The Late Voice Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music [Hardcover]

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation.The Late Voicewill undertake such an analysis by considering issues of time, memory, innocence and experience in modern Anglophone popular song and the use by singers and songwriters of a 'late voice'. Lateness here refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by recorded sound); retrospection (how voices 'look back' or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts.

There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focussing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies.The Late Voiceseeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.

Elliott (popular music, Univ. of Sussex, UK) has written a complex analysis of the late voice of a number of musicians. The first chapter, Time, Age, Experience, and Voice, is analytical, drawing on numerous theoretical studies. In chapter 2, Elliot provides an interesting discussion of Ralph Stanley, known now for his performance of O Death in the filmO Brother, Where Art Thou?(2000) but whose country music recording career began in the 1940s. Elliott places Stanley within the southern musical tradition of cultural isolation that preserved the old ways and the old songs and that projected the region onto the national imaginary as a placelÃ