Singer-songwriter

In the early 21st century, various digital production tools, examples including GarageBand and other software programs, began to be used by singer-songwriters to compose their music and otherwise work as an audio engineer enhancing media.

[4] According to AllMusic, singer-songwriters' lyrics are often personal but veiled by elaborate metaphors and vague imagery, and their creative concern is to place emphasis on the song rather than on their performance of it.

[5] The term may also characterise songwriters in the rock, folk, country, and pop-music genres – including Henry Russell (1812–1900), Aristide Bruant (1851–1925), Hank Williams (1923–1953), and Buddy Holly (1936–1959).

This thickening process demonstrates the fluid, multiple, and heterogeneous voices underneath the singular authorial image, thus complicating the notion of authorship for singer-songwriters.

Thus, the folklorist Anatole Le Braz gives a detailed account of one ballad singer, Yann Ar Minouz, who wrote and performed songs traveling through Brittany in the late nineteenth century and selling printed versions.

[24][25] In the 1940s and 1950s country singer-songwriters like Hank Williams became well known,[26] as well as Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger,[27] along with Ronnie Gilbert and Lee Hays and other members of the Weavers who performed their mostly topical works to an ever-growing wider audience.

Additionally in the 1930s through the 1950s several jazz and blues singer-songwriters emerged like Hoagy Carmichael, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Harry Gibson, Peggy Lee, and Nina Simone, as well as in the rock n' roll genre from which emerged influential singer-songwriters Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, and Paul Anka.

In the country music field, singer-songwriters like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Roger Miller, Billy Edd Wheeler, and others emerged from the 1940s through the 1960s, often writing compelling songs about love relationships and other subjects.

These singer-songwriters included Bob Dylan, Neil Young, John Lennon, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, Albert Hammond, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell.

In contrast to the storytelling approach of most prior country and folk music, these performers typically wrote songs from a highly personal (often first-person), introspective point of view.

[32][33] In the late '60s a new wave of female singer-songwriters broke from the confines of pop, using the urban landscape as their canvas for lyrics in the confessional style of poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

These pioneering women, appeared in a feature in Newsweek, July 1969, "The Girls: Letting Go: 'What is common to them – to Joni Mitchell and Lotti Golden, to Laura Nyro, Melanie, and to Elyse Weinberg, are the personalised songs they write, like voyages of self-discovery, brimming with keen observation and startling in the impact of their poetry.

"[34] In The Guardian, author Laura Barton describes the radical shift in subject matter—they sang about politics, love affairs, the urban landscape, drugs, disappointment, and the life and loneliness of the itinerant performer.

[35] Lotti Golden, in her Atlantic debut album Motor-Cycle, chronicled her life in NYC's East Village in the late 1960s counterculture, visiting subjects such as gender identity (The Space Queens-Silky is Sad) and excessive drug use (Gonna Fay's).

In the late 1980s, the term was applied to a group of predominantly female U.S. artists, beginning with Suzanne Vega whose first album sold unexpectedly well, followed by the likes of Tracy Chapman, Melissa Etheridge, Nanci Griffith, k.d.

lang, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan, Shawn Colvin, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb, Joan Osborne, Indigo Girls, and Tori Amos, who found success first in the United Kingdom, then in her home market.

Also in the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Bono, the Edge, Dave Matthews, Jeff Buckley, Richard Barone, Duncan Sheik, and Elliott Smith borrowed from the singer-songwriter tradition to create new acoustic-based rock styles.

In the 2000s, a quieter style emerged, with largely impressionistic lyrics, from artists such as Norah Jones, Conor Oberst, Sufjan Stevens, David Bazan, South San Gabriel, Iron & Wine, David Gray, Ray LaMontagne, Meg Hutchinson, Darden Smith, Josh Rouse, Steve Millar, Jolie Holland, Patrick Duff, Richard Buckner, Jewel, Jack Savoretti, Richard Shindell, John Gorka, and Antje Duvekot.

He would remain an isolated act until the creative blooming of a new generation during the post-World War II era (mid-1940s and 1950s), where such artists as Léo Ferré, Georges Brassens, Félix Leclerc (from Quebec), Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Brel (from Belgium), Henri Salvador (from French Guiana), Charles Aznavour, and Barbara appeared, with contrasted and rich imagination.

During the 1960s and 1970s, prominent singer-songwriters included Claude Nougaro, Jean Ferrat, Boby Lapointe, Françoise Hardy, Frédérik Mey, Michel Polnareff, Nino Ferrer, Christophe, Bernard Lavilliers, Véronique Sanson and Jacques Higelin, amongst others.

[40] In the last 25 years the tradition has mainly been continued by Samuele Bersani, Caparezza, and the so-called "2nd Roman school of cantautori" (including Max Gazzè, Niccolò Fabi, Daniele Silvestri, Simone Cristicchi).

Although the term cantautore normally implies consistent sociopolitical content in lyrics, noteworthy performers in a more inclusive singer-songwriter categorization are: Domenico Modugno, Luigi Tenco, Gino Paoli, Sergio Endrigo, Fabrizio De André, Francesco De Gregori, Antonello Venditti, Roberto Vecchioni, Ivano Fossati, Lucio Dalla, Francesco Guccini, and Franco Battiato.

In the latter part of the 1960s and into the 1970s, socially and politically aware singer-songwriters like Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés emerged in Cuba, birthing a genre known as nueva trova.

The first nationwide-famous bards (starting their career in the 1950s) are traditionally referred to as the First Five: Mikhail Ancharov, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Novella Matveyeva, Bulat Okudzhava, and Yuri Vizbor.

In the same period, the movement of KSP (Kluby Samodeyatelnoy Pesni – amateur song fan clubs) emerged, providing the bards with highly educated audience, and up to the end of the 1980s being their key promotion engine.

At the same time, there were some prominent underground figures which were against the official Communist Party line, such as Angel "Jendema" Angelov, Yavor "Yavkata" Rilov, and Velizar "Valdes" Vankov.

Major figures in the Bulgarian tradition are Dimitar Taralezhkov, Angel "Jendema" Angelov, Yavor "Yavkata" Rilov, Velizar "Valdes" Vankov, Dimitar Dobrev, Andro Stubel, Branimir "Bunny" Stoykov, Dorothea Tabakova, Mihail Belchev, Assen Maslarski, Grisha Trifonov, Plamen Stavrev, Vladimir Levkov, Margarita Drumeva, Maria Batchvarova, Plamen Sivov, and Krasimir Parvanov.

[citation needed] Rooted in the European Bänkelsang ("bench-singing") and Moritat traditions while also taking immediate inspiration from the French chanson scene and the American folk music revival, the 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a whole generation of German-language singer-songwriters called Liedermacher ("songmakers"), among them Hannes Wader, Franz Josef Degenhardt, Reinhard Mey, and Konstantin Wecker from West Germany, Wolf Biermann from East Germany as well as Ludwig Hirsch and Georg Danzer from Austria.

The lyrics often deal with topics such as social injustice, militarism, consumerism, environmental issues or the repercussions of the German Nazi past, often expressing technoskepticism and anti-establishment views.

Cornelis Vreeswijk and Fred Åkerström were particularly influential in their efforts to blend the heritage of the "visa" (a specific way to render simple stanzaic poems or songs, given distinction by artists such as Carl Michael Bellman and Evert Taube) with modern approaches to balladeering.