Although a wheelchair-user and permanently disabled through polio, the southern American singer Connie Boswell was one of radio and vaudeville's biggest stars in the 1930s. She and her sisters were a compelling force in American popular entertainment for the first half of the decade; and when the group split in 1936, Connie carried on a solo career in radio, recording, film and television for another twenty-five years. Connie's unique position as the only visibly disabled ‘A-list’ female popular entertainer for most of the twentieth century – and one whose voice, both physical and musical, shaped the sound of jazz and popular music – makes her an obvious focus for any study that links popular music and disability. This essay is concerned with how disability may have operated as a discourse about and within Connie's chosen medium, jazz; and how disability studies can illuminate why the ways in which difference is figured in her work, initially a source of anxiety, could have also been a significant reason for her success.

The American Johnnie Ray (1927–1990) is best known for his emotional rendition of Churchill Kohlman's song ‘Cry’, a tune that Ray recorded with Mitch Miller in 1951. This song, along with Ray's own composition, ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’, earned Ray nicknames such as ‘The Nabob of Sob’ and ‘The Cry Guy’. Although wildly popular in the mid-1950s, Johnnie Ray was soon overshadowed by his contemporaries and has been virtually ignored by scholars.

This essay situates Ray's music and his hearing impairment in the material and mediated conditions of his life. In addition to interpreting Ray's signature performances, the essay deals with Ray's childhood musicality, his appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, the influence of televangelism on Ray, cinematic contexts for his life and art, and the hearing aid technology of the 1940s and 1950s.

This article looks at a remarkable cluster of popular musicians who contracted and survived poliomyelitis (‘infantile paralysis’) epidemics through the twentieth century, and ways in which they managed and, to varying extents, explored their polio-related impairments and experiences in their music. Drawing on medical history and disability studies, it focuses largely on the pop and rock generation of polio survivors – the children and young people from the 1940s and 1950s who were among the last to contract the disease prior to the successful introduction of mass vaccination programmes (in the West). These include Neil Young, Steve Harley, Joni Mitchell, and Israel Vibration. The article then looks in detail at the work of Ian Dury, who was for a while the highest profile visibly physically disabled pop artist in Britain, and who produced a compelling body of works exploring the experiences of disability.

In this article we examine the relatively new use of disability as a marketing device in pop music. Our analysis makes specific reference to how the career of Ian Curtis and Joy Division has become overshadowed by his epilepsy, depression and subsequent suicide, with comparison between early press and promotional materials from 1979–1980 and more recent materials created to promote reissues and films about Curtis. It also references other relevant individuals from the pop music sphere and marketing campaigns created around them that ignore or highlight issues of disability.

Using these examples, we examine the ways in which messages about disability are packaged and presented within pop marketing discourses and discuss the issue of ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ disability identities in pop, which have been created through a largely marketing-driven discourse. Finally, we briefly explore how the deployment of ‘disabled’ identities impacts on the musicians so identified, as opposed to on the sales of products.

Disability culture is a site within which social and positional identities are struggled for and dominant discourses rejected; in which mainstream representations of people with impairments – as victims of personal tragedy – are held to the light and revealed as hegemonic constructions within a disabling society. Drawing upon styles that range from jazz, blues and folk to reggae, performance poetry and punk, disabled singers and bands in the Disability Arts Movement in Britain have been central to the development of an affirmative disability discourse rooted in ideas of pride, anger and strength. Examining lyrics by Johnny Crescendo, Ian Stanton and the Fugertivs – performers emerging as part of this movement in the 1980s and 1990s – this article considers the dark humour which runs through much of this work. It is suggested that these lyrics' observational reflections on everyday experiences of being oppressed as disabled people have been overlooked within critical disability studies to date, but are important in developing an understanding of positive disability identity as a tool available to disabled people in order to make sense of, and express themselves within, the world in which they find themselves.

In this article I discuss the past and present of Station 17, a project made up of disabled and non-disabled musicians, which was founded in Hamburg, Germany in 1988. Station 17 refuse to regard themselves as a pedagogic or therapeutic project. My specific interest is to show how they attempt to solve artistic and economic problems that arise out of this decision. In artistic terms they developed two major modes of production, which both led to a dead end. As a consequence they merged these two modes in order to regain the flexibility of improvisation without losing the benefits of sequencer-based electronic music. Within the pop market the lyrics, which are exclusively provided by disabled members of the project, serve as a unique selling proposition. In economic terms they succeeded in creating themselves a niche within a therapeutic structure that allows them to act as professional artists.

Musical performances on the bass guitar, able to be felt bodily beyond the ear, connect into the many layers of affect that music excites; but they are particularly potent as a means of communicating embodied masculinity for one young man with a hearing disability. Masculinity as a social code enacted within practices of the everyday involves both the affect and the effect of difference. The bass guitar, the instrument which drives a band's sound and rhythm, is part of the performativity of masculinity within popular music – visually, and at the level of sound, as auricular materiality – an embodied sensation where the ‘feel’ of sound through the body constitutes a language in which ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ modes of masculinity become appropriated and defined.

Displays of musical prowess on the bass guitar open a space for becoming ‘unfixed’ from the identity and abject status of the hearing-disabled Other. This ‘Othering’ occurs primarily in everyday spoken encounters where difficulties with hearing and speech limit opportunities for occupying a viable masculine positioning. By contrast, the capacity to ‘fit’ the sensory and sensual prompts that trigger recognition of masculinity within popular music enables the re-assembling of an embodied masculine identity for a hearing-disabled young man. Masculinity and disability are rendered reversible and exchangeable – performative productions that are excessive and transgressive, contingent on the sensory perceptions of self and others.

This emphasis on embodied communicative practice through the play of bass guitar provides an important counterweight to representational forms of embodied gendered subjectivity that continue to predominate in some modes of disability and gender theorising. It constitutes a forceful assertion of how everyday embodied interactions are irrevocably coupled with mobile and transient masculine and disabled aesthetic identifications.