XII.
American Popular Music
Since the end of World War I the history of popular music in America has been one of interplay between musical styles and technological advances in sound reproduction. Of the many influences affecting the popular music scene, two are especially noteworthy: the introduction of microphones and amplifiers, allowing performers to project their sound without mastering the same techniques used by performers of art music; and the movement of mainstream popular music from a European-inspired written tradition to a vernacular style derived from oral tradition.
Until the 1920s the primary consumers of popular music were the literate middle and working classes, who had both the ability to read music and the means to buy a piano on which to reproduce it in the home. The emergence of affordable electronic sound reproduction made popular music accessible to a broad audience unconstrained by geography or the necessity for formal musical training. By 1925, control of the popular music industry had begun to shift from publishing houses to radio stations, record companies, and manufacturers of sound reproduction equipment. Popular music in the United States has always been dominated by styles directed toward and listened to by the so-called mainstream audience: urban, middle-class whites. In the first half of the century that music was the product of Tin Pan Alley; in the second half it has been rock. But styles particular to other groups in the population have sometimes attracted broad-based audiences as well—for example, the music of rural whites, first known as hillbilly and later as country, and the music of African Americans, which includes blues, jazz, and gospel.
The study of popular music, whatever its style, provides a rich source of information about women. They have excelled mainly as compelling singers, but have also made significant contributions as instrumentalists and composers. Unlike art music, which is known primarily through its composers, popular music is known primarily through its performers; therefore, the number of preeminent women in the field has been exceptionally large.
TIN PAN ALLEY
What music historian Charles Hamm identifies as the “golden years of Tin Pan Alley” are those bounded by the United States's participation in the two world wars. The songs of Tin Pan Alley, written primarily by Jewish Americans living in New York City and grounded in the European classical tradition, maintain important links with European art music. Some of the people who composed these songs—Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Kay Swift—continue to be revered. Throughout the Big Band Era, many bands featured female singers who performed the best of this repertoire. One classic type of singer, referred to as a “canary,” was a consummate stylist, cultivating a distinctive stage persona. Beautifully coifed and made-up, costumed in an elegant gown, she performed in clubs, lounges, and, at the peak of her career, in concert halls. The heyday of the canary was ca. 1940-l955; among the many songbirds achieving commercial and artistic success were Jo Stafford (b. 1920), Patti Page (b. 1922), Dinah Shore (1917-1994), Kay Starr (b. l922), Rosemary Clooney (b. 1928), Margaret Whiting (b. 1924), and Peggy Lee (b. l920).
Peggy Lee
Dubbed America's “premiere chanteuse” by Peter Reilly and “the Queen” by Duke Ellington, Peggy Lee is unarguably the most successful popular singer of her generation. Born Norma Dolores Engstrom on May 26, 1920, in Jamestown, North Dakota, she was encouraged by church choir directors and high school teachers to pursue a career in music. When she began to work as a radio singer, the station manager of WDAY in Fargo gave her the stage name Peggy Lee. Lee went on to perform in Minneapolis, St. Louis, Palm Springs, and Chicago, where Benny Goodman offered her a job as vocalist with his band. In 1942, still with Goodman's band, she recorded “Why Don't You Do Right?” a song that sold more than one million copies. “Why Don't You Do Right?” “Fever,” “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” and “I'm a Woman” are considered her standbys, songs associated with her for over thirty years.
Despite a lack of formal musical training, Lee has either written or collaborated on hundreds of songs. Some of the best known are “It's a Good Day,” “I Don't Know Enough about You,” and “Mañana,” a song with a distinctive Latin beat. Although she has received many accolades throughout her career, true recognition as a serious artist came only in 1962, when she was invited to appear in Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center. For this concert she wrote an entire program entitled “The Jazz Tree,” tracing the development of jazz as an American art form. Although plagued by bad health, Lee has continued to perform, record, and write in the 1990s.
FIGURE 12.1. Peggy Lee in the 1940s. The Frank Driggs Collection. Used by permission.
Lee's professionalism and perfectionism are well known. She prepares for each performance meticulously, recording every aspect of the event in a large black notebook. For a major performance she culls approximately thirty songs from a list of over one hundred by her favorite writers. Lyrics, arrangements, notes on instrumentation, observations about the songs and the gestures she will use to convey their meaning are carefully entered, along with directions for lighting, her entrances and exits, and her wardrobe and hairstyle. Nothing is left to chance; improvisation, musical or otherwise, is not her style. The result is a refined performance by a woman of queenly bearing. Because her voice is small and its range limited to about an octave and a half, Lee has perfected the subtler aspects of her art. One might call her a sculptor of song, a musical artist who works delicately with color, inflection, emotion, and clarity of enunciation.
Rosemary Clooney
Rosemary Clooney (b. 1928), who came to national attention with such hit tunes as “Come on-a My House” and “Botcha Me,” has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during the 1990s that has made her the toast of the cabaret circuit and the recipient of Grammy nominations for her albums Do You Miss New York and Girl Singer. Clooney began her rise to fame at the age of seventeen, when she and her younger sister, Betty, appeared on WLW Radio in Cincinnati. The act soon signed on to tour with Tony Pastor's big band, an engagement that lasted until 1949, when Betty left the show and Rosemary struck out on her own. The 1950s brought numerous top-selling records, including “Mambo Italiano” and “Hey There,” some well-received movies (e.g., White Christmas with Bing Crosby), and her own television show. These years also saw her marriage to José Ferrer and the birth of the first of five children.
But the work also took its toll on Clooney in stress and an overreliance on prescription drugs, and a breakdown on a Reno stage in 1968 seemed the end of her already waning career. Following a stay in a psychiatric hospital, Clooney found that the top-of-the-line clubs and halls she had been playing during the good years were unwilling to hire her. This time the path to success was harder to climb, but climb it she did—first taking many offers she would have dismissed earlier, then cultivating a new kind of material that gradually established her as an artist of real depth and expressive strength. The ballads and up-tempo standards of jazz, pop, and Broadway formed the meat of her acts in cabarets and concerts, bringing her to the forefront of a group of mature artists that includes such luminaries as Julie Wilson, Barbara Cook, and Tony Bennett.
Now in her seventies, Clooney still spends much of her time on tour, drawing appreciative audiences across the country. In 1998 she married Dante de Paolo, with whom she had lived for over twenty years, in a joyous family celebration in her hometown of Maysville, Kentucky. Her recent album, Still on the Road, sums up in its title the current state of her career. Clooney's voice has mellowed from the bright, eager sound of her early days, and the richer quality of the 1990s surrounds and subtly shades such songs as “Moonlight Becomes You” and Duke Ellington's “Nothin' but the Blues,” alongside the inevitable “Come on-a My House” and a newly glowing “Hey There.” Rosemary Clooney is again on top.
COUNTRY MUSIC
Country music is a commercial arm of folk music of the rural South that was originally handed down through oral tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although its origins are in the folk music of British settlers, the evolution of country music has been shaped through contact with African-American and various other types of ethnic and urban commercial music. The roots of country music as an industry reach back to the 1920s, when barn dance programs began to be broadcast on radio. The most important of these shows, originating in Nashville, Tennessee, was Grand Ole Opry. Recordings date from 1927, when the Carter Family and a former railroad worker from Mississippi, Jimmie Rodgers, made their first discs for Victor.
The Carter Family
A country music trio composed of Alvin Pleasant Carter (1891-1960), his wife, Sara Carter (1898-1979), and their sister-in-law, “Mother” Maybelle Carter (l909-l978), the Carter Family became one of the most influential and popular country music groups in America. Their repertoire of Anglo-American folk songs, country ballads, religious songs, and sentimental parlor songs was very large. Their musical style—three-part harmony sung to simple chordal accompaniments on Maybelle's guitar and Sara's autoharp—was known and respectfully imitated by other groups. Maybelle, with her distinctive technique of playing the melody on low strings and strumming chords on upper strings, helped to popularize the guitar as a country music instrument. Although the trio did not perform together after 1943, its influence continued into the l960s, when such singers as Joan Baez learned and performed the group's songs. Mother Maybelle continued to perform with her three daughters, Helen, June, and Anita, on Grand Ole Opry and with singer Johnny Cash, June's husband, on television and in road shows.
Because population shifts in the 1940s necessitated by the war effort brought people from the rural South and West together with people from the urban North and Midwest, traditional rural styles fused with urban popular styles. By 1950 Nashville was established as the commercial center of the now-national entertainment of country music. From the 1970s to the present, country music has mirrored the growing homogeneity of American life and represented the way changes take place within the framework of a strong tradition. The lyrics of the songs remain traditional: familial love and traditional values, disappointed love, hard work, hard times, the man who leaves his woman, and old-time religion; the story is still the focal point of the song, and its accompaniment should not be too sophisticated. The change over the years is reflected in the mixture of country with popular and rock styles and the attraction of an international audience. Originally the instrumental ensemble comprised a fiddle, a five-string banjo, and a guitar; a mandolin, a string bass, and a steel guitar were added later. In the 1930s drum and piano were incorporated, and, over time, electric instruments appeared. By the 1970s electric instruments had largely replaced acoustic ones.
Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline
For most of its history country music has been men's music performed by men. Traditionally, women singers sang the sad songs, and few women emerged as top performers until Kitty Wells (b. 1919) made a decisive statement with “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” a pointed reply to Hank Thompson's “Wild Side of Life.” Though Thompson's song held women responsible for the fall of man, Wells countered by blaming men for their own downfall and for dragging women down with them. Her song, which made a new statement in country music, marked the turning point in her career and made her the first “Queen of Country Music.” With a career spanning some three decades, Kitty Wells served as an inspiration to later stars. She fashioned the singing style that most women country singers have adopted—twangy and nasal, but clear and subtly ornamented. Her later hits, “Release Me” and “I Can't Stop Loving You,” were made famous for the mainstream audience by rhythm-and-blues singer Ray Charles.
The other country queen of the 1950s, Patsy Cline (1932-1963), reached her audience in part through the new medium of television. Her singing style, influenced by contemporary popular music, helped her gain a crossover audience. She is best remembered for her song “I Fall to Pieces.” Cline, whose life ended tragically in a plane crash in 1963, provided a powerful model of strength and self-sufficiency for women who wanted solo careers apart from male partners or family groups.
The 1960s and 1970s ushered in new trends for women performers. Many of them broke with their male partners and became stars with independent identities. They began to sing about subjects formerly taboo to them: divorce, female adultery, contraception, the experience of sex, and womanly independence. The singing itself was sometimes strongly influenced by mainstream popular styles. Some women began wearing clothes that in earlier times would have caused a scandal. What is true for the best-known stars, however, is not the norm. Most country women still sing about the long-suffering woman who tolerates the weaknesses of her man and whose place is still at hearth and home, caring for the children—the public and lyrical myth of domesticity.
Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn has lived the life of the women depicted in many country music songs. Born one of twelve children to a coal-mining family in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, in 1935, Loretta Webb married Oliver Vanetta “Mooney” Lynn, a veteran and former coal miner, at the age of fourteen and was the mother of four by the age of eighteen. Like most mothers, Lynn sang lullabies she remembered from her own childhood. Mooney Lynn was so impressed with his wife's singing ability that he bought Loretta an inexpensive guitar. It may have been the most prudent investment he ever made. Loretta taught herself to play basic chords and began making up simple songs of her own. These early attempts at songwriting convinced Mooney all the more of her exceptional talent. His boasting that Loretta was a better singer than any country queen except Kitty Wells led to her first opportunity to perform professionally, an invitation in 1960 to sing with a country band on a local radio show in Bellingham, Washington. She was an immediate success.
Lynn taught herself to “compose” in the age-old manner of learning others' songs and respectfully imitating their styles. Over time she developed a style of her own and recorded a demonstration disc of a song she wrote, “I'm a Honky Tonk Girl.” In order to promote the song, she and her family drove over 75,000 miles from radio station to radio station, persuading disc jockeys to play it. Their unorthodox scheme worked. The Lynn family was able to move to Nashville, and Loretta was engaged to appear on Grand Ole Opry. She also performed on the Wilburn Brothers' syndicated television show and was paired with Conway Twitty to form one of country music's most popular duos. No female country singer before her had been able to gain such national recognition.
A key element of Lynn's tremendous success was her talent for writing honest, direct lyrics about the realities of the lives of women who, like herself, married young, became mothers sooner and oftener than they had intended, and knew daily life in all its tedium and drudgery. Hers are earthy songs emanating from the heart but revealing in their plain language and often outspoken and courageous manner a kind of homespun philosophy. Among her best-known songs are “Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' with Lovin' on Your Mind,” “One's on the Way,” “You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man,” “The Pill” (banned from many radio stations because of its stand favoring birth control), “Bargain Basement Dress,” “I'm Gonna Make Like a Snake,” and “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath” (Lynn is part Cherokee). Because she cannot read music, Lynn sings her songs into a tape recorder and writes the lyrics on whatever paper is available. Her melodies are shaped to fit the mood of the lyrics.
Though Lynn modeled her early vocal sound on that of Kitty Wells, she has since developed her own style, making her strong but touching voice slide like a steel guitar. As she has become one of country music's most prominent crossover artists, her voice has lost some of the twangy harshness that was a part of its early charm. Today one might better describe it as warm and vibrant. After winning top honors in three categories at the Country Music Association Awards in 1972, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek, and her life story was told in the film Coalminer's Daughter. Country music had finally been absorbed into mainstream popular culture in America.
Dolly Parton
Like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton (b. 1946) was one of twelve children whose family lived in a two-room wooden shack. Her childhood in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, revolved around singing and the church where her grandfather was a preacher. At the age of eight she was given a guitar on which she learned to accompany herself when she sang alone in church and with her uncles on the Farm and Home television show in Knoxville. Determined to become a country music star, Dolly boarded the bus for Nashville the day after her high school graduation.
Although she was able to find singing jobs immediately, Parton was not allowed to sing “hard” lyrics because of her high, childlike voice; she therefore began recording a country-rock blend known as rockabilly. Her career began to flourish when she joined Porter Wagoner's band and became his protégée. Her seven years on his television show (1967-1974) and concert appearances with his band gained her national exposure. Even after Parton left his band for a successful solo career, Wagoner continued to produce and arrange for her.
In 1977 Parton began a conscious attempt to appeal to a wider audience. She traded a back-up band consisting entirely of relatives for one composed of eight professional Nashville musicians experienced in pop, rock, and country, and she replaced her Nashville manager with a Hollywood firm. By the time she and the new band, Gypsy Fever, opened at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, they were playing to enthusiastic houses with such prominent rock stars as Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen in attendance. In a review for the New York Post (May 14, 1977), Carl Arrington referred to the show as “the hottest ticket in New York” and observed that media people had been “gobbling up seats.” A successful crossover album released in the same year, New Harvest, First Gathering, reached the top of the country chart and placed near the top of the popular chart. Parton has also had success as an actor and as a host of television variety shows.
A gifted songwriter, Parton often draws on her Tennessee heritage for inspiration. Among the autobiographical songs, “Coat of Many Colors” (in CAMW, pp. 239-40) stands out as a particularly poignant memory of her impoverished childhood. The song, filled with biblical imagery, tells of a coat her mother pieced together for her from scraps of fabric. Other widely known songs with references to her childhood are “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” “Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man,” and “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” a beautiful evocation of the sounds and senses of the Great Smoky Mountains. John Rockwell accurately noted that Parton's music is often shaded by the modalities and rhythmic idiosyncrasies of English folk song, a link to the music she learned as a child. Like Loretta Lynn, Parton cannot read music. Her method for writing songs is to sing the tunes and lyrics into a tape recorder. Describing her compositional process as “trancelike,” Parton feels that she is spiritually inspired.
A soft Appalachian twang is distinct in Dolly Parton's pure, accurate soprano voice. The voice itself is childlike, shivering with a rapid, controlled vibrato, but it can also be made to sound sheer, delicate, sweet, tender, or passionate. Parton displays a wide range of emotions in her songs, from the haunting “Falling Out of Love with Me” to the raucous, knee-slapping “Muleskinner Blues.” The surprising flexibility of her voice has allowed Parton to perform many types of music, from mountain ballads to religious songs to rock-influenced popular tunes, and to elicit deep emotional responses from her audiences.
Because of her impoverished background, Parton thinks of her current life as a fairy tale, an escape from all the ugly things in life. Her stage appearance is flamboyant—even gaudy—yet appealing. She is a pretty, dimpled woman with an hourglass figure who likes to wear elaborate makeup and shiny, glittering, suggestive costumes in vibrant colors. But behind the frothy appearance, which she considers a kind of in-joke with her audiences, is a shrewd and very wealthy businesswoman with her own theme park, Dollywood, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
Country Singers: The Current Generation
For the younger generation of women in country music, image is more important than ever because of video and cable television. The performers of the 1980s and 1990s have succeeded in presenting stunning images both visually and aurally, and they are confident and in control of their careers. At the heart of this group are Mary Chapin Carpenter (b. 1958), Kathy Mattea (b. 1959), Suzy Bogguss (b. 1956), and Wynonna Judd (b. 1964). Although most closely associated with country music, they are also the spiritual daughters of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, and Bonnie Raitt. Wynonna Judd, whose vivid songs are inspired by the music of Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt, began her career as lead singer in a duo with her mother, Naomi (b. 1946). The Judds were the most successful women in country music for nearly a decade, garnering both top sales and awards. In 1991 Naomi Judd's battle with a debilitating liver disease forced her into early retirement. The following year, Wynonna began her solo career by releasing an album tellingly entitled Wynonna. An eclectic mixture of country, rock, blues, and gospel, the album sold over a million copies and was a success on both the country and popular charts. She has released two subsequent albums, Tell Me Why (1993) and Revelations (1996).
GOSPEL
Although gospel music originated in both black and white fundamentalist churches of the rural South, the more compelling musical style has been that of black congregations. Like ragtime, blues, and jazz, black gospel emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, transforming staid Protestant hymns through the rhythmic techniques of syncopation and reaccentuation, the melodic techniques of note-bending and blue notes, the harmonic techniques of quartal and quintal chords, and performance techniques that called on performers to “sing” with their entire bodies.
Modern gospel style, which dates from the 1920s, continues an older tradition of singing, shouting, and preaching. There are two discrete practices: quartet, dominated by male performers and characterized by singing in precise harmonies, often a cappella, by voices ranging from deep, resonant bass to falsetto; and gospel, dominated by female performers and making use of soloists, groups, and choirs. Gospel is sung with full voice and can sound strained, rasping, or guttural. The performers seek emotional power by singing at the extremes of their ranges, though performers in the 1970s and 1980s began to use the middle range more extensively. Long melismas by the soloist alternate in responsorial fashion with brief, staccato exclamations by the background group. In one special technique, originated by Mahalia Jackson and called the vamp, the soloist improvises while the accompanist and background group repeat the chord progression of a phrase in ostinato fashion. The piano, the main accompanying instrument from the 1920s on, was replaced by the electric organ in the 1950s. Accompanists, who are viewed as virtuosos in their own right and often have long-standing relationships with particular singers, play in a style that combines syncopations derived from ragtime with the left-hand octaves of stride technique and hymnlike chords in the right hand.
With few exceptions, the greatest individual artists in gospel music have been women. Outstanding among them are Willie Mae Ford Smith (1906-1994) Sallie Martin (1896-1988), Roberta Martin (1907-1969), Clara Ward (1924-1973), Marion Williams (1927-1994), and the undisputed “Queen,” Mahalia Jackson (19ll-1972). Most of these performers were also leaders of well-known groups, but it is as individuals that they shaped their performances idiosyncratically in every aspect, from ornamentation to stage deportment.
Women also attained eminence in gospel recording. Gospel recordings date from the mid-1920s, and the initial hit was made in 1938. “Rock Me,” a blues-inflected version of an earlier song, “Hide Me in Thy Bosom” by Thomas A. Dorsey, was performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973), the first gospel performer to achieve a national reputation. Nine years after Tharpe had demonstrated the commercial potential of gospel, Mahalia Jackson's “Move On Up a Little Higher” (1947) became the first such recording to sell a million copies. Jackson's deep, rich voice conveyed the music's message in a way that spoke meaningfully to both black and white audiences. Throughout her enormously successful career, Jackson remained essentially a church singer, but she freely acknowledged a stylistic debt to the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith, whom she called her favorite.
THE 1950S: ROCK ’N’ ROLL
American popular music changed markedly when two musical styles, one black and one white, came together. Black rhythm and blues had in common with white country music strong, insistent instrumental backgrounds that urged listeners to dance; the prominent use of the guitar—acoustic, electric, or steel; and a down-home vocal style proud of its rough edges. This new music, which we now know as rock, was known in its early history as rock ’n’ roll and was the first American music to cut across cultural and racial lines. The term “rock ’n’ roll” was a black euphemism for sexual intercourse; the connotative meaning was lost on neither the white male performers who dominated the early history of the style nor on their youthful audiences.
Most of the well-known performers who shaped early rock ’n’ roll were male: Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. There was, however, one woman, a black rhythm-and-blues singer named Big Mama Thornton, who deserves special mention as a powerful influence on rock ’n’ roll's most successful star, Elvis Presley. The daughter of a Montgomery, Alabama preacher, Willie Mae Thornton (1926-1984) was weaned on gospel before moving on to blues. Throughout the 1940s she sang in clubs and theaters in the South. By the early 1950s she was touring the entire United States. In 1952 she recorded the song “Hound Dog,” which so appealed to black audiences that it reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues chart in 1955. With the emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the same year, Thornton's career went into a brief decline, while Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog,” recorded in 1956 and clearly modeled on Big Mama's earlier version, reached No. 1 on the popular, rhythm-and-blues, and country charts. Of the two recorded versions, Presley's pales in comparison to Big Mama's.
Thornton revitalized her career during the blues revival of the 1960s. Again she served as model for a young white singer, this time rock star Janis Joplin, whose version of Big Mama's “Ball and Chain” helped propel her to stardom. Thornton herself achieved national recognition, appearing at the Monterey and Newport jazz festivals and at other jazz, blues, and folk festivals throughout the country. Her singing style comes out of the tradition of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith—an earthy, somewhat coarse sound, which could be wrenchingly expressive.
The music industry resisted promoting early rock ’n’ roll for several reasons. The music was linked with societal problems ranging from juvenile delinquency and sexual promiscuity to racial unrest. It emerged at the same time as serious consideration of the issue of desegregation in American society and attracted racially mixed audiences. More important, however, it brought on a power struggle between music publishers and recording companies, which the recording companies ultimately won. American popular song had always belonged to a written tradition, whereas rock ’n’ roll sprang from two oral music traditions and depended on technological advances that made the shift in power irrevocable.
Rock ’n’ roll became an umbrella term for numerous styles in the late 1950s, including popular ballads, love songs, dance music, jazz, gospel, and even California surfing music. Much of the music was performed by squeaky-clean whites, women and men, who became teen idols. Most of these “idols” were boys intended to appeal to adolescent girls, but the two most important female performers of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Connie Francis (b. 1938) and Brenda Lee (b. 1944), were women whose appeal was primarily musical. Francis's strong contralto voice was ideal for rich romantic ballads such as “Who's Sorry Now?” and “My Happiness,” but it was also effective in the novelties “Stupid Cupid” and “Lipstick on Your Collar.” Though Brenda Lee's roots were in country music, her repertoire ranged from rock to ballads to country. Among her better-known songs are “Dynamite,” “Rockin' around the Christmas Tree,” “I'm Sorry,” and “The Cowgirl and the Dandy.” Her powerful voice and diminutive size earned Lee the moniker “Little Miss Dynamite.”
By the late 1950s, the Brill Building in the center of New York's music district housed a group of songwriters attempting to bridge the gap between the coarse music of rock ’n’ roll and the sophisticated songs of Tin Pan Alley. This successful attempt, which came to be identified as the “Brill Building sound,” began as the brainchild of Al Nevins and Don Kirshner, the founders of Aldon Music. The Brill Building writers were talented professionals who believed a good song could carry the singer, and their songs set a new qualitative standard in rock ’n’ roll.
Carole King
It seems as if Carole King (b. 1942) has had two separate and successful careers in popular music. In the 1960s she wrote teen-idol music, rhythm and blues, soul, and rock; during the 1970s she helped to develop, write, and perform a style called “soft rock,” which emphasized the lyrics rather than the beat. Her first career began when she dropped out of Queens College to marry Gerry Goffin, who was also interested in popular music and wrote lyrics for fun. They began almost immediately to turn out hits, especially ballads sung by black vocal groups and marketed for urban teen audiences. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (recorded by the Shirelles in 1960) and the sophisticated “Up on the Roof” (recorded by the Drifters in 1962) exemplify their best and most famous early songs. In the mid-1960s they wrote a soul tune entitled “Natural Woman” that became one of Aretha Franklin's biggest hits. By the time King and Goffin dissolved their writing partnership and their marriage in 1968, they were probably the most popular and prolific of all the Brill Building teams.
King's second career began on the West Coast, where she moved with her two daughters. She began performing with a rock group called the City, which she formed in Los Angeles in 1968. The group was not successful, but other sides of her career flourished. King began to work with lyricist Toni Stern, who wrote biting, realistic, and not particularly optimistic texts. This change in the sort of texts King set to music proved beneficial to her writing. Another boost to her career was an invitation to tour with James Taylor, who encouraged her as both performer and writer and added some of her songs to his repertoire. She recorded two solo albums in rapid succession. The second, Tapestry (1971), which was still on the charts in 1977 and eventually sold some fourteen million copies, was one of the greatest successes in the history of recorded music. In it the new Carole King revealed herself as a gentle balladeer, singing about home, lost youth, friendship, painful separations, and the pleasures of physical love. In the same year she and Taylor made a tour that ended at Carnegie Hall. Writers began referring to King as the “Queen of Rock” and successor to Janis Joplin. In 1972 Tapestry won the Grammy Award for “Best Album,” King won “Best Female Vocal Performance” for her song “It's Too Late,” and James Taylor won “Best Male Vocal Performance” for his version of her song, “You've Got a Friend.” The albums that followed could never measure up to the success of Tapestry, although several—Music, Fantasy, Diamond Girl, and Simple Things—were gold albums and Carole King Thoroughbred received a Grammy award. Her career then went into a decline, but King attempted a comeback with a new album, City Streets (1989), her first in nearly a decade. In 1994, she made her Broadway debut in the musical Blood Brothers.
King's songs are characterized by a dominating bass line, simple harmonic progressions with gospel inflections, and shapely melodies with their roots in Tin Pan Alley. As a performer, King is an effective interpreter of her own material. Her plain, rather small voice is deceptively strong but lacks the energy and edge provided by the young black singers who made her earlier songs hits. She compensates somewhat for these deficiencies with good technique.
THE 1960S: URBAN FOLK REVIVAL
By the beginning of the 1960s early rock ’n’ roll had vanished, and new trends—among them folk-derived music—recalled musical and social elements of the American past. Bob Dylan (b. 1941) was one of the first prominent figures in the urban folk revival to compose most of his own material. Among those who followed Dylan's new direction were three women—Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell—whose careers began in the coffeehouses and intimate nightclubs that were urban sanctuaries for folksingers. Collins (b. 1939) composed some of her own music, but she also sang songs by Dylan and the Canadians Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. She also expanded her repertoire to theatre songs, popularizing Stephen Sondheim's “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music. Baez, the first woman folk singer to become a star, began her career in the late 1950s and always remained true to folk music. Mitchell, who composes most of her own material, is a product of the late 1960s and has been able to adapt creatively to the times.
Joan Baez
The original folk madonna, Joan Baez has always viewed her musical career and her political life as one. In 1967, when the Daughters of the American Revolution would not allow her to perform in Constitution Hall because they viewed her protest of the Vietnam conflict as unpatriotic, she gave a free concert at the Washington Monument that drew ten times as many people. Baez has been allied with the civil rights, antiwar, and antinuclear movements, and much of the income from her concerts has gone to these causes.
Baez began to sing in coffeehouses in the Boston area after dropping out of Boston University. She had no formal training in singing and had taught herself to play guitar. In 1959 she was invited to appear at the Newport Folk Festival, where she met and befriended the black folk singer Odetta Gordon (b. 1931), who also became one of the prominent figures in American folk music. Although Baez's name did not even appear on the festival program, her performance made a tremendous impact. In 1960 Baez returned to Newport as a star. Her first album, Joan Baez, the most popular folk album ever recorded by a female singer, also dates from 1960. By November 23, 1962, she was Time magazine's cover story.
Audiences for some four decades have been attracted to her supple soprano voice, described as pure and haunting. Its range of about three octaves allows her to perform some songs, notably Spanish ones, in an alto range. Her approach to performance has always been spare and informal. Assured and self-contained, she wears comfortable clothing, little or no makeup, and a simple hairstyle. Unlike most stars, Baez placed self-imposed limits on her career, refusing to record more than one album a year (her practice even at the height of her popularity). Anglo-American folk songs constituted her early repertory; soon after, she added protest songs. One of the first established folk singers to promote Bob Dylan's songs, Baez felt his music spoke to her social consciousness, clarifying for her what political action to take. Baez has dedicated herself to political activism while continuing to perform (often at benefit concerts), record, and tour. In 1979 she established Humanitas International, an organization committed to peace and world unity that operated for thirteen years.
Although Baez has written some songs throughout her career, she does not consider composition a particular strength. Ironically, as her popularity faded in the 1970s, she composed some quite effective songs, several of which appeared on her important album, Diamonds and Rust (1975). No longer considered a folk madonna, Baez is now called the matriarch by a new generation of women with whom she often performs. Baez's 1995 recording Ring Them Bells, a collaboration with several rising folk stars—Dar Williams, the Indigo Girls, and Mary Chapin Carpenter—represents a kind of passing of the torch to these young women. Dar Williams's “You're Aging Well,” a song about passing on the wisdom of one's experience to younger people, might well be the theme for Baez at the end of the millenium.
Joni Mitchell
The most innovative woman songwriter to emerge in the late 1960s, Joni Mitchell, with her penchant for minor-mode melodies and texts with multilayered images, grew stylistically over three decades from folk to rock to jazz to jazz fusion. Now a mature artist, she can shift easily among these styles. Born Roberta Joan Anderson (1943) in Fort MacLeod, Alberta (Canada), Mitchell first performed in Toronto and then Detroit. After the breakup of her first marriage to Chuck Mitchell, also a folk performer, she moved to New York, determined to make her way. Here she met David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills, and Nash fame), who was impressed by her artistry and taught her the method of guitar tuning that makes her folk accompaniments unique. In 1968 the album Joni Mitchell (later renamed Song to a Seagull) was released; like many of her subsequent albums, it was a critical but not a commercial success. Clouds, released the following year, included “Both Sides Now,” which in a version by Judy Collins sold over one million copies; the album, with Mitchell's interpretation of the song, won the Grammy in 1970 for Best Folk Performance.
By the early 1970s Mitchell was beginning to earn a reputation as a songwriter of uncommon ability. Her songs, often experimental and self-consciously artistic, were critically acclaimed for their beautiful melodies and transparent imagery. Some of her more complex, introspective works have been compared favorably to art songs. Examples of her striking originality as a composer and lyricist appear on the album Blue (l97l). The title song is about the pressures put upon youth in a world filled with dangers—drugs, alcohol, guns, and sex. The indecisive Dorian-mode melody, blue notes in the harmonies, and varied line lengths intensify the meaning of this “foggy lullaby…your song from me.” In the touching song “Little Green,” Mitchell uses the word green to symbolize the child who has been born too soon to parents who are themselves still children. The child, named “Green” so that “the winters cannot fade her,” is encouraged to be a nonconformist over the nervous percussive beat of a music that implies such a path is rocky and sometimes filled with sorrow.
In 1978 Mitchell began a collaboration with jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus (1922-1979) in which she was to write lyrics to his jazz tunes. The project as envisioned was never completed because of Mingus's untimely death, but her next album, Mingus, dedicated to him, was in a jazz style. The album also had her paintings of the jazzman on the cover. Her work in the 1980s, marked by its social consciousness, takes a pessimistic look at the political system in America and addresses the problems of aging. Turbulent Indigo (1994), her best artistic statement since the 1970s, is a poetically sad album intended to reflect the madness of the contemporary world. For the cover Mitchell painted a self-portrait in the style of Van Gogh, whose turbulent brush strokes were said to be associated with madness. Her “Heijira” from the album of the same name is printed in CAMW.
THE 1980S AND 1990S: NEW URBAN FOLK REVIVAL
The 1980s witnessed the rise of a new generation of urban folk musicians, some of whom refer to their styles as folk-rock, alternative folk, or acoustic rock. Among these groups, Indigo Girls, a duo from Atlanta, reached national prominence and won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording in 1989 for their album Indigo Girls. Emily Saliers (b. 1964) and Amy Ray (b. 1965), both songwriters and guitarists, began performing together in 1983. Saliers, a soprano whose voice has been described as soft and honeyed, plays a skillful lead guitar and is the more sophisticated writer. Ray's rough-hewn alto voice matches her intense rhythmic playing and visceral songs. Since they produce most of their own material, the writer of a given song usually sings lead. The duo then works by trial and error, building the song by experimenting with passages in call-and-response, unison, and harmony. Until the mid-1990s they worked at blending their contrasting but complementary sounds and styles of playing. In Shaming the Sun (1997), they began instead to emphasize the differences in their sounds; they also substituted electric for acoustic guitars and shifted the focus of their songs from the personal to the political.
ROCK
From the outset, the new popular music called rock represented a cluster of styles connected by a common ideology, audience, and milieu. Rock belongs to the American political and societal upheavals of the 1960s, when individuals and groups organized into movements to overcome political, social, cultural, racial, and sexual repression. Rituals, among them rock concerts and festivals of various types, arose to replace those deemed outdated and no longer viable, and the music itself became an instrument for change.
There are three particularly striking ironies concerning the rise of rock. The first is that music attached to emancipation movements and liberal ideology should attract a predominantly white middle-class audience and become mainstream music. The second is that the music industry did not cry out in moral outrage, as it had during the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, against music that celebrated anti-establishment values, but rather capitalized on its vast commercial potential. The third is that the reinvigoration of American popular music came from an unexpected source: the invasion from the British Isles of groups such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, both of which paid homage to the roots of early rock ’n’ roll and gave a needed infusion of raucousness and rhythmic drive to the genre.
Bands emerged by the hundreds in the early 1960s from San Francisco's then-obscure Haight-Ashbury district. The music of these early bands, while rooted in the past, was electric and used distorted, heavily amplified instrumental sounds, distinguishing it from rock ’n’ roll. As the music grew more sophisticated, it began to assimilate elements of Eastern music, especially Indian ragas. The music and dancing captured a seeming formlessness and spontaneity. The song lyrics, the technique of sound distortion, and the light shows at dance concerts were intended to re-create the psychedelic experience, and audiences were intensely involved with the music. The year 1967 was the heyday for San Francisco rock, and by 1971 the local scene had all but disintegrated; but the musical style that arose there became a national phenomenon and provided the foundation for rock in the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s.
Electronic tone generation and amplification are the hallmarks of rock. The core instruments are electric guitars, supplemented by electronic keyboards (piano, organ, and, later, synthesizers), bass, and drums, and a lead singer with backup group. Each performer has a separate microphone and amplifier, and the sound is normally fed into a central mixing board and out through powerful loudspeakers, electronically filtered and distorted through feedback. In recording studios it was possible to manipulate the music still further through splicing, overdubbing, and multitrack taping.
Rock was at first the strict province of males: exclusive, fraternal, misogynistic. The Grateful Dead, a group with a large following even today, represents the quintessential San Francisco rock band of the mid-1960s: all male, psychedelic (under the patronage of Owsley Stanley, an LSD chemist), with a full sound dominated by Jerry Garcia's guitar runs and some twenty-three tons of sound equipment. Women who entered the rock fraternity had to be tough “bad girls” who could compete equally with the boys. Only two women emerged from the San Francisco rock scene as superstars, Janis Joplin and Grace Slick (b. 1939). Lead singer and guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, Slick was responsible for the group's rise to national prominence with her song “White Rabbit,” a drug-influenced variation on the theme of Alice in Wonderland. She wrote songs uniquely suited to her penetrating voice—bitterly contemptuous songs that made her seem to be both man- and woman-hater.
Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin (1943-1970), whose celebrity no other female rock star approached, projected vulnerability beneath a veneer of toughness. An alienated teenager growing up in a conservative small town in Texas, she preferred reading, painting, and listening to the recordings of Bessie Smith, Odetta, and Leadbelly to typical teenage activities. In 1966 she joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company in San Francisco. Universally acclaimed as the only white crossover artist to perform the blues convincingly, Joplin turned millions of white, middle-class rock fans into blues enthusiasts. It was in fact her show-stopping rendition of Big Mama Thornton's “Ball and Chain” at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 that made Joplin a national star.
Joplin created an onstage image to please herself. Her eccentric costumes were of feathers, fur, sequins, odd hats, and an equally odd array of jewelry. The counterculture image extended to her stage deportment. Janis swaggered onto the stage drinking Southern Comfort, her language peppered with profanity, as she talked to her audiences at length about war and peace, love and brotherhood. When she sang, she was totally unrestrained, gripping. Her powerful, anguished voice, welling up out of deep personal pain, worked in extremes—from whispers and moans to howls, groans, and shrieks—in a single song. Her renditions of the blues had a frenetic, driven quality. Although she usually performed others' songs, she had the rare ability to make those songs hers in a way that few singers have equaled. Joplin was at the peak of her brief career when she died of a drug overdose in 1970. The album she was in the process of recording, Pearl, contains her final best-selling song, “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kris Kristofferson, and two of her own songs, “Mercedes Benz” and “Move Over.” It is, however, the last song on the album, “Get It While You Can,” that serves as a timely epitaph for Janis Joplin and the counterculture she represented.
FIGURE 12.2. Janis Joplin. Photo by Doug Fulton. The Frank Driggs Collection. Used by permission.
SOUL
The rise of the musical style known as soul, often described as rhythm and blues with gospel fervor or secular gospel, coincided with civil rights activism and the awakening of black pride in the early 1960s. The musicians who performed it succeeded in breaking down the barriers between white and black, making this black vernacular style a dominant force in popular music. Soul was about sincere feelings, compellingly expressed in music; it carried a message of promise, of expectations. It was music for dancing. Most of the singers had Southern roots and had once sung in black churches. Many of the musical characteristics and vocal techniques of soul are rooted in gospel but applied to secular lyrics in a highly stylized manner. A solid rhythm section provides an anchor for the often fluid vocal lines.
There were two prominent styles in soul. The first, referred to as Southern, “raw,” or Red Clay soul, was harsh, aggressive, visceral music with heavy blues inflections, a pulsing rhythm, and a sense of spontaneity. The studio musicians, working without written arrangements, took a sketch of a song from a writer or producer and shaped it with their own ideas as the rehearsal progressed. When they began to “feel” the music, the recording commenced. Because the music was recorded in Southern studios, the house bands were racially mixed and composed of authentic blues and country musicians.
Northern, also called “soft” or “sequin” soul, was the disciplined, polished style usually associated with Motown Records in Detroit. Rhythm was the driving force of this formulaic music. The meter was invariably 4/4 with emphasis on the percussion section. The baritone saxophone figured prominently in arrangements. A slightly later manifestation, called the soul ballad, was a romantic love song, elaborately arranged and indebted to Tin Pan Alley. Motown had a resident composing team—Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland—who came to define Motown's style and produced twenty-eight “top-twenty” hits between 1963 and 1966. Although men produced the recordings and must be credited with developing both styles, women were the most important and successful artists. Many began their careers as gospel singers, standing in a line extending back from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bessie Smith, and Ella Fitzgerald, through Dinah Washington, to Aretha Franklin.
Aretha Franklin
The prima donna of Red Clay soul, Aretha Franklin (b. 1942) belongs to a female vocal tradition that mingles the sanctified with the worldly. Child of a Baptist minister and gospel singer, she grew up surrounded by musicians who came to stay at her family's home in Detroit when visiting or performing in her father's church. James Cleveland taught her gospel piano techniques; Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Marion Williams, Dinah Washington, Lou Rawls, and Sam Cooke taught her about singing; and Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles served as crossover models for her career.
John Hammond, who had recruited Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday for Columbia Records, signed eighteen-year-old Aretha to a contract. Columbia wanted to mold her into a singer of torch songs and popular standards, but the plan failed miserably. After Jerry Wexler persuaded her to record for Atlantic, Aretha began to find her niche. She was allowed to choose her own material, which ranged from songs by Sam Cooke and Otis Redding to Carole King's “Natural Woman.” Wexler took her to record in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Here she worked out arrangements with studio musicians who, like her, had grown up in gospel music. The result was electrifying. Five of her recordings were No. 1 hits, and her forceful version of Otis Redding's “Respect” won a Grammy award in 1967. She had become one of the most successful singers in America and a powerful symbol to African-American audiences, who referred to the summer of 1967 as the time of “’Retha, Rap, and Revolt.” The following summer, Franklin's soul interpretation of the national anthem opened the tempestuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Soul, like the blues of an earlier era, went out of fashion in the 1970s, but Franklin proved her ability to reach beyond its limits with her introspective album, Young, Gifted, and Black (1972). Her powerful mezzo-soprano voice, with its range of about two-and-a-half octaves, is vibrant, natural, and expressive. She exhibits great flexibility in register shifts and can change color and intensity as the lyrics demand. Her eloquence is best revealed when she is singing gospel. Franklin's Amazing Grace (1972), described by Paul Evans as her magnum opus, returns to the source of her earliest inspiration. The title song displays the range of her vocal techniques: impeccable phrasing, tasteful ornamentation, beautifully styled melismas, an effortless alternation of falsetto with full voice. An arrangement combining Thomas A. Dorsey's “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” with Franklin's sanctified version of Carole King's “You've Got a Friend” [in Jesus] further testifies to her powerful command of the genre.
The 1980s witnessed a new blossoming of her career. In addition to attaining commercial and critical success with new recordings, she starred in a television special for Showtime and was the subject of a PBS broadcast in the American Masters series (1989). Franklin also released a second gospel album, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism (1987).
Diana Ross and the Supremes
The pinnacle of Motown success, the epitome of “sequin” soul, and the most famous of the many female singing groups of the 1960s, the Supremes had record sales of over twelve million—second only to those of the Beatles—and were the only group ever to have six consecutive gold records in a single year (1964). The Supremes were a true American success story—a group of three friends growing up in the Detroit housing projects who were recruited out of high school by Berry Gordy and then fashioned into a sleek, sophisticated, professional group. They were a perfectly polished act from their appearances, choreography, and stylized hand gestures to their onstage conversation. Mary Wilson (b. 1943), Florence Ballard (1943-1976, replaced by Cindy Birdsong [b. 1939] in 1968), and Diana Ross (b. 1944) made up the famous group. The Supremes began to generate interest when they were paired with the writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, who tailored music to their voices. Their first hit, “Where Did Our Love Go?” provided the model for subsequent songs—simple structures in 4/4 meter with steady rhythm and accents on all four beats, and a soft, velvet vocal sound scored in close harmony with Ross's plaintive little-girl voice singing vapid lyrics about teenage love. Among their most prominent successes were “Baby Love,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” and “Come See About Me.” The Supremes sang their last song as a group, “Someday We'll Be Together,” at a farewell performance in 1970, for Diana Ross had decided to begin a solo career. After her departure the group achieved only moderate success and finally disbanded in 1979.
Diana Ross soon sought to change both her feline image and her singing style. With gowns designed by Bob Mackie, she transformed herself into a glamorous vision. Her voice became more refined and the songs she recorded, while verging on the sentimental, were no longer about teenage love but rather about women whose independence had been obtained at a heavy cost. A number of these songs were commercial successes: “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand),” “Ain't No Mountain High Enough,” “Remember Me,” and “Do You Know Where You're Going To?”
As a nightclub performer Ross has a wonderful stage presence, and she has been able to command top fees as an entertainer. She received critical acclaim for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the film Lady Sings the Blues (1972). More recently she has worked closely with her former protégé, Michael Jackson, who has produced several of her albums and with whom she often performs. Early in 2000 Ross announced that The [New] Supremes (Ross along with Scherrie Payne and Lynda Laurence) were planning a summer tour. (Payne and Laurence had joined the original trio after Ross left, but the tour was eventually canceled due to lack of public interest.)
ROCK SINCE THE 1970S
Since the 1970s rock styles have mushroomed to include folk rock, blues rock, hard rock, soft rock, Southern rock, soul, jazz rock, art rock, punk rock, funk, disco, and New Wave. While the basic language of rock has undergone little alteration in this period, it has taken on a new rhythmic vitality that has come from influences without and within. Hispanic immigrants, especially those from the Caribbean basin, have brought their music alive with exciting rhythms. A second enlivening source has been a style of improvised rhymes with rhythmic accompaniment called rap, first developed by streetwise black youths in New York City. Both influences represent the continuing movement away from melody and toward rhythm that began in early rock ’n’ roll. Rapid technological progress has been responsible for the most significant modifications in the production and transmission of rock: groups have added sophisticated electronic equipment, particularly synthesizers and digital sequencers.
Despite the shifting fashions in rock, there has always been a desire for songs that speak to the human condition, with the human voice as messenger. Clear evidence of this need shows up in musical trends that thrive outside mainstream rock. One is the persistence of Tin Pan Alley styles—updated arrangements of older songs or new compositions based on models from the past. Among those who have fashioned successful careers by performing this style are Barbra Streisand (b. 1942) and Linda Ronstadt (b. 1946), who began her career in rock. Streisand, known for her emotionally exaggerated singing style, is considered an outstanding interpreter of popular standards. Ronstadt is an accomplished stylist who, in the recent past, has performed popular standards, operetta, opera, and songs by Philip Glass. Her three 1980s recordings of Tin Pan Alley songs were critical and commercial successes, as was her album of rancheras, songs sung to mariachi music, made as a tribute to her Mexican-German father. Trio, Ronstadt's 1987 collaboration with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, reaffirmed her love of country music; in Dedicated to the One I Love (1996) she restyled popular songs from the past four decades as lullabies for her infant daughter.
A second type of music somewhat outside the rock mainstream, called women-identified music, arose out of the Women's Movement. A number of women musicians began to respond in creative ways to the misogyny expressed in rock music's lyrics and to the nearly total control of the popular music industry by men. Strengthened by the Women's Movement, they began writing “women-identified music” or “women's music” as a conscious expression of the singular experience of a musician as a woman. That it is feminist music implies a political end—the redefinition of the status of women in popular culture and in the mass media.
The audience for this music consists of people who believe in a strong female ideal and in more expansive roles for women in society, and who support women's issues and humanist causes. The performers reach their audiences through recordings, concerts, and women's music festivals. The more traditional ways of communicating with an audience—recordings and concerts—have taken on nontraditional aspects. At concerts, for example, child care and signing for the deaf may be provided and the concert sites made accessible to the disabled. Women's music festivals, which have proliferated since the first one in 1974 at the University of Illinois, are sometimes entirely closed to men.
The male-dominated music industry has resisted change on the question of equal rights for women. Women learned, as had African Americans in the early 1960s, that the best way to transmit new or different musical ideas was to take control of both artistic and business aspects of the industry. Since the early 1970s, women-identified music has grown from several grassroots organizations to sophisticated enterprises controlled entirely by women. Blossom Dearie and Betty Carter had formed their own labels in an earlier era, but their motives were entirely artistic. More recently, women have produced recordings for ideological reasons. Of these, which have record-label names such as Ova, Urana, and Sweet Alliance, the most important is Olivia Records. Founded in 1973 as a women's collective, Olivia's purpose is to control the process, from writing the music to its production and engineering. Olivia's first entirely women-produced album was Meg Christian's I Know You Know. Women's Independent Label Distributors (WILD) formed as a collective in 1978 to promote record distribution and concert tours of the recording artists nationally. Today there are a number of promotion companies, among them Women on Wheels and Once in a Blue Moon.
Although the message is often radical, the style of women-identified music is mainly that of the mainstream idiom inspired by Tin Pan Alley. Performers' distinctive musical sounds derive more often from the way instrumental texture, vocal quality, and particular techniques are blended than from innovations of form. Lyrics, then, assume maximum importance; many are directed to a lesbian audience.
A pioneer musician who recorded on her own Cassandra label before the latest revival of the Women's Movement, Malvina Reynolds began writing music in the 1940s that spoke to humanistic causes and was consciously political. Reynolds encouraged the use of her songs as advocacy pieces and allowed them to be performed without payment of royalties. The messages of some of the songs are evident from the titles: “Rosie Jane (Pregnant Again)” or “We Don't Need Men.” The song for which she is best remembered, however, is “Little Boxes”; it describes the poorly constructed, look-alike housing developments of the post-1945 era, for which she coined the term “ticky tacky.”
Performers of women-identified music who emerged in the late 1960s include the New Harmony Sisterhood, the New Miss Alice Stone Ladies' Society Orchestra, Deadly Nightshade, the New Haven Women's Liberation Band, Meg Christian, Holly Near, and Margie Adams. Meg Christian and Cris Williamson both record for Olivia; Holly Near records on her own Redwood label.
ROCK AT THE END OF THE CENTURY
From the vantage point of the late 1990s, one can look back over some forty-five years in which rock has dominated popular music in the United States. Rock stars lead lives of great affluence and astonishing celebrity, and have become role models for the young. The culture is saturated with rock music. Expensively produced videos serve as the audio-visual equivalents of the 45 rpm records that represented the most current technological advance in the early days of rock ’n’ roll. MTV, cable television's most successful rock video channel, has been on the air since 1982. Madonna, arguably the most successful rock star of the 1980s, owes her meteoric rise in popularity in large part to a skillful use of the new technology.
Madonna
A combination of brains, hard work, driving ambition, talent, and timing have made Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone (b. 1959) the epitome of the late-twentieth-century success story. A shrewd linking of the new—slickly produced music videos—and the old—an album of dance singles—helped bring about her leap to stardom in the early 1980s. Music video was the perfect vehicle for Madonna, who considers videos to be little movies in which she stars. Knowing that she must create an arresting visual image that will film well, she uses as her models glamorous female stars of an earlier era: Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe. The result is an image that is both brazenly sexy and delicately feminine, with the veneer of a Catholic “bad girl” who wears the symbols of her church—rosaries and crucifixes—as jewelry to adorn her revealing costumes. Madonna has said that she is her own experiment, a work of art in progress. Her canny ability to reinvent herself, to embody social change, has been the linchpin to her fame.
The success of her debut album, Madonna (1983), was largely due to an aggressive promotional campaign using music videos. Of the two singles to reach Billboard magazine's top ten, one was aptly titled “Lucky Star.” Madonna's second album, Like a Virgin (1984), contained three songs that became best-selling singles, including “Material Girl,” the tongue-in-cheek lyrics disdaining romantic love in favor of “cold, hard cash.” By 1985 the album had sold over six million copies, earning Madonna some cold, hard cash of her own. The music on the first two albums and on True Blue (1986) is light, girlish, fresh, and hip. Madonna's thin, breathy, slightly nasal, and nervously energetic voice drives the music forward and is ideally suited to the dance tunes of these early albums.
Like a Prayer (1989), her most ambitious musical endeavor, reveals a more sophisticated approach. Her voice is lower, darker, fuller, and truer to pitch. The songs, while retaining much of the tunefulness of her earlier work, are serious and self-revelatory. “Till Death Do Us Part” speaks to the painful and very public breakup of her 1985 marriage to movie idol Sean Penn. In “Promise to Try” Madonna attempts to deal with poignant memories of the mother who died while the singer was still a child. The music in some of the songs is referential; “Cherish,” a song about lasting love, bows to the Association's song of the same name. Throughout the album Madonna draws effectively on her Catholic background. In the title song she skillfully alternates music of prayerful petition with a more typically Madonnaesque refrain of hard-driving dance music. She rounds out the album with “Act of Contrition,” a compelling song that begins with her quiet recitation of the rosary. In the early 1990s Madonna turned her attention to Hollywood. She starred in several films, including Dick Tracy and Evita, and her image off screen was informed by transvestism. Ray of Light (1998), Madonna's first album since the birth of her daughter Lourdes, exemplifies her latest metamorphosis. The woman who once taught us about sexuality, materialism, social ambition, and androgyny now studies sacred texts and seeks to link popular music with metaphysics.
It remains to be seen whether Madonna will come to occupy a place in popular music comparable in status to that of the female singers whom she most admires: Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, and Patsy Cline. Still, she has clearly earned a niche in history as “Rock Queen of the 1980s.”
Women Rappers
Though at first it seemed as if the world of rap was to be inhabited solely by male performers, the mid-1980s brought several young African-American women to the fore. The three-woman group Salt-n-Pepa brought out its first album, Hot, Cool, & Vicious, in 1986. Since then, with new albums appearing about every three years and a Grammy nomination for “Push It,” the group has made good on its aim to be the top women on the hip-hop scene. Queen Latifah's first album, All Hail the Queen (1989), revealed her lyrics as actively pro-woman and pro-African American, as, for example, in her “Ladies First” (with British rapper Monie Love), “Fly Girl,” and “Latifah's Had It Up 2 Here.” Owner of her own management company, Latifah has also promoted herself as an actress in films and on television.
Rock's Individualists
Canadian Alanis Morissette cuts a significant figure on today's rock scene. Morissette made her American debut in 1995 with her album Jagged Little Pill. Her in-your-face manner won her four Grammys and the knowledge that the album was the greatest commercial success of any rock disc by a female performer. Another Canadian personality, k. d. lang has aroused controversy both for her music and her coming-out as a lesbian. Her earliest albums marked her as a rising star of country music, and her 1989 CD Absolute Torch and Twang won her a Grammy in the country music category. However, her next Grammy winner, Ingénue, secured the award for best female pop vocalist and established her as a mainstream artist.
Far from most ideals of the musical mainstream, Courtney Love has attacked ubiquitous female stereotypes in her song lyrics and in intense performances that embody the physicality of punk rock. Songs from her albums Pretty on the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994) cry out the painful aspects of growing up female; the latter won several “Best Album” awards. Since the suicide of her husband, rock star Kurt Cobain, Love has established herself as an actress (Althea Leasure in The People vs Larry Flynt) and has resumed her musical career.
AN ALTERNATIVE STYLE FOR THE 1990S: TORI AMOS
A prodigy who began playing piano at the age of three, Tori (Myra Ellen) Amos was born in North Carolina in 1963. Her parents moved the family to Baltimore so that their young daughter could study at Peabody Conservatory. Amos, however, was not suited to conservatory study, preferring to create her own music and play by ear. After touring for several years as a teenager in a lounge act, she recorded a debut album, Y Kant Tori Read, that was a miserable commercial flop. Success came only after several years of concentrated dedication to songwriting. The reception of Little Earthquakes (1991) proved her singular artistic vision was commercially viable.
Amos views her piano as a live, female orchestra and a friend to whom she talks. In concert, sitting at the edge of the bench, her left foot working the sostenuto pedal and her torso turned toward the audience, she appears to be caressing the instrument as she sings to her fans in an intense, confessional whisper. Mainly through extensive touring, she has achieved a cult following among college students and the gay population. Amos's loyal fans are attracted to the disturbing honesty of her lyrics and to her dynamic yet intimate singing style. Under the Pink (1994) and Boys for Pele (1996), which she describes as “a woman's journey into the hidden parts of the feminine unconscious,” are piano-driven albums. A newer album, From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998), integrates the piano into an overall sound; all the songs were recorded with bass, guitars, drum, and a programmer. Amos sees this new album as a reflection of her growth as a musician.
CONCLUSION
The popular music tradition embodies a multiplicity of styles, and though styles may change over time, nothing from the past ever goes away entirely. Today the most creative musicians often speak to contemporary concerns while enlivening their music by reinterpreting or evoking the best ideas from the past. One element that has greatly contributed to enlivening popular music in the twentieth century is the talent of women musicians, vocalists, instrumentalists, and composers. The idea persists that women are incapable of making significant contributions except as singers or pianists. Historical facts, however, document quite dramatically that women instrumentalists and composers have been neither welcomed nor encouraged by the men inside the tradition or by society. Even singers, though always considered more acceptable, were stereotyped—as canaries, bad girls, folk madonnas, and the like. The handful of women who overcame such arbitrary obstacles must be perceived as grand exceptions to the rule. Nevertheless, since the so-called liberation movements of the recent past, much progress has been made in discrediting long-held sexual stereotypes in American society. Although today's world of jazz and popular music is far from providing equal opportunity, women's chances for success are much greater than ever before.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
In addition to the items mentioned in the text, the following sources provide information on American popular music.
Baez, Joan. And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir. New York: Schirmer Books, 1987.
Bufwack, Mary A., and Robert K. Oermann. Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music. New York: Crown Publishers, 1993.
Franklin, Aretha, with David Ritz. Aretha: From These Roots. New York: Villard, 1999.
Gaar, Gillian. She's a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock and Roll. Seattle: Seal Press, 1992.
Hamm, Charles. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.
Heilbut, Anthony. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. New York: Limelight Editions, 1985.
Hirshey, Gerri. Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music. New York: Times Books, 1984.
Kerstetter, Rich. “Joan Baez: From Folk Madonna to Folk Matriarch,” Sing Out 41/2 (Aug. 1, 1996): 36-43.
Lee, Peggy. Miss Peggy Lee: An Autobiography. New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1989.
Lewis, Lisa. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Lynn, Loretta, with George Vecsey. Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter. Chicago: Regnery, 1976.
Malone, Bill C. Country Music, U.S.A. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
Mellers, Wilfrid. Angels of the Night. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Metz, Allen, and Carol Benson, eds. The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary. New York: Schirmer Books, 1999.
Miller, Jim, ed. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. Rev. ed. New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1980.
O'Brien, Lucy. She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop, and Soul. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
O'Dair, Barbara, ed. Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock. New York: Random House, 1997.
Pavletich, Aida. Rock-A-Bye, Baby. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.
Peraino, Judith. “PJ Harvey's ‘Man-Size Sextet’ and the Inaccessible, Inescapable Gender.” Women & Music 2 (1998): 47-63.
Pleasants, Henry. The Great American Popular Singers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.
Roy, D. “The Patsy Cline Discography.” Journal of Country Music 9/2 (1982): 47-115.
Scovill, Ruth. “Women's Music.” In Woman's Culture: The Woman's Renaissance of the 70s, ed. C. Kimball. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981, pp. 148-62.
Steward, Sue, and Sheryl Garratt. Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: True Life Stories of Women in Pop. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993.
Whitesell, Lloyd. “A Joni Mitchell Aviary.” Women & Music 1 (1997): 46-54.
Winer, Deborah. The Night and the Music: Rosemary Clooney, Barbara Cook, and Julie Wilson, Inside the World of Cabaret. New York: Schirmer Books, 1996.
Rolling Stone magazine is an excellent source for articles, interviews, and reviews. The Internet yields interesting, though not entirely reliable, information (audio clips, photographs, “fanzines,” etc.) on popular musicians.