Singer-songwriter Epilogue

First, an explanation for those of you left in the dark, or silence as the case may be, listening via the Internet on July 24. Chicago suffered severe flooding and WFMTís ISP, Comcast, literally drowned. The interruption of the Internet stream was totally beyond our control.

This message is belated because I have been away since the program aired. Imagine returning to your flood of E-mails.

I have received about 50-60 E-mails with suggestions, a few curses and occasional praise. There is some common agreement about certain artists left off my list, such as Tom Russell, Anne Hills, Kate Wolf, Eric Andersen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Janis Ian and a few others. I am going to try to tabulate all of your suggestions and post them here in a week or so.

Thus, I promise to do a second program on November 6 with 25 of the songwriters and their songs that were not on my list that you think are the most significant of the past 50 years. With a couple of exceptions, I agree with all of you and perhaps my list should have been 100 songwriters long. Of course, then the program would have run until 5 AM and I would have dropped from exhaustion, not to mention the wrath of our classical listeners. Also, even if it had been 100 songwriters, some listeners would have pointed out omissions.

However, I do stand by my criteria that the people selected must have the following qualifications:

• They must be solo songwriters. That is, they write the songs entirely themselves. I made one exception for Robin & Linda Williams.
• They must have started writing or continued *actively* writing after 1960. I know Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles and others lived into the 1960s, but they were not writing at that time. Obviously, I am not ignoring Woody and his enormous contribution to American music.
• The person must have a body of original songs beyond one or two major ìhits.î Even Don McLean wrote far more than ìAmerican Pie.î I was judging writers, not performers.
• I decided to exclude comedy and humor. Thus, Tom Lehrer and a few others are not on the list. However, some often humorous artists such as Loudon Wainwright III would easily qualify to be on the list.

As I said in my preface, any list is arbitrary. In no way do I consider my list definitive. I also chose writers in what I consider the folk genre. Letís not try to define folk, no one has truly succeed yet.

Five years ago the list would have been significantly different. Five years from now, if Iím still around, it will be different. Of course, 10 years from now, given the opportunity, Iíll choose the 60 most significant songwriters and their songs of the past 60 years. Or maybe that should be the 120 most significant songwriters of the past 120 years? Hello A. P. Carter and Jimmie Rodgers, not to mention Woody. -- Rich

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