Women in American Popular Music

S. Kay Hoke

• Publisher: INshort
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253010124
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

A concise collection exploring women in rock, rap, folk, and other contemporary genres. Women in American Popular Music features composers, performers, patrons, musical contexts, and an expanded view of women in music in America. Touching on genres such as Tin Pan Alley, rock, rap, country, gospel, and soul, this enlightening collection is a good source of programming ideas for performers and a handy resource for music lovers.

INTRODUCTION

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. 1940–1955; 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. 1922), Rosemary Clooney (b. 1928), Margaret Whiting (b. 1924), and Peggy Lee (b. 1920).

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 (1909–1978), 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 1960s, 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 s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Tin Pan Alley