Until the development of recording at the end of the nineteenth century all analysis of singing styles and techniques is inevitably limited to what can be gathered from written sources. Recording allows direct access to the primary source, albeit one that has been manipulated by both technology and commerce. It also enables the singing of popular music to be analysed on similar terms to classical singing. Working directly with the primary source material means that it is possible to show clearly the progression of singing style in all its phases within varieties, as well as to analyse the relationship between the classical and the popular. In American popular singing, jazz established, and then lost, its dominant status over other popular varieties as it went through the three-stage process of development, decadence and renewal. This chapter explains how the process operated in the popular music field during the first half of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the roles of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

Even the earliest recordings were intended to be ‘performances’ despite the novelty of projecting them by remote control into listeners' living rooms and the circumstances (without a ‘live’ audience) of capturing performances using the new technology. Recording, as opposed to public performance, is a private medium in which a one-to-one relationship is established between singer and listener who are probably unknown to each other and who will probably never see one another.