JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum Who's your favorite songwriter?

Very interesting yet difficult question to answer. The reason is because most of the names listed above may have (indeed) been the artists/performers of many popular songs, but in most cases there were many other writers involved. For example, Amy Grant used mostly outside (non performing) writers.

In other words, back in the days of the "super stars", many songs where written by relatively unknown writers, so we'd have to really dig to pull up all those names. The best way is to check song sheet credits inside popular song books or around the net. In most cases the stage performers got all the "fame & glory" while the actual songwriters where somewhere behind the curtains.

Things may be changing now for most genres because now more than ever we have Singer/Songwriters; so the songwriter and the performance personality are wrapped up in the same "famous" stage name. This is more how it was in the days of classical and neo-classical music. All the "famous" composers started out with performing their own music, so they got famous not only for composing the music but also for performing it. They had to do both well, so there was less of them and they had to be "great" to raise through the "clutter and noise" and survive this many years.

This concept is also true for many modern day bands, probably starting with bands like Glen Miller (back in the 1940's) and of course mostly through the Beatles era and beyond to this day. Think of Chicago, Pink Floyd, many of the "smooth jazz" giants and almost all modern day rappers, etc. Their bands or groups wrote their own songs and they also performed them.

From what I hear, Country music is about the only genre left which outsources songwriters, but it's probably less than 50% of the time anymore. The whole industry seems to be going in the direction of singer/songwriters and bands that create their own music and stage it, so they get famous for doing both.

Michael