This special issue of Popular Music honours the contribution of a distinguished musicologist to the study of popular music. It was Wilfrid Mellers who, together with Charles Hamm, pioneered the study of popular music as a respectable undertaking within musicology before popular music studies itself began to become a continuing and critical intellectual tradition in the late 1970s. As with Charles Hamm, Wilfrid Mellers' contribution to the study of popular music has not been restricted to scholarship alone. As founding Chair of the Department of Music at the University of York, Wilfrid Mellers created an intellectual and institutional environment within which it was possible for undergraduate and graduate students alike to undertake the serious academic study of popular music. Without this environment it is possible that the careers both of Richard Middleton and myself would have turned out differently.

Irving Berlin's 200-odd songs written between 1907, the date of the first one, and late 1914, when his first complete show for the musical stage (Watch Your Step) opened at New York's Globe Theatre, are virtually identical to one another in their published piano/vocal format. Like other Tin Pan Alley songs of the early twentieth century, most of them consist of a brief piano introduction, a few bars of vamp, then several verses, each followed by a chorus. All are in major keys and most have a tempo marking of moderato. Piano introductions are drawn from either the first or last phrase of the chorus, the vamp anticipates the melodic beginning of the verse, and both verse and chorus are usually made up of four 4-bar phrases in C or four 8-bar phrases in other metres.

Wilfrid Mellers was one of the first scholars of American music to recognise that jazz was situated within many of the major contexts and controversies of American civilisation. In Music in a New Found Land (1965) and Caliban Reborn (1967), he argued eloquently that jazz was the music which both expressed and challenged urban alienation from a distinctly African-American point of view.

For reasons which would themselves be worthy of an article, the musical theatre has been almost entirely ignored by popular music scholarship. This has often puzzled me, since such factors as the musical theatre's ambiguous position in the high/low culture debate, its close relationship with film (film musicals were for a time a favoured subject – with film theorists), its persistent playing with the links between song and drama, the sociality of its performance conventions, the durability of the amateur performance tradition, to name but a few, together suggest a promising vein of study. Musical theatre songs have been the subject of intermittent scholarly investigation, mostly from a perspective derived from classical musicology. Wilfrid Mellers, characteristically, sought meaning through musicology (he speaks of Cole Porter's chromatics as telling us ‘regretfully, that we are kidding ourselves’ (in love) and of the ‘queasy honesty’ of ‘Anything Goes’), but found too many musicals tend to ‘create an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions’ and never get beyond that point. (Mellers 1964, pp. 384, 385).

This is a brief meditation on ethnicity as a source of all powerful musical styles, as a kind of curse in the contemporary world of nation states, and as an ever more complex puzzle for every student of popular music to solve.

In 1993 several of the British national newspapers published obituaries of a Liverpool schoolteacher, Alan Durband. He had been a key figure in the establishment of the Everyman Theatre in the city and he was the former head of English teaching at the Liverpool Institute, the school which is shortly to be reopened as the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Among Durband's students in the 1950s were Paul McCartney and George Harrison. ‘His love of the English language was infectious’, wrote one of Durband's obituarists and it is tempting to imagine a link between this enthusiasm and the lyricist who produced ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘For No One’.

In his comprehensive celebration of women singers in the twentieth century, Wilfrid Mellers proposed a three-stage socio-musical evolution from the jazz, blues and gospel songs sung by black women, through the black-inspired white singers who followed them, to a new synthesis of singing poet-composers (Mellers 1986). Within this third category, very much the main point of the book, Mellers deals in considerable detail with a range of singer/song writers, from Joni Mitchell and Dory Previn to Rickie Lee Jones and Laurie Anderson. In this article I should like to take this concept of the woman singer/song writer as a point of departure from which to look at two very different kinds of singer: different, that is, both from each other and from any of the singers dealt with in the Mellers book. It has always seemed to me to be characteristic of much of Wilfrid Mellers' writing (and certainly of Angels of the Night) that he never lets his musicological agenda get in the way of his fundamental enjoyment of the music as a fan trying to make sense of his own taste. The reader can accept or reject his thoughts about the significance of it all, and not get so blinded by musicology that you cannot face listening to the songs: that, after all, is in the end what we are supposed to do. In what follows, I, too, write as a fan, but since performers do not often get the chance to bite back at musicologists, I should also like to take the opportunity to question from a singer's point of view a certain kind of performance analysis used by many musicologists. The subject is fraught with ideological booby-traps, so I should confess right away that I am a middle-class, middle-aged English married father.