About

Richard Elliott is a cultural musicologist with a particular interest in popular musics of the world. He is the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (Ashgate, 2010), Nina Simone (Equinox, 2013), The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), The Sound of Nonsense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and DJs do Guetto (2022, part of Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 Europe series) He has also published articles and reviews on popular music, literature, consciousness, ageing, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology.

Richard’s research interests are wide but mostly connect to ways in which music reflects and produces time, space and memorable objects. His early work explored the roles played by loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music and was heavily influenced by theories of place and spatiality. These ideas were developed in his first book Fado and the Place of Longing, which analysed Portuguese fado music as a reflection and production of space and place.

The topics of memory, nostalgia and revolution are also present in Richard’s book on Nina Simone, which combined history, biography and song analysis and which – unusually for publications about this artist – explored the whole of Simone’s career. As well as attending to the often-discussed role Simone played in the civil rights era of the 1960s, Richard discusses the artist’s late style and starts to outline his theory of the late voice.

Another ongoing theme in Richard’s work is the various ways in which music creates or evokes ‘memory places’ that take on significance for individuals and communities. More recent work reflects music’s potential to soundtrack lives and histories; His 2015 book The Late Voice explores the representation of time, age and experience in popular song, building its narrative around extended case studies of Ralph Stanley, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. Richard has written further about late voice in the work of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, and in a study of the song ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes‘, also contributing to an episode of the BBC series Soul Music devoted to that song. In a related vein, Richard’s article on popular music and aging features in the Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging.

The Sound of Nonsense, published at the very end of 2017 (with a 2018 publication date), reflects Richard’s interest in words, music and sound studies. It brings together novelists, nonsense writers, sound poets, experimental composers, comedians and pop musicians in an attempt to get at the role of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning. The book builds on ideas previously explored in two articles about the musician Robert Wyatt.

Richard’s other areas of specialisation include the global span of popular music styles from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, music and cultural theory, urban musicology, the poetics of song and the politics of authenticity. He has a background in a variety of disciplines, having gained a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative American Studies, a Master’s in Popular Culture and a PhD in Music.

 

Richard is currently conducting research on the materiality of song and on the representation of global popular musics in the phonographic era. This work is appearing in a variety of formats, including a podcast about songs and objects, an article about Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson’s object-oriented songcraft (forthcoming in Songwriting Studies), an entry in the 33 1/3 Europe series on DJs do Guetto (a 2006 compilation of Luso-African batida (beats)) and a chapter on the 1981 pop song ‘Japanese Boy’ for a collection about One-Hit Wonders.