Wyrwich, Markus Henrik, on Orientalism
Wader, Hannes 116 in popular music 199
Wainwright, Martha, Drowned in Sound 96
Walker, Jerry Jeff 10 yé-yé music 30

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THE SINGER-SONGWRItER IN EUROPE

Isabelle Marc is Lecturer at the Department of French in Universidad Complutense,

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows

ISBN: 9781472452108 (hbk)

Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita

Typeset in Times New Roman

List of Figures and Tables  vii

Introduction More Than Words: Theorizing the Singer-Songwriter  1

1 ‘The Songs I’d Write Would Be Like That’: Transnational

2 Politique des Chant-Auteurs: French Auteur Theory and Italian

3 ‘Words Take the Place of Meaning’: Sound, Sense and Politics

4 Thinking the Canzone d’Autore  65

5 Rediscovered Sisters: Women (and) Singer-Songwriters in Italy  79

6 ‘I Write the Songs. He’s the Eye Candy’: The Female

7 In Germany After The War: Broadening the Discourse on the

8 Judges, Guitars, Freedom and the Mainstream: Problematizing

9 Starting Over: Singer-Songwriters and the Rhythm of Historical

PaRT III PlacE

10 The Re-Invention of the French Singer-Songwriter in the

11 Transitions of the Cantautor: Aesthetics, Politics and Authenticity

13 A Place for Us? Building the Sense of Place in the ʻGenoese

I.1 Screenshot of archival record of Beck’s Wikipedia entry at

13.1 Structural outline of ‘Genova per noi’ (Lauzi, 1975) 200

Alessandro Bratus gained his PhD in Musicology in 2009 at the Università

Dietmar Elflein is an ethnomusicologist and lecturer on popular music at the

Richard Elliott is Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Sussex. He is a

voice in popular music, particularly in relation to singers and songwriters. He also

Mark Goodall is Senior Lecturer at the University of Bradford. He has published

Stuart Green is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at University of Leeds, where he

Peter Hawkins is Senior Research Fellow in French at the University of Bristol.

Cultures of the Francophone Indian Ocean. He is also a writer, performer and

Rachel Haworth is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull. Her research

Isabelle Marc is Lecturer in the Department of French in Universidad Complutense,

Sílvia Martínez is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the Universitat

Jacopo Tomatis is a doctoral student at the Università di Torino. His research

Luís Trindade is Senior Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at Birkbeck, University

Stan Hawkins, Professor of Popular Musicology, University of Oslo and

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beck&oldid=646298830 (accessed on

Figure I.1 Screenshot of archival record of Beck’s Wikipedia entry at

Exploring the Singer-Songwriter in Europe

The Singer-Songwriter as Genre

A genre is a discursive construct, ‘the result of a loose agreement’ (Frith, 1996,

1. It is demonstrated that specific works belonging to that form contain in some

The cultural prestige of the singer-songwriter as a generic label is also manifest

The Origins of the Singer-Songwriter

Notions of complexity, meaningfulness, creative autonomy and ‘inner truth’

Nuancing the Singer-Songwriter

While the predilection for self-referentiality in popular music – the dominance of

be a stronger predilection for autobiography and emotional topics in the figure of

What we perceive as a negative opinion of female singer-songwriters by the

The Chapters in this Book

commercial goals and banality. Jacopo Tomatis’s chapter, ‘Rediscovered Sisters’,

consider cultural exchange across borders. In ‘Transitions of the Cantautor’,

Influence: Theoretical and Practical Approaches

‘Influence’ is a widely used critical concept in music journalism, also adopted by

Phenomena such as intertextuality and disciplines like translation studies, then,

Transnational Influences: Early Examples, from Art to Popular, from

Influences from Outside Europe: A Summary

US Influences Before Dylan

of the best-known bossa nova singer-songwriters to escape to various European

List of Figures and Tables vii

Introduction More Than Words: Theorizing the Singer-Songwriter 1

4 Thinking the Canzone d’Autore 65

5 Rediscovered Sisters: Women (and) Singer-Songwriters in Italy 79

13.1 Structural outline of ‘Genova per noi’ (Lauzi, 1975) 200