The ‘social history’ of popular music: a label without a cause?

During the coffee break at a recent conference, I described myself to a new acquaintance as ‘a social historian of music’. He replied that he was glad to meet me as he now knew all four of us. The ‘club’, of course, has never been quite that exclusive, but the joke highlighted the essentially submerged and inchoate nature of work in this field. What follows is a decidedly personal article, designed not as a polished, final argument but as a review of some recent developments within the social history of popular music and as a stimulus to further work and argument. Aimed most particularly at those, whether they define themselves as musicologists or historians, taking relatively early steps into this field, it reflects the biases and preoccupations of a social historian with decidedly Anglo-centric interests and for whom history tends to ‘begin’ about 1750; I have a sense, however, that some of my comments may be relevant to the study both in and of other countries and of other historical periods. ‘Popular’ music is broadly defined here to accommodate both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘social’ usages of the term, but given my particular interests, and perhaps because of the methodological imperatives of social history, the latter application undoubtedly receives the closest attention.