The composer and the performing artist have long been at odds with each other for recognition in American pop culture. Some composers do perform, and some performers do compose. But when the two factions are separate people, they are rarely identified as equal shareholders of a song by the general public that listens to their music.
Over the last two centuries, singers and instrumentalists have enjoyed a relatively steady amount of celebrity and influence in American pop culture. The composers that created their songs, however, have oscillated between being virtually unknown to the average listener and becoming household names in their own right.
To better understand the reason for this change, you have to consider how the role of the composer has evolved alongside ever-evolving trends in American popular music. A few main questions arise: which decades or musical eras seem to have brought about a shift in the general cultural relevance of the composer? What were the contributing factors in the music industry during those periods that precipitated the shift? In each of those eras, who “owns” a song— the composer who wrote it, or the artist who performed it?
After considering this criteria, two musically-important periods of time come to mind in particular: the rise of the legendary Great American Songbook writers at the beginning of the 1900’s, and the gradual disappearance of famous composers at the end of the century, as the culture of the pop star gained prominence.
The Rise of American Music
The tumultuous, war-torn early years of America in the 18th and 19th centuries left little room for cultural expansion. There were relatively few truly “American” songs being created, as the nation struggled to establish itself. The music that did emerge was passed down through oral tradition for the most part, among slaves on plantations, soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War, factory workers during the American Industrial Revolution, and pioneers and cowboys on the western frontier.
Without neatly written scores, these songs (and the intentions of their composers) were very rarely well-documented. Some of the most memorable songs of the era, like “Oh Shenandoah” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” are from disputed or entirely unknown origins. Even the songs that were published as sheet music through “official” methods by composers like Stephen Foster had conflicting versions of the lyrics or song form, because they were still subject to evolution as they were sung and passed on by different musicians.
But with the invention and subsequent boom of the record industry at the turn of the 20th century, however, it quickly became possible for identical renditions of music to be shared in a more concrete way . For the first time ever, music could be consumed without musicians being physically present to perform it. Songs that would have only been heard in dance halls or on parlor room pianos could now be sold, shared, and enjoyed by a much wider audience. While this newfound visibility on a national stage was naturally a great boon for performing artists, surprisingly enough the composers benefited from it as well.
It was around this time that the concept of the Great American Songbook was beginning to take shape. Though it was not a physical book, the Songbook was a publicly agreed-upon set of jazz and popular songs (often referred to as “standards”), written by an array of well-known composers. The concept of this informal-yet-definitive collection of songs was unlike anything that had been seen in Western music tradition before. Unlike the folk music of the early Americas, the Songbook songs had clearly notated melodies, chord changes, and lyrics directly from their composers to prevent cultural distortion as they were shared — but unlike the classical music canon of Europe, the written word of those composers was not final. When performing a standard, artists had much more of an allowance for deviations from the score, and it was common practice for them to create new arrangements or incorporate their personal style to make the song “their own”, provided that the general melody of the tune was still recognizable to the listener.
Male and female vocalists like Bessie Smith, Nat King Cole, Billie Holliday, and Bing Crosby began to earn a lot of national attention both in concert and with record sales as they each put a unique spin on these songs, but the composers that wrote the tunes were still fairly well-known in their own right. George Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, Cole Porter, and many others became household names as they continued to create and release new music. Songbook composers were held in high esteem in popular culture, and some performing artists even made a point to honor them directly when recording their music — Ella Fitzgerald famously released a collection of eight albums centered around different composers in the Great American Songbook pantheon, and in doing so she helped to establish the Songbook’s reputation as “American Classical” music. Though the artists and the composers of this place in time were both noteworthy, the composers were revered as the rightful owners of their work in the eyes of the American public.
Pop to the Top
Several decades later, however, there had been a considerable shift in the visibility of the composer. The jazz and blues of the early 1900’s gave way to the age of rock and roll, and rock and roll gave life to countless genres that twisted and branched forth like fractals as time passed. Popular music changed dramatically, and “pop” as a label became more of an umbrella term that encompassed many of the newly emerging styles. Additionally, as new formats like the compact disc and the mp3 made music even more portable and shareable, it became much easier for musicians to promote their work and achieve worldwide stardom in an amount of time that would have been unfathomable only a decade or two earlier. Solo-acts and bands alike were in high demand in the 80’s and 90’s, easily reaching national and even global star-status for themselves in only a few years, but the process of rising to fame was tinged with a much greater element of manufacturing.
The typical, home-grown origin story behind famous mid-century groups like the Beatles and Pink Floyd was quickly becoming a relic of the past — instead of a handful of friends or schoolmates coming together to create music, many of the new groups were being assembled by producers and other industry moguls for the sole purpose of selling records. The highly sensationalized 90’s boy bands the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, for example, were each created through a careful audition and rehearsal process. While a few of the members knew each other before the bands were created, the formation of the groups was more a marriage of convenience than a natural result of friendship. Once the band rosters were finalized, the boys were groomed into superstars — and as they gained increasing amounts of name recognition on the world stage, the songwriters behind the hits that helped to make them famous began to fade into obscurity in the public’s consciousness once again.
Like the bands and artists that performed them, the pop songs being written in the turn of the millennium also had a much more formulaic creation process than the music of years past. While there was also a disconnect present between the author and the performer during the Great American Songbook years, the performers of this new era of pop generally contributed less to the creation process of a song than their earlier counterparts. Improvised solo sections that were once common in mainstream music were no longer in vogue, and there was often little room for creative license once a song had reached the recording studio. A vocalist could essentially receive a fully finished piece complete with melody and lyrics from their writers and make minimal or no alterations of their own, yet still become the sole name associated with it when it was released onto the market.
Some stars did still write their own songs — this was more common on the fringes of popular music, with solo artists like David Bowie and bands like Nirvana, though the self-proclaimed King of Pop, Michael Jackson notably authored or co-authored the majority of his songs — but pop was overwhelmingly trending towards composers that were much less well known by the public. Behind every Celine Dion or Britney Spears that took the stage was at least one composer that might only ever appear in a line or two of the fine print on the back of a CD case. Audiences did not necessarily know who was writing the songs that they had fallen in love with anymore, and they did not necessarily care. The performing artist reigned supreme, and the composer was an afterthought.
So, What Happened?
Many different developments in the music industry over the 20th century could be attributed to the decrease in cultural importance of popular music composers, and the gradual decline in artists communally sharing the songs among themselves is likely one of them. Similar to the folk music of the 19th century, early American popular music and the songs in the Songbook were intended to be shared by singers and instrumentalists of all sorts. Some songs did become closely associated with one specific singer every now and then — Mack Gordon and Harry Warren’s song “At Last”, for example, is still considered to be Etta James’ signature song even well into the 21st century, thanks to her iconic recording of it; and Harold Arlen’s “Stormy Weather” became closely associated with its first singer, Ethel Waters. But in most cases, the songs truly “belonged” to the Songbook composers in the eyes of the American public. Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” is known as exactly that: Irving Berlin’s.
It was not until the early 1960’s and 70’s that the sense of ownership began to shift towards the performing artist, with the popularization of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and bands like the Rolling Stones that composed their own music. Because a greater number of artists were now performing their own work, it was becoming very uncommon to hear “neutral” songs that were fair game for anyone to perform the way that the Songbook songs were. Some artists did occasionally cover songs that were not “theirs”, but covers rarely, if ever appeared on the covering musician’s main album, and instead were typically released as a single or performed in a set list on a live tour. Once a song had been recorded and released, audiences began to associate it with the artist performing, exclusively, and regardless of whether the artist wrote it themselves. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, for example, was and still is unquestionably known as a Cyndi Lauper song, even though it was written by Robert Hazard. This more selfish mentality towards music reinforced the public’s growing inclination towards considering artists the proprietors of the music they performed, and it further pushed the songs’ composers out of the spotlight.
Another contributing factor towards the change in visibility of the popular composer was probably a result of the new media formats that were gaining prominence in both eras. In the early 1900’s, the development of music recording and reproduction technology made it possible for songs to be replicated and shared, which helped initiate the transition between the unknown songwriters of the 19th century to the legendary status of the writers of the jazz era. Songs that were being shared and performed colloquially could now be properly preserved, and songs that would have been published as sheet music for amateurs at their household pianos could now be enjoyed by those that were not musically talented. While the potential loss of revenue in the shift from printed music to records was certainly a concern for the music industry at first, many publishing companies eventually used the switch to their advantage by assuming responsibility as copyright holders for the songs, and business boomed. This expansion of the market to include the record as a production medium eventually helped popularize the early crooner and songbird figures of the jazz era, which in turn led to the waxing prominence of the composers that wrote new music for them.
Curiously enough, it was a similar advancement of new formats that spurred the composers’ return to relative obscurity in the later half of the century. As the 2000’s approached, the dawn of both the internet and the mp3 as the main media format meant that music was becoming shareable in the blink of an eye. The music industry has always had to adapt quickly to the ever-changing demands of the public, but the speed at which music was being consumed was unprecedented. More than ever, the songwriting process had to be compressed into a sort of assembly line to ensure a steady stream of new songs to maximize profits. The performing artist was the race car driver, and the production team was the pit crew — the work of creating new music needed to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, and the disappearance of the composer was an unfortunate side effect of this increase in output.
As the music industry looks ahead to the future and the new 10’s draw to a close, it will be interesting to reflect on which artists of the decade owned their music, and which, if any, did not. For example, Dolly Parton made history with her 1974 song “I Will Always Love You” as the first artist to reach number one on the Billboard charts twice for the same song when she recorded it herself — but the most well-known rendition of the song to this day is actually the cover that was made and released nearly 20 years later by Whitney Houston. Parton must own the song, given that she both wrote and performed it to great success, but especially since Houston’s death in 2012 and the many tributes done for her in the year following, some music analysts might argue that perhaps the song actually might belong to her, too, at least in part. As pop music marches tirelessly onwards into the future, listeners can only speculate on what the composer and performer dynamic might develop into in the coming years.
