African American Studies Commons^™

Crooning On The Fault Lines: Theorizing Jazz And Pop Vocal Singing Discourse In The Rock Era, 1955-1978, Vincent L. Stephens

Vincent L Stephens

The critical boundaries drawn between pop crooning and jazz singing are less discrete than commonly perceived by critics and historians. Commercial choices rather than clear-cut aesthetic differences have influenced classifications of non-improvisers like Tony Bennett and Peggy Lee as “jazz” singers, a category presumed to represent the ultimate in vocal interpretation. Comparatively, singers like Johnny Mathis and Barbra Streisand are aesthetically similar to prerock crooners (PRCs) but typically understood as pop singers and thus on a lower interpretive tier. This article interrogates the binary by examining the overlaps and divergences between PRCs whose recording careers (mostly) began during the big …