The EPMOW Biography volumes contain entries on biographies of key popular music personnel worldwide. Included are entries on record producers and engineers; technological innovators; record company heads and other industry figures; important journalists, critics and scholars; individual songwriters, composers, lyricists, performers and groups. A much wider range than is to be found in comparable reference works. All entries conclude with a bibliography, discographical references and discography, with additional information on sheet music listings and visual recordings. Written by leading popular music scholars and other music professionals and edited by a team of distinguished scholars in the field, this encyclopedia set is the first comprehensive and scholarly reference work on popular music personnel world-wide (competing texts focus on the Anglophone world and often give much thinner coverage of contemporary popular music in favour of classical or traditional musics). Each entry strikes a balance between biography and critical assessment, interweaving the two into a more interesting and informative narrative than is provided by the customary division of music biographies into 'life and works'.

Author Biography

John Shepherd is Chancellor's Professor of music and sociology, and Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at Carleton University, ON. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. David Horn was a founding editor of the journal Popular Music (Cambridge University Press, 1981+), and a founding member of IASPM (The International Association for the Study of Popular Music). He was Director of the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool from 1988 until his retirement in 2002. Together with the blues scholar Paul Oliver he first proposed the idea of EPMOW in the 1980s, and has worked on the project since that time. Other recent publications include two edited volumes: The Cambridge Companion to Jazz (with Mervyn Cooke, 2002), and a special issue of Popular Music in honour of Paul Oliver (2006).