Most Overrated Musical Tradition:

The singer-songwriter tradition. What’s more American than a kid named Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, reinventing himself—taking the name of a Welsh poet and copying the style of a Depression-era folksinger? After Bob Dylan took his guitar case on the road to New York, however, in addition to writing some nice songs, he inspired an earnest army of guitar poets who took a dubious message from his example: that songs had to be homemade in order to be deeply, authentically felt by their listeners. The singer-songwriter movement was born, with its credo that a song’s value was morally tied up with its authorship by the singer (however clumsily constructed or performed). Generational distrust about the corporate music business elevated the raw, sincere singer.

A true singer-songwriter could sneer at the preponderance of “covers” of other people’s tunes listed on a performer’s LP. What had been a strength for Sinatra or Billie Holiday—the ability to interpret and convincingly feel the moods of a variety of people’s compositions—was now suspect and slick. There were notable exceptions to the moral code: Throughout the singersongwriter decades, Aretha Franklin stubbornly refashioned other people’s songs into hits with her outsized voice (beginning with Ronnie Shannon’s “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” and Otis Reading’s “Respect” in 1967), and no one dared question her authenticity.

The singer-songwriter imperative is weakened but still with us, providing new voices and nonvoices each year, but it’s had some holes poked in it by hip-hop music (with its “sampling” of old tunes in new compositions) and by the commercial examples of people like Madonna, who can neither write nor sing but, like the old-time record executives the singersongwriters had meant to replace, knows a marketable hit when it is brought to her.

Most Underrated Musical Tradition:

The drum battle. Most music critics would rather listen to a wood mulcher than a drum solo, but the drum or trap set itself may be our great undervalued musical instrument, evolving from the era of one-man bands and ultimately (in the hands of a melodic rhythm artist like the great Count Basic drummer Jo Jones) able to evoke a wider range of musical moods than some more celebrated native inventions like the ever-hopeful banjo. The trap set was a natural driving force in early jazz combos, of course, but it took center stage during the swing era, when each big band was anchored by its rhythm star: Gene Krupa, Big Sid Catlett, Cozy Cole, Jo Jones, Dave Tough, Chick Webb, Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson. The classic drum battle was really a break time for the singers or other band members, but it nonetheless became a crowd favorite: the battle of the bands winnowed down to simply drummer versus drummer.

The ferociously crisp playing of Buddy Rich (of Artie Shaw’s and other bands) blew away Benny Goodman’s former drummer Gene Krupa in such a contest,