In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Songbook Historiography:Phases and Stages in the Literature of American Popular Music
  • Eric Weisbard (bio)

The first books, or booklets, about Louis Armstrong were transcriptions of his trumpet and cornet solos. The next book, sold as an autobiography, might have been written in part by him; we're still not sure. A book closer to a biopic, by a French admirer, based on Armstrong's letters to him followed next, but Satchmo (1954) was a masterpiece: the great musician recalling his life growing up in New Orleans. Yet that book left out later sequences Armstrong had written on his time in Chicago, on his lifelong love of smoking weed. Scholars got that work, and other unpublished writing, into books that became still another memoir of sorts. There was a book about his books, plus the narration he provided a recordings compilation, as metabiography. At some point, the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes he assembled of conversations, used by his most recent biographers, will become still another self-chronicle—perhaps in podcast form.1

What should an intellectual history of our understanding of popular music focus on? As Armstrong's example suggests, he meant different things at different moments: an essence of vernacular musicianship, a celebrity winking at things not fully revealed, an icon of Black artistry, an archive unto himself. His own prose, filled with dashes and breaks just like his playing, would not suggest a conventional intellectual, but few would question his centrality to the thinking of people who from a 2021 perspective clearly were, like the essayists, novelists, and great friends Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. Those kinds of connections, between artists and thinkers, organic intellectuals and professors, are staples of intellectual history.

But what about the connections between Armstrong and his pot dealer, Mezz Mezzrow, who wrote Really the Blues (1946) with Bernard Wolfe, himself a former secretary to Leon Trotsky, future science fiction novelist and porn-magazine contributor? Between what might be called the first Top 40 crossover hits, Armstrong's slanged-up Tin Pan Alley covers in the 1930s, and [End Page 338] the "segregated sound" of race records? Between Satchmo and another 1950s memoir, Lady Sings the Blues (1956), by Billie Holiday, Armstrong's successor as a jazz vocal innovator? Between Armstrong singing the blues, of a kind, with Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, and Muddy Waters singing the blues, of a kind, with Mick Jagger? None of this is intellectual history, you might say, until Bernard Wolfe links to Frantz Fanon, those cartoonish Armstrong hits to Jazz Age modernity, those blues versions to debates about genres of culture.

A funny thing happened on the way to publication: I realized my book on these topics hinted at chapters I hadn't planned. Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music (2021) uses a decentered perspective, with 160 or so short essays on key authors, artists, and topics that move from a 1770 starting point (William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer) to a 2010 endpoint (Jay-Z, Decoded). Structuring by publication dates made neighbors of books not commonly connected. But when asked to consider carving my ridiculous table of contents into something the brain could process, subsections, I found a periodization with implications for reshaping the field beyond the book's scope. Elsewhere, I've described the diversity of meaningful popular music writers and why academia's belated embrace of the subject shouldn't purge that messier tradition.2 Here, I want to outline the stages under which that writing took shape. The historiography of American popular music turns on the vernacular—a perfect example being records with Armstrong solos. But interpretation developed via unifying tendencies, dominant paradigms, that went well beyond authorial choices and musical categories.

Setting the Stage

In the beginning was the vernacular word, twisted from standard speech in the tradition of Protestantism's native tongues, in the insurgency of democratic rabble, in the racism of a theater that used primitivism to excite raucous and affluent audiences. Songbooks turned out to be our first records, as in documents. William Billings, a New England tanner in his twenties, scarcely trained musically, said "I think it best for every Composer to be his...

pdf

Share