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Singing with YouSeptember 22, 2005 The first pop music LP I ever bought was Introducing the Beatles. That was the year the Beatles first came Stateside; I was 13. Through high school and college I favored pop, folk, rock, British folk-rock, anything political, and all combinations of the above: they all ran together in those days (you wouldn't believe the stuff that made the Top 40 and got played on AM radio). From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, I was into women's everything, including music. Non-feminists tend to see this as limited, limiting, parochial, sectarian, separatist, and generally unreasonable, a position that still baffles me because I found it expansive, liberating, illuminating, and challenging, among other things. I started listening to more blues, gospel, and reggae; I was introduced to music from the Balkans, South America, and South Africa. For four years I worked at Lammas, D.C.'s feminist bookstore. Owner Mary Farmer also repped for Ladyslipper Music, the North Carolina-based women's distribution and recording company. Musicians were often in and out of the shop; something was always playing on the turntable. And there's the rub: the soundtrack for the entire first half of my life is on vinyl. My last turntable died years ago, and didn't get much use for years before that. Around the time I moved to Martha's Vineyard, I started buying everything on cassette; eventually I bought a boom box so I could play CDs. All that wonderful women's music that I'd danced to and sung along with slipped silently into the past. Two or three years ago, I started hankering to hear it again. Fortunately, Ladyslipper (may long life and a positive cash flow bless it forever) is still with us, online now, with the greatest catalogue of music by women anywhere in the world, and a lot of those early recordings are now on CD. The last couple of days I've been working to Simply Love, Holly Near's two-CD "women's music collection," and the live recording made by Meg Christian, Cris Williamson, and lots of friends at the 1983 Carnegie Hall concert to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Olivia Records. For Proust it was madeleines; for me it's music. The songs are in my bones; I recognize nearly all the names and pictures in the richly reminiscent booklet that accompanies Simply Love. More -- personal memories come back: hearing Cris for the first time, in Constitution Hall ca. 1978; Meg Christian, Maxine Feldman, and Judy Reagan at Lammas's tenth anniversary concert in 1983 (I still have the T-shirt) . . . I didn't go to the Carnegie Hall concert, but plenty of my friends did: word was that the energy was spectacular but musically it wasn't outstanding. (I get a similar feeling from the recording, which I never got on vinyl, but what the hell, I'll take it.) I heard Holly for the first time at a D.C. Gay Pride Day in, I think, the late 1970s; it was still small enough to be a street fair just northeast of Dupont Circle, near where Lambda Rising, the city's gay bookstore, was then located on S Street. Holly Near was women's music's squeaky clean queen -- "politically correct" the way we used the term before the Republicans got hold of it in the mid-1980s: she addressed every feminist issue you could think of and some that hadn't occurred to you yet, and sometimes you just wanted to throttle her for it. So I listen to Simply Love grinning at how we called her "Holly Queer" when she came out and "Holly X. Queer" when the rumors went round that she'd "gone back to men." When "Hay Una Mujer" played, we sang "I own my own hair." (If a line or song title could be butchered, we butchered it: Olivia was "Oblivion Records," and Holly's own label became "Deadwood.") "Hay Una Mujer" summons another memory: Holly's stunning impromptu duet with Ronnie Gilbert in Wasn't That a Time? Pretty soon I'm remembering hearing Holly and Ronnie (nobody had last names in those days) when they toured together -- a performance that stands out more than two decades later for the music, the theatricality, the electricity in the air. Afterward, a friend said, astonished, "Ronnie Gilbert can't sing!" -- a remark that puzzles me to this day, because this friend had excellent judgment and I still don't know what the hell she meant. Simply Love includes "Singing with You" -- Ronnie and Holly singing to each other with unabashed mutual appreciation: "You throw me back a voice / That is a mighty bit more than / Making a dream come true." Probably my next retrospective CD purchase should be the Holly-Ronnie collaborations; Lifeline doesn't get the play it deserves because I've got it on cassette and Uhura Mazda, unlike Tesah her predecessor, plays CDs but not tapes, and Holly and Ronnie's cover of Charlie King's "Two Good Arms" -- about Sacco and Vanzetti -- is heartbreakingly beautiful. Strange but true, I've got on my 1985 Sisterfire muscle shirt (I have the 1983 version too). Sisterfire was a women's music festival held for several years in the 1980s in Takoma Park, a close-in Maryland suburb of D.C. (We called it Sisterblitz, and the producing organization was Roadhog.) I just pulled it off to read the back, where all the performers are named. Sure enough, Ronnie Gilbert is among them. So is the D.C. Area Feminist Chorus, which I joined my last year in D.C. I'd stopped singing in high school, convinced I was no good at it and that sooner or later someone was going to figure it out. I've been in one chorus or another pretty much ever since.
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