THE READING ROOM: New Anthology Tells More of the Story of ‘How Women Made Music’

There is a sense in which this book should not need to be written. Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, Mother Maybelle Carter, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, among others, are the fount of the blues, jazz, gospel, country, and rock. So the title of this book gets it just right: How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music, edited by Alison Fensterstock, with an introduction by Ann Powers (HarperOne, Oct. 1). This throng of women lifted their voices and their heads to face an unwelcoming atmosphere that most of the time excluded them, taking from them a style, but seldom giving them credit for their work.

This book indeed turns the tables—the book is inspired by and grew out of the groundbreaking NPR Music series “Turning the Tables,” co-founded by Fensterstock and Powers—on traditional music histories that give short shrift to the women who composed, who shredded, and whose voices provided the textures and rhythms the music that has shaped listeners for generations. As Powers points out in her introduction, “Women…are fundamental, and always have been.” The book also includes a list of “The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women” and a list of “The 200 Greatest Songs by 21^st-Century Women+.”

Opening the pages of this book is like walking into a room full of female artists buzzing in lively conversation about their lives in music. They talk about the influence of earlier artists on their lives; they share pain, and they share triumph. They share those moments that music helped define their identity, and they claim their power. Entering this room is exhilarating. The stories in the book are told in short profiles/essays of artists, interviews, and capsule reviews of albums and songs. The chapter titles—”tradition bearers and breakers,” “warriors,” “teenage kicks,” “listen to your body,” “live,” “scream queens,” “shredders,” “shape-shifters,” “storytellers,” “empaths,” “sweet inspiration”—indicate the range of artists and experiences that How Women Made Music covers.

“Shredders,” for example, opens with music critic Sasha Geffen’s profile of Annie Clark, who inhabits the musical persona St. Vincent. “The guitar, for Clark, is not an appendage, not a phallus, not an extension of the body. By thinking of her guitar as a peer and not a tool, Clark frees her own voice to take on new textures and movements,” Geffen writes. “By loosening the structure of her music, Clark frees her instrument from its historical status as a masculinity amplifier; an assertion of gendered power. She doesn’t use it to embellish her songs; she uses it to build worlds. Forget the glass ceiling. Inside a St. Vincent song, you don’t even know where the floor is.”

In the “sweet inspiration” chapter, critic Jill Sternheimer reflects on Carole King’s monumental 1971 album Tapestry, observing King’s innovativeness as a songwriter as well as her soulful renditions of her lyrics. “King’s evolution as both an artist and a woman is perhaps most evident in the grown-up version of ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ that appears on Tapestry,” Sternheimer writes. “The first major writing credit for then-teenage King and lyricist husband Gerry Goffin, which hit No. 1 for the Shirelles in 1961, is transformed from a girl’s yearning question into the bittersweet doubts of a woman wise enough to know that even true love doesn’t always last ‘till the night meets the morning sun’.”

Singer Margo Price, in the “live” chapter, looks back on Janis Joplin’s mercurial career and ponders the ways that Joplin’s life and music have imbued Price’s own life and music. “Janis Joplin burst into this world like a flaming comet. She burned brightly, felt deeply, and disappeared in a flash, but the mark she left on music blazed a trail like a Western pioneer. The lawless rebel, the misunderstood schoolgirl, a pariah and a protestor with progressive ideals and a love for Black music, she was rock and roll’s own version of Calamity Jane,” Price reflects. “Janis is one of those rare and multidimensional cosmic artists who shine brighter than a solar eclipse. You can’t look directly at them, or you’ll burst into flames.”

In the chapter titled “teenage kicks,” Music writer Kimberly Mack looks at the influence of women artists on writers, other artists, and critics. “Donna Summer and Debbie Harry showed me that women could be fierce in their lyrics and in their stage personas. And I welcomed a fierceness that was not born of violence (as it was with the two key women in my life), but of sexual independence. They were both Bad Girls. And when I listened, I got to be one, too.”

“Warriors” contains an archival interview with Nina Simone in which she recalls how she created her vocal style: “I developed it because of racism,” Simone says. “So you see me singing songs of sweetness and tenderness and you see me singing songs of deep, deep resentment of what has happened here, and I don’t think it’s gotten any better.” In the same chapter, singer-songwriter Raya Zaragoza reflects on the power of protest in music: “Every stage is a rally…Every performance is an opportunity to speak the truth to power and stand up stand up for ourselves, each other, and mother earth.”

How Women Made Music teems with life, and the conversations among these women range far and wide in time and place. It belongs on the shelf alongside Powers’ and Evelyn McDonnell’s edited anthology Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap, Alice Randall’s My Black Country: A Journey through Country Music’s Past, Present, and Future, Marissa Moss’s Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be, Daphne Brooks’ Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, and Francesca Royster’s Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions, Jewly Hight’s Right by Her Roots: Americana Women and Their Songs, and any book by music critic Ellen Willis. How Women Made Music serves as a fitting introduction as well as a bracing manifesto.