Yesterdays

One feature of the popular music landscape showing a relationship to the past is the recording of albums of songs from the “Great American Songbook.” This chapter begins with an analysis of Ella Fitzgerald, the musician most responsible for establishing the Songbook tradition as a coherent, venerable repertoire—not just a stack of musty old songs. The majority of this chapter, however, focuses on artists who came to prominence in other genres of music—including Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Dylan, and Rod Stewart—who have recorded albums of material from the Great American Songbook at crucial junctures in their careers. The recording of standards by musicians originally associated with other repertoires troubles our conventional notions of firm generic boundaries and hierarchies in popular music. These albums also serve as an important site of historical consciousness in popular music, by salvaging songs from the past and re-presenting them to listeners.