35 American writers about music

Doug Adams is a musician, author, lecturer, and educator. He is the author of The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films, a book about the music in The Lord of the Rings films.

William Berger is an American author, radio music host and commentator.

John C. Bohlinger III is an American musician and writer who worked primarily in television as a band leader/music director for The USA Network's "Real Country", NBC's program Nashville Star and The GAC Network's series, The Next GAC Star, the "CMT Music Awards" from 2009 to 2019, CMT's Christmas Special featuring "Larry The Cable Guy" as well as PBS's "The Outlaw Trail", GAC networks' 2012 "Christmas with Scotty McCreery & Friends". In 2013, Bohlinger became the Nashville video correspondent for Premier Guitar where he films Review Demos of musical gear and Rig Rundown interviews with celebrity guitarists.

John Franklin Botume was a singer, choir director and vocal pedagogist. He is the author of several books on singing including Modern Singing Methods: Their Use and Abuse (1885).

Thea Bowman was a Roman Catholic religious sister, teacher, and scholar who made a major contribution to the ministry of the Catholic Church toward her fellow African Americans. She became an evangelist among her people, assisted in the production of an African American Catholic hymnal, and was a popular speaker on faith and spirituality in her final years. She helped found the National Black Sisters Conference to provide support for African-American women in Catholic religious institutes. Bowman has been designated a Servant of God.

Ian Brennan is an American music producer, author and lecturer on violence prevention.

Dudley Buck was an American composer, organist, and writer on music. He published several books, most notably the Dictionary of Musical Terms and Influence of the Organ in History, which was published in New York City in 1882.

Helen Louise Bullock was a musical educator, temperance reformer, women's prison reformer, suffragist, and philanthropist from the U.S. state of New York. For 35 years, she taught piano, organ and guitar. She gave up her profession of music, in which she had achieved some prominence, to become a practical volunteer in the work for suffrage and temperance. In 1889, she was appointed national organizer of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and in that work went from Maine to California, traveling 13,000 miles (21,000 km) in one year. During the first five years of her work, she held over 1,200 meetings, organizing 108 new unions and secured over 10,000 new members, active and honorary. She received in one year the largest two prizes ever given by the national WCTU for organizing work.

David Byrne is a British-American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, artist, actor, writer, music theorist, and filmmaker, who was a founding member and the principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the American new wave band Talking Heads.

Matthew Chojnacki, is an American writer on film and music. Chojnacki's company, 1984 Publishing, releases pop culture books and soundtracks LPs.

James Francis Cooke spent his life involved with music. He was a pianist, composer, playwright, journalist, author, a president of Theodore Presser music publishers from 1925 to 1936, and editor of The Etude music magazine from 1907 to 1950, or 1913 to 1956. He taught piano for more than twenty years in New York, led choral clubs and taught voice. He also gave music-topic lectures.

Konrad Claude Dryden is an American author who has written extensively on Italian opera, particularly about the movement known as Verismo.

Jacob Eisenberg (1898–1964) was an American pianist, teacher and author of books and articles on the piano. He was married to Ruth Brewer Eisenberg, "Ivory" of the piano duo, Ebony and Ivory.

James Edwin Ferguson is an American guitarist, composer, journalist, and educator.

Bill Flanagan is an American author, television executive and radio host. He was born in Rhode Island and graduated from Brown University in 1977. His books include Written in My Soul (1986), Last of the Moe Haircuts (1986), U2 at the End of the World (1995), and the novels A&R (2000), New Bedlam (2007), Evening's Empire (2010), and Fifty in Reverse (2020).

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an American award-winning essayist. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2018 for her profile of white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof, as well as a National Magazine Award. She was also a National Magazine Award finalist in 2014 for her profile of elusive comedian Dave Chappelle. Her first book, The Explainers and the Explorers, is forthcoming from Random House.

Edgar Stillman Kelley was an American composer, conductor, teacher, and writer on music. He is sometimes associated with the Indianist movement in American music.

Darlene Koldenhoven is an American musician. Darlene won a Grammy Award for her singing.

Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media.

Sara Marcus is a writer and musician best known for her 2010 book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.

Isaac Marion is an American writer. He is best known as the best-selling author of the "zombie romance" novel Warm Bodies and its series.

Rebeca Mauleón is an American pianist, composer, arranger and writer, specializing in salsa and other Latin American and Afro-Caribbean music.

Leon Milo is an American composer, percussionist and sound artist.

Havelock Nelson (born May 6, 1964) is a music journalist and co-author of the 1992 book Bring The Noise: A Guide To Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture. Nelson was Billboard magazine’s first rap editor.

Guy Harley Oseary is an American talent manager, investor, writer and businessman. His clients include Madonna and U2.

Charles Alan Philips is an American writer and investigative journalist. From 1995 to 2008 he worked for the Los Angeles Times, after first freelancing for the newspaper.

Fiona Karen Ritchie MBE is a Scottish radio broadcaster best known as the producer and host of The Thistle & Shamrock, an hour-long Celtic music program that airs weekly throughout the United States on National Public Radio (NPR). She also curates ThistleRadio, a 24/7 web-based music channel devoted to new and classic music from Celtic roots and is co-author of The New York Times Best Seller Wayfaring Strangers.

Mark Rotella is an American author and Senior Editor at Publishers Weekly.

Bill Simon was an American songwriter, musician and music critic. He was a contributor to the music business in the mid-20th century, notably as a jazz commentator for Billboard Magazine and other publications.

Neil Darrow Strauss, also known by the pen names Style and Chris Powles, is an American author, journalist and ghostwriter. He is best known for his book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, in which he describes his experiences in the seduction community in an effort to become a "pick-up artist." He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also wrote regularly for The New York Times.

Paul Tanner was an American musician and a member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. He developed and played the Electro-Theremin, a theremin soundalike instrument that is best known for its use on the Beach Boys 1966 songs "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and "Good Vibrations".

Pat Thomas is a San Francisco-based musician, music journalist and producer of music reissues.

Irving Townsend (1920–1981) was an American record producer and author. He is most famous for having produced the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which is the best-selling jazz album of all time according to the RIAA. He later served as president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States.

Richie Unterberger is an American author and journalist whose focus is popular music and travel writing.

Robert Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written numerous award-winning books and articles including, most notably, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.