In Their Own Words

Bob Dylan’s greatest gift to pop culture has long been seen as his role in teaching rock ‘n’ roll to think, making the music more than a limited teen delight. But it’s possible that an even greater contribution was bringing the singer-songwriter tradition into the pop mainstream.

It’s a breakthrough that is paying welcome dividends this fall, a season packed with winning new albums from an array of valuable artists, including Beck, Steve Earle, India.Arie, Rhett Miller and Ron Sexsmith. Not to mention Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel, Jackson Browne, Ryan Adams, Peter Case, Tracy Chapman and Badly Drawn Boy.

It’s a striking addition to the singer-songwriter tradition that has been a creative center of the pop experience for much of the last half century.

Because of the popularity of such guitar-carrying solo artists as Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Browne in the early ‘70s, there is a tendency to equate the term “singer-songwriter” with folk music.

But the tradition is broad enough to stretch from Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and Lauryn Hill in R&B; to Chuck D., Ice Cube and Eminem in rap to Lennon-McCartney, Elvis Costello and Eddie Vedder in rock to Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Vince Gill in country music.

The emphasis on singer-songwriters lessened in recent years as record producers, from Max Martin to the Neptunes, became the kings in commercial pop, shaping hits for teen and R&B; acts.

The result, in most cases, was anonymous music that frequently had catchy, commanding textures but rarely any deeply rooted personal edge.

Against the aftermath of Sept. 11, it’s tempting to think there will be renewed interest in the personal commentary and introspection that can result from singers telling their stories. If so, this fall’s bounty of albums makes plenty of heartfelt music available.

Although few of the songs in this fall’s batch of albums are direct reflections on the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, all four of the singer-songwriters interviewed for this article say that day affected them as artists.

India.Arie, part of the refreshing neo-soul movement that includes singer-songwriters Alicia Keys and Hill, says Sept. 11 underscored her belief that music can be a positive social force.

“I always felt that music had this special power, but it was mostly a theory--until I started seeing it for myself,” says Arie, 26, whose “Acoustic Soul” album last year led to seven Grammy nominations, including best album. “There’s a connection that you can feel on stage and in talking to people about music--and that’s especially true after Sept. 11.”

Adds Ron Sexsmith, 38, whose wistful tunes tend to have uplifting components, “I did a show with Lucinda Williams on Sept. 12 [2001] and we didn’t know if people were going to show up or be in the mood to listen to music because it was such a scary time.

“But I played this song, ‘Former Glory,’ that I had written for the new album and you could feel people responding to it as if it had just been written that day, and that felt good.”

For anyone under 40, the idea that pop music isn’t built around singers telling their own stories must sound strange. But for generations, pop was guys (mostly) in New York (or Nashville or Los Angeles) writing songs such as “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and Patti Page (or Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole) singing them.

There were songwriters in the “secondary” fields of country, folk and blues who sang their own tunes, but the songs were usually re-recorded by pop singers if the songs were to be accepted in the pop market.

All those great Hank Williams country ballads, including “Cold, Cold Heart” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” were pop hits, but only after Tony Bennett and Joni James recorded them.

Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” and Woody Guthrie’s “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Ya)” only reached the Top 10 through remakes by the Weavers.

There were, of course, many, many great songwriters before Dylan, and their songs sometimes fell into just the right hands--Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra is one of many perfect matches. Mostly, though, the separation of writing and singing worked against the soulfulness and character of recordings.

By drawing on the singer-songwriter traditions of country, folk and blues, some of the early rock stars--notably Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly--helped open a door for Dylan by writing their own songs.

Berry was by far the most significant of these pioneers. Although some of his biggest hits were novelty tales designed to catch the teen ear with their wordplay (“Sweet Little Sixteen”), Berry wove social observation into other songs (“You Never Can Tell” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”) that helped lift the aspirations of rock ‘n’ roll songwriting.

The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and the Beatles’ Lennon and McCartney were making strong strides in furthering this tradition, but it was Dylan’s merging of the folk, blues and country traditions with the explosive energy of rock in the mid-’60s that remains a landmark moment in pop.

He not only made rock safe for social ideas, but also wrote love songs with the same intensity and fearlessness as his commentaries. John Lennon often pointed to Dylan as the reason his own writing took on deeper and more inspiring edges.

Together, Dylan and the Beatles made it mandatory for any self-respecting rocker to write his own material.

“Woody Guthrie kind of invented our job, but Dylan upped the ante for all of us,” says Earle, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter. “He had a pop sensibility and he understood you don’t need a classic voice. He took out the middleman in pop music and let us all speak to one another directly.”

Unlike India.Arie and Sexsmith, Rhett Miller and Earle did write post-Sept. 11 songs. Miller, however, was reluctant to do so.

The Old 97’s leader, whose first solo album, “The Instigator,” is due Sept. 24, lived so close to the World Trade Center that he and his now-wife, model Erica Iahn, felt pieces of burning metal in their hair as they raced from their building that morning.

Returning to the apartment a few weeks later to pick up their belongings, Miller noticed workmen removing rubble from around abandoned cars in a parking lot below. He realized the cars had been owned by people killed in the World Trade Center collapse.

He wrote a song about it--a sort of Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl tale, he says. But Miller, 32, felt uncomfortable about putting such a direct Sept. 11 reflection on the album. Fearful of exploiting the tragedy, he even feels hesitant talking about the song and Sept. 11.

But he does acknowledge that the emotions of his experience crept into at least one of the album’s songs, “Your Nervous Heart.” It’s about feeling vulnerable and wanting to comfort a loved one.

There are other songs on Miller’s album--especially the tender “Things That Disappear”--that may be seen as post-Sept. 11 reflections, even though they were written earlier.

Like many of us, Earle watched the collapse of the towers on television.

“I think everybody in the country was on the same wave length for about 45 minutes,” says Earle, 47. “I think we were all focused on the victims and we were scared. But eventually there is a moment when you start worrying about how it affects you.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh no, all the work we’ve done against the death penalty is going to go out the window because this country is really going to be in the mood for revenge.’ But that hasn’t happened, thankfully.

“The next thing was that I started thinking about my 20-year-old son, because he’s registered for the draft.”

Soon, Earle, whose music has had a social consciousness ever since his acclaimed “Guitar Town” collection in 1986, began thinking about the country’s response to the attacks.

“I think we are seeing a time when our civil liberties are definitely in danger,” he says now. “We are doing it to ourselves. We are giving our law enforcement officials and military a blank check to do whatever they want to do. As soon as I heard the term ‘war’ on television that day, I knew it was time to starting writing.”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com