An Avid's Guide to Sixties Songwriters

by Peter Dunbavan

Overview

An essential reference book for sixties music lovers, this encyclopedic overview includes detailed chart statistics and biographical information for eighty songwriters and covers around two thousand songs, some of which are among the greatest ever written.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524633455
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	02/28/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	692
File size:	27 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Peter Dunbavan was born in Preston, England, in 1951. He was educated at the local grammar school and Imperial College, London, from which he graduated in chemical engineering with first-class honours. His diverse employment history has included working as a labourer, finance director, industrial chemist, meter reader, charity director, wallpaper warehouseman, college lecturer, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation employee. During his somewhat haphazard working life, his love of music has been a constant. He has been involved in playing live music since the age of 15, when he formed his first band. He has performed in various set-ups over the years, and for a short time in the nineties worked professionally as a solo artist. He has also been a spectacularly unsuccessful songwriter, having written over a hundred songs and still waiting for his first hit. After a short break of ten years, he is now back performing in pubs and clubs. His lifetime love of music, and songwriters in particular, has resulted in extensive research, which he hopes has now been put to good use by writing this book. He has three children and two grandchildren and, aside from his passion for music, enjoys photography, literature, and walking in the Lake District.

Editorial Reviews

2017-07-19
A debut encyclopedia celebrates famous and obscure pop songwriters of the 1960s. Dunbavan, a British musician and songwriter, wants to applaud the writer's craft rather than the singer's. He therefore includes only songwriters who mainly did not perform their own work but did pen tunes that made it into the Top 40 charts in America or Britain. Applying these criteria to the '60s, when the singer/songwriter came to dominate music, leads to a somewhat haphazard selection that leaves out Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and many other luminaries of the era to focus on a dwindling number of professional pop composers. (The Beatles do get in thanks to a handful of forgotten tunes they wrote for other bands.) But there's a good roster of legendary songwriting teams, including Burt Bacharach and Hal David, scribes of jaunty classics like "I'll Never Fall in Love Again"; Carole King and Gerry Goffin, authors of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" and other anthems of teen-girl yearning; Motown mainstays Eddie and Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier; and Phil Spector, who had his thumb as co-writer or producer in countless '60s hits. The tireless Dunbavan also unearths unsung figures like Phillip Goodhand-Tait, who managed to get three songs onto the British charts, topping out at No. 6 with 1968's "A Day Without Love." Each entry includes lists of the songwriter's charting hits, covers, and rereleases and biographies of several pages, with detailed accounts of how successes were composed and recorded. These thoroughly researched, gracefully written essays contain a wealth of information for scholars and aficionados, including anecdotes from the hit factory in Manhattan's Brill Building, where songwriters plonking away in their cubicles could barely hear their own tunes above the din of others', and well-judged critical appreciations. (The author toasts Bacharach's "unconventional and shifting time signatures, polyrhythms, asymmetrical phrasing, and complex harmonies which stretched even the most accomplished vocalist.") Fans of hits from the sublime ("You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' ") to the ridiculous ("Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini") should have their memories jogged and their interests piqued. An intriguing and informative compendium of lore about a great pop-music canon.

Kirkus Reviews