How Women Made Music

Starred review from September 15, 2024
A wide-ranging exploration of the role of women in popular music over the last century. The book draws on the NPR project "Turning the Tables," created by Ann Powers, Jill Sternheimer, and Alison Fensterstock, to document how women have been "musical pathfinders, innovators, and standard-bearers." The text of the book consists mainly of segments from that show, along with bits from other NPR shows like "All Things Considered," some only a few sentences long. They cover female artists from 1920s pioneers like Bessie Smith and Mother Maybelle Carter to midcentury icons including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Barbra Streisand, rock stars Janis Joplin and Diana Ross, right up to modern-day chartbusters Beyonce and Taylor Swift, with lots of others from every school of music. And there is a fair bit of attention paid to non-U.S. performers such as South Africa's Miriam Makeba, Iceland's Bj�rk, and Brazil's Gal Costa. Of the longer essays, some are largely biographical, while others record the artist's impact on the writer's own life. The shorter ones vary between interview snippets and comments on specific records, the latter drawn from two lists created for the radio show (and included in the book) of "greatest albums" by women--one covering the whole history of recording, the other from the 21st century. Omissions are inevitable in such an ambitious project, but almost every reader is likely to find a host of new names to check out. Recommended for anyone who takes music--especially women's music--seriously. An indispensable survey of the too-often neglected role of women in creating the music we all listen to.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 15, 2024
How Women Made Music highlights and expands the work of the series Turning the Tables, an NPR initiative started in 2017 by veteran music writers Ann Powers and Alison Fensterstock and music producer Jill Sternheimer. The project endeavors to correct the persistent marginalization of women and nonbinary artists in the music world. NPR's Marissa Lorusso describes the series as "a means to question the very framework by which greatness gets defined--and then, to fill that framework with so much paradigm-shifting, era-defining, boundary-breaking art that the whole thing collapsed, so that we could start to build something entirely new." Turning the Tables publishes groundbreaking lists like "150 Greatest Albums Made by Women," produces live musical performances, and features essays about influential artists. This volume includes substantial material from the series as well as excerpts from archival NPR interviews with seminal performers like Dolly Parton, Joan Baez, Chaka Khan, and Odetta, which weave a powerful thread of oral history through this stunning anthology. Full of photographs and other visuals, this is not a book on women in music; it is the book on women in music.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from August 12, 2024
Fensterstock, a contributor to NPR’s Turning the Tables, a “multiplatform series” that celebrates the women who shaped American popular music, draws from it and more than 50 years of the station’s coverage in a rich and resonant collection of essays, interview excerpts, and ephemera. The tone of the entries varies widely: Michelle Mercer fondly captures how Ella Fitzgerald became a “folk hero synonymous with cassette technology” with a 1972 commercial in which a recording of her high notes shattered glass (“Only Ella Fitzgerald, in the living, singing flesh, could have become the Memorex Lady. She was an American original”), while Harmony Holiday paints a visceral, uneasy picture of how Tina and Ike Turner’s abusive relationship turned live performances into spectacles of “eroticized violence” in which the audience unconsciously takes part (onstage, Tina is “mimicking sex, pretending she doesn’t hear or notice him slyly threatening her life onstage”). Other essays explore musicians’ intimate influences on listeners, including how Kate Bush’s The Dreaming (1982) gave shape to Ann Powers’s conflicted feelings about shame and femininity. Spanning from Joan Baez to Rihanna, the collection captures the varied ways women have innovated the American musical landscape, in the process powerfully giving due to music as a cultural artifact, a public artistic expression, and a site of personal meaning. It’s a buoyant, welcome ode to some of the most influential songstresses of the 20th and 21st centuries. Photos.