LibGuides: Music Biographical Research: Biographical Research

Biographies Online

I probably don't need to tell you that some of what you find online might not be entirely true...

Proceed with caution when using any webpages as sources in your biographical research, considering:

Your person has a legitimate personal website that can be verified.
The biographical information is posted on a trusted news website or reputable organization site.

This isn't always as easy as it sounds. There may be a fan page, or information copied from other sources... with changes.

Biography.com
Biography.com can be a good source for biographical information on musicians. It's not a replacement for research in one of our databases, though!

Biographical Databases

Each of the following databases contains biographical information, although some will have more than others.

A great place to start is Oxford Music Online, which includes biographical information on composers and musicians from all periods and styles.

A good resource is with Credo Reference, which is a collection of online encyclopedias where you might find multiple biographies for the person you're researching.

Credo Reference's Academic Core This link opens in a new window The Credo Reference database is a portal to over 1,300 full-text reference titles from over 120 major publishers. Easy to search and browse, the Credo platform provides access to text, images, maps, statistics, and graphic concept maps to illustrate connections among and between topics. The titles, which range across subjects in art, biography, business, geography, history language, law, literature, medicine, music, philosophy, psychology, religion, science, the social sciences, and technology, are fully integrated through the Credo search platform, and the Credo database also provides numerous points for accessing other Cheng Library resources. Credo is a most useful starting point for general research on almost any topic.
America: History and Life This link opens in a new window Bibliographic database contains over 450,000 citations and abstracts for journal and magazine articles, book and media reviews, and dissertations covering the world's scholarly literature about the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. Includes material from over 1,820 journals and magazines written in over 40 languages, although the majority of items were published in English. Most of the items in the database were issued after 1954. Many records contain links to full-text articles in other Library databases. [1954 - present]
Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window Oxford Music Online is a full-text portal to high-quality music reference sources, including the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, containing over 50,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, instruments and notation, forms and genres, and individual works. The database also includes the full text of The Oxford Companion to Music and The Oxford Dictionary of Music.
Salem History (Decades in America, Great Lives, Milestone Documents) This link opens in a new window The Salem History portal provides full-text access to several major series published by Salem Press, inclduing Decades in America (1920s-1990s), Great Lives from History, and Milestone Documents.

If you're not finding enough, or if your artist is still alive, you might also want to explore one of our current events databases. Here you will find performance and recording reviews, interviews, etc.

ProQuest Newsstream This link opens in a new window Full-text access to newspapers and other news media from the United States, Canada, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Important titles include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Times (London), The Bangkok Post, El Norte, Financial Times, The Guardian, Jerusalem Post, South China Morning Post, The Daily Telegraph, Asian Wall Street Journal, and the BBC Monitoring series of publications, plus many other major news publications.

Biographical Books & Encyclopedias

The Library has a large collection of biographical books (including dictionaries and encyclopedias), which cover a wide range of subject areas.

The easiest way to find these types of materials is through the Books & Media tab on our homepage.

Try using the keyword biography in combination with your artist's name, and see what you get!

Giants of Jazz by Studs Terkel; Robert Galster
Call Number: ML385 .T45 2002
Biographical Dictionary of Jazz by Charles Eugene Claghorn
Call Number: ML105 .C59 1982
The Billboard Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues by Howard Mandel (Editor)
Call Number: ML102.J3 B55 2005

Hard To Find People

It may be difficult to find biographies on some musicians, especially if they are very current or not very well known.

In these cases, you might consider searching for articles about them, instead of strictly looking for biographies. Sometimes you can piece together a complete picture by using bits and pieces from different sources (performance and recording reviews, interviews, obituaries, etc.).