Toby Martin (University of Huddersfield, UK)
Songwriting is a poetic response to the world. As such – and as music – it can give voice to thoughts that are difficult to express through conventional testimony. Song is not autobiography; it is persona, and can provide a theatrical way of structuring narrative that obscures or complicates the songwriter’s identity (Bradley: 300). Songwriting in marginalised communities can, therefore, be a particularly useful way of exploring social issues as it provides an oblique way of approaching a story, and provides a shield behind which difficult and challenging ideas can be tackled.
This paper will consider the possibilities for songwriting in community settings as a form of research into social issues. In doing so it will draw on a number of sessions and workshops that the author has worked on, as a songwriter or facilitator . These sessions have taken place in criminal justice settings, with refugees and recent migrants, and with Indigenous communities, both in Australia and in the UK. These sessions have produced striking and original ways of looking at important social issues. For instance, songs written in these sessions have considered the historic issue of forced adoption of Aboriginal people in Australia (known as the ‘Stolen Generations’), and around conflicted feelings about home amongst people in criminal justice settings. Songs from marginalised communities are a form of social inquiry in themselves (Urie et al), but also through commercial recordings have the potential to provide marginalised, or silenced voices, with a wider audience.
This paper will also consider the possibilities for songwriting to be a form of practice-led research more broadly.
References
Adam Bradley, The Poetry of Pop, Harvard University Press, Yale, 2017
Alison Urie et al, ‘Reintegration, Hospitality and Hostility Song-writing and Song-sharing in Criminal Justice’ Journal of Extreme Anthropology, 3:1, 2019, 77-110