Writing about popular music has not always been the most esteemed vocation. It’s been famously likened to “dancing about architecture,” a bon mot that’s been attributed to everyone from art-rocker Laurie Anderson to comedian Martin Mull. Frank Zappa once described music journalism as “people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”1 And David Lee Roth, the erstwhile lead singer of Van Halen, once remarked that the reason critics liked the bookish singer-songwriter Elvis Costello’s music so much is because he looked like them. Chronicling pop has historically been something of a thankless chore, even as it’s also been a pretty fun one.At least two of the above quips find their way into Eric Weisbard’s remarkable new work, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music. (I didn’t see the Zappa quote, but it’s possible I missed it.) Songbooks is essentially an annotated bibliography of something like the American pop-writing tradition, even if its scope frequently exceeds the standard boundaries of both “American” and “pop,” and its sheer variety engulfs “writing” in nearly all its far-flung forms, with the only stipulation that everything covered here has to be an actual book. “The range of books” represented here, writes Weisbard, “makes an argument for intellectual history, comparable to pop’s implications for music history” (2).Songbooks is difficult to describe, in part because I don’t think there’s ever been a book quite like it. It consists of more than 150 short essays on books that Weisbard (who is a departing editor of this journal) holds to be pivotal in the canon of writing about American popular music. These entries are divided into seven sections, proceed chronologically, and span close to 250 years, beginning with William Billings’s 1770 song collection New-England Psalm-Singer and ending with Jay-Z’s 2010 memoir Decoded. And yet each individual entry offers a whole bibliography of its own. The essay on Billings, for instance, focuses less on the details of his book and more about its prominent place in foundational works by Americanist musicologists such as H. Wiley Hitchcock and Richard Crawford. Jumping forward 206 years, an entry on Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s 1976 edited volume Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subculture in Post-War Britain—a book that has relatively little to say about music and even less about America—largely focuses on the enormous influence that the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies had on pop scholars such as Simon Frith, Eric Lott, and Tricia Rose. Entries on the Beatles and Bob Dylan, probably the two most written-about subjects of the rock and roll era, are rooted in Michael Braun’s 1964 fan-quickie “Love Me Do!”: The Beatles’ Progress and Dylan’s own 2004 quasi-memoir Chronicles, Vol. 1, respectively, and provide whirlwind tours through the reams of words these artists have inspired. “Beatles,” concludes Weisbard, “could not be rethought, just compulsively anthologized” (162).Other books have certainly taken up broadly similar projects to Songbooks. In jazz, for instance, John Gennari’s Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics chronicles the history of jazz criticism; Eric Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists combs jazz and the discourses around it as a terrain of intellectual history, and Robert Gottlieb’s massive anthology Reading Jazz is among the best-known of countless attempts to construct a jazz-writing canon.Songbooks shares some familial traits with all of these books but is sui generis in both its structure and approach. Many of the book’s most interesting entries are its most heterodox and counterintuitive. Essays rooted in books, such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, trace American fiction writers’ literary depictions of American music. Entries on Robert G. O’Meally’s The Jazz Cadence of American Culture and Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century make compelling cases for the ongoing relevance of considering jazz and classical music, respectively, in terms of their relationships to pop and popular music studies.Songbooks’ best moments, though, are when it stays closest to home and pays tribute to the writers whose work has clearly most inspired Weisbard himself. A lovely entry on Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War rightly describes the former librarian’s masterpiece of independent scholarship as “impossible not to romanticize” and situates her as a forerunner to the transnational turn in the historiography of slavery (223). An essay on Robert Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the ‘70s lauds the critic’s movements “between the demands of personal listening and populist listening, between an idea or judgement call produced by a single example and a lifetime thinking about pop in general, between a casual tone and critical rigor” (248). In her 1969 book The Sound of Soul: The Story of Black Music, Weisbard writes that the path-breaking journalist Phyl Garland “found the collegian in Booker T. [Jones], staged a conversation between country/urbane soul figures Albert King and Al Jackson Jr., and used Billy Taylor Taylor? and Les McCann to pinpoint soul’s jazz roots” (185).As Weisbard acknowledges in the book’s introduction, Songbooks isn’t necessarily meant to be read cover to cover. He invites his audience to “read through or hopscotch” (14). For many readers Songbooks will likely function as a useful reference tool, a way of acquainting themselves with quick-hit tours on the literature surrounding figures from Ellington to Elvis. But most reference books aren’t this creative in their approach, this passionate about their subjects, and this sharp in their assessments. They also don’t tend to be this holistically elucidating and thematically nuanced. One argument for reading this book from front to back is to trace the recurrent trends and issues, emerging and receding debates, and the changing shape and scope of Weisbard’s body of literature.One of Songbooks’ more prominent subcurrents is popular music studies’ emergence and gradual institutionalization as an academic field. The book’s later entries skew more academic than its earlier ones, a trend that seems to reflect two concurrent developments. The first of these is the growing acceptance of studying popular music from within the academy, the hard-won ability of graduate students to write Ph.D. dissertations on punk and country and hip-hop and rock and roll, and these dissertations’ finding their way to university presses. The second is trade publishers’ declining appetite for music books and the precarious nature of arts writing in the digital age. As Weisbard himself notes, many of today’s most widely read music critics, such as Jon Caramanica, Lindsay Zoladz, and Craig Jenkins, haven’t (yet) published books, presumably in part because the demands of their day jobs are too consuming and the advances on offer for music books can’t justify the time away from other work. It’s telling that one of the few non-academic books in the final section of Songbooks is by Jay-Z, a billionaire. It would be a somewhat ironic development if writing the history of arguably the most jubilantly populist corner of American culture became the near-exclusive province of people with Ph.D.s.A book with Songbooks’ ambitions can’t remotely aspire to comprehensiveness, and surely there will be readers who quibble with omissions and assessments, an engagement that Weisbard’s energetic and opinionated tone surely welcomes. Songbooks is a Herculean achievement of both research and tribute, a book that excavates and illuminates the intellectual history that it promises and so much more.