Music for Middlebrows: Defining the Easy Listening Era, 1946–1966

By Keir Keightley


As an object of historical elision and nomenclatural confusion, "easy listening" offers us an opportunity to explore the construction of meaning and value for popular music. Although its referents subtly shift from the 1940s to the 1960s—from radio programming to relaxing background music to adult-oriented pop in general—"easy listening" can be shown to possess a strong degree of coherence as the historical name for that otherwise nameless and neglected period of twentieth-century popular music: the mainstream between the end of the swing era circa 1946 and the rise of rock culture after 1966. Of course, easy listening did not disappear during the rock era; it lived on long past 1966 and flourishes today in a range of contexts that include chill-out recordings and Adult Contemporary radio formats. But this essay focuses on the historical period when easy listening was the dominant form of popular music in the United States and Canada. In popular music historiography, this period has long been ignored and indeed is rarely even taken to constitute a distinct period, unlike the swing or rock eras that respectively preceded and succeeded it. While the lounge revival of the 1990s made important contributions in recovering aspects of this musical formation, particularly in the long-neglected area of discography, there is almost no scholarly historical work that attempts to make sense of what was, in point of fact, the most successful musical mainstream of the twentieth century prior to rock.