The songwriter-performer divide

The songwriter-performer divide is the separation, in popular music, between the people who write songs and the people who perform them, and the debate over which of the two is the author of a record. Alec Wilder (1972) treats the composer as the author and a gifted singer’s persuasion as a distraction from the song. Jason Toynbee (2000) traces the rock musician’s claim to authorship to the album, which presented a record as the work of a band or singer-songwriter who wrote their own songs. Keir Keightley (2001) writes that rock’s histories passed over the successful women performers of the years before the Beatles. Jacqueline Warwick (2007) makes the singers the central musicians of the girl group records. Simon Frith (1996) writes that a listener hears in a sung song both the singer’s voice and the author’s. Keith Negus (2011) argues, against Frith and Lee Marshall, that knowing the real author shapes how listeners hear a performance. Toynbee proposes that authorship is social, the work of a creator, alone or in a group, choosing within the conventions of a musical field. Negus writes that the revenue from a song’s rights goes to its writer and not to its interpreter.

The composer as author

Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song (1972) places authorship with the composer. Its premise, in James T. Maher’s introduction, is that the “unique qualities” of American popular song derive “continuously from the innovations of a few outstanding song composers,” and the book is organized composer by composer.¹ Wilder judged the songs from the printed music. Maher writes that this sets aside “the marvelous persuasion of gifted singers,” along with arrangers and recordings; any of these can make a song “sound better than it really is.”¹ Wilder also credited performers who write: he believed that one reason Johnny Mercer’s lyrics have “an added zest, a crackle and shine to them” is that Mercer “probably sings them as he writes them.”¹

Ken Emerson’s Always Magic in the Air (2005) is a history of seven songwriting teams of the Brill Building era. Aldon Music, at 1650 Broadway, was home to Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.² Emerson records how Aldon’s writers followed one another’s hits. After Mann and Larry Kolber’s “I Love How You Love Me”, King and Goffin wrote a single for the Paris Sisters, “He Knows I Love Him Too Much”, in which “not only the melody but even the song’s title echoed its predecessor.”² King, as Emerson quotes her, said that “We all wrote interchangeably,” and that the environment “didn’t exactly foster inventiveness.”²

The rock musician as author

Jason Toynbee’s Making Popular Music (2000) traces the rock musician’s claim to authorship to the album, which, with its sleeve notes and credits, presented a record as the work of its artists.³ The rock band, or singer-songwriter, became “a self-contained author-performer unit with a considerable degree of autonomy,” conferred “by the emerging cult of rock authorship,” and in Toynbee’s account the Beatles are the leading case.³ Rock authorship, he writes, “significantly increased musician control over the means of production.”³

Keir Keightley, in “Reconsidering Rock” (2001), writes that rock culture, in understanding its own history, “selected certain performers and ignored others.” It dismissed the music of 1959 to 1963, in his words, as “a formulaic, shallow, and insignificant interregnum between Elvis and the Beatles,” though women performers had great success in those years. He names the Brill Building songwriters King and Weil among the women who became “important industry insiders.”⁴ With the British Invasion, he writes, “female and African-American performers experienced massive career setbacks,” as girl groups and rhythm and blues singers lost chart places to white male British bands such as the Rolling Stones.⁴ “There is no conspiracy here,” Keightley writes, “but it is significant that rock culture celebrates two highly male-dominated periods (fifties rock’n’roll, British Invasion) as its foundational moments.”⁴

The singer as author

Jacqueline Warwick’s Girl Groups, Girl Culture (2007) treats the singers as “the central musicians” of the girl group records, against scholarship that ranks “instrumentalists and composers as the most important players in music-making.”⁵ She describes a hierarchy, settled during the 1960s, that places “producers and songwriters at the head of the musical enterprise,” with singers at the bottom.⁵ She asks why the girl groups’ not writing their own songs was held against them but not against Elvis Presley, “who likewise wrote none of his songs but is nonetheless generally considered the author of his music.”⁵

The author heard in the voice

Simon Frith’s Performing Rites (1996) asks, “What is the relationship between the ‘voice’ we hear in a song and the author or composer of that song?”⁶ Singers, he writes, perform “a star personality (their image) and a song personality, the role that each lyric requires,” and the listener also hears “the voice of the lyricist, the author, the person putting the words in the ‘I’s’ mouth.”⁶ Among musicians, Frith writes, the argument over what counts as creativity brings in “pop’s own version of the composer versus the performer,” particularly when the songwriter is, “as is often the case, the singer, the non-musician.”⁶

Keith Negus, in “Authorship and the Popular Song” (2011), answers the position “that any truth and meaning resides in the performance persona or star image.”⁷ Negus finds it in Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star (2007), Lee Marshall’s study of Dylan, and calls Frith’s version “a similar, but more nuanced position.”⁷ Both, Negus writes, ignore “the way that knowledge of the real author informs interpretations of the personae.”⁷ Negus proposes separating the facets of a songwriter’s identity, among them the real author, the implied author, the character, the narrator and the star persona, so as to question “the presumed connections between author and song.”⁷

Authorship as social

Toynbee proposes a social account of authorship. His creator, “individual or collective,” works within limits set by habitus, the dispositions a person acquires, and by the conventions of a musical field; Toynbee’s name for the creator’s function is “social authorship.”³ Negus traces the idea to the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Howard Becker.⁷ Rock authorship, Toynbee argues, “has constituted a fetish,” by which he means that creativity “has been falsely venerated as something extraordinary.”³ The Beatles, his leading case of rock authorship, worked in “a flexible division of labour” with their producer, George Martin, and their engineers.³ Toynbee also takes the case of the producer Phil Spector. Citing Barbara Bradby’s 1990 analysis of girl group songs, Toynbee writes of “the absurdity of lauding Spector as auteur and techno-visionary in a situation where production of ‘his’ work was actually social and many-faceted.”³

Who is paid as the author

Negus writes that the composing songwriter “holds a privileged place in the economic and cultural valuing of creativity,” and that “rights revenue is allocated to the song ‘writer’ and not the interpreter.”⁷ Toynbee gives as one reason the song survives as a unit “the persistence of archaic copyright laws which enshrine the principle of the composed work,” even when its melody and lyrics were written down only after it was recorded.³ In the United States, federal copyright covered musical compositions from 1831 but sound recordings only from 1972, and the Music Modernization Act of 2018 brought recordings made before then partially into the federal system.⁸ Reviewing Emerson’s book, Geoffrey O’Brien quoted Mike Stoller, who produced the Drifters with Jerry Leiber, saying that the group “got no royalties.”⁹

Further reading

• Barbara Bradby, “She Told Me What to Say: The Beatles and Girl-Group Discourse,” Popular Music and Society 28, no. 3 (2005): 359–90 — a later essay by Bradby, on the Beatles and the language of the girl group songs

See also

• Pop as craft — the debate over whether made-to-order pop is art
• The pop factory — the debate over the industrial production of pop
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music