Mapping the Culture of Jazz

Jazz, by its musical practices and subculture perpetuates an ‘underground’, male-dominated community, that dictates a musical hierarchy based on one’s ability to play harder, faster, and longer than the next person and one’s ability to generate highly creative, spontaneous musical statements or solos. The importance ascribed to the solo in a jazz performance centres the music in intellectual labour that is not generally associated with women. Because it originates with musical and aesthetical values that eschew European conventions regarding masculinity and femininity, the public and private, black women have been able to negotiate some, but not all of the politics of jazz more stealthily. Although jazz pulls from many different cultural and musical sources, most important is its link with West Africa. The musical traditions of this region differed significantly from those of Europe, as music not only served as an extension of everyday life but was also communal in practice. While there are specific gendered aspects to certain types of ritualised music, for the most part women actively and equally engaged in musical performances. This was the opposite of European traditions, which (largely) prohibited, until the nineteenth century, women from public performance unless within the church. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that women had full access to musical instruction. The roots of jazz are traced back to the musical practices that evolved out of cultural engagement between African slaves and Europeans within the milieu of early America.

The music that came to be called jazz, or jass (the original spelling of the word), developed out of a number of cultural and social practices that excluded women: brass/military bands, rural blues, and ragtime. The confluence of these genres pervaded late-nineteenth-century New Orleans and quickly became an important part of the city’s ritualistic life. There were a number of reasons as to why women musicians were not active in this early period. First, jazz was incubated in spaces that were generally deemed inappropriate for women of good reputation (e.g. streets, brothels, dance halls, the red-light district Storyville). The politics of respectability denoted that no self-respecting woman would perform outside of the home and for monetary profit. Second, there was the prevailing belief that women were not capable musicians or composers by virtue of their emotional and physical abilities. This also extended to gendered notions regarding instruments. Only instruments that did not compromise feminine graces (e.g. piano, harp, guitar, banjo) were acceptable. Thus, women were limited in their music making as well as in exposure to musical instruction.¹ These precepts did not, however, dissuade some women from performing in public and as the popularity of jazz increased, it provided options for working-class blacks to escape poverty.

Americans’ growing infatuation with leisure culture in the late nineteenth century precipitated the mainstreaming of many forms of music that were initially heard primarily within the insular environment of Southern and Midwestern black communities. The integration of ragtime, blues, and spirituals into minstrel shows during this period enabled women performers to develop knowledge of the repertory and performance approaches that were to be identified as the early jazz aesthetic. The women who were able to penetrate the fraternal ranks of the early New Orleans scene did so because their talent was acknowledged and promoted by established male musicians or because they performed as part of familial units. In New Orleans during the early twentieth century, bandleaders like Oscar ‘Papa’ Celestin were important in recognising the talents of young female musicians. For almost two decades he led the house band at the Tuxedo Dance Hall. There were a number of female pianists that worked with the band during this period including Emma Barrett, the celebrated ‘Bell Gal’, and Jeanette Salvant Kimball. Domestic relationships, legal and common-law, also allowed women musicians to navigate the politics of respectability and the perils of the performing life.

Vaudeville and minstrel shows offered the first opportunities for black female performers. Segregation laws in the South and Midwest kept black and white performers separated, but many of the black performers managed to sustain successful careers. The Alabama Minstrels featured Mrs Henry Hart during the 1860s and 1870s. Lisetta Young, mother of famed saxophonist Lester Young, toured first with her family and later with her husband, Billy Young, during the first decade of the twentieth century.² Isabele Taliaferro Spiller travelled with the Musical Spillers, whose personnel included saxophonists Alice Calloway, Mildred Creed, Helen Murphy, Leora Meoux Henderson, and May and Mayda Yorke.³ While these bands featured female brass and woodwind players, most of the professional female musicians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were pianists.

As one of the primary instruments taught to women of status, the piano became the centre of amateur female music making. Most women performed only in the home, but the transition of jazz into dance halls, jook joints, and tent shows provided opportunities for many black women. These women created a stomping, strong style of piano playing that became commonly known as ‘gutbucket’ or ‘barrelhouse’ piano. This style reflected a pianist’s ability to capture the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic aspects of the complete band within the full range of the piano. Gutbucket and barrelhouse piano styles were identified by their driving left-hand rhythm, which replicated the function of the drums and bass, and the improvised melodies played in the right hand. The melodies performed reflected a range of genres from the blues, to hymns, rags, and stomps.

Emma Barrett (1898–1982) was one of the first notable women to convey this style in early New Orleans jazz bands. Barrett learned to play by listening to street musicians. She became a member of Papa Celestin’s famed Original Tuxedo Orchestra, and in 1923 became the first black female instrumentalist to record.⁴ Like many of her peers, Barrett adapted a hard-driving approach to her playing that shattered the myth of a feminine approach to the piano. She bore the appellation the ‘Bell Gal’ because of her signature outfit; red dress, red garters, and jingling knee bells, which ornamented her playing.⁵ After Celestin disbanded his group in 1928, she played intermittently with other bands for the next decade. She was an important part of the revival of New Orleans jazz during the post-Second-World-War years, performing weekly at the Happy Landing, a nightclub in Pecaniere, Louisiana. In 1961 Riverside Records released the album The Bell Gal and Her Dixieland Boys Featuring Jim Robinson, which provides strong sonic evidence of Barrett’s piano playing. It also reveals the eclecticism of the post-war New Orleans repertory, as the remastered version includes bawdy blues tunes like ‘I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of This Jelly Roll’, standards including ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, and original tunes such as ‘The Bell Gal’s Careless Blues’ and ‘Sweet Emma’s Blues’. She would go on to record three more albums before suffering a stroke in 1968. Despite being partially paralysed, Barrett continued to perform with one hand until her death in 1983.

Migrations and the Birth of New Sounds

As America entered the First World War and continued the progression of the industrial revolution in the North, Southern blacks and whites began to migrate from the South in huge numbers. A parallel migration of jazz musicians brought considerable changes to the cultural life of cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, San Francisco, and New York. It was in these spaces that New Orleans musicians interacted with a growing pool of proficient women musicians. The proliferation of music education within public school systems and the emergence of American conservatories during the last two decades of the nineteenth century significantly impacted the public and private music making of women. No longer relegated to the piano, harp, guitar, and banjo, a generation of brass and woodwind players emerged. Due to the connection between jazz and disreputable forms of leisure culture (e.g. prostitution, drinking, gambling, etc.), white female instrumentalists avoided the genre, opting to focus their attention on classical music and light dinner music. But for black women, the migration of jazz and blues provided opportunities for upward mobility.⁶

At a time when most working-class black women had limited economic choices (e.g. agricultural work, prostitution, domestic work), vaudeville circuits like the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), speakeasies, and nightclubs provided more lucrative ways to make a living. The TOBA was the major booking agency for black vaudeville talent during the time. Despite the problems and hardships encountered by performers, it provided in most cases consistent employment and national exposure. Opportunities increased even more when Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’ in 1920 initiated a recording boom that fuelled America’s thirst for black music during the height of the Jazz Age. While black women dominated this genre as singers, they also provided instrumental accompaniment.

The young black women that came to prominence in this historical period came from similar backgrounds. Most showed some musical promise at an early age and either developed that talent through formal training or on their own. The majority were born in the South and had either remained there or migrated to the North with their families during the years that preceded the First World War. They were raised in fundamental churches and left home during their adolescence to make a better life for themselves or to support their households. Regional music scenes such as those in Kansas City, St Louis, Memphis, New York, and Chicago boasted a roster of several active young women like saxophonist Irma Young and trumpeter Dolly Jones, who played in bands that performed in a variety of settings.

Chicago as Jazz’s Second City

Chicago-based musicians took the foreground in introducing New Orleans jazz to Northern audiences. The genre became an important connection to home for many of the migrants, who discovered that the urban North was not as progressive in its social politics as they had hoped. Despite documented resistance against the proliferation of Southern culture in the North, jazz came to dominate the music scene in 1920s Chicago. One of the leading bands of the era, Joe ‘King’ Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, included one of Chicago’s most talented musicians, Lil Hardin (1898–1971). Known as ‘Jazz Wonder Child’, Hardin’s ability to read and write music made it possible for the unwritten ‘head’ arrangements that dominated the early New Orleans jazz aesthetic to be written down and preserved. Her piano playing, although sometimes very subtle, was featured on many of Oliver’s early recordings, including the famous ‘Dippermouth Blues’, which became an early jazz standard.

In 1924 Hardin changed the course of jazz history when she married a young Louis Armstrong, urged him to pursue a solo career, and instructed him in music fundamentals. Although Armstrong would later deny the impact Lil had on his career, evidence of this influence can be found in his early post-Oliver band recordings. Lil composed a number of the group’s repertory including the celebrated ‘Struttin’ With Some Barbeque’, ‘Brown Girl’, and ‘Hotter Than That’. These arrangements, as well as Louis’ performances, were significant in shifting the performance aesthetic of jazz in the late 1920s. They served as a template for the music produced by the generation of musicians who were increasingly privileging solo improvisation over the collective improvisation of the early New Orleans style. As musicianship increased, the repertory that musicians played widened beyond the standards of the previous generation. Lil Hardin’s arrangements became an important part of a new canon of songs. After the two separated in the 1930s, Lil continued to perform, recording with various all-female and male groups. Unfortunately, she would disappear from national attention during the height of the big band era, only to remerge during the Dixieland Revival of the 1950s.

Hardin’s talent as an arranger was unmistakable, but she was not the only prominent female musician working Chicago’s early jazz scene. Famed bandleader, arranger, and pianist Lovie Austin (1887–1972) started her career playing the vaudeville circuit of the 1920s. Later she led her own group, Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders, directed her own musical shows, and served as the house pianist at Paramount Records. Her stint at Paramount earned her a place in both jazz and blues historiographies, as she provided accompaniment for and wrote arrangements for singers such as Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and Ethel Waters. She worked with noted jazzmen such as Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory during these years. A number of historic recordings from the period bear Austin’s name as pianist or arranger, including ‘Downhearted Blues’ and ‘Travelin’ Blues’, which made her one of the few jazzwomen to profit from the growing popularity of jazz.

Jazz in a New York State of Mind

By the late 1920s New York was replacing Chicago as the city of music, and many musicians migrated east. The Harlem Renaissance and the proliferation of black dance bands and nightclubs drew musicians to New York. The popularity of these bands also marked the beginning of a new ‘age’ in jazz, cultivated by a new generation of players who attempted to validate the black experience with their music. Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, and others gave America new sonic representations of jazz, sparked new dances, and provided new visual images of the jazz musician. Some of these bands consisted of black female musicians, not only as pianists, but also as brass and woodwind players.

The Fletcher Henderson band, which set the standard for thirties big band music, occasionally featured the bandleader’s wife Leora Meoux (1893–1958). Leora played not only the trumpet, but also the saxophone. She met Fletcher while working on a riverboat and credits him and Louis Armstrong with teaching her how to play jazz.⁷ She married Henderson, ‘the architect of swing’, in 1924 and took an active role as arranger, and road manager for the group. Occasionally she played sax and second trumpet in the band, but she was permanently aligned with the Musical Spillers, The Negro Women’s Orchestral and Civic Association, Lil Armstrong’s All-Girl Band, and her own group the Vampires.⁸

Kansas City, Here I Come: The Sound of the Southwestern Jazz Scene

Kansas City, Missouri, just like Chicago and New York, became an important cultural centre due to a burgeoning infrastructure of nightclubs, dance halls, brothels, and bars. The city quickly earned the distinction of being the ‘Casbah of the Midwest’ and served as the de facto ‘capital’ of the Southwestern jazz scene. In this region, which stretched into Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and as far west as Denver, Colorado, territory bands, along with pianists playing both ragtime and a blues-based piano style known as boogie-woogie supported a vibrant musical scene that catered to black and white listeners. A number of musicians, singers, and performers traversed this region, with many opting to remain in the city. Pianist Mary Lou Williams (1910–81) moved to the city in 1928 after her husband, saxophonist John Williams, was asked to join Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy. She was one of a number of women musicians that worked in this vibrant scene. Williams, in her account of these early years, referenced two particular musicians; pianists Julia Lee and Mary Colston Kirk.⁹

Born in 1902, Julia Lee (1902–58) started piano lessons as a child. Her career included stints with groups that extended out of her family. She first worked with her father’s string band, but came to prominence working in her brother’s group, George E. Lee’s Singing Novelty Orchestra. The band served as the training ground for a number of influential musicians, including Lester Young and Charlie Parker.¹⁰ In 1933 Lee started a twenty-year residency at the Tap Room. There she cultivated a diverse repertory that included barrelhouse and boogie piano music, blues standards such as ‘Trouble in Mind’, and bawdy blues songs such as ‘Gotta Gimme Watcha Got’ and ‘My Man Stands Out’, which became her signature. For a time, she led her own band, Julia Lee and Her Boyfriends, which included musicians like Jay McShann, Vic Dickenson, Benny Carter, and Red Norvo. Unlike a number of her peers, Lee stayed in Kansas City all of her life, leaving only for recording sessions with Capitol Records in the 1940s.

Mary Colston Kirk (1900–90) studied music with Wilberforce J. Whiteman, the father of famed bandleader Paul Whiteman, during her formative years.¹¹ She displayed considerable talent, which eventually led to a stint with George Morrison’s Jazz Orchestra. She was one of two female pianists that performed with the band. In 1925 she married tuba player Andy Kirk, and they moved for a short time to Chicago. After the birth of their son, Colson stopped performing publicly except for in church. Andy Kirk joined the band of Terrance T. Holder in the late 1920s, which brought the family back into the Southwestern jazz territory. By the time Mary Lou Williams arrived in Kansas City, Andy Kirk had assumed leadership of the group. Mary Kirk resumed her performing career in Kansas City, forming a trio, which included drummer Paul Gunther and a young Charlie Parker.¹² Later when the Kirks relocated to New York, Mary began teaching at a nursery and elementary school.

Mary Lou Williams was a consummate professional when she arrived in Kansas City in 1928. At a time when most young girls were playing with dolls, Williams, born Mary Burley, was travelling throughout the Midwest with some of the most notable bands of the period including McKinley’s Cotton Pickers. She came to national prominence in 1929 when Kirk’s regular pianist could not make an audition with an A&R man with Brunswick Records. Mary, at the urging of her husband John Williams, played the audition and aided the Kirk band in gaining a recording contract. She made her first solo recordings – the two original stride piano works ‘Night Life’ and ‘Drag ’Em’ – during these sessions. It was also during this session that the appellation ‘Lou’ was added to her name, largely because the engineer thought Mary was too common a name.¹³ Her role in the band extended beyond that of pianist, as she became its primary arranger. Williams’ arranging style was defined by her ability to synthesise the blues and other black folk practices like boogie-woogie into polished, swinging performances (such as ‘Little Joe from Chicago’).¹⁴ She was also known for her unique instrument pairings (as exemplified, for example, through ‘Walkin’ and Swingin’’) and innovative harmonic approaches (such as in ‘Mary’s Idea’). Williams remained with the band until 1942, but by that time her reputation of being an innovative arranger was set. Most of the big bands of that time had at least one of her pieces in their repertoire and she provided arrangements for some of the biggest bands of the period, including Benny Goodman (‘Camel Hop’, ‘Lonely Moments’), Duke Ellington (‘Trumpets No End’), and Jimmy Lunceford (‘What’s Your Story Morning Glory’).

Women and the Globalisation of Jazz

In the years following the First World War, Europe offered some women jazz musicians opportunities that they were denied in the United States. For black musicians it offered freedom from the racial, economic, and cultural oppression they experienced daily in both the North and South. For black women that migrated there, Europe also presented some freedom from gender discrimination, as European audiences seemed enamoured with ‘good’ music regardless of the performer. Singer-dancer Josephine Baker, who arrived in Paris in the 1920s, set the stage for the migration of black women artists. Baker, with her audacious manner and highly charged performances, has come to personify what the French called les années folles.¹⁵

Following Paris’s acceptance of jazz, other European cities began cultivating the genre. Trumpeter Valaida Snow (1905–56) was one of the many jazzwomen who found fame and a cultured life in Europe. She arrived in England in the late 1920s, having already earned a reputation performing on Broadway. From 1926 until 1928 she toured the Far East, and returned to America in 1928. As she alternated between the United States, Russia, Europe, and the Middle East over the next few years, Snow’s popularity increased. In the United States she recorded with Earl Hines’ band, performed on Broadway, and appeared in several film shorts. In 1936 she settled in Europe (Paris and Scandinavia) and became a staple of the European jazz scene. The ‘Queen of the Trumpet’ or ‘Little Louis’, as she was commonly called, came to symbolise glamour and success. The latter was a reference to her musical prowess, which by testimony matched that of Louis Armstrong.¹⁶ She is rumoured to have travelled ‘in an orchid-coloured Mercedes Benz, dressed in an orchid suit, her pet monkey rigged out in an orchid jacket and cap, with the chauffeur in orchid as well’.¹⁷ While Europe offered a positive environment for black jazzwomen, it was not without its problems. The widening radius of Hitler’s invasion of Europe prompted many black and Jewish performers to return to America, but Snow believed her celebrity would shield her. In 1940 she accepted an engagement in Denmark, which shortly thereafter fell to Nazism. She was imprisoned for eighteen months. The circumstances of that imprisonment were debated for many years, as Snow claimed to have been captured by the Nazis. Mark Miller, author of High Hat, Trumpet, and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Valaida Snow, believes she was taken into custody before the invasion to ensure her safety.¹⁸ Although she attempted a comeback upon her release in the mid-1940s, Snow never fully regained the success she had before. In 1956 she died of a cerebral haemorrhage following a performance.

Jazz and the Making of the ‘Girl’

As the popularity of big bands continued to grow, these larger aggregations became the defining paradigm in jazz from the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s. Although a number of women would find roles as instrumentalists in these groups, the female vocalists would greatly influence jazz traditions during this time. Before the 1930s the female jazz vocalist was an anomaly. That is largely because, before the late 1920s and early 1930s, there had not been a discernible jazz vocal tradition. However, when Louis Armstrong began singing wordless improvisations that extended his horn lines, a new vocal practice was born. The emergence of female jazz singers in the late 1920s and early 1930s paralleled the rise of the ‘girl’ as the persona situating the place of women in jazz. ‘Girl’ was a term used to market a context of youthfulness; a vibrancy that correlated with the politics of respectability, and destigmatised jazz. It was used to characterise female instrumentalists and singers regardless of biological age. The rebranding of jazz during this period significantly progressed the mainstreaming and whitening of its culture during the Depression years. The white female vocalist was essential in the early promotion of the image of the ‘girl’.

As the big band rose in popularity many bandleaders sought ways in which to create diversity in their sound and image. At the centre of this change for many was the addition of the female jazz vocalist. Mildred Bailey (1903–51) first manifested this phenomenon when she joined Paul Whiteman’s band in 1929. Bailey was born Mildred Rinker in Tekoa, Washington, but spent her formative years on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in Idaho. As a teenager she worked as a song demonstrator at Woolworth’s department store. Bailey’s sound was initially influenced by the shouting, percussive sound of vaudeville blues women, but it later evolved into a more nuanced, subtle aesthetic. During her career she was known by many different nicknames; ‘The Rockin’ Chair Lady’ (a reference to a popular blues song she recorded with Whiteman) and ‘The Queen of Swing’. Unfortunately, Bailey’s career was hampered by health challenges, as well as her insecurities surrounding her weight. As the girl singer became more and more a part of the big band aesthetic, Bailey faded into obscurity.

The role of the early girl singer morphed into that of musical cheerleader and eye candy during the 1930s. Singers were often chosen more for their physical attributes than their musicianship, causing a rift between the male musician and the female vocalist. Most musicians viewed vocalists as ‘canaries’ or ‘chirpers’ who had no real knowledge of the music and were a waste of time. Bandleaders were no different in their assessments, as the early girl singer aesthetic developed into what I refer to as the 32-bar aesthetic. Most big band arrangements mirrored the 32-bar AABA formula that defined popular song form. Following the statement of the melody (AABA), most arrangements transitioned into cycles of melodic variation between sections, or the entire band and individual solos. Singers were generally restricted to singing the melody only, with the remainder of the performance focusing on the instrumentalists. Those 32 bars generally contained no improvisation or variation of melody or harmony. The replication of this formula by a number of bandleaders perpetuated the notion of a ‘gendered’ space for the girl singer that did not obstruct the ‘real’ work of male instrumentalists. It also reinforced the notion that girl singers lacked the intellectual and musical ability to perform jazz. The engagement between black bandleaders and black girl singers significantly shifted this paradigm. Billie Holiday (1915–59) and Ella Fitzgerald (1917–96) were significant in expanding the repertory and agency of girl singers.

Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan (1915–59), learned to sing the blues listening to the records of Bessie Smith. When Count Basie hired her in 1935, it began a musical relationship that transformed the way in which she interpreted and performed the music. Holiday was significant in redefining the performance aesthetic of jazz. She modelled the performance approaches used by instrumentalists like her close friend, saxophonist Lester Young. The genius of Holiday’s musicianship rested not so much in the size of her voice, but in her interpretation of the text and her ability to manipulate the melody in a manner that virtually milked the lyrics of every bit of emotional content. She expanded the jazz singer’s repertoire to include original songs like the modern blues ‘Fine and Mellow’ or torch songs like ‘Don’t Explain’ that reflected the often-troubled nature of her personal life. In 1938 Holiday reflected the growing connection between the black civil rights struggles and jazz when she debuted ‘Strange Fruit’, a song about the Southern practice of lynching, at the New York nightclub Café Society.

Ella Fitzgerald continued this progression of the girl singer aesthetic with her extensive range, amazing vocal control, and ability to create long, intricate vocal improvisations through scatting. Ella’s career was launched when she won the Amateur Hour at the Apollo Theater and was adopted by ‘Harlem’s King of Swing’, drummer and bandleader Chick Webb. Her first big hit was an interpretation of the famous nursery rhyme ‘A-Tisket A-Tasket’. She would go on to be one of jazz’s biggest selling artists, making a number of significant recordings, including a series of ‘songbooks’ that focused on the compositions of some of America’s greatest songwriters (e.g. George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and Jerome Kern). As the girl singer found more and more acceptance on bandstands and amongst the critics that served as the ‘cultural gatekeepers’, the female instrumentalist continued to battle for relevancy.

A Woman’s Place Is in the Groove: The Birth of the All-Girl Band

The 1920s also marked the emergence of several all-female bands. Two major black women bandleaders that worked during this period were Marie Lucas (1880–1947) and Blanche Calloway (1903–78). Marie Lucas was the daughter of minstrel performer Sam Lucas and enjoyed wide recognition. Ellington, in his early career, saw her perform on various occasions at Washington’s Howard Theatre, and later wrote of her band’s abilities in his autobiography Music Is My Mistress.¹⁹ Blanche Calloway, known as the ‘Queen of Swing’, was well known in many early jazz circles.²⁰ However, she never achieved the success of her younger brother Cab, who was backed by promoter Irving Mills and his promotion machine. Blanche’s career, however, did consist of some successful stints with various all-female and all-male bands including Andy Kirk’s Twelve Clouds of Joy, Chick Webb’s Orchestra, and her own Blanche Calloway and Her Boy Toys.

Despite the successful stints of Mary Lou Williams, Lil Hardin, and a number of other women with all-male bands during the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the 1930s progressed, most women instrumentalists began to find it increasingly difficult to become members of the more established bands. All-girl bands provided an alternative, but some women resisted this format, believing male musicians would have to recognise their talents if they were juxtaposed with mediocre male players. Others believed the creation and success of all-girl bands would lead to true integration and acceptance of women into male bands and the mainstream jazz scene. As if gender was not limiting enough, race also impacted the treatment that all-girl bands received. White female bands generally received the more lucrative and prestigious jobs at theatres and hotels, but black bands were limited, for some time to the TOBA. White bands such as Phil Spitanly’s Hour of Charm or Ina Ray Hutton and the Melodears received the attention of agents and record companies, while black bands were sustained economically through live performances. Despite these differences, neither kind of group were ever paid the same or as much as the most mediocre male groups. Many of the manufactured white bands relied on gimmickry and tricks to draw audiences. Unfortunately, this led to all-girl bands in general being viewed as novelty groups by critics. The seminal black bands of the thirties, the Harlem Playgirls and the Dixie Sweethearts, mirrored the performance aesthetic and repertory promoted by male bands. The popularity of these two groups served as the impetus for the creation of subsequent bands in the forties, which moved beyond the novelties and gimmicks.

In the book Swing Shift: ‘All-Girl’ Bands of the 1940s, scholar Sherrie Tucker explores how the 1940s became the ‘golden age’ for female jazz musicians as America’s entrance into the Second World War and the diminishing number of available male musicians provided more performance opportunities for them. Colleges and secondary school music programmes became important aquifers for all-girl bands. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the Swinging Rays of Rhythm, and the Prairie View Co-Eds all evolved out of the segregated educational system of the South. Many high-school-aged girls left school and their families to join the professional bands that passed through their home towns.

The most famous of these groups was the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, which started as a fundraising initiative for the Piney Woods School for Girls in Piney Woods, Mississippi. The band’s success was halted momentarily when its members defected from the school and resettled outside of Washington, DC. The next incarnation of the Sweethearts consisted of a number of important professional musicians including trumpeters Ernestine ‘Tiny’ Davis (1907–94) and Jean Starr, tenor saxophonist Viola ‘Vi’ Burnside (1915–64), and drummer Pauline Braddy (1922–96). This period marked the band’s transition to a professional dance orchestra. Historically the Sweethearts were noteworthy not only because of their musical ability, which matched that of the most popular male bands, but also because they were one of the first interracial bands. They boosted members of white, Native American, and Asian descendent, and were the longest functioning all-girl band (c.1937–48).

From their premiere as a professional band at the famed Apollo Theatre in 1941, the Sweethearts distinguished themselves from other all-women bands of the time. In the 1940s they were frequently pitted against male bands in the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ series, toured Europe by invitation of Armed Forces radio, and were named one of the best bands of the period. The organisation, like many of the all-girl bands, had its share of problems. Hampered consistently by changing personnel and financial difficulties, the Sweethearts disbanded in 1948. Those members who chose to continue performing did so with regional, national, and international success.

Conclusion

By the time the Sweethearts split in 1948, the American jazz scene was shifting in sound and culture. The emergence of bebop aesthetically represented the black male’s reclamation of jazz. For many, swing diluted the music, cutting off of its creative nature and making it possible for the most mediocre musician to circumnavigate their way through a jazz performance. Bebop, with its complex rhythmic and harmonic approaches, wove a musical language commensurate with the post-war male consciousness. The jazzwomen who had kept Americans entertained and dancing during the swing era quickly found themselves being forced back into the margins as bandleaders replaced them with returning male musicians, and all-women bands dissolved. These efforts to reclaim what had previously been a male terrain extended to every facet of life. The next seventy years of jazz’s history were marked by fragmentation into various stylistic ‘schools’, ideological debates regarding what constitutes jazz, and the emergence of new influential voices. While you will find women musicians actively representing each of these substyles and cultural trends, there has been no significant change in attitude amongst critics, listeners, and musicians. Jazz continues to be equated with male intellectual work. Twenty-plus years after the release of the jazz postage-stamp series I referenced at the beginning of this essay, a number of women vocalists have been featured on stamps, but there has yet to be a stamp of a female jazz instrumentalist. The title of this chapter is a nod to a line from Public Enemy’s 1990 song ‘Fight the Power’, during which rapper Chuck D references how the conventional narrative of the American hero is centred on the heteronormative lived experiences of white males. Black men, especially the radical and transgressive ones that Chuck D idolises, are excluded from this heroic framework. But through jazz, as well as blues, funk, soul, and hip-hop, black men found ways in which to insert their self-actualised sonic identities into this narrative. We have yet to see this with women musicians. However, like Chuck D’s, my efforts to ‘fight the power’ involve challenging the perpetuation of this paradigm by ‘decentring’ the canonic presentation of jazz history in textbooks, museum exhibits, and anthologies with narratives such as the one presented here, that contextualise how women musicians collaborated with their male counterparts and each other to further the progression of jazz.

Girls, Boys, and Women

But to begin, it is useful to differentiate the social experience and function of ‘girl’ from those of both ‘youth’ and from ‘woman’, even while we acknowledge that girls constitute a market category that overlaps with both youth and women. In many contexts, girls constitute a particularised subset of youth, which is nominally gender-neutral but actually usually designates boys: storytelling about youth invariably centres on male experience, and female readers are expected to identify with male protagonists in ways that male readers are not encouraged to do with stories about female characters. Books about boyhood ranging from Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876), and The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling, 1894) to The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger, 1951) and the Harry Potter series (J. K. Rowling, 1997–2007) are held to be classics that will resonate with all readers, while Emma (Jane Austen, 1815), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte, 1847), Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868), Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery, 1908), and The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath, 1963) are characterised as women’s literature and not directed at male readers (many of whom read them anyway, of course!). In the cinematic world, films from 1946’s The Yearling and 1967’s The Graduate to 1986’s Stand by Me and 2014’s Boyhood present coming of age through the lens of white, American masculinity, but have nevertheless been embraced by audiences of all genders and nationalities.

In short; girls’ stories are for girls, but boys’ stories are for everyone. Because this assumption pervades so much of the media created for children, girls learn from an early age to perform a cross-gender identification in order to see themselves reflected in the stories presented to them, while boys are rarely encouraged to identify with anyone not like themselves. Furthermore, as John Berger told us in Ways of Seeing, ‘from earliest childhood [a girl] has been taught to and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity.’⁵ This is not unlike W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, articulated in his monumental Souls of Black Folk as the ‘peculiar sensation [of an African American], this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.’⁶ This kind of learned doubleness also shapes the listening habits of all girls, as they learn to recognise themselves as the subject of men’s songs but also seek to empathise with and model themselves after male narrators and creators. Non-white girls exist at the intersection of both forms of marginalisation, as girls of colour are the least-depicted group in media made for children.⁷ Small wonder, then, that Valerie Walkerdine considers that ‘girls’ fantasies are shaped entirely by the available representations: there are no fantasies that originate with girls, only those projected onto them’.⁸

Similarly, studies of childhood, youth, and adolescence have overwhelmingly presented masculinity as the norm, leading Angela McRobbie to predict in 1980 that ‘questions about girls, sexual relations and femininity will continue to be defused or marginalised in the ghetto of Women’s Studies’.⁹ McRobbie was an important pioneer of studying girlhood within the broader landscape of popular culture studies, which was shaped by masculinist priorities in its early days as a scholarly field. Her lament points also to the often-uneasy position of girls in relation to women; because the term ‘girl’ has often been used to infantilise and trivialise adult women, many feminists and progressive folk prefer to avoid it. In white supremacist economies like the Southern United States at mid-century, for example, ‘girl’ was an acceptable way to refer to those black women who worked in the homes of white women – who expected to be called ‘ladies’ – and age was irrelevant to this distinction. First- and second-wave feminists seeking the dignity of equality with (white) men did not, unsurprisingly, want to align themselves with girls.

And yet, girls – and here I mean quite specifically adolescent and pre-adolescent females – were courageous activists and symbols of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Long before she created hit recordings like ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’, and even before her fellow Atlantan Martin Luther King, Jr. took his first stand for justice, Gladys Knight earned the honour of a lifetime membership in the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) while still a child; aged eight in 1952, she won a national prize singing in the popular radio series Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, in spite of racist contempt for her participation.¹⁰ Five years later, black civil rights activists in Little Rock, Arkansas, carefully chose six teenage girls (and three boys) to desegregate the city’s Central High School. These community leaders reasoned that the necessary discipline of forbearance was already more familiar for girls than boys, as evidenced in the stunning composure of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford in photos of her attempts to enter the school, alone, in the face of a seething mob.¹¹ The four girls killed by murderous violence in the 1963 racist attack on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama became potent symbols of loss.

Girls and Girls’ Voices

So, when I write about girl singers in this chapter, I choose my terms deliberately and advisedly, and with the utmost respect for girls and girlhood. Most singers in girl groups of the 1960s were audibly pubescent and even pre-pubescent, and their songs were explicitly about the experiences and concerns of female adolescence. Girl group music was a popular music phenomenon involving pre-teen and teen girls, especially prevalent in the United States during the early to mid-1960s, but with a significant echo in the 1990s with groups such as Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls. Girl groups are distinct from bands that involve girls as instrumentalists, and most groups comprised three to five members who generally dressed alike and performed simple choreography while they sang about themes of importance to girl culture. For the most part, songwriting credits on girl group records are attributed to professional songwriters, instruments are played by professional session players, and the songs treat such topics as crushes on boys, wedding fantasies, the strictness of parents, and the travails of adolescent romance, through songs like ‘Beechwood 4-5789’ (The Marvelettes, 1962), ‘Chapel of Love’ (The Dixie Cups, 1964), ‘Party Lights’ (Claudine Clark, 1962), and ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ (The Crystals, 1963), amongst many more. Some of the best-known groups include the Shirelles, Ronettes, Chiffons, Little Eva, and Lesley Gore (the latter two associated with the genre although nominally solo artists). The Supremes and Shangri-Las are generally considered girl groups, although their chief popularity came after the main girl group phenomenon had ended, and it must be noted that from the very beginning of their success, the Supremes presented a sophisticated, aspirational version of femininity that aligned more with adulthood than adolescence. Between 1960 and 1964, girl group music dominated Top 40 radio in North America, an unprecedented and unrepeated instance of teenage girls taking centre stage of mainstream popular culture.

The first girl group songs began to circulate in the late 1950s in New York; these recordings all had distinctly different styles, and their popularity was generally limited to African American communities in north-eastern cities of the United States, so that they were not understood as representing a cohesive new style. Rather, these early records drew on musical styles such as doo-wop, jump blues, barbershop, and choral singing, and Tin-Pan-Alley-styled songs. These influences led to such diverse songs as the Chantels’ ‘Maybe’, the Bobbettes ‘Mr. Lee’ (both 1957) and the Shirelles’ ‘I Met Him on a Sunday’ (1958), all successful on the R&B charts. Sonically, these three songs have little in common beyond the use of young female voices; ‘Maybe’ uses a doo-wop harmonic progression, a 6/8 time signature, and a choral sound for backing vocalists to support seventeen-year-old Arlene Smith’s ringing soprano, while ‘Mr. Lee’ is a rollicking twelve-bar blues with honking saxophone solo, walking bass, and precociously growling vocals from twelve-year-old Reather Dixon; and ‘I Met Him on a Sunday’, with its foregrounded handclapping and finger-snaps, simple, sing-song melody expressed by each girl in turn, and refrain of doo-wop syllables punctuating the story of a week-long romance, bears a strong resemblance to the handclapping and jump-rope songs so central to girls’ play at mid-century.¹²

In the soundscape of the late 1950s, these three songs were embraced as part of the North American doo-wop style that was popular amongst urban youth, featuring teenage boys who developed their sound singing a cappella and filling in instrumental lines with nonsense syllables. While groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers could roam their neighbourhoods and experiment with close-harmony singing in alleys and stairwells, however, the members of the Chantels, Shirelles, and Bobbettes had less freedom to wander the streets unchaperoned. Confined as they were by the restrictions of respectability and by their vulnerability to dangerous men, these girls gathered at supervised choir rehearsals, basketball practice, and glee club meetings to create songs that were at first derivative, but would eventually coalesce into a distinct, and distinctly girl-centred, new genre.

The Girl Group Era

In 1960, the Shirelles recorded Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s composition ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’, depicting a girl on the brink of her first sexual encounter, coincidentally in the same year that the US Federal Drug Authority approved the clinical use of the birth control pill for women. This record, which rose to the top position on the Billboard pop charts early the following year, is arguably the true start of the girl group phenomenon. The voices heard were audibly those of teenage girls, and the musical language and vocal style suggested that they were nicely brought up and respectable, as distinct from the womanly, raunchy blues queens who were more familiar discussants of female sexual desire. The Shirelles made it possible for ‘nice’ girls to talk about sex without disrupting society’s preferred view of them as demure.

Songwriters King (b.1942) and Goffin (b.1939) were themselves teenagers, on the brink of a marriage triggered by an unplanned pregnancy, as they both worked tirelessly and enthusiastically to find their places in a newly professionalising rock ’n’ roll music business.¹³ As a songwriting duo, King and Goffin would become important architects of rock ’n’ roll and youth culture in the early 1960s; as with other young songwriters such as Ellie Greenwich (b.1940), Jeff Barry (b.1938), Cynthia Weil (b.1940), Barry Mann (b.1939), Mort Shuman (b.1938), and Neil Sedaka (b.1939), Goffin and King were part of the Brill Building community of songwriters creating the soundtrack to adolescence just as baby boomers came of age. (You can read more about Carole King’s career as a songwriter in Chapter 10, ‘“(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”: Women in Songwriting’.) ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ provided a template for teens to talk about sex and love, and helped girls ask difficult questions of their boyfriends.

The record’s style also set the standard for the girl group sound: a young, untrained voice, with backing vocals suggesting friends in dialogue with the lead singer, against a backing of pop instrumentation (i.e. piano or strings, not guitar) and rock ’n’ roll rhythms and grooves. Over the next few years, the Marvelettes’ ‘Please Mr. Postman’ (1961), Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’ (1962), and the Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ (1963) adhered fairly closely to the style, presenting more examples of ‘good’ girls discussing their feelings and fantasies in candid, yet polite, ways. Often, the backing vocalists respond to the lead singer’s statements with encouraging remarks such as ‘go ahead, girl!’ and songs like the Marvelettes’ ‘Too Many Fish in the Sea’ (1964) address themselves explicitly to young women, with spoken phrases such as ‘look here, girls, and take this advice’. This direct, spoken interpellation of girl listeners would be echoed in more explicitly feminist songs such as Laura Lee’s 1971 ‘Women’s Love Rights’ and Madonna’s 1989 ‘Express Yourself.’

Different musical versions of girl identity began to appear as the girl group phenomenon became more established. In 1963, a trio from New York’s Spanish Harlem had spectacular success with ‘Be My Baby’, written for them by Brill Building songwriters Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. This song seemed to articulate all of the dramatic intensity and heightened emotional state of adolescence, and the singers provided new models of girlhood for girl listeners to experiment with. The Ronettes, whose meteoric success in 1963–64 included five Top 40 hits and a UK tour with the Rolling Stones as their opening act, were a mixed-race group of two sisters and a cousin; as girls growing up under the watchful eye of their grandmother, they experimented with singing, dance, and fashion to create a striking look. Their distinct group style, provocative though it may have been, provided a measure of safety as they began to explore New York’s club scene as teenagers, in that all three were marked as belonging together. It also helped them garner a following and the confidence to seek performing opportunities; in this way they ultimately came to the attention of producer Phil Spector, who developed his famous ‘wall of sound’ production style around Ronnie Bennett’s (later Ronnie Spector’s) passionate vibrato.¹⁴ Singer and producer went on to marry, and Ronnie discloses the abuse she suffered at his hands, and her difficulties leaving the marriage, in her autobiography Be My Baby.

Legacy of the Girl Groups

The Crystals and the Blossoms, in New York and Los Angeles respectively, were also acts produced by Spector, who recorded such girl group classics as ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Then He Kissed Me’ (both 1963 hits for the Crystals) and ‘He’s a Rebel’, infamously recorded by the Blossoms in Los Angeles but then released as a single by the Crystals in 1962. Spector owned the names of both groups and decided that the Crystals needed a hit, while the Blossoms were more useful to him as a malleable group of session singers who could be paid studio session rates to provide backing vocals for an extraordinary range of artists, from Frank Sinatra to Betty Everett. The Blossoms’ lead singer, Darlene Love, would eventually record ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ with Spector, under her own name, and the Blossoms as a group earned overdue recognition in the 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. By this time, the brilliant, tyrannical Phil Spector was midway through a prison sentence for the murder of Lana Clarkson, a reversal of fortunes that must have provided some sense of closure for the girl groups he produced after his exploitative and controlling treatment during their teen years in the 1960s.

Beginning in 1964, a tough, streetwise version of white girlhood issued from the Shangri-Las, whose songs, such as ‘Leader of the Pack’ (1964), were operatic in scope, narrating anguished tales of teenage death and tragedy. Listening to these records in the privacy and safety of her bedroom, a sheltered suburban girl could experiment with the tough, streetwise stance and seductive manner of the singers she heard, and she could give herself over to the powerful emotions enacted in the music. The navigation of dramatic conflicts between love and repressive social mores in Shangri-Las songs like ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’, ‘Out in the Streets’, and ‘Past, Present and Future’ (all 1965) ensured that these recordings were formative listening for teens such as Debbie Harry, who fronted a semi-ironic girl group called the Stilettos before co-founding the band Blondie in 1974 and, by extension, the New York punk rock scene. In her own career, Harry’s performance of pretty blonde femininity was complex and subversive; by adopting some (but not all) of the conventions of attractiveness for the male gaze, she was able to poke apart easy assumptions about girls and women. Her blonde hair with deliberately visible dark roots foregrounded the artifice of beauty, and in her singing she similarly destabilised the tropes of girlhood, deploying textures ranging from breathy wistfulness in ‘Sunday Girl’ to predatory snarling in ‘One Way or Another’ (both from the 1978 album Parallel Lines).

Harry’s ability to mimic the qualities of a girl’s voice, well into her thirties, indicates both her canny understanding of girlhood as a costume and also her deep familiarity with the girl group records of her teen years.¹⁵ The musical language created by girl groups in the 1960s had created an architecture of girlhood that would also shape the experiences of future generations of girls, as when the 1987 teen film Adventures in Babysitting introduced its central character, an archetype of 1980s suburban, white, American girlhood, via a bedroom lip-synch performance of the twenty-two-year-old song ‘Then He Kissed Me’. In the twenty-first century, the brilliant singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse drew significantly from girl group sound and style, modelling the song structures and even production approaches to her recordings on the work of groups like the Shangri-Las, and encouraging thirteen-year-old Dionne Bromfield to make her recording debut, on Winehouse’s label Lioness, with the Shirelles’ ‘Mama Said’ in 2009.

Girl Singers and Boy Listeners

Male adolescent listeners have been equally enthralled and inspired by girl groups; Brian Wilson was moved to write a song for the Ronettes after hearing ‘Be My Baby’. When Wilson took ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ to his idol Spector, the more seasoned producer rejected it, so Wilson recorded the song in 1964 with his own group. The Beach Boys also recorded a cover version of a girl group song, transforming the Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’ into ‘Then I Kissed Her’ in 1965. While Wilson and his bandmates switched gender pronouns in order to preserve ‘proper’ courtship patterns of active male and passive female, the possibility of adopting a girl’s point of view through a song’s persona did allow some boys and men to experiment with gender fluidity. This was particularly appealing during a time when expectations for boys and men were highly rigid, and writing songs for girls to sing allowed male songwriters to explore vulnerability and tenderness. Motown songwriter Eddie Holland observed that:

As part of the legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team that wrote hits for Motown acts such as the Four Tops, the Isley Brothers, and Marvin Gaye, as well as the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas, Eddie Holland had ample opportunity to explore and express complex emotions through creating songs for male artists to sing: it is significant that he would value writing for girl singers.

Other male groups in the early 1960s found that singing girl group songs was the key to appealing to a female audience and earning massive popularity. Indeed, many of the British Invasion beat bands had their first North American hits with girl group songs; I have already noted that the Beatles recorded and performed numerous examples. What is more, the Fab Four’s famously appealing androgyny derived in no small part from their ability to sing from the subject position of girls, demonstrated in many of their original songs (i.e. ‘It Won’t be Long’ or ‘You’re Gonna Lose that Girl’). Herman’s Hermits achieved international success in 1964 with their cover version of ‘Something Good’, a song that Carole King and Gerry Goffin had originally written as a solo effort for Earl-Jean McCrea of the Cookies earlier that year, and Manfred Mann recorded versions of the Exciters’ ‘Do-Wah-Diddy’, Maxine Brown’s ‘Oh No, Not my Baby’, and the Shirelles’ ‘Sha La La’ in their contribution to the British Invasion of the mid-’60s. The appeal of girl group songs to young men continued, with male punk bands in the 1970s turning to songs like the Shangri-Las’s ‘Give Him a Great Big Kiss’ (Johnny Thunders, 1978) and the Ronettes’ ‘Baby I Love You’ (the Ramones, 1980), and Johnny Marr and Morrissey made their recording debut as the Smiths in 1982 with a rendition of the Cookies’ ‘I Want a Boy for my Birthday’.¹⁷

Conclusion

But the significance of girl groups to boys’ music is not the only, nor even the most important, reason to celebrate them; girl groups gave voice to teenage girls at a crucial juncture in North American history, and their music provided models of racial integration. During the most active and revolutionary years of the Southern civil rights movement, girl group songs, created by teams of songwriters, musicians, producers, and singers from diverse ethnic backgrounds, were heard on Top 40 radio around the United States. Although the Marvelettes’ 1960 ‘Please Mr. Postman’ was issued with a drawing of an empty mailbox on the record cover for fear that a photograph of the black group would make it unmarketable to white listeners, by mid-decade the Supremes were icons of style and amongst the most visible African Americans in the world. Girl groups and their songs were emblematic of girl culture at the very moment when notions of youth identity, race identity, and female identity were in upheaval, and they played a central role in defining girlhood for decades to come.

In 2017, National Public Radio published a superb list of the 150 best albums by women, aptly named ‘Turning the Tables’ as it explicitly sought to overturn the hierarchies of taste that have excluded women’s music making from canonical status. The Turning the Tables essays celebrated music from a wide range of genres and styles, honouring albums by girl groups like the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes, as well as work by Pauline Oliveros, Nina Simone, and Joni Mitchell; this approach allowed the list’s curators to make room for joyful, exuberant pop songs alongside serious, introspective music. Listening to this broader soundscape and honouring the value of girls’ music ensured that the list makers documented a history of girls and women in music that is both restorative and inspiring. In celebrating girls and their musical creations, we can help to build a world where girls and women raise their voices with confidence that they will be heard.

Early Rock and Roll and Anomalousness

Rock and roll became a phenomenon in the United States in the mid-1950s, a time when we frequently think of American women as housewives who stayed home with children. Images from contemporaneous media, such as sitcoms about idealised suburban family life, inform collective memories of the era. What lifestyle could be more opposite to rock and roll than a domestic one?

Rock histories therefore frequently state that there were few, if any, women in early rock and roll. One textbook from 2013 claims, for example:

Texts like these tend to offer a small number of exceptions. Wanda Jackson – a country-turned-rockabilly performer often compared to Elvis Presley – is frequently cited in this context. The same textbook states: ‘Jackson stands revealed on [her] records as a performer who could readily go toe-to-toe (or pelvis to pelvis!) with Elvis Presley or with any of the other major male rock ’n’ rollers of this period.’⁹ Otherwise, we’re told that early rock and roll was the domain of wild men; women were anomalies.

Anomalousness, according to Russ, acknowledges that women participate in an art form, but insists that ‘she doesn’t fit in’. It’s a way of ensuring ‘permanent marginality’.¹⁰ Related is Russ’s concept of isolation, which acknowledges that some women did participate, but claims that they were few.¹¹ If we’re told that a woman performing rock and roll was an anomaly, then what incentive is there to seek more like her? Russ cautions that this thinking leads to complacency; we start to see small numbers of women as sufficient representation.¹² Wanda Jackson deserves her place in rock history, but when she is represented as an exception, others can be hidden.

Feminist scholars have revised some common narratives about domesticity in the post-Second-World-War era to better show that there was no singular experience shared by all women, a tactic which may help in reframing early rock and roll. Stephanie Coontz’s work demonstrates that real life in the United States was both poorer and more racially diverse than mid-century television showed.¹³ What feminist writer Betty Friedan described as the ‘problem with no name’ – the alienation and repression experienced by women told not to desire anything beyond domestic life – was centred on white middle- and upper-class women. As bell hooks writes in her assessment of Friedan: ‘Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure-class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change, but they were not the pressing political concerns of masses of women.’¹⁴ Many American women, hooks reminds us, have had little choice but to work.¹⁵ Women’s employment in the United States did drop with the end of the Second World War, but by the mid-1950s, rose to levels higher than those seen during the war. The social acceptability of working women increased too, although they received lower pay and faced limits as to the types of work made available to them.¹⁶

‘Rock and roller’ was not a typical job. Anyone making a living at it was already striving for something unusual. Though the genre was controversial, it is difficult to find evidence of consensus as to who could acceptably perform it. While some critics found rock and roll too vulgar for women, there are counterexamples of male rockers facing critique for being too feminine. One columnist claimed in 1956: ‘We live in the “sexbomb” age. A “sexbomb”, in the entertainment world, is a performer who gets by on animal allure rather than on artistic merit . … Until now, women have dominated the “sexbomb” field. Elvis Presley is the first to show it can also be a male industry.’¹⁷ The performing conventions of rock and roll, therefore, weren’t always seen as too controversial for women: they could also be seen as unremarkable because they were performed by a woman. Maureen Mahon writes, for example, about how black women, including Big Mama Thornton – who created sounds and gestural vocabularies central to rock – are frequently silenced while Presley is held up for the ‘sexy masculinity [that] comes into being in part as he draws on Thornton’s confrontational black femininity’.¹⁸ Thornton, who recorded ‘Hound Dog’ before Presley, once said: ‘I’ve been singing way before Elvis Presley was born, and he jumps up and becomes a millionaire before me … off of something that I made popular. They gave him the right . … [N]ow, why do they do that? He makes a million and all this jive because his face is different from mine.’¹⁹

Both supporters and detractors expected rock and roll to be a fad. Few counted on long careers in the genre, and the idea that a young woman might be an entertainer until she married was not necessarily radical, particularly if she was working class. Record labels even sought ‘female Elvises’. RCA promoted rockabilly Janis Martin under that epithet right alongside her labelmate, Elvis Presley. Another woman with the stage name ‘Alis Lesley, the Female Presley’ toured internationally with Eddie Cochran and Little Richard and played barefoot while shaking her hips.

Nearly everywhere men performed rock and roll, women did too; even if, as is the case today, they were not always present in equal numbers or had career arcs that differed from men’s. Driven to capitalise on whatever could be labelled ‘rock and roll’ and sold to teens, the industry in the mid-1950s defined the term in a fairly catholic way, not yet uniformly rendered masculine. Examine the Billboard charts as rock and roll broke in 1955, and not far below Bill Haley’s ‘Rock around the Clock’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybelline’, you’ll see a record by Lillian Briggs – the self-proclaimed ‘Queen of Rock and Roll’ – of Louis Jordan’s ‘I Want You to Be My Baby’. One of the biggest hits of 1956 was Kay Starr’s recording of ‘Rock and Roll Waltz’, which seemed to poke fun at rock and roll, but started as an inside joke for listeners of Alan Freed’s famed rock and roll radio shows. Live performances and sock hops were also common venues for women. Freed’s productions on air and in theatres always included women, which was not uncommon for package shows featuring multiple acts. Performers who made appearances on his shows included women from R&B, country, and pop backgrounds. Fans might hear LaVern Baker, Jo-Ann Campbell, Valerie Carr, the Chantels, Jean Chapel, Linda Laurie, Gloria Mann, Ruth McFadden, the Rhythmettes, Jodie Sands; even Freed’s third wife, Inga Boling.²⁰ Ads for venues ranging from state fairs to urban clubs further show that women were working as musicians in rock and roll in many contexts.

The restrictions that women faced in the 1950s should not be discounted, barriers that were broken must be recognised, and the careers that might have blossomed under different circumstances deserve to be mourned. But we must take care to apply these narratives with precision so as to not create blinkers preventing us from seeing the women who did it anyway.

The 1960s and the Double Standard of Content

The first wave of rock and roll is often said to have ended around 1960. The standard story is that men from the early craze left the scene: Elvis Presley was drafted; Chuck Berry served prison time; Jerry Lee Lewis was enmeshed in scandal; Little Richard left music for religion; and a plane crash took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson (known as ‘The Big Bopper’). Meanwhile, payola investigations and the standardising of radio formats took a toll on distribution. The first generation of fans headed into adult life, and the younger cohort coming up behind them had its own taste, which many critics characterise as tamer.

Still, many women produced music rooted in the teen-oriented customs of rock and roll in the early sixties. Connie Francis and Brenda Lee led a youthful group of singers, releasing impressive streaks of hit records. Mary Wells was cutting her first sides for Motown by 1960, as that label was poised for success. Wanda Jackson finally cracked the Billboard Top 40 with ‘Let’s Have a Party’ (1960). The first nationally popular ‘girl groups’, including the Chantels and the Bobbettes, had emerged by the late 1950s and established a burgeoning trend. (See Chapter 8, ‘Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s’ for an in-depth consideration of the American girl groups of the 1960s.)

So, was it men’s departures or women’s participation that signalled rock and roll’s ‘death’, or at least its taming, to many critics? One critic claimed, for example, that it was not ‘until rock’n’roll lost its spark of spontaneity and became a tributary of the musical mainstream, with its waters paddled by clean-cut kids, was it acceptable for white girls to dip a toe in’.²¹ Another noted that ‘female artists were also successful during this period. They were usually not categorised as teen idols, but their music followed the same pallid formulas … As is the case of the teen idols, girl groups were simply song stylists.’²²

This discourse shows how anomalousness and isolation were less effective strategies for separating women from rock in the 1960s. The teen stars at the outset of the decade were just a few of the musicians who are still household names today, rendering the manoeuvre more difficult. The Supremes alone had twelve No. 1 US singles between 1964 and 1969, and they were only one act from a slate of Motown talent. Girl groups from other labels, including the Ronettes, the Shirelles, and the Crystals, had enduring hits, too. Solo singers also sold millions of records each; Aretha Franklin and Lesley Gore, for example, or Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield as part of the British Invasion. In the countercultural movement, Janis Joplin and Grace Slick were both prominent in psychedelic rock, whereas on the folk side, artists like Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian, and Odetta made an impact with socially conscious lyrics and ushered in a new age of singer-songwriters. (See Chapter 10, ‘“(You Make Me Feel Like ) A Natural Woman”: Women in Songwriting’, for a consideration of women songwriters, including a discussion of Mitchell.)

Not only was ‘rock and roll’ undergoing redefinition, but the way we conceptualised the category of ‘women’ in the 1960s was also shifting. If the dominant narrative of the 1950s was one of repression, in the 1960s, we look towards the growing force of second-wave feminism in tandem with the civil rights movement and the ‘free love’ of the countercultural sexual revolution. The story is generally no longer one in which women are not participating, but their increased visibility allows narratives employing what Russ terms ‘the double standard of content’. The double standard relegates women’s art to a separate realm, proclaiming their work less universal than that produced by men. The lower social value placed on women’s experiences leads to their art being devalued. Russ explains that even when the art isn’t ignored, the double standard can hurt ‘all women artists, both those whose art is specifically recognised as “feminine” (it is depreciated) and those whose art is not (it is misinterpreted)’.²³

It’s easy to find examples of music by women that was made throughout the 1960s being devalued, perhaps because of its meaning to women. Susan Douglas’s 1994 essay ‘Why the Shirelles Mattered’ noted that the group’s music voiced the concerns of girls but that:

Critical appraisal of the girl groups seems to have shifted in a positive direction since Douglas’s essay. Yet the centrality of the women’s rights movement to the story of social change in the 1960s to this day has a narrative pull that can paradoxically bring about the double standard of content. The emergence of second-wave feminism can be a useful interpretive lens for music of the time, and there is an important body of scholarship showing how music helped young women voice political concerns, as both performers and listeners.²⁵

Used uncritically, however, this lens becomes another way of claiming that music speaking to women must have had a limited audience and that the larger story of rock therefore needn’t be too bothered by it. One male critic went so far as to blame feminism and the sexual revolution – in a book titled Go, Girl, Go! The Women’s Revolution in Music – for women’s lack of chart success in the 1960s, asking:

The sexual revolution and women’s movement did not impact only women, just as the songs of Lesley Gore or the Shirelles were not heard by only girls. The double standard of content suggests that rock performances by women amount to the sum of their success or failure to achieve presumed feminist aims. And while discussions of the 1960s are particularly susceptible to this suppression tactic, it often crops up when the audience for a woman’s music is believed to be feminine.

The Rock Era and False Categorisation

The term ‘rock and roll’ has never had a singular definition. By the 1970s, it was sometimes just ‘rock’, and the number of subgenres included under its umbrella increased. Broad depictions of rock from the 1970s into the 1980s will generally include varied sub-classifications including progressive rock, arena rock, glam, funk, punk, post-punk, new wave, hip-hop, and heavy metal. The umbrella had greater coverage, but the danger of a slippery definition of ‘rock’ for marginalised performers is that it can continually be redefined to exclude them.

Russ calls this move ‘false categorisation’, which can manifest as ‘denying [creators] entry to the “right” category, by assigning them to the “wrong” category’, or even rearranging or renaming phenomena in order to change their significance.²⁷ ‘The assignment of genre can also function as false categorising’, writes Russ, ‘especially when work appears to fall between established genres and can thereby be assigned to either (and then called an imperfect example of it) or chided for belonging to neither’.²⁸ The establishment of rock criticism as a discipline over the course of the 1960s encouraged defining and categorising. As Norma Coates argues in her work on the masculinisation of rock, criticism sought to establish rock as serious and ‘authentic’. Authenticity was a vague concept that was ‘best defined by what it was not: not mass culture, not prefabricated, and not necessarily “popular”’. Coates notes that it was defined on the level of ‘I know it when I hear it’.²⁹ Defining in the negative and on a subjective level makes exclusion easier.

The ‘wrong’ category for women can be pop, for instance, but it can also vaguely be ‘not rock’. Even women who were stars during what we think of as the ‘classic rock era’ – generally the late 1960s through the 1980s – were frequently excluded from the category for reasons not applied equally to men. Sometimes this was an accusation of a lack of substance via claims that the woman’s visual appeal supplanted musical talent. Sometimes it was criticism that she appealed to commercial interests. Sometimes it was because she didn’t play an instrument or write her own songs; having her success attributed to a man is also recategorisation. Examples are, again, easy to find:

While these performers and their peers also received favourable reviews embracing them as rockers, comments like those above are frequent enough to destabilise how women were perceived with respect to rock.

False categorisation was hardly a new tactic in music. Jes Skolnik writes in her critique of the ‘women-in-rock’ trope that:

These segregation practices had existed about as long as recorded music. The criticisms lobbed at Pat Benatar or Joan Jett for not ‘rocking’ correctly might not be given the chance to arise when an artist had already been relegated to another genre. Could Donna Summer be ‘disco’ as well as ‘rock’? Can Chaka Khan’s style be thought of as ‘rock’ in addition to R&B or funk? While many of us find it easy to answer these questions with an unqualified ‘yes’, significant enough doubt in rock’s dominant discourse requires us to make these arguments constantly. And, as Russ noted, falling between genres can itself constitute suppression by recategorisation.

In the early 2000s, the term ‘rockism’ emerged to describe these gatekeeping practices.³³ Rockism can be difficult to defeat, because, as Kelefa Sanneh reasoned, ‘the language of righteous struggle is the language of rockism itself’.³⁴ The theme of rebellion and struggle against power is a consistent thread connecting rock culture to its varying subgenres. Empowerment and rebelliousness, however, can be difficult to delineate within an intersectional feminist framework because the patriarchal forces shaping rock – and the risks of reproducing them – do not act upon all people in the same way.³⁵ Patricia Hill Collins writes that ‘empowerment for African-American women will never occur in a context characterised by oppression and social injustice. A group can gain power in such situations by dominating others, but this is not the type of empowerment I found within black women’s thinking.’³⁶ Instead, Collins found empowerment that occurs in tandem with larger, networked efforts to address social injustice. As philosopher Monique Deveaux argues, feminist modes of empowerment can be hard to perceive. ‘Feminists need to look at the inner processes that condition women’s sense of freedom or choice in addition to external manifestations of power and dominance … Women’s “freedom” does not simply refer to objective possibilities for manoeuvring or resisting within a power dynamic but concerns whether a woman feels empowered in her specific context.’³⁷

Judging whether a woman feels empowered by her circumstances is more complex than noticing if she has tattoos, wears leather, or plays electric guitar. Yet while we do not always know how performers navigated their options or asserted personal rebellions, we can complicate the idea that pleasing audiences of straight white men is evidence of rebellion. Dismantling such notions could trigger more significant disruptions. As Russ writes of women in literature: ‘In order to have her “belong” …, the tradition to which she belongs must also be admitted. Other writers must be admitted along with their tradition, written and unwritten. Speech must be admitted. Canons of excellence and conceptions of excellence must change, perhaps beyond recognition.’³⁸ Would the concept of ‘rock’ survive such a dismantling?

Revivals and Lack of Models

In 1991, Barney Hoskyns declared that ‘rock and roll is being hijacked by angry girls with electric guitars’. He continued:

Critics wrote so much about women’s presence in rock around this time that Ann Powers once quipped, ‘I’ve often joked that I wrote at least one article about the “year of women in rock” every single year in the 90s.’⁴⁰ An impulse to explore this apparent trend on a deeper level led to a new wave of cultural criticism and books on ‘women in rock’. Many of the musicians profiled in this literature seemed to harken back to earlier subgenres in which women were particularly visible. The 1990s and early 2000s saw new girl groups, amongst them TLC, Destiny’s Child, and the Spice Girls. Meanwhile, singer-songwriters including Tori Amos, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, and Liz Phair echoed the movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

These revivals also demarcate a cycle of remembering and forgetting. Russ refers to this as ‘lack of models’. She argues that it isn’t contradictory to claim that women’s traditions exist while also noting that contemporary women lack models. ‘One difference is in the age of the women involved’, she notes. ‘Female support groups exist, but they must be created anew by each generation, so that what was missing during one’s formative years may (with luck and drive) be built or discovered later on at considerable cost in time, energy, and self-confidence.’⁴¹ Thus, ‘women in rock’ are reinvented every decade or two.

Looking back, for example, it seems that 1974 was also declared a ‘year of women in rock’. One 1975 newspaper article bemoaned the proliferation of writing on the topic: ‘[T]he stories keep appearing. What they do is merge different styles of music and performers to substantiate a “new phenomenon”, when in fact different types of female singers and groups of female singers have been with us right along.’⁴² The columnist also mentions a new book documenting the phenomenon, Rock ’n’ Roll Woman, by Katherine Orloff.⁴³ Orloff concluded that ‘rock and roll’ and ‘women’ were contradicting terms: ‘If rock demonstrates that very masculine power, a woman is at odds with the definition immediately. While she can play the notes and sing the tunes, all the elements that have influenced her upbringing and attitudes tell her she is in the wrong place.’⁴⁴

And around we go. The terms ‘rock’ and ‘women’ still resist rectification, so the trope of ‘women in rock’ continues. But Russ urges us to keep working on the problem. The worst thing we can do, she notes, is turn our backs.⁴⁵ Recovery is important, but we should also not mistake enlarging the existing canon for systemic change. We have to monitor the cultural work that the label ‘women in rock’ does, remaining cognisant of the history of suppression it contains. We must rethink how we define women and rock to break old cycles, prevent harm to musicians, and address inequality in the industry.

Carole King

Carole King was born Carol Joan Klein on 9 February 1942 in Brooklyn, and added the ‘e’ to her first name to stand out from two high school peers with the same name. Following in a long line of Jewish entertainers who sought success under a non-ethnic name, she chose ‘King’ to replace ‘Klein’.³ King learnt to play the piano as a child, and was encouraged in this by her parents. She attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn. While a high school student, she volunteered to contribute to the annual James Madison High School Sing, and writes in her autobiography that she found writing and arranging songs very satisfying. She explains that although she performed some of her songs herself, she gained the most pleasure from teaching other students to sing what she had written, eventually forming a doo-wop group from her Advanced Mathematics class (the ‘Co-Sines’). Although her main goal at this point was to complete the arrangements and hear them performed, she realised that if she sang one of the four vocal lines herself, she needed to bring in fewer performers.⁴ The focus of her recollections suggests that she did not write songs as a vehicle for herself as performer, but that she performed them as a way to get the music heard.

At this time, King’s main musical influences were the popular records that Alan Freed played on his radio shows.⁵ As King recalled: ‘The music that had informed the songwriters on the records Alan played was a lot more gritty and diverse than the simple pop ditties, show tunes, and classical music to which I had been listening for most of my life. But I was determined to learn, and the timing in popular music and political history was favourable.’⁶

King recalls how her arranging technique over the years stems from her high school experiences:

She was aware that the weakness in her songwriting lay in her lyric writing, commenting:

After graduating high school in June 1958, she set about obtaining a record contract. While supportive of her endeavours, King’s parents encouraged her to attend the nearby Queens College and study for a teaching qualification as a fallback.

King met Gerry Goffin at Queens College, and they began to collaborate on songs, with King writing the music and Goffin the lyrics. By August 1959 they were married and King was pregnant with their first daughter Louise, who was followed later by Sherry. Since leaving high school, King had visited the Brill Building on Broadway regularly to try and sell her songs, and now did so with Goffin. One day in 1960 she bumped into singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, who suggested she meet with Don Kirshner and Al Nevin, with whose publishing company he had recently signed. She set up a meeting and played them some songs in their office. They suggested she return with Goffin the next day, and the pair were immediately signed with Aldon music, and given an office at 1650 Broadway, which along with 1619 Broadway, was known as the ‘Brill Building’. The songwriters hired by Brill Building producers were younger than traditional popular music songwriters, and therefore closer in age to their intended audience. An important development from the pop music that had come before was the inclusion of women. As Mary E. Rohlfing comments: ‘It was at this time that women made their entry into rock’n’roll … as composers, players, and producers.’⁹

Crucially, these songwriters could write about and therefore validate important life experiences for their listeners. In his 2002 categorisation of forms of authenticity in rock, Allan Moore suggests that authenticity is not created from certain musical features, but rather from the interpretation that can be brought by listeners. Goffin and King’s songs offered ‘second-person authenticity’ to many fans: ‘[This] occurs when a performance succeeds in conveying the impression to a listener that that listener’s experience of life is being validated, that the music is “telling it like it is” for them.’¹⁰ Their first major hit was ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’, recorded by the Shirelles and released on 21 November 1960. The song stayed at No. 1 in the Billboard 100 for ten weeks. As King had predicted, ‘Does he like me?’ was the issue that spoke most keenly to the popular music audience, which was largely comprised of teenage girls. The song documented the insecurities and anxieties faced by a young woman after a one-night stand, with lines such as:

However, as King has commented:

(See also Chapter 8, ‘Leaders of the Pack: Girl Groups of the 1960s’.) After this hit, both King and Goffin were able to give up their day jobs to focus on their writing. During the 1960s, the pair wrote a number of classic songs for a variety of artists. Throughout her career thus far, King had been indifferent to performing her own songs. Her voice, and her piano skills, provided a method through which to hear her music.

King and Goffin divorced in 1968. She moved to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles with her two daughters, and continued songwriting, as well as reactivating her performing career by forming The City. Her position as a behind-the-scenes songwriter was to change still further in 1971, when she released her second studio album.¹² Tapestry (Ode Records, produced by Lou Adler) was a collection of songs written or co-written by King, and performed by King at the piano (Box 10.1).

Tapestry was to become one of the best-selling albums ever, with over 25 million copies sold worldwide. It was also well received critically, with esteemed rock critics claiming that her unadorned and untrained voice would provide a touchstone for female singer-songwriters, and that Tapestry surpassed previous milestones of personal intimacy and musical accomplishment.¹³ In 1972, it received four Grammys: Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Performance (Female), Record of the Year, (for ‘It’s Too Late’), and Song of the Year (for ‘You’ve Got a Friend’).

King cut her teeth working as the musical half of the songwriting team Goffin and King, essentially working behind the scenes providing songs for famous performing artists. Despite a lack of confidence in her own lyric-writing ability, she had given a good deal of thought to the subjects that would appeal to a popular music audience comprised predominantly of young adults in her demographic. However, it was when she recorded an album of her own performances of a collection of such songs that she reached significant success. She was able to connect with her audience in two ways: through creating relevant material and content, and through her accessibility as a performer.

Joni Mitchell

‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ was No. 1 while Joni Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson, in Fort Macleod Alberta, 7 November 1943) was establishing herself as a performer on the folk circuit in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Toronto, Ontario. The folk scene in each city tended to accord veteran folk performers the exclusive right to perform their signature songs, which were most often not written by the performer. Mitchell resolved to write her own songs, which often reflected personal concerns of love, sorrow, and joy, as well as wider political and environmental anxieties.

In 1964, Mitchell was touring the folk circuit in Ontario. She was pregnant by an ex-boyfriend, and unable to raise the child. She gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, up for adoption. She later attributed the inspiration for her early songwriting endeavours to this experience, claiming it forced her to write songs that put her personal emotions and experiences on show. In late 1965, she left Canada for the first time with American folk singer Chuck Mitchell. They moved to Detroit in the United states, and married in June 1965. This marriage and musical partnership ended in early 1967. Joni kept his surname and moved to New York City, playing venues up and down the East Coast. She performed frequently in coffeehouses and folk clubs, and by now her repertoire often included her own material. By this time she was beginning to become well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style, informed in part by disabilities caused by a childhood bout of polio.

In addition to the success of other artists’ versions of her songs, Mitchell continued to rise in prominence for her own performances and interpretations of her own work, becoming, to many, the archetypal 1960s confessional singer-songwriter. Renowned singer-songwriter David Crosby heard her performing in a club in Coconut Grove, Florida, and introduced her to friends in his musical circle back in Los Angeles. As a result of this, Elliot Roberts became her manager. Roberts introduced her to producer David Geffen, and she was eventually signed to Reprise in 1968.

Mitchell’s best known album is her fourth studio album. Blue was released just four months after Tapestry, in June 1971. The period 1970–71 was a fruitful one for Mitchell and King, both of whom recorded their albums at the same time in Sunset Sound in Hollywood. The two singer-songwriters were part of the same musical community, and as well as sharing recording space, shared musical collaborators. While recording her album, Mitchell was in the throes of a love affair with singer-songwriter James Taylor, who played guitar on the tracks ‘All I Want’ and ‘A Case of You’. Blue documents several romantic relationships she had during its creation. People were keen to speculate on Mitchell’s liaisons and often let gossip preclude discussion of her music, as the following comment by Jack Hamilton shows: ‘“A Case of You” is (maybe) about Leonard Cohen; “My Old Man” is (likely) about Graham Nash; “Carey” is (almost certainly) about an unfamous expat bartender that Mitchell met while vacationing in Crete.’¹⁴ ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ is about leaving Chuck Mitchell. King had met James Taylor in 1970, and the pair established a long-standing musical relationship. Taylor was recording his own album Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon at Sunset Sound concurrently to King’s Tapestry, and both albums featured versions of ‘You’ve Got a Friend’. King played piano on Mud Slide Slim, while Mitchell sang backing vocals. Taylor played guitar on Tapestry, and both Taylor and Mitchell appeared as backing vocalists.

Joni Mitchell wrote the songs for Blue during a self-imposed sabbatical in Europe. The songs, which develop and refine the idiom of the confessional and relatable singer-songwriter, traverse a range of life experiences and the associated emotions. As her biographer Mark Bego has commented:

The opening song, ‘All I Want’ is the most uptempo and upbeat song on the album. It is addressed to the man she loves, and she sings of the many ways she plans to express her devotion:

She also addresses the depression when she and her lover hurt each other:

In the third song on the album, ‘Little Green’, Mitchell addresses the child she gave up for adoption. She nicknames the child Kelly Green, and sings of the devastation she felt at giving her up and all the events she will miss in the child’s life:

This is a song from the 1967 era, and the only accompaniment is Mitchell herself on guitar. This serves to make the song more intimate and personal, and projects the feelings behind the song to her audience. The audience seeks and believes that the music they are hearing communicates authenticity of experience: a confessional singer-songwriter is someone who writes lyrics about their own experiences, and sings and accompanies themselves in performance. The unadorned vocal and accompaniment styles of both King and Mitchell help portray the idea of an unmediated, authentic persona, and their music may be seen as a direct line of communication to an audience that is always searching to validate their own experiences. In addition to the second-person authenticity (validation of experience) of King and Goffin, King’s solo work and Mitchell’s confessional style exhibit ‘first-person authenticity’, or ‘authenticity as expression’. As Moore explains, here an unadorned vocal and instrumental style can help reduce any perceived mediation of content. The audience feels closer to the performer because they believe they are sharing autobiographical experiences, which they themselves may have experienced too.¹⁶

Mitchell accompanies herself on piano for the title song, ‘Blue’. This song is purportedly about her relationship with James Taylor, and she sings of his melancholy, and his tendency to bury his feelings with a variety of methods:

Mitchell continued her live touring and studio recording practices throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Her style evolved throughout her career, as shown by jazz and pop influences on later albums including Court and Spark (1974) and Mingus (1979). In 1994, she won a Grammy for the album Turbulent Indigo. Taming the Tiger (1998) was her last album of new original songs for some time: in 2000 she released an album of reinterpretations of jazz standards, Both Sides Now, followed two years later by Travelogue, an album of reworkings of her own material. In 2006, she released Shine, a much-anticipated album of new songs. Her influence on musicians around her has continued to be evidenced through her entire career: in September 2007, the prominent jazz musician Herbie Hancock released an album of jazz covers of Mitchell’s songs entitled River: The Joni Letters. Throughout her career, Mitchell asserted her creative authority by producing all her albums herself. In recent years she has suffered from a variety of health issues, and at the time of writing (August 2019) does not perform any more but occasionally appears in public to speak on environmental issues.

Kate Bush

The English singer-songwriter Kate Bush was born Catherine Bush on 30 July 1958. She began songwriting aged eleven, and after sharing many of her self-recorded songs with family friend Ricky Hopper, who passed them on to Dave Gilmour (guitarist from Pink Floyd), was signed by EMI at sixteen. O’Brien has commented that Bush’s 1978 No. 1 debut single, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘an offering to the lost love of Cathy and Heathcliff, was a brittle, shivering pop song with a folk base incorporating strings, piano and mournful echo. Nothing like it had been heard before: especially the voice – a high-pitched wander through octaves that pierced through the banality of daytime radio.’¹⁷ ‘Wuthering Heights’ debuted at No. 1 in the UK singles chart, where it remained for four weeks. Bush was the first female UK singer-songwriter to achieve a No. 1 with a self-penned song. ‘Wuthering Heights’ was released just a month before her debut album The Kick Inside, which also topped the album charts in the UK. The album was named after the eponymous song, which took an old English folk tale about an incestuous pregnancy and consequent suicide as its inspiration.

Kate Bush’s musical style incorporates a number of musical influences including pop, classical music, glam rock, folk and ethnic styles, and studio effects. Her primary instrument, piano, is the feature upon which most of her accompaniments are built. It is worth noting here that female singer-songwriters have historically been more readily accepted when their primary instrument is typically understood to be feminine. Lucy Green’s suggested ‘performance of femininity’ is not disrupted by the piano-playing of King and Bush, nor by Mitchell’s acoustic guitar.¹⁸

Bush’s soprano voice is unusual in the singer-songwriter idiom, and the listener’s attention is immediately grabbed by its high frequency and clear timbre. Her music has been described as ‘surreal’, in part for her frequent references to literature and the cinema, and for her rapid switches between emotional states.¹⁹ Unlike King, who appealed largely to universal emotions, and Mitchell, who validated thousands of listeners’ personal experiences, Bush embodied characters she had created in her songs, making them believable through her vocal portrayal. After Simon Frith and Philip Auslander, Moore defines this type of character construction in popular song as ‘song character’, or ‘song personality’.²⁰

In 1979, Bush embarked on a six-week tour of her rapidly produced second album Lionheart. She had recently begun to study dance, and the shows utilised complex choreography, lighting, several costume changes, and Bush performed onstage alongside a magician. After this tour, dubbed The Tour of Life, Bush refused to do live tours of her work, choosing to save her creativity for the studio and music videos. She produced a Live on Stage EP from her tour, and co-produced her 1980 album Never for Ever. Like Mitchell before her, she asserted authorial authority by self-producing all ensuing albums. All her studio albums charted, as did many of her singles.

This hiatus in live performance lasted until her 2014 Before the Dawn residency at the Hammersmith Apollo. The Beatles had famously set a precedent for artists that chose to perform and create in the studio, by refusing to perform live after August 1966. As they had demonstrated before her, it was possible to produce much more intricate soundscapes in the recording studio than those it would be possible to perform live. Her albums utilised synthesisers, drum machines, huge orchestras, and double tracking and layering of her own voice. Once again, the pattern for existing in the popular music world had been established and reinforced by male ‘genius’ figures. Bush continued to write and record studio albums through the 1980s and early 1990s before taking a career break to focus on marriage and motherhood until Aerial, which was released in November 2005.

Bush represented the evolution of female singer-songwriters: no longer bound to confessional songs based on personal experiences and understandings of the world, and no longer restricted to unadorned simplicity of vocal style, she was able to extend her expressivity and musical style with a range of techniques and references.

Adele

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on 5 May 1988, in Tottenham, North London. Adele (the name which she later used as her stage name) graduated from the BRIT School of Performing Arts in Croydon (South London) in 2006. A friend posted a demo song she had written for a class project on Myspace, which led to a phone call from Richard Russell, owner of the independent record label XL Recordings. She was signed by the label in September 2006. Adele is a contemporary pop singer, and credits her musical influences to such towering figures as ‘Etta [James] to get a bit of soul, Ella [Fitzgerald] for my chromatic scales and Roberta Flack for control’.’²¹ Her first two albums, 19 (2008), and 21 (2011), were famously break-up albums, attributed to different failed relationships. They are titled after her age during the main writing and recording period of the albums. Her first album included her first song, ‘Hometown Glory’, written aged sixteen, about West Norwood in South London, where she spent a good deal of her youth.²² The album 19 also included ‘First Love’, ‘Daydreamer’, and ‘Tired’, providing a focal point for audiences who wanted to associate with a public figure who wasn’t afraid to advertise her romantic failures. The lyrics to ‘Tired’, for example, show a despondent acceptance of her partner’s lack of interest:

Adele’s audiences, like Mitchell’s and King’s before her, seek the second-person authenticity defined by Moore as ‘authenticity of experience’. The album was hugely successful, gaining platinum status eight times in the United Kingdom, and three times in the United States. Adele commenced the first of three world tours to promote the album, playing enormous and prominent venues such as Wembley Stadium and the American TV show Saturday Night Live, setting her far away from the intimate venues in which King and Mitchell performed in their early careers.

As Box 10.4 shows, Adele herself was the primary songwriter for 19, which helped provide her audience with a sense of intimacy and the authenticity of shared experience. Sarah Suhadolnik argued in 2016 that, although Adele tried to retain some ownership as songwriter of her material with her second album, audiences were by now focused on the power of her voice and her vocal delivery. ‘Recurring themes on fan commentary’, Suhadolnik writes, ‘consistently point to the sounds of sincere, heartfelt angst as a primary draw.’²³ Many of the songs on 2011’s 21 were collaboratively written (see Box 10.5), as Adele’s public figure shifted from one that commanded second-person authenticity through the experiences expressed, to one who begins to embody third-person authenticity, or ‘authenticity of execution’. As Moore explains: ‘“third person authenticity” … arises … when a performer succeeds in conveying the impression of accurately representing the ideas of another, embedded within a tradition of performance’.²⁴ Adele’s command of the bluesy, soulful style, along with the association with the African American singers she lists as inspiration, situates her within a distant tradition that connotes pain and hardship.

Adele’s breakthrough successful album was 21, which won her six Grammys, two BRIT awards, and three American Music Awards, achieving platinum status seventeen times in the United Kingdom, and certified diamond status in the United States. Having established a reputation and public profile as an authentic singer-songwriter who spoke to shared experiences through perceived autobiographical content and her singing voice, sole authorship of the musical and lyrical material became less crucial.

Adele is also an interesting case study for the idea of the constructed persona. As Moore has suggested: ‘[when listening to popular song] it is usually more helpful to recognise that we are listening to a persona, projected by a singer, in other words to an artificial construction that may, or may not, be identical with the person(ality) of the singer’.²⁵ This disjunct is underscored further by the personality that comes across in interviews. Suhadolnik comments:

The difference between Adele’s artistic and performed persona and her off-stage personality is underlined by her acceptance speech at the BRIT awards in 2012:

Adele took a short career break after the worldwide success and fame 21 brought. She released 25 on 27 November 2015, commenting:

The ‘life happen[ing]’ that she alluded to included settling down into a long-term relationship with Simon Konecki, and giving birth to her first son Angelo in October 2012. Her relationship with Konecki was confirmed to have ended in April 2019.²⁸

As on 21, all these songs are collaborations. Adele made her name as an authentic down-to-earth performer, with a powerful, soul-inspired voice. It seems that a direct line of communication expressing her own experiences is of lesser concern to her audiences than it was earlier in her career. The album 25 is credited with rekindling British record sales: it was the best-selling album worldwide for 2015, and debuted as No. 1 in 25 countries. The album won many accolades: including the BRIT award for British Album of the Year in 2016, and Grammys the following year for Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album. The opening single ‘Hello’ won Grammys for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Solo Performance the following year.

Conclusion

Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Adele; my focus on performing songwriters in this chapter has provided an explanation for why female singer-songwriters evoke strong feelings of authenticity and relatability from their audiences. By writing about their own experiences, and then performing these songs themselves in fairly unmediated formats and venues, King, Mitchell, and Adele represent a seemingly direct line of communication, from emotional narrator to emotional receiver. These examples, along with other female singer-songwriters, provide a visible focal point for audiences. Bush is an outlier to this trajectory, and has been included in this chapter to showcase the commercial success that can be achieved by a female singer-songwriter who is unapologetic about using extensive artistic reference points and studio techniques.

Gender and My Mid-1990s Thesis

For that earlier doctoral research, I had not considered writing much about gender issues. I felt that my research findings were controversial enough as they stood: drawing attention to the many problems encountered by myself regarding the trajectory of folk music ideology, business, and dissemination at that time. Also, not being female, I did not feel entirely qualified to engage with the alarming stereotyping of women I had come across. However, in the seventh chapter of the thesis gender was discussed a little. As one example, I cited an interview with my former guitar tutor, local folk singer Bob Buckle. Bob informed me of a gig that he and his singing partner Pete Douglas (‘the Leesiders’) had played at Ewan MacColl’s folk club (I think it was the Scots Hoose in Moore Street, London) in the 1960s. After the evening’s proceedings had ‘officially’ drawn to a close, he asked MacColl a question: ‘what about women?’ Bob recalled the response:

I can still recall feelings of revulsion upon hearing this. Although I had never been a follower or fan of MacColl (I didn’t care for his Marxist and later Maoist politics or his Critics Group purisms), I certainly respected much of both his and Bert Lloyd’s research. However, the more I learnt about this folk ‘axis’, the more I mistrusted their formalist a priori critical/historical determinisms, which appeared to hold scant respect for any kind of radical emancipation for women (or anyone else, for that matter). MacColl’s reported misogynist comments certainly resonated across my research, for these masculine tropes disguised as ‘policy’ reeked of the folk revival that I had come to know.

Looking back now, I suppose it all reflected the misogynist nature of British society at that time: one seldom feels that the popular music scene to which one is drawn is a representation of broader society, but (one way or another) it usually is. I much later learnt that the legendary folk singer Shirley Collins had also found both MacColl’s and Lloyd’s attitudes towards her as a female artist contemptible. According to Colin Irwin:

Such blithe dismissals of women in the British post-Second-World-War folk revival (a kind of ‘here, but not here’ ghostly shadow) should also be placed into the historical-political matrix of mid-twentieth-century British Marxism. As Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson have commented:

Both Bob Buckle’s comments concerning MacColl and the above quote from Fraser and Nicholson made it into my PhD thesis, but were not present in the published Ashgate text. I cannot recall whether the decision to omit these important statements was mine, or my editor’s, but I know that I later regretted it, for it was quite evident that the one key element of the British folk revival’s musical-historical discourse was its overtly masculine narrative. Indeed, it was only via such a limited, myopic focus that the folk scene’s self-directed hagiography could even exist: stitching together ‘acceptable’ folk fragments in a male-oriented post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. This artificial masculine linear narrative (‘because of this came this’) connected only those ‘facts’ deemed appropriate.

I found all folk clubs to be particularly problematic in this respect, with most members projecting into folk performances particular kinds of masculine-interpreted social and musical fantasies that gratified their folk ‘historical’ inclinations. Ruth Finnegan (whose work I still admire) acknowledged that ‘folkies’ in Milton Keynes in the late-1980s ‘associated their music, and hence themselves, with “the folk” – ordinary people – in the past and present’,⁷ but I felt that she had neither recognised or articulated that this ‘ordinary people’ visage-cum-fantasy was effectively a masculine-centric hypothesis (the authentic working-class male) communicated within a male-dominated environment (the folk club, the pub). To me, it all appeared, not only part of the male sphere of socialisation, but also authority.

Towards the end of my research I came to feel that I had not even scratched the surface of the ‘non-figuring’ folk woman, and felt that as long as folk music performances in British folk clubs continued to be devised from masculinised politico-heritage tropes, they would continue to marginalise in song and dance not only female roles, but also other partially hidden folk music narratives (e.g. those concerning race, sexuality, mental illness, etc.). To me, the folk club was a recidivist environment: a patriarchal, self-indulgent (albeit somewhat contested) place of worship, out of step with broader societal developments. Back in 1989, Finnegan had also suggested that women felt relatively comfortable in the folk clubs she attended in Milton Keynes, but from my own research I found this not to be the case (I still hold ethnographic research on the topic). By 1993 Georgina Boyes was already declaring:

Folk clubs were undoubtedly in a demographic predicament of vast proportions: for example in an article concerning the young folk club organiser Jane Threlfall, Folk Roots editor Ian A. Anderson suggested that:

Actually, as projected in my thesis, a marked decline of folk clubs did come about. These days the ‘traditional’ club is merely one facet of a healthier, disparate, and voluminous folk music environment.¹⁰ There exists a folk scene that encapsulates all different kinds of venues, events, and musical performances from great festivals and concert halls, to arts centres, and tiny house gigs. The folk scene still has a long way to travel in advocating a plurality of ethics, beliefs, and epistemologies, but at least it has now largely rejected the concept of humanity as a unitary male-informed ‘given’. What follows are, I hope, examples of this: firstly, excerpts from two discussions between myself and two ‘figuring’ women currently involved in the 2019 British folk music scene: one, a female folk music performer, the other a female folk music business woman. Secondly, I also include in my summary a small vignette concerning one of my former music students, ‘Mary’.

Folk Music Performance: Emily Portman

Emily Portman is an integral part of the British folk scene’s current ‘new wave’; she is a highly regarded singer, writer, and concertina player, and has recently won several awards.¹¹ For example, she was the 2013 holder of the BBC Radio Two Folk Award for ‘Best Original Song’, and in the 2016 Folk Awards she was nominated for ‘Best Singer’. In addition, Emily is a member of the Furrow Collective. This group also features Lucy Farrell, Rachel Newton, and Alasdair Roberts. They were awarded the prestigious ‘Best Band’ in the 2017 BBC Folk Awards. Emily lives in Liverpool, and she briefly presented BBC Radio Merseyside’s Folkscene prior to myself. She has written articles for fROOTS magazine, and has given lectures on ballad studies at Cecil Sharp House and at The International Ballad Conference. She also teaches on the traditional music degree at Newcastle University. I would admit that I’m a fan of her work and have played several Emily Portman and Furrow Collective tracks on Folkscene.

As a new Furrow Collective tour approached (including an important gig lined up on 23 April 2019 at the Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room), Emily came into BBC Radio Merseyside to co-present Folkscene. Rather than interview guests per se, I have a policy of asking guests to co-present the programme. So, in addition to promoting their event and/or new release they might simply comment as and when they feel is appropriate. This awards the programme a more relaxed ‘organic’ feel which at the same time befits the aesthetics of the twenty-first-century folk scene. I also later visited Emily at her home, on 30 May 2019, to continue our conversation a little.

Following a lively discussion of both Emily’s solo career and the Furrow Collective tour and latest album, I asked her, what it was like as a woman on the folk scene in 2019. Emily responded:

I responded by stating that during my mid-’90s research, I came across a great deal of tokenism, with folk authenticity residing for many in the masculine, not the feminine. Emily replied:

Emily also remarked:

(On the practicalities of trying to combine a freelance career with parenthood, see also Chapter 16, ‘Women in the Music Industries: The Art of Juggling’.)

Emily also brought up the issue of singing what might be described as ‘badly chosen’ traditional song material. We discussed this at some length, agreeing that the rape, infanticide, and murder narratives contained in some ballads and traditional songs require at the very least discussion, re-contextualisation or perhaps ‘answering’ in a new song (as Emily has done in her song ‘Borrowed and Blue’). After all, popular music is kinetic and perhaps, just like Marx’s ‘modern man’, should not be preserved as if ‘in aspic’. (For another account of a woman’s experiences in the contemporary British folk scene, see ‘In Her Own Words: Practitioner Contribution 2’, by Virginia Kettle.)

Folk Music Business: Rose Price

Rose Price is a folk and acoustic music promoter ‘born, bred, and buttered within the city walls of Chester’.¹⁵ For the past five years Rose has promoted under the name of SoundBox at such venues in the city as ‘Upstairs at the Lock Keeper’, St Mary’s Creative Space, and St Mary’s Handbridge Centre. Rose was previously an editor for two editions of the Chester Standard series of local newspapers. The ‘SoundBox’ moniker emerged from her weekly ‘what’s on’ column of the same name. Kate Rusby and Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle were two early promotions, together with a stint for Chester Fringe, devising, and curating pop-up music events, and also booking O’Hooley & Tidow for what was their debut performance in Chester. Rose had been involved in folk and acoustic music for a long time:

Rose also informed me that:

I asked her whether she felt it actually ‘mattered’ being a ‘female folk music promoter’ (i.e. whether a discussion about gender and folk promotion was even relevant), to which, she replied:

Regarding the current folk music industry, Rose found that ‘if you don’t go through an agent and deal directly with the artists, it can be far easier’. I replied that as a radio presenter I dealt on a regular basis with many female publicity people, to which Rose replied that one might interpret this as women ‘being handed the worst job’. She knew ‘from personal experience’ that press release work was a ‘very time consuming, and often thankless, job’. She suggested, too, that such work might even be ‘passed on to women, referencing the secretarial/admin role, traditionally associated with females’. However, she also stated ‘these days, from an agency perspective, it’s not overly male dominated, especially in the larger agencies where they need to cover a wide artist roster’.

I enquired whether, as a female promoter in Chester, she ever felt exposed:

The discussion moved on to folk music festival organisation: we both noted that the 2019 Wirral Folk Festival had returned following a year’s absence in 2018 brought about by the illness of one of the organising committee. Previously, Rose and I had discussed taking over the festival’s management for a year, rather than see its removal from the UK festival calendar; but nothing came of it. Upon its restoration, the festival continued to be organised by a committee. I asked Rose whether she might have put herself into a position of joining a committee to help organise and/or promote a folk festival (i.e. rather than sole-promote, as she currently did). She replied that she felt there might be ‘too many battles that would be unwanted distractions’ and felt that at present:

Rose also suggested that:

Rose had booked an interesting line-up of artists to play at both ‘Upstairs at The Lock Keeper’ and at St Mary’s Creative Space between September and December 2019: mixed-gendered band Road Not Taken, the Chris Cleverley Trio (including Kim Lowings and Kathy Pilkinton), Chris Foster, Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage, Mishra, and Belinda O’Hooley & Heidi Tidow.

Overall, one might argue that this is an extremely well-balanced programme as far as gender is concerned; out of the fifteen ‘featured’ artists presented, eight are women and seven are men. These figures might also represent a growth in gender equality across the twenty-first-century British folk scene. For example, since my return to BBC Radio Merseyside in 2014, over 65 per cent of the 2,000-plus tracks I have presented on Folkscene have been performed by women: as soloists, in single-gender or mixed-gender duos, trios, and bands. In fact, as Rose has mentioned to me on several occasions, she tends to book those she admires, or those who have previously ‘gone down well’ at the venues she uses; for example, such popular artists might include (say) O’Hooley and Tidow, as much as (say) Jim Moray; at the very least, ‘promising’ news for the budding female folk artist.

Summary

I recall supervising a female folk-rock performer at Liverpool Hope University shortly before resuming my radio career in 2014. ‘Mary’ was approaching completion of her third-year dissertation, the topic of which was the logistics of self-promotion and performing in a mixed-gendered ‘folk-style’ band. She fronted a mixed female/male unit consisting of two guitarists, a bassist, a fiddle and part-time melodeon player, and a percussionist. They were raw, but had a good sound. They were looking forward to a busy summer, having received several festival bookings between June and September: ‘almost enough to make a living’ she quipped. ‘Mary’ informed me that a discussion had taken place the previous day between herself and a Liverpool-based promoter: the band had been booked as a support, but were informed by the promoter that some ‘disappointment’ had been expressed because they were not an all-girl band. Apparently, the promoter suggested that a former female member of the group, who had recently left, might be encouraged to return ‘so that they would appear more of a girl band to the local brewery “guys” sponsoring the gig’. More females on stage apparently ‘avoided the likelihood of complaints’: tokenism, of course.

‘Mary’ asked whether I thought they should continue with the booking. I suggested that they might consider withdrawing, because, not only was it typecasting women, but also took no account of the guys in the band. It also struck me that such issues were not simply tokenistic, but also redolent of ‘non-figuring’ female choices and status. However, a little later that day, I came to change my mind: after all, those anti-female philosophical mono-discourses we persuaded ourselves to follow had been replaced by a tapestry of micro-threads of convergences and contingencies together with micro-circumstances demanding contingent responses.¹⁷ Therefore, I determined to speak to ‘Mary’ again. I would tell her that there was little to be gained from reducing such complexities to one overall meta-philosophical stance: take the money, play the gig, have a good time, move on.

I saw ‘Mary’ again on campus the following morning and before I could even get a word in edgeways, she said ‘we’ve decided to keep the gig and are taking the advice to add back “Emma” [the musician who had previously left]. The money’s good, we are only on for forty minutes, so: “so what?”’ As it turned-out, the promoter in question was female and pressure from the (surprise, surprise) all-male brewery marketing staff was falling on her, rather than the band per se. Although this female promoter appeared to possess power, that power was considered disruptive by the brewery team. ‘Mary’ suggested that the promoter lacked ‘real’ authority because she was a woman. So, she and her band had realised they were not victim-performers, per se, and attempted to debate a more multi-layered resolution to this convergent sphere of music performance and music business activity. This created a different starting point for ‘Mary’ to reflect on her role as a female folk/rock bandleader, as she fashioned a more contingent time-based inflection to the issue: it was more conditional than universal. By doing so, she might have even helped the promoter to maintain her hard-won music business-related status. Evidently, circumstances were not ideal, but neither were they as binary as first appeared. Yes, perhaps the promoter had attempted to ‘swerve’ the issue by placing it into the hands of ‘Mary’ and the band. Yet ‘Mary’ had geared her response specifically towards the micro-context: convergence and contingency supervened mono-philosophical thought.

Any configuration of language-games is contingent: even those mono-historical ‘tablets of stone’ previously placed before us older ‘folkies’ by MacColl and Lloyd. Further, all popular music futures are determined by tolerances, borderlines, and frames of reference; for all music scenes create borders and ‘frames’. Scenes tolerate as they define via contingent and contextual fields of representation. However, borders surrounding ‘tradition(s)’ can exist to encapsulate or purify. As important as they might be in the name of tradition, symbols created by and through the historically rooted folk orthodoxy should no longer frame a so-called ‘consensus’: one in which the woman ‘figures’ only via male rhetorical tropes.

Perhaps the most useful way of understanding the many strands of the twenty-first-century British folk scene is via how it has come to recognise and respond to contextual, transient, and discursive musical and social spaces, interventions, and interactions. Within such discursive spaces we are able to allow representations from the past to stand, but can then critique them via the edges and limits of our sonic inspirations and delineations. Whether we like it or not, historical misogyny was once as integral to the social framework of the British folk scene as it was to the social framework of British society. We should not deny this historical fact, but instead express our subjective freedom by and through our actions and creative responses; such subjectivity will serve us well as a reminder not to withdraw into the British folk revival’s previous patterns of behaviour, especially regarding the ‘non-figuring’ woman.

In all the examples discussed above, contingent, contextual, and provisional ‘figurings’ appear to be far more stable representations of female realities than the masculine-informed folk mythologies in which women were conceived as the ‘non-figuring other’. If the British folk scene of the twenty-first-century can be truly described as vitally important popular music praxis, one in which social and cultural mores and issues such as feminism and gender equality are openly debated alongside a priori tropes of tradition, then in spite of the afore-discussed historically apprised recidivism, the awareness that abounds across the scene in terms of egalitarianism and fairness should help foster a variety of exciting and relevant discourses in which young women (and men) might pro-actively engage and ‘figure’.

Tina Turner: The Power of the Branded Self, the Survivor Narrative, and the Redemptive Comeback

In some ways, MTV was really nothing new.¹¹ Sound had already met image – to powerful effect – on television decades before, in live appearances on shows like The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand, on music-centred television programmes like The Monkees and The Partridge Family, and on variety shows such as Soul Train, Solid Gold, and Saturday Night Live. But in this new environment, a different kind of storytelling emerged, with solo women leading the charge. Some stars sought to build in protection as they told their stories, creating branded selves to absorb the anticipated body blows associated with female daring. Cyndi Lauper turned herself, with the help of her handlers, into a cartoon in the video for ‘She Bop’, presumably so she could say she was just having a laugh, though she was clearly arguing in favour of female pleasure. Janet Jackson used cheeky humour and choreographed spectacles to encourage audiences to amplify the punchline (‘Ms. Jackson if you nasty’) while her songs explored heteronormative power dynamics and women’s need for autonomy and control. These strategies of loading subversive messages of resistance into gender-normative packaging worked – and stuck.¹² Both Lauper and Jackson experienced spikes in recognition in 2016 when ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ came back as ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun(damental) Rights’ signs at the Women’s March, and Jackson’s ‘Nasty’ went viral in meme form after Donald Trump dismissed presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as ‘such a nasty woman’. The lesson learned and passed onto future stars was this: Conform to gender expectations and you can resist, as long as you seem playful, and you maintain an image of youth, femininity, and desirability. (Think of Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’ – and her overall brand presentation throughout her career – as an example of this theory in action.)

The branded self was also a new mechanism for sharing and selling gendered and sexualised violence and exploitation, as numerous scholars, such as Susan Bordo, have suggested through their examinations of Madonna’s videos.¹³ But traditional forms of power-based domination, such as domestic abuse and sexual violence, had plagued stars’ careers long before MTV. The new music channel gave bold stars a worldwide platform to engage with these issues creatively, with the potential for unprecedented reach and impact.¹⁴ Tina Turner provides a compelling example of an artist whose backstory, image, and resulting brand catapulted her to unprecedented success on MTV. Turner had literally sacrificed everything she had, including her physical safety, to pursue her dream. After enduring years of abuse at the hands of her husband and manager, Ike Turner, Tina broke free and became a star.¹⁵ Her solo debut, Private Dancer (1984), served as a fiery, defiant declaration of independence, earning her multiple hit singles and videos, three Grammys, and international recognition and acclaim. (Turner quickly capitalised on these opportunities, venturing into the wider entertainment business with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.)

As an industry veteran in the midst of a major comeback, Turner used personal narratives to propel her performances, and to resonate with audiences hungry for justice via sing-along empowerment anthems. In her wonderfully campy ‘Private Dancer’ video, Turner draws parallels between sex work and pop stardom, roasting the ethics, integrity, and short-term, transactional focus of music-industry players. ‘I’m your private dancer, dancer for money’, she sings; ‘Do what you want me to do’. Then, acknowledging music’s new subservience to spectatorship, she concedes: ‘And any old music will do’. It is worth noting that the lyrics to ‘Private Dancer’ were penned by Mark Knopfler, lead singer of Dire Straits, whose song ‘Money For Nothing’, was an MTV smash despite its open hostility towards MTV and its effects on the industry.¹⁶ Predictably, internalising the channel’s formula catapulted Knopfler and his band to wider mainstream success and greater critical acclaim than ever before. Knopfler sold ‘Private Dancer’ to a more reliable (woman) narrator, but in ‘Money For Nothing’ he cast himself as the prostituted protagonist, sickened by the ‘little faggot(s)’¹⁷ who sell out with ease to make their ‘money for nothing’.¹⁸ This telling epithet suggests that acquiescing to exploitation is for women, men who play the game are feminine or gay, and sexism and homophobia pervade the industry.

‘Better Be Good To Me’ finds Turner, the industry’s first middle-aged sex symbol, in a black leather bodysuit, staring down the camera. She is grounded in her new expectations – she ‘has no use’ for what her love interest ‘loosely call(s) the truth’ and that she doesn’t ‘have the time for (his) overloaded lies’. Towards the end of the video, she literally grabs a white man (‘The Man?’) in a comic turn, and demands: ‘Why can’t you be good to me?’ In ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’, Turner struts through the city – presumably to show off her famous legs – and collects interested glances from those she passes. But she’s not interested, dismissing love as ‘a second-hand emotion’, and ‘a sweet old-fashioned notion’ and opting to prioritise her ‘own protection’ instead, at least for the moment. The title of this song also became the title to Turner’s biopic, released in 1993.

Sinéad O’Connor: The Cycle of Abuse, Rebellion, Sacrifice, and Recovery

While MTV and brand building empowered artists such as Turner, giving them new levels of exposure and creative agency via branding, it disempowered or erased others; especially those who refused to even pretend to play by the new rules. The precipitous rise and savage takedown of Sinéad O’Connor perhaps best captures the perils of being a solo woman pop star in the ‘ring of spectatorship’ in which stars are ‘plumped for the slaughter, then primed for the comeback’.¹⁹ Through O’Connor’s story we see the four aforementioned themes in action, and find that ‘one of the biggest challenges for a woman in pop is to express herself from the core’.²⁰

From the beginning of her career, O’Connor was clear she ‘didn’t want to be a fucking pop star’, but did want to be ‘a protest singer’.²¹ Ensign Records founder Nigel Grainge signed O’Connor precisely because she was a serious artist who didn’t play by the rules, but then dared to suggest an image change. O’Connor rebelled:

This had immediate implications for her brand when she hit the market with The Lion and the Cobra (1987), which was recorded while she was pregnant. Framed as an ‘androgynous pixie’ who was a ‘striking contrast to the sexual potency of the reigning pop diva, Madonna’,²³ O’Connor successfully differentiated herself from the beginning. Her look endured for more complicated and personal reasons. ‘In the pagan tradition, they say the goddess has four faces. In one the goddess is shaven headed’, she said. ‘When the goddess is being her true self, she has no sexuality the way that men perceive earthly sexuality. But her sexuality comes from her soul.’ Her photographer combined these notions, observing that hearing O’Connor’s voice was ‘like being French kissed by the angels’.²⁴

When O’Connor’s album was released in the UK, its cover depicted shaven-headed Sinéad, crossing her wrists across her chest as if protecting herself from a punch, and with her mouth wide open, suggesting a scream, or a cobra about to strike. Her eyes look in the direction of her presumed attacker. When it was released in the United States and Canada, the cover was edited, presumably to make her more gender-normative, and thus palatable to less forgiving markets. O’Connor’s mouth is closed, her eyes are cast down at the ground, and her expression suggests defeat. Her arms still form an ‘X’ across her chest, but now O’Connor looks passive, as if she has resigned herself to being hit without fighting back. She also appears to have a black eye. One explanation for the difference could be that female passivity was expected to sell better than female rage.

In writing about Blondie, rock critic Lester Bangs described the dynamics between powerful woman stars and their male admirers in a way that might shed light on the strategy behind the more acquiescent positioning on the US cover.²⁵

Writer Cheryl Cline responded to Bangs’ observation, noting the fact ‘[that] a powerful woman brings out a desire in men to conquer her – if not to actually beat her into submission, then to bring her under his sway in some other way – is hardly a novel idea’.²⁷ Cline also suggested that the increasing popularity and acceptance of eroticised male domination was emboldening men to be more direct about such desires. ‘Ten or twelve years before, Janis Joplin brought out similar reactions in male writers’, she wrote. But they expressed fantasies about ‘being the guy who comforted a “sad”, “hurt” Janis after she’d been brutalised by some other cad – or by the hard life of a rebel girl’.²⁸

O’Connor’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, was released in 1990. O’Connor appeared in a video for its breakout hit, a cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, two days after ending her romantic relationship with Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, who was also her manager. In the video, striking for its simplicity and vulnerability on the heels of ’80s excess, O’Connor’s face appears in close-up, set against a black background. There is nothing between O’Connor and the audience – no pretence, no eighties effects, no big hair – and she has such a harrowing story to tell that she actually begins crying. (O’Connor maintains that her tears were real and shed for her mother, who died in 1986, when O’Connor was nineteen). Writing for the New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich captured the rare, revealing, meta-narrative of the video: ‘“This is all of my humanity”, her face seems to say. “Don’t you dare look away”’.²⁹

O’Connor’s next single, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ (1990), maintained this intense connection, exploring the trials of fame and criticism, post-partum depression, gaslighting, abuse and exploitation, male impunity and female ‘hysteria’, mental health, reality versus perception, and the consequences of truth telling: ‘They laugh cause they know they’re untouchable, not because what I said was wrong’. And audiences loved it, until they didn’t.

O’Connor began to rebel strenuously against her rising fame, and by 1991, her brand was morphing from powerful protest singer to compassionate-but-exasperating contrarian. After rejecting four Grammy nominations – and one Grammy win – O’Connor did battle with a New Jersey concert venue to prevent the American National Anthem from being played before her performance. This angered Frank Sinatra, who called her a ‘stupid broad’ and said he’d like to ‘kick her ass’.³⁰

Then, in 1992, O’Connor released her third album, Am I Not Your Girl, which featured covers of jazz standards, not the pop hits fans had come to expect. The album was considered commercial suicide by fans and critics alike; and some paying close attention even wondered if its release was designed to stall O’Connor’s career, and put her in self-imposed exile. Her behaviour on Saturday Night Live (SNL) on 3 October 1992 solidified growing perceptions of O’Connor as difficult, cantankerous, and disrespectful. She sang Bob Marley’s ‘War’ – an odd choice given that it was not on the album she was there to promote – adapting the lyrics to focus on child abuse. As she sang the word ‘evil’, she held up a photo of Pope John Paul II, ripped it apart, and shouted ‘fight the real enemy’.³¹

Without sufficient context for her rage and actions – O’Connor was a child abuse survivor who was deeply committed to God but enraged at the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church for covering up priests’ crimes against children – the backlash was immediate and violent. During Joe Pesci’s opening monologue on SNL the following week, he held up the same photo, explaining he had taped it back together, and then destroyed a photo of O’Connor, saying that if he had been hosting the previous week, he would have given her ‘such a smack’.³² Music industry mogul Jonathan King, told Billboard that O’Connor needed a spanking.³³ (King was later convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault on teenaged boys and sentenced to seven years in prison.)³⁴

Thirteen days after O’Connor’s fateful appearance on SNL, she performed at Bob Dylan’s thirtieth anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden. When she took the stage, she heard ‘a thundering mixture of cheers and jeers’ that sounded, to her, like good and evil warring.³⁵ Although the sound made her ‘want to puke’, O’Connor doubled down, screaming ‘War’ to be heard above the crowd. Then she glared defiantly at the audience, walked off stage, and hugged legendary songwriter Kris Kristofferson, who had been asked to remove her from the stage, but had declined in solidarity. After this incident, O’Connor announced she was quitting her music career at twenty-five. A VH1 documentary explained the paradox: ‘Sinéad may have had the “profile of a pop star”, but she also had “the low self-esteem of a child abuse victim”’.³⁶ O’Connor sank into a ‘life-threatening depression’ for seven years following the event, and tried to kill herself eight times in one year.³⁷ Reflecting back on her actions, O’Connor acknowledges she could have contextualised her anger more effectively for audiences, but remains convinced she did the right thing.

O’Connor returned to music two years later, releasing Universal Mother in 1994, Gospel Oak in 1997, and Faith and Courage in 2010. She credits God with giving her the voice that enabled her comeback and recovery. ‘That voice is what lifted me out of hell’, she said. ‘Like if I had not sung, god only knows, I’d be Kurt Cobain now’.³⁸ Retrospectively, she’s proud she spoke her truth on SNL. ‘If that’s all I ever did on Planet Earth, I would be happy’, O’Connor said in 2013. ‘I am really proud that I got to be that person.’³⁹ O’Connor converted to Islam in 2018, and took the name Shuhada Sadaqat in 2019. Shuhada is an Arabic name meaning ‘witnesses’ or ‘martyrs’.

Alanis Morissette: The Connections Between Emotional Pain, Pop Stardom, and Mental Health

O’Connor’s work opened up space for emerging pop and indie artists who wanted to use their platforms to share disappointment, express rage, and hold men accountable. PJ Harvey’s Dry (1992) and Rid of Me (1992) and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (1993) made women’s anger palpable in indie rock circles – and in critical reviews in mainstream outlets – amplifying the ideas espoused via the more DIY riot grrrl movement.⁴⁰ With Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995), such themes exploded into the mainstream, became popular, and got audiences talking.⁴¹ But mainstream success came with unexpected consequences.⁴² In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Morissette revealed she pursued fame to cure her emotional pain, believing: ‘I will be less lonely, and I will be understood, and I will be loved. And that love will go in and heal any of the broken parts.’⁴³ Instead, fame exacerbated underlying issues, led to PTSD,⁴⁴ and ‘one dimensionalised’ her brand, first typecasting her as angry woman. She recalled:

Morissette described feeling particularly vulnerable and violated when excited fans would try to cut bits of her hair or skin off as souvenirs.⁴⁶ Scholar Kathryn Lofton places such moments in context, explaining: ‘Transforming flesh into commodity has a long history, a history that includes far less voluntary formats of commodification than those experienced by Britney Spears … But to make something that is human something that is marketable … is, undeniably, a procedure of atomisation, valuation, and dehumanisation.’⁴⁷ By building human brands to be short-term, highly lucrative, and then disposable, the industry facilitates this dehumanisation, and ensures stars who are women can only be so powerful for so long. Once woman superstar brands are shunned or shut down, so too are their platforms, until a subsequent generation of stars notice the same cultural issues decades later and get in formation to try to fix them. But if each successive group of stars reinvents the wheel, it spins furiously but makes little progress.

As O’Connor and Morissette work to heal their personal selves from past pain and trauma,⁴⁸ their brands are also being rehabilitated by peers and audiences eager to celebrate the fearless contributions they made in less empathetic times.⁴⁹ In Variety, singer Kay Hanley admitted feeling jealous and threatened by Morissette’s fearlessness. ‘Her singing was guttural, primal, unconventional, terrifying, real … her lyricised revenge, fist-pumping catharsis’, Hanley wrote. ‘I didn’t understand how to write the way Alanis was writing and I found her authenticity deeply upsetting.’⁵⁰

Fiona Apple: The Necessity of Setting Self-Protective Career Boundaries

Aspiring stars who watched O’Connor be sacrificed, and Morissette be bashed despite – or because of – her popularity, could read the tea leaves. Some opted out of the branded pop star game to preserve their sanity and longevity. One artist who intuited the value of self-preservation from O’Connor is Fiona Apple, who wrote her solo debut, Tidal (1996), when she was seventeen, and released it when she was eighteen. Her natural trajectory was quick and clear; pop stardom. (She scored three hit singles, earned instant acclaim and popularity, and her album went platinum.) She also won the Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for ‘Criminal’ in 1996 and the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist in a Video for ‘Sleep to Dream’ in 1997. But when critics accused her of glorifying child pornography in her ‘Criminal’ video, and of looking too young and emaciated, she fired back, revealing painful personal reasons for wanting to stay slim.⁵¹

Apple quickly encoded the industry’s terms and rejected them; just saying no to top-level fame. She made herself difficult to market, releasing a sophomore effort with a ninety-word title and behaving aggressively at awards shows, calling the world and the industry ‘bullshit’.⁵² Her actions created a career ceiling; her music would never again be as popular or mainstream as it was on Tidal. She could retreat to the music-first world of the indie star, but perhaps this choice paid other dividends with respect to mental health and career longevity, so her choice should be more appropriately understood as a victory, not a defeat.

Apple’s third album, the knowingly titled Extraordinary Machine (2005), found her embracing her choices and her humanity: ‘I am likely to miss the main event’, she sings on ‘Better Version of Me’, ‘if I stop to cry or complain again’. Buoyed by her choice and exhausted by the ‘folderol’ and ‘hauling over coals’, she continues: ‘So I will keep a deliberate pace’, she sings, ‘let the damned breeze dry my face’. After O’Connor posted a video of herself crying in the midst of a psychiatric episode (on Facebook on 5 August 2017), Apple responded with two videos. In the first, Apple calls O’Connor her ‘hero’ and offers her support, and in the second, she screams and thrashes along to a live performance of ‘Mandinka’, erupting into applause at the end.⁵³

Gaining Awareness, Giving Credit Where It’s Due, and Building Upon Past Sacrifices

Janet Jackson dominated the pop charts alongside Madonna throughout the mid-to-late 1980s, and was still so resonant in 2004, she was tapped to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake. During the performance, Timberlake ripped Jackson’s top, revealing a strategically covered nipple, for 9/16 of a second, to 143 million television viewers.⁵⁴ This ‘wardrobe malfunction’, also known as ‘Nipplegate’, resulted in Jackson being banned from the Grammys that year, while Timberlake was permitted to attend and perform.⁵⁵ Jackson’s songs and videos were also banned by Clear Channel Communications, which controlled MTV, CBS, and many radio stations, compromising Damita Jo (2004), which became Jackson’s worst-selling album since 1984. As Billboard summarised: ‘Jackson was made a public example of; the new millennium’s modern witch put on trial.’ In 2017, Timberlake was invited to perform at the Super Bowl again, and did.⁵⁶ Black feminist critic Janell Hobson, amongst others, identified the intersecting racism and sexism that sacrificed Jackson, a black woman, but absolved Timberlake, a white man.⁵⁷ Such stories, once marginalised, have become mainstream.

Stefani Germanotta had humbler beginnings than Jackson, Apple, and O’Connor, but, after being dropped by Def Jam after only three months on its roster, Germanotta went all in, creating one of the best-known pop brands of all-time: Lady Gaga.⁵⁸ Drawing on Madonna’s visuals and choreographed spectacles (‘Born This Way’), Turner’s narratives of sexual abuse and exploitation (‘Bad Romance’), and O’Connor’s taboo-violating silence-breaking about sexual abuse (‘Til It Happens to You’), Gaga adapted Madonna’s pop star playbook and extended its vision. Madonna fought powerfully for gay rights, and Gaga effectively ‘queered the mainstream’.⁵⁹ This made it safer for numerous high-profile pop stars, such as Miley Cyrus, Halsey, Kesha, Janelle Monáe, and Hayley Kiyoko, to come out and provide better multidimensional representation for their industry peers and queer audiences.⁶⁰

Beyoncé followed a similar trajectory, leveraging Jackson’s choreographed-spectacle-as-protest idea, Tina Turner’s survivor narratives, and Madonna’s boss-bitch business acumen, to effectively become an industry unto herself. With these moves, Beyoncé pushed back against male dominance and white supremacy, and gained cultural power rather than losing it.⁶¹ Beyoncé’s approach has been dynamic and immersive reinvention, around her overarching brand theme of complicated, resistant, and self-affirming black womanhood. (Beyoncé’s approach also put Madonna’s call for continuous brand reinvention on an accelerated timeline). While clearly liberating for some fans, this branding strategy was also optimised for demanding followers who had been trained by social media, streaming services, and Amazon.com to expect instant gratification.

Conclusion: Surviving, Speaking Out, Finding Support, and Sticking Around …

The human sacrifices of being a post-MTV pop star are abundant and clear: there’s no privacy, fans expect full-time access to stars’ lives, and if fans don’t like something a star does, she might be destroyed as quickly as she was embraced. For those daring to share personal or professional narratives about abuse and exploitation, or exhibiting real, human signs of struggle in their private lives, the likelihood of fierce rejection, humiliation, and backlash increases exponentially. But Turner, O’Connor, and Morissette had the courage not only to share their experiences, but also to keep talking about them, despite the vitriol they inspired. They are pop stars who bottomed out and survived, showing others that such a trajectory was possible.

The stars featured in this chapter articulated women’s desires, ambitions, identities, and sources of anger and rage in highly compelling ways and then made their resulting need for respect, autonomy, and justice seem not only fair, but obvious. These stars sacrificed their own comfort and well-being to build a safer platform for those coming up behind them to explore similar themes of exploitation and abuse, cultural taboos, and underexplored dimensions of identity. The careers of Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Kesha, Demi Lovato, and Billie Eilish would be unimaginable without them. Pop stars tacitly agree to serve as our representational proxies through their songs and performances. If we appreciate their efforts, we should reciprocate with love, support, respect, and a determination to change the sexist culture that continually demands their sacrifice. ‘People say I’m controversial’, Madonna told a crowd of industry insiders at the Billboard Women in Music Event in 2016. ‘But I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around.’⁶²