Scholars looking for a way into Eric Weisbard's Songbooks might well begin with his two short essays dedicated to the literature surrounding Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson, found later in the book (on pages 406–10 and 412–16, respectively). Weisbard observes that, aside from the folk singer-poet's own Chronicles, “there was never a great Bob Dylan book,” thus underlining the necessity of myriad attempts at “Dylanology” (406 and 408). Similarly, in summing up the biographical-cum-cultural conjecture that has nearly swamped the Southern-Gothicized bluesman, Weisbard describes the accumulated commentary on Johnson as a “Talmudic saga of texts around texts”—which could also double as description of this author's characteristic critical method (416).

Songbooks comprises a sequence of 159 of these microcosmic bibliographic essays, usually about one to four pages in length, in which Weisbard takes stock of The Literature of American Popular Music (his chosen subtitle) spanning from the late-eighteenth century to 2010 and beyond. Most of the texts touched upon are either quasi-journalistic criticism or scholarly monographs, though fiction, memoir, and other oddments pepper this literary survey. It is not incidental that Weisbard creates a separate title for each essay that hovers above—and thus supersedes—a citation for each book that is putatively under review: Part of the peculiar magic of Weisbard's small essays for Songbooks is that, although they each take a single text as lodestar, they are more concerned with a surrounding constellation of related texts.

Songbooks would be commendable as a reference work even if its goal were to merely situate its texts along an evolving continuum of music-cultural criticism (in which case its survey might have read as a more-or-less linear history of popular music writing). But Weisbard has given us something rather better: a finely tuned instrument of cross-reference—authors seem to cheerfully debate amongst themselves (as if at Weisbard's invitation) in each essay. He distributes his essays among seven parts, which are perhaps less significant as strict chronological divisions than as mile-markers of epochal shifts in music commentary (14). The book's chronology is sensibly arranged around publication dates—metonyms, in most cases, for each text's initial point of cultural impact: that is, the chronology is one of authorship and not of subject-matter (2 and 14). Though Americanists concerned with the nation's early, and even postbellum, life will find essays from the first part worthwhile, the lion's share of the texts referenced concern twentieth- and twenty-first-century American popular musics. Weisbard's topical compass is limited mainly to U.S. culture, yet his openness toward a wider world of music-making in the Americas is never in doubt (see, for example, his inclusion of an essay on Alejo Carpentier's Music in Cuba [382–85]).Footnote ¹

Songbooks's survey is noticeably strong on rock and its permutations, without shortchanging other genres. His treatment of blues and jazz is quite as impressive. Other cultural streams are given somewhat shorter shrift: Scholars of bluegrass- or country-adjacent genres may feel their concerns fall somewhere toward the book's outer orbit. More striking still is the paucity of essays concerning musical comedy, a music tradition that has precipitated a gushing aquifer of academic commentary. “I define popular music primarily around songs,” Weisbard writes; an orientation that perhaps makes the multi-number format of stage works an uneasy fit for his survey (2). Film music—a prominent American popular soundscape—is avoided. Indeed, beyond jazz, relatively little in the way of instrumental genres are represented here. So long as we accept that Weisbard opts to orient his survey around “song” particularly (the book's title providing the crucial clue), we can allow his use of the catchall term “American popular music” as a euphemism for his collation of various, mostly sung music traditions that together constitute a nation's stylistically varied (or even borrowed) “songbooks.”

Throughout the book, Weisbard shows himself to be among American popular music's most erudite archaeologists, with each of his brief essays reading like a carefully stratified Tell. His diligence in searching out his subjects’ bedrock tends to surpass his (often considerable) enthusiasm for any single text on a given topic. The plural in his title, Songbooks, has a dual valence, perhaps: a multiplicity of topics, each of them giving rise to a multiplicity of texts. This strategy of “texts around texts” is one for which Weisbard is singularly well-equipped (416). Educated at Princeton and Berkeley, and currently serving as a professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, Weisbard has written two previous books, Use Your Illusion I and II and Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music, the latter the recipient of IASPM-U.S.'s 2016 Woody Guthrie Prize.Footnote ² He also helped conceive the Pop Conference for Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture (formerly the Experience Music Project). But he may be better known to some readers for his work at Spin and The Village Voice.

In keeping with Weisbard's professional background, his book's tenor is less academic than subculturist. Weisbard has given us a boldly subjective criticism where many academics, even fine ones, would likely have given us some variation on an (ostensibly) objective annotated bibliography. (A 65-page “Works Cited” section is, nonetheless, one of the book's most useful features.) Given the impossibility of a single annotated bibliography corralling the full range of scholarship on popular music in the U.S., Weisbard provides the shrewdest possible alternative: What he calls “a critical guide” is essentially a multipart bibliographic essay interweaving an extensive personal selection of scholarship and criticism that he reads as integral (1).

In that respect, Songbooks is an odd bird among the larger “Literature of American Popular Music,” where it is difficult to find anything obviously comparable, making its inclusion within Duke University Press's “Reconfiguring American Music” series apt (13). Weisbard's book is neither a “reader,” nor even an essay anthology in the conventional sense: Each of Songbooks's bibliographic essays were written by Weisbard specifically for this volume.Footnote ³ The book thus evinces a greater unity than most essay collections, in that its author has proceeded from a pre-calibrated schema. The closest corollary might be a collection of book reviews, yet Weisbard's essays review not so much single books as clusters of related books.Footnote ⁴

In the end, it may be the critical and literary style, more than the form, that most clearly differentiates Weisbard's approach. Songbooks is an academic survey that adopts the stance of the great jazz and rock journalists, replete with Weisbard's own distinctive substrain of their hepcat literary style. His alternative to a dry bibliography-type format allows popular music—more particularly, an established tradition of popular music criticism—to dictate the form and flavor of its own literature review (2–5). And, really, that is what he has handed us with Songbooks: a literature review of American popular music writing; one far more expansive than any single monograph or annotated bibliography would allow. Weisbard's uncommon capacity for syncretizing seemingly discontiguous sources fairly vibrates off every page. He makes no pretense of formal remove from his subjects, once he has chosen them for review. Nor need he: Readers will find his savvy critic's stance to be of surprising utility when navigating a continually expanding universe of popular music scholarship. Weisbard has a knack for sussing out exactly those intriguing provocations that render each writer's work irreplaceable by any other, superficially similar source. He hones the edges of his chosen writers’ arguments with an infallible instinct for where one scholar's work generates friction against another's.

The book's primary readership will almost inevitably consist of its author's fellow academics—popular culture-oriented Americanists who are thoroughly invested in the historiographic and theoretical approaches that Weisbard referees between the various authors represented. Scholars from other, non-musical corners of the humanities can also find much that is suggestive here for their research. Ambitious undergraduates are sure to discover Weisbard's essays to be useful in formulating their own bibliographies. Even some amateur genre enthusiasts will find usefulness in the book's carefully deliberated concept and execution.

Perhaps most remarkable—the brilliance of Songbooks—is Weisbard's consistently demonstrated ability to précis a source in just a sentence or two, often by means of interpretive maneuvers more specific (and hence, more meaningful) than those that might result in a mere summary. Rather than simply relaying to us the subject, or even the basic argument, of a source, he forms an indelible imprint of that source's peculiar point of view. Matthew Tauch's sly cover design advertises Weisbard's arresting critical mode: Unlikely conversations—barely missed connections, we are made to feel—are forged effortlessly by this scholar. Who else would think to seat Jazz-Age littérateur Zora Neale Hurston at a table next to the likes of sixties counterculture maverick Lester Bangs? And it is surely modesty that prevents Weisbard from showing himself seated at even the table's lowliest place: It is, after all, his distinctive gift as speculative stenographer that enables us to listen in on the invigorating arguments between such disparate authors that he imagines for us in every essay of Songbooks.