‘All good things are born of wonder’, remarked Aristotle. Today, as ever, listening to good music one cannot cease wondering at the mysterious spell of sound combinations. The phenomenon becomes even more mystifying when one deals with a simple and popular tune.

Well the blues come to Texas lopin' like a mule

Well the blues come to Texas lopin' like a mule

You take a high brown woman man she's hard to fool

You can't ever tell what a woman's got on her mind

Man you can't tell what a woman's got on her mind

You might think she's crazy ‘bout you she's leavin’ you all the time

She ain't so good looking and her teeth don't shine like pearls

She ain't so good looking and her teeth don't shine like pearls

But that nice disposition carries a woman all through the world

I'm goin' to the river gonna carry my rocker chair

Well I'm goin' to the river carry my rocker chair

——— have the worried blues right here

I think I heard my good gal callin' my name

Hey hey good gal called my name

She couldn't call so loud but she called so nice and plain

‘What kind of music?’ This question has been put to me by hundreds of people, always for different reasons: by fellow train passengers who want to know what I do; by hi-fi dealers anxious to advise on the right type of speakers for listening to my record collection; in record shops when I enquire about the latest releases; by theatre managers when I have asked to hire their premises for a concert; by a young spectator while I am tuning up my '63 Stratocaster; by other musicians when I have asked to join a group; by civil servants responding to my application for a state grant; by sound engineers when I have hired a recording studio or amplification system; by the RAI* when I have proposed programmes or when I am engaged as a guitarist and they want to determine how much I should be paid; by policemen and frontier guards throughout Europe when I go through customs with my instruments and identity card on which is written: ‘Profession: Musician’.

Popular music analysis-why? One of the initial problems for any new field of study is the attitude of incredulity it meets. The serious study of popular music is no exception to this rule. It is often confronted with an attitude of bemused suspicion implying that there is something weird about taking ‘fun’ seriously or finding ‘fun’ in ‘serious things’. Such attitudes are of considerable interest when discussing the aims and methods of popular music analysis and serve as an excellent introduction to this article.

Henry Pleasants has argued that the significant revolution in musical style to occur at the turn of the century was not that represented by the works of composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and their successors but that constituted through the advent of Afro-American and Afro-American influenced musics and the very substantial impact that these musics subsequently made, not only on main stream Western culture, but on world culture as a whole (Pleasants 1969). Yet despite the radical shift in musical and social aesthetic that has been maintained since the turn of the century through successive waves of so-called ‘popular’ music, remarkably little attention has been paid to popular music as a cultural form. As Jenny Taylor and Dave Laing have remarked, ‘popular music remains a poor relation in cultural theory, usually being tagged onto a list in which film or television takes pride of place’. A reason for this neglect, Taylor and Laing continue, ‘is its lack of status … which has the effect that rock is usually studied or taught in odd corners of the curriculum … In addition’, they conclude, ‘music as such poses great problems in the determination of meaning and signification’ (Taylor and Laing 1979, P. 43).

In urbanised Britain by the nineteenth century, the long symbiosis of the oral tradition with songs transmitted at least in part through printing was turning firmly in favour of the latter. Despite this — and largely because of the welcome rediscovery of industrial folk song — our picture of popular song between 1800 and 1850 is currently dominated by music in the survival of which oral transmission has played the greater part. Even when the music we hear can be shown with any certainty to have been in circulation at that time, a major cirticism of this emphasis arises. The oral tradition is a sifting process; what survives has passed ‘the test of time’, and this can only obscure the picture.