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• Songbook Historiography:Phases and Stages in the Literature of American Popular Music
• Eric Weisbard (bio)

The first books, or booklets, about Louis Armstrong were transcriptions of his trumpet and cornet solos. The next book, sold as an autobiography, might have been written in part by him; we're still not sure. A book closer to a biopic, by a French admirer, based on Armstrong's letters to him followed next, but Satchmo (1954) was a masterpiece: the great musician recalling his life growing up in New Orleans. Yet that book left out later sequences Armstrong had written on his time in Chicago, on his lifelong love of smoking weed. Scholars got that work, and other unpublished writing, into books that became still another memoir of sorts. There was a book about his books, plus the narration he provided a recordings compilation, as metabiography. At some point, the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes he assembled of conversations, used by his most recent biographers, will become still another self-chronicle—perhaps in podcast form.¹

What should an intellectual history of our understanding of popular music focus on? As Armstrong's example suggests, he meant different things at different moments: an essence of vernacular musicianship, a celebrity winking at things not fully revealed, an icon of Black artistry, an archive unto himself. His own prose, filled with dashes and breaks just like his playing, would not suggest a conventional intellectual, but few would question his centrality to the thinking of people who from a 2021 perspective clearly were, like the essayists, novelists, and great friends Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. Those kinds of connections, between artists and thinkers, organic intellectuals and professors, are staples of intellectual history.

But what about the connections between Armstrong and his pot dealer, Mezz Mezzrow, who wrote Really the Blues (1946) with Bernard Wolfe, himself a former secretary to Leon Trotsky, future science fiction novelist and porn-magazine contributor? Between what might be called the first Top 40 crossover hits, Armstrong's slanged-up Tin Pan Alley covers in the 1930s, and [End Page 338] the "segregated sound" of race records? Between Satchmo and another 1950s memoir, Lady Sings the Blues (1956), by Billie Holiday, Armstrong's successor as a jazz vocal innovator? Between Armstrong singing the blues, of a kind, with Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, and Muddy Waters singing the blues, of a kind, with Mick Jagger? None of this is intellectual history, you might say, until Bernard Wolfe links to Frantz Fanon, those cartoonish Armstrong hits to Jazz Age modernity, those blues versions to debates about genres of culture.

A funny thing happened on the way to publication: I realized my book on these topics hinted at chapters I hadn't planned. Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music (2021) uses a decentered perspective, with 160 or so short essays on key authors, artists, and topics that move from a 1770 starting point (William Billings, The New-England Psalm-Singer) to a 2010 endpoint (Jay-Z, Decoded). Structuring by publication dates made neighbors of books not commonly connected. But when asked to consider carving my ridiculous table of contents into something the brain could process, subsections, I found a periodization with implications for reshaping the field beyond the book's scope. Elsewhere, I've described the diversity of meaningful popular music writers and why academia's belated embrace of the subject shouldn't purge that messier tradition.² Here, I want to outline the stages under which that writing took shape. The historiography of American popular music turns on the vernacular—a perfect example being records with Armstrong solos. But interpretation developed via unifying tendencies, dominant paradigms, that went well beyond authorial choices and musical categories.

Setting the Stage

In the beginning was the vernacular word, twisted from standard speech in the tradition of Protestantism's native tongues, in the insurgency of democratic rabble, in the racism of a theater that used primitivism to excite raucous and affluent audiences. Songbooks turned out to be our first records, as in documents. William Billings, a New England tanner in his twenties, scarcely trained musically, said "I think it best for every Composer to be his...

中文翻译：

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歌本史学：美国流行音乐文学的阶段和阶段

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 歌本史学：美国流行音乐文学的阶段和阶段
• 埃里克·韦斯巴德（生物）

关于路易斯阿姆斯特朗的第一本书或小册子是他的小号和短号独奏的转录。下一本书作为自传出售，可能部分是他写的。我们还不确定。一本更接近传记片的书，由一位法国崇拜者根据阿姆斯特朗给他的信件改编，但接下来是萨奇莫（1954 年）是一部杰作：这位伟大的音乐家回忆起他在新奥尔良长大的生活。然而，那本书遗漏了阿姆斯特朗后来写的关于他在芝加哥的时间，关于他一生对吸食大麻的热爱的故事。学者们将这项工作和其他未发表的作品编入书籍，成为另一本回忆录。有一本关于他的书的书，加上他提供的录音汇编，作为元传记。在某个时候，他最近的传记作者使用的数百个由他收集的谈话录音带将成为另一个自我编年史——也许是播客的形式。¹

我们对流行音乐的理解的思想史应该关注什么？正如阿姆斯特朗的例子所表明的那样，他在不同的时刻意味着不同的东西：白话音乐的精髓，名人对未完全揭示的事物眨眼，黑人艺术的标志，他自己的档案。他自己的散文，就像他的演奏一样充满了破折号，不会暗示传统的知识分子，但很少有人会质疑他对从 2021 年的角度来看显然是，如散文家、小说家和好朋友拉尔夫等人的思想的中心地位埃里森和阿尔伯特·默里。艺术家和思想家、有机知识分子和教授之间的这种联系是思想史的主要内容。

但是，阿姆斯特朗和他的大麻贩子 Mezz Mezzrow 之间的关系又如何呢？后者与伯纳德·沃尔夫（Bernard Wolfe）一起撰写了《真正的蓝调》（1946 年），伯纳德·沃尔夫本人是未来科幻小说家和色情杂志撰稿人列昂·托洛茨基的前秘书？在可能被称为第一个 40 强跨界歌曲、阿姆斯特朗在 1930 年代翻唱的锡盘巷和[End Page 338]种族记录的“隔离声音”之间？在 Satchmo 和 1950 年代的另一本回忆录之间，Lady Sings the Blues（1956 年），阿姆斯特朗的继任者比莉·霍勒迪 (Billie Holiday) 是爵士乐声乐的创新者？在阿姆斯特朗和弗兰克·辛纳屈或宾·克罗斯比唱一种蓝调，还有浑水和米克·贾格尔唱一种蓝调？你可能会说，这一切都不是思想史，直到伯纳德沃尔夫与弗朗茨法农联系起来，那些卡通阿姆斯特朗对爵士时代现代性的影响，那些布鲁斯版本对文化流派的辩论。

在出版的路上发生了一件有趣的事情：我意识到我关于这些主题的书暗示了我没有计划的章节。歌本：美国流行音乐文学（2021 年）使用了一种去中心化的视角，有 160 多篇关于主要作者、艺术家和主题的短文，这些文章从 1770 年的起点（威廉比林斯，新英格兰诗篇歌手）到2010 年的端点（Jay-Z，解码）。按出版日期构建的书籍的邻居通常不相关。但是当被要求考虑将我荒谬的目录雕刻成大脑可以处理的东西时，我发现了一个分期，对重塑超出本书范围的领域有影响。在其他地方，我已经描述了有意义的流行音乐作家的多样性，以及为什么学术界对这个主题的迟来的拥抱不应该清除这种混乱的传统。²在这里，我想概述写作形成的阶段。美国流行音乐的历史编纂转向了白话——一个完美的例子是阿姆斯特朗独奏的唱片。但是通过统一的趋势和主导范式发展起来的解释远远超出了作者的选择和音乐类别。

设置舞台

一开始是白话词，从新教母语传统中的标准讲话、民主暴民的叛乱、使用原始主义来激发喧闹和富裕观众的剧院的种族主义扭曲而来。歌本原来是我们的第一张唱片，就像在文件中一样。威廉·比林斯 (William Billings) 是一名 20 多岁的新英格兰制革商，几乎没有受过音乐方面的训练，他说：“我认为最好让每个作曲家都成为他的......