The singer, not the song: women singers as composer-poets

Extract

In his comprehensive celebration of women singers in the twentieth century, Wilfrid Mellers proposed a three-stage socio-musical evolution from the jazz, blues and gospel songs sung by black women, through the black-inspired white singers who followed them, to a new synthesis of singing poet-composers (Mellers 1986). Within this third category, very much the main point of the book, Mellers deals in considerable detail with a range of singer/song writers, from Joni Mitchell and Dory Previn to Rickie Lee Jones and Laurie Anderson. In this article I should like to take this concept of the woman singer/song writer as a point of departure from which to look at two very different kinds of singer: different, that is, both from each other and from any of the singers dealt with in the Mellers book. It has always seemed to me to be characteristic of much of Wilfrid Mellers' writing (and certainly of Angels of the Night) that he never lets his musicological agenda get in the way of his fundamental enjoyment of the music as a fan trying to make sense of his own taste. The reader can accept or reject his thoughts about the significance of it all, and not get so blinded by musicology that you cannot face listening to the songs: that, after all, is in the end what we are supposed to do. In what follows, I, too, write as a fan, but since performers do not often get the chance to bite back at musicologists, I should also like to take the opportunity to question from a singer's point of view a certain kind of performance analysis used by many musicologists. The subject is fraught with ideological booby-traps, so I should confess right away that I am a middle-class, middle-aged English married father.