More than 25,000 people filled out a New York Times readers' poll on the 30 greatest living American songwriters, and their ballots produced a ranking built from nearly 12,000 distinct choices. Each voter could write in up to 10 names, and the paper's editors spent weeks sorting the results into a top 100.
That is why the poll is drawing attention now: it was not a small critic's exercise, but a mass ballot in which more than 25,000 readers took part. The list was created after the paper made its own ranking of the 30 greatest living American songwriters and then invited readers to build a version of their own.
The tabulation was messy enough to need a long cleanup. A rough first pass at standardizing votes brought the list down to below 7,000 names, before editors combined variants, removed ineligible candidates and counted the readers' top 100. Even after that work, the field remained narrow at the top: fewer than 200 eligible songwriters drew more than 100 votes, while thousands received only one.
One voter, described as the 1,001st person to vote for Billy Joel, captured the scale and variety of the response in a single ballot. The result also shows how strongly the list leans toward artists who write and sing their own songs: only one of the readers' top 30 is not primarily known for performing his own material, and the lineup is relatively light on genres such as R&B, where songwriting and performance have often been split apart.
That tilt matters because it shapes what the ranking can and cannot measure. Readers clearly embraced the poll, but the habits of the ballot pushed it toward singer-songwriters and away from corners of American music where the craft is more likely to live behind the microphone. The full readers' ranking continues well beyond the top 30, but the deeper story is already plain: this was a broad vote, and it produced a list that says as much about who shows up to rank songwriters as it does about songwriting itself.
