The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music

(Hardback)

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Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, memory, innocence and experience in modern Anglophone popular song and the use by singers and songwriters of a 'late voice'. Lateness here refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by recorded sound); retrospection (how voices 'look back' or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts. There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focusing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies. The Late Voice seeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.

Reviews

Elliott (popular music, Univ. of Sussex, UK) has written a complex analysis of the late voice of a number of musicians. The first chapter, "Time, Age, Experience, and Voice," is analytical, drawing on numerous theoretical studies. In chapter 2, Elliot provides an interesting discussion of Ralph Stanley, known now for his performance of O Death in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) but whose country music recording career began in the 1940s. Elliott places Stanley within the southern musical tradition of cultural isolation that preserved the old ways and the old songs and that projected the region onto the national imaginary as a place of backwardness. Subsequent chapters discuss a variety of performers Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Judy Collinsfocusing on the substance and meaning of their songs and providing some biographical background. In his conclusion, Elliott writes that his aim in writing the book was not so much to remove value from the metaphysics of age but to locate it at various points in the life course. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
Engagingly written, carefully thought through, and characterised by exemplary scholarship, Richard Elliotts book navigates with great elegance some complex theoretical waters. Through a selection of rich case studies, Elliott offers a powerful contribution to a growing body of work on ageing, nostalgia, and memory, particularly in relation to music. * Freya Jarman, Senior Lecturer, Department of Music, University of Liverpool, UK *
This thoughtful intervention to the interdisciplinary area of popular music and ageing brings sustained critical attention to the aesthetic concerns of the late voice by offering a range of distinctive case studies of singers, songwriters and songs. The result is an impressive synthesis of theory and analysis that bridges popular music studies and traditional musicology as an approach to understand music, ageing and experience. * Ros Jennings, Director of the Research Centre for Women, Ageing and Media, University of Gloucestershire, UK *
Through a series of illuminating case studies of particular singers, Richard Elliott shows how age, memory, temporal distance and loss are displayed in vocal quality as well as lyrical content. This is an original book: theoretically informed, and full of insight into the process of assimilating and evaluating what time, age and experience bring to us, it breaks new ground in studies of popular music, and deserves to be widely read. * Michael Pickering, Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis, Loughborough University, UK *

Author Bio

Richard Elliott is Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University, UK. He is the author of Fado and the Place of Longing (2010).