Singer-Songwriters

The web-book Lica Cecato Songs starts the year 2021 as a breath of hope. “The music must continue”, Lica said. So, anyone who wishes to play Lica’s compositions, with transcription and editing by Ricardo Gilly (Gilly Music Publishing) will find sheet music, lyrics with chord symbols, charts for guitar and a link to each song on the digital platforms Spotify and YouTube. Have fun!

Epitomizing the singer-songwriter idiom as it emerged during the 1960s, Leonard Cohen’s early recordings capture an intense concentration on the self filtered through patterned language and given voice through performance. This essay is an attempt to think through a number of central themes in Cohen’s songwriting that relate to his interest in modernist poetics and what Camille Paglia portrays as a widespread ‘spiritual thirst’ among the counterculture. Cohen’s songs embrace the power of spirituality, enchantment, and the metaphysical as means to counteract what was perceived as an increasingly technocratic society, speaking the language of love and mysticism in the face of Allen Ginsberg’s materialist leviathan Moloch. Borrowed from Cohen’s first novel The Favourite Game, the idea of ‘disciplined melancholy’ is a precise description of his art – a calling in which performance, poetic craft, and personal experience commingle to create a fusion of self-reflection and self-erasure, control and surrender.

Latin American folkloric-popular music had an impact on the music scenes of both Germanies, where singer-songwriters emerged and became interested in Chilean Nueva Canción, the Argentinian Movimiento del Nuevo Cancionero, and Cuban Nueva Trova in the 1970s. Particularly interesting in this context is the contact of some Latin American countries with the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on translation theory and articles on Nueva Canción in Europe, this article examines the Latin American presence at the Political Song Festival in East Berlin and analyses some publications that focus on this annual event. The article focuses on the singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne, who during the 1980s, took Nicaragua as a political example, as is shown in songs, and who also composed German lyrics to melodies by Violeta Parra, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Silvio Rodríguez, transferring the songs into a new context.

With the debuts of highly popular artists such as Matsutōya Yumi, Nakajima Miyuki, and Takeuchi Mariya, Japanese popular music of the 1970s saw a rise of young female singer-songwriters. Not only were they notably successful commercially but also respected as creative artists. This recognition and valuation of female professional creativity was extraordinary from a gender point of view. Furthermore, their position as active social agents defied the social expectations for women in Japan at that time. In this respect, they can be conceptualised as a musical embodiment of the movements pursuing female emancipation in the 1970s. While the musical significance of these female singer-songwriters has been recognised in previous studies, the gender point of view has remained largely unaddressed. By drawing from theories about female musicians and canon formation, this article re-assesses the social significance of Japanese female singer-songwriters of the 1970s.

(PAPER ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION IN POPULAR MUSIC IN 2020.)

This chapter contrasts the myth of America as established in the Lewis Allen  (Abel Meeropol) song "The House I Live In" (1936) with the parabolic or satirical songs of the early 1970s written by Randy Newman and presented on his albums "Sail Away" and "Good Old Boys."

Through a sequence of empirical studies, Paula Wolfe demonstrates how the patriarchal structure of our industry isolates women in music production. As an artist-producer-researcher, she spotlights the life experiences of women artists-producers who stay the course despite all the blocks. Giving a tribute to women singer-songwriters who have developed their production and promotion skills alone in their home studio, her book elaborates on the new opportunities that the digital industry offers to marginalized producers, apart from major labels. From the perspectives of an insider, researcher, and educator, I propose to also consider collective empowerment, feminist approaches of creation, and improvisation processes to preserve our inner power and stand against the status quo. Eventually, I call for 'the female gaze' inspiration that would benefit the industry at large because our globalized world needs more diversity to keep our listeners interested.

This paper addresses the importance of singer-songwriters to understanding China's contemporary folk music ethos. Instead of considering singer-songwriters as those who perform their own material, this paper examines them as a discursive field that involves the notion of authorship. The first part of the paper revisits the history of singer-songwriters as a thickening process of the aesthetic and sociological voices in their singular authoritarian role. Drawing on Negus's "unbundling" concept, the myth of singer-songwriters' heightened investment of authorship is deconstructed via analysis of the dynamic relationships between the song, the performance and the real author. We then demonstrate three kinds of authorship across three phases of the making of folk singer-songwriters, namely confession, parody and scenius. The analysis reveals why and how the making of singer-songwriters and the issue of authorship are useful to the understanding of contemporary folk ethos in China. Overall, the transformation of authorship in the making of singer-songwriters reveals the complexity of textual narratives, the expansion of performance approaches, and the enhancement of sociological agency in the evolution of contemporary folk music. Folk music carves out a distinctive space for reflection on the process of urbanization and its effects on the thought and practice of people of different cultural, social and ethnic backgrounds.

During the second half of the twentieth century, there were no spectacular events in Mexico—civil wars, military dictatorships, or revolutions—capable of fracturing the social, political, or cultural structures of the country. The absence of these culturally traumatic events positioned Mexican protest songs in the periphery of the affective narrative of the nation. The story of modern Mexican troubadours was, nevertheless, a story of resistance whose heroes—the singers, songwriters, and performers—spent the decades between 1960 and 1990 denouncing poverty and corruption, condemning governmental violence, marching side by side with students, activists, women, workers, and peasants, supporting civil rights and grassroots movements both nationally and internationally with their songs. The story of these musicians has remained unknown for too long. This article attempts to reignite academic interest in this story with the goal of encouraging future critical and theoretical studies regarding socially-engaged Mexican singers and songwriters from the 1960s through the 1990s. It focuses on the life and work of one of the main exponents of the Mexican protest song, singer-songwriter Gabino Palomares (b. 1950). It offers a brief historical analysis of the Mexican Canto Nuevo movement and establishes a much-needed chronology of Palomares’s work, essential to our understanding of the contemporary cultural history of Mexico.

Leggendo libri sulla storia del folk inglese o interviste a famosi chitarristi, capita spesso di vedere citato Nic Jones. Un chitarrista bravissimo, ottimo cantante e arrangiatore, buon violinista, molto meno conosciuto in Italia rispetto a Renbourn, Jansch e altri. Un artista che merita di essere riscoperto e sostenuto.