Popular music writing has made for strange colleagues and quickly lost legacies. I want to sketch some of them and suggest how they continue to influence the US version of popular music studies, arguably more so in our moment than in the previous period that codified an academic approach. I'll be anecdotal, alive to particulars of language, affiliation, method and form rather than attempting a quantification. Ranging from William Billings in 1770 to Daphne Brooks in 2021, I'll explore how such key framings as vernacular, sentimental and literary have shaped the nature of books on song. My hope is that, in synthesizing the larger history, I can suggest why so often this work could be characterized as, to use one of Robert Palmer's favourite words, unruly.

流行音乐创作为陌生的同事创造了条件，并很快失去了遗产。我想勾勒出其中的一些，并建议它们如何继续影响美国版的流行音乐研究，可以说在我们这个时代比在以前编纂学术方法的时期更是如此。我将是轶事，对语言，从属关系，方法和形式的细节充满活力，而不是尝试量化。从 1770 年的威廉·比林斯（William Billings）到 2021 年的达芙妮·布鲁克斯（Daphne Brooks），我将探讨诸如白话、情感和文学等关键框架如何塑造了歌曲书籍的性质。我的希望是，在综合更大的历史时，我可以提出为什么这部作品经常被描述为，用罗伯特·帕尔默最喜欢的词之一来说，不守规矩。