http://www.usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/010430/music.htm Science & Ideas 4/30/01 Rewriting women and rock A new history helps set the record straight By Dan Gilgoff In the 1950s, male audiences jeered Big Mama Thornton if her voice sounded less than perfect, since she didn't offer much in the way of looks. Sixties-era production guru Phil Spector forced his wife, Ronnie, leader of the Ronettes, to drive with a blowup doll in the passenger's seat when he couldn't chaperone her himself. And Linda Ronstadt was so intimidated by male musicians when her solo career took off in the '70s that she constantly apologized for being "not that good of a singer." These are a few of the less glamorous vignettes collected in We Gotta Get Out of This Place, a new history of female rockers by longtime Rolling Stone Hirshey. Her book joins a flurry of recent literature aimed at setting the record straight on women's roles in the evolution of rock-and-roll. Credit report. Part of the problem has been faulty attribution. Ronnie Spector she has read books "crediting a man for certain things and romanticizing what they did to discover me, and it's not remotely accurate." Although Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters get credit for laying down rock's foundation with the blues, the first black blues vocal recording was Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," in 1920. In fact, women who sang the blues early on were actually better paid than men, with Bessie Smith earning nearly 15 times what the average black male singer made. But history has also distorted the significance of acknowledged leaders in the field. Carole King, who wrote or cowrote rock staples like "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "The Loco-Motion," and "Natural Woman," is a far less respected member of the rock pantheon han Jim Morrison, who gets credit for hits he didn't even author, like "Light My Fire." New York Times critic Ann Powers, who has edited and contributed to anthologies about female musicians, says that male artists continue to hog the historical spotlight. "Are there 20 biographies of Joni Mitchell the way there are of Bob Dylan?" she asks. "I don't think so." When Rolling Stone released its Illustrated History of Rock & Roll in 1992, only four of nearly 100 chapters were devoted to women. The Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las were squeezed into a three-page chapter titled "The Girl Groups." An entire chapter went to Phil Spector alone. {for more good stuff, click the link above}
