Historical accounts of popular songwriting during the 1960s have tended to highlight the contributions made by prominent writer-performers such as Bob Dylan and John Lennon-Paul McCartney, and marginalize the contributions made by the numerous non-performing songwriters who were also successful at this time. The emergence of a balanced account of the development of 1960s popular songwriting has been hampered by the absence of a substantial body of information pertaining to a broad range of 1960s song texts.
The present study applies a range of lyrical and musical text analysis techniques to a large number of songs written by the most successful writers of U.S. top forty singles between 1963 and 1966. Comparisons are made between the stylistic characteristics of songs written by individual songwriters, as well as those written by particular groups of songwriters - such as Brill Building writers, black pop crossover writers, British Invasion writers and white writer-performers. Information obtained from the text analysis procedures is employed, together with contextual information, to monitor the development of popular songwriting during an important period of transition, and to re-examine some common interpretations of the history of the 1960s popular song.
The results of the procedures described above suggest that Curtis Mayfield and the Motown songwriters (in particular Brian Holland-Lamont Dozier-Eddie Holland) - whose songs represent a substantial infusion of gospel-based elements into the U.S. top forty - should be accorded a much more prominent place in the history of the 1960s pop song. In addition, although the new writer-performers represented a significant challenge to a number of the established professional songwriters, and often articulated the rebelliousness and growing social awareness of 1960s youth, many of the new songs - particularly those associated with the early British Invasion - have clear stylistic connections to preceding, often-denigrated songwriting traditions.