A singer-songwriter is a person who writes songs and then sings them. There's more to it than that, however: the "singer-songwriter" label is associated with certain styles of music. Traditionally, the label refers to Three Chords and the Truth music in which a single singer accompanies himself with only an acoustic guitar or a piano, but you'll also find singer-songwriters in pop and rock. The defining characteristics of a singer-songwriter is that he is billed individually rather than as part of a band, that he writes his own songs, and that the emphasis is on the lyrics rather than on complex music (this is why you don't call Jimi Hendrix or Frank Zappa "singer-songwriters", even though they did sing and write songs).

In Russia, this includes the entire bard music (authors' song) genre. This genre started back in 19th century and has continued to expand and transform ever since. It's impossible to list those not already having an article here, given that lists of the names starting with most letters of Cyrillic alphabet on bards.ru are several times longer than this whole page, and they miss half of the names popular in fandom in last 20 years or more.

May or may not write Protest Songs, Filk Songs, or both.