By Margie Adam —
I began composing instrumental music in 1963, my junior year at Marymount School for Girls, when I fell in love with my best friend, Kathy. My first solo piano piece was entitled “Kathy’s Song.” When I signed up for the “open mic” at Kate Millett’s Women’s Music festival ten years later, on May 4, 1973, I had been writing songs with lyrics for less than a year. This evening, in a music classroom at Sacramento State University, I sat at a grand piano facing twenty-five strangers and explained I had never sung my songs in public. I suppose it was an awkward request for support. When the women laughed gently and applauded, I had my first experience of an audience becoming a community. I began my set with “Susan’s Song.”
If not for the passion I felt for my lover, Susan, maybe I never would have written words to that song. However, a decade into writing jazz/pop piano music, my artist self was compelled to give voice to my lesbian heart. I spent months at an upright piano in a farmhouse in the middle of a field in Atascadero, California, composing music, writing lyrics, and singing my life out, while Susan drove away each day to work with criminally insane sex offenders at a nearby state mental hospital. I wrote “Beautiful Soul” for her.
As songs accumulated on my cassette tape recorder throughout 1972, I began to get serious. I researched how I might get my songs to someone like … Dusty Springfield, one of my favorite singers. In early April, 1973, I spent a week in Los Angeles, meeting with record company guys who were listening for “hits” for their singers. One after another, they rejected the songs I had spent the last year channeling and crafting.
At the time, their reactions didn’t faze me. My excitement about the upcoming weekend overrode my disappointment. A new friend, Liz Stevens, who later co-founded Iris Films with Frances Reid and Cathy Zheutlin, had invited me to what may have been the first national lesbian conference. This conference, held at UCLA, turned my young lesbian identity inside-out. To paraphrase Sydney Abbott & Barbara Love’s seminal book, Sappho Was a Right-on Woman: “By envisioning and demonstrating a new reality for and with Lesbians … ” we also created it.
Linda Shear, a singer/songwriter and a member of the Family of Woman rock band, held a music-related workshop and passed around a contact sheet on a clipboard. I met Joan Nixon, a low-key Jenny Appleseed, who was driving Linda’s band around the country in her station wagon while recording and sharing the music of women she heard along the way; musicians like me, who would later be identified with Women’s Music. She was also a behind-the-scenes philanthropist, who invested in many lesbian feminist endeavors including Cris Williamson’s album, Changer and the Changed.
Deep inside, my Muse gathered Herself, cleared Her throat and whispered, “Yes!” I heard Her Voice ring out from my soul that weekend in April 1973, sitting with several hundred lesbian feminists in a UCLA lecture hall. Now, five decades later, I can see many instances when I received similar directives that I followed just like I did that day, as extraordinary opportunities and experiences began to come my way in Women’s Music and beyond.
When I reached for Linda Shear’s clipboard, I added my name and contact information to a virtual network being born right on the spot. In this ecstatic setting, I heard Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics and Flying, announce that she was going to stop giving speeches, and instead, organize a music festival. I was on my way.
My plan was to get to Kate’s music festival at Sacramento State University where she was teaching, share my songs at an open mic session and find someone who might want to sing them. Forget Dusty Springfield and mainstream singers! However, once I sang my own songs, in my own voice, my plans changed, primarily because I encountered two women: Woody Simmons and Jeanne Cordova.
As I waited for my turn at the open mic, I felt increasingly out of place as I listened to folksinger after folksinger singing … folk music. Strum-strum, free-free. Then Woody Simmons sauntered over to the microphone and began to sing. Her music and performance came at me from a different realm. My ears snapped to attention as she executed intricate chord progressions with accessible melodies while accompanying herself on piano, banjo, and her twelve-string guitar. This was not folk music!
By the time the weekend was over, Woody and I had spent hours and hours together, talking about music in ways neither of us had ever spoken before, sharing songs and ourselves with each other. Before long, she came to visit and we began to perform together. I tripped and skipped over fundamentals of performing as we explored the order of songs, when and if to talk between songs, what clothes to wear, how we would present ourselves individually and as a duo. Much later, a tone poem called “Woodland” came to me and spun our transformative relationship into spacious melody, rhythm, and chord color. I included that piece on my first solo piano album, Naked Keys.
The other woman I met that night was Jeanne Cordova, a radical lesbian feminist writer and organizer, who had been the force behind the recent national lesbian conference in Los Angeles. She was there in the audience at that open mic session, decompressing after confronting very difficult post-conference controversies. She invited me to sing at an upcoming fundraiser for her magazine, The Lesbian Tide. The event was to feature Jill Johnston, author of Lesbian Nation.
There were some significant consequences of saying “Yes!” to Jeanne’s invitation to sing at her Lesbian Tide fundraiser. I went to the local veteran’s memorial building and tracked down the janitor whom I brazenly asked to set up a microphone at the piano so I could practice singing into it. He said he’d set it up but would turn the sound off if he didn’t like the music. Fortunately for me, he liked it. My first audition.
Just as I was being introduced at the Tide event, Robin Tyler, comedian, and excellent festival producer, jumped up on stage and interrupted the program to criticize Jeanne for bringing in an “unknown performer” instead of inviting Maxine Feldman, a local lesbian folk singer, to sing. She then invited Max, who had just recorded her song, “Angry Atthis,” to take the stage and Max sang a rousing version of that song. I followed her. After a nervous start, the audience was encouraging and I sang my heart out. Later, I met Barbara McLean, Jeanne’s roommate and singer Vicki Randle’s manager. Barbara asked me if I would like to write music for Vicki and accompany her on the piano from time to time. I said, “Yes!”
Vicki was an extraordinary singer and interpreter of songs. She could blend her voice with other voices effortlessly, shifting styles and musical genres in a second. It was a thrill to have her sing my songs alongside her other repertoire, which included Melissa Manchester, Carole King, and Joni Mitchell.
In early 1974, Barbara heard from her friend, Joan Lowe, one of the few female recording engineers in America, that some women at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana were organizing a National Women’s Music Festival.
Vicki should be there, Joan said. Barbara asked if I’d like to accompany Vicki in her set and, perhaps, I could sign up for a set myself. I said, “Yes!” having recently performed at “Woman-Made Day,” a Los Angeles Women’s Building event featuring artist Judy Chicago, lesbian feminist theorist/writer Charlotte Bunch, and The Women’s Survival Catalog creators, Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie. I was getting ready.
It was Kristin Lems, a folksinger/songwriter who inspired and coordinated the surprisingly diverse, week-long festival of women musicians Vicki and I were about to join when we arrived on site, May 28. Cris Williamson was on the bill that Tuesday night. In one of the many magical synchronicities of my early days in Women’s Music, when I took my seat in the auditorium, I had been listening to Cris’ music for two years. Someone had mentioned I should get her Ampex album and I had become strangely obsessed with the quest until I found it in a record store cut-out bin in Portland, Oregon.
Watching her sing those songs, so familiar to me, was breathtaking. It was a 360° experience of an aesthetic and emotional soundscape I had been inhabiting for two years. When I approached Cris after her set and introduced myself as a songwriter and admirer of her music, our connection was immediate and full-on electric. We quickly agreed we’d like to find a piano somewhere so we could share our music with each other.
There was a spinet piano in the dormitory lounge where we were both housed as festival participants. For the next hours, we slid easily from ordinary time into a mystical space where the music was the message and the message was a mind-body-spirit blend of woman-loving energy shifting effortlessly back and forth from major to minor, from finished work to potentialities.
I prefaced one song I had written by saying I wasn’t sure about it because the audience didn’t applaud. It was “Beautiful Soul.” Cris said something like, “That song does not call for applause. It invites silence as we take it in.” Then she played a song she had just completed. Its melody was inevitable. Each phrase flowed easily into the next. The rhythmic patterns, chord color, and progressions were glorious. The song was “Waterfall.” It is now 50 years since that night and whether the details of this recollection are entirely accurate, I’m not sure. But that we sang for each other and to each other and were swept away by the encounter is simply true.
I met Meg Christian the next day in Cris’ dorm room. Cris and Meg already knew each other. They had sung each other’s music together in Washington, D.C., where Cris performed and Meg lived and was a member of the Olivia Records collective. Meg was an elegant guitarist whose classical training also aligned perfectly with her folk and pop impulses. Her songwriting and singing were irresistible and, coupled with her flirtatious sense of humor, knocked me out the first time I sat in her festival audience on Thursday night.
So many connexions! Each of us had been singing along with Dusty Springfield since 1964 so we knew her vocal “licks.” We were totally unselfconscious as we broke into three-part harmonies mimicking Dusty’s “Oooooh, Baby!” We all knew Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Laura Nyro’s music and understood that those women’s individual evolutions from songwriter to singer/songwriter/performers pointed toward a new freedom for female singer-songwriters like us.
How is it that we ended up singing together at that first National Women’s Music Festival in 1974—each of us appearing on Saturday night’s bill? Well, the original music acts—Yoko Ono and Roberta Flack—both canceled at the last minute and the festival organizers scrambled to replace them with musicians whose performances had been popular earlier in the week. Woody Simmons and the Clinch Mountain Back Steppers opened the show. Meg, Cris, and I each did short sets and, more significantly, we sang together. By this time, we were dying to climb into each other’s songs. We were like joyful playmates, desperate to jump into the water, holding hands, delighted to float down the river together. The audience that Saturday night witnessed the beginnings of a musical love affair that altered each of our hearts and artistry forever. The sound we made together was exquisite.
Shortly after the festival, Barbara McLean produced The Women’s Sound of Music with Vicki, Cris and me in concert at the Embassy Theater in Los Angeles. Lynda Koolish, a fine Berkeley photographer, was brought in to photograph the three of us in rehearsal and those photographs became central to promotional materials and the concert program. By now, we were on purpose.
Ginny Berson, a member of the Olivia Collective and Meg’s partner, having heard us all sing at the first National Women’s Music Festival, contacted Barbara (Boo) Price, her close friend from Mt. Holyoke College days, and said something like: “You have GOT to see these three women, Vicki Randle, Margie Adam, and Cris Williamson in concert. They are going to blow the roof off!” Boo, at the time a law student at UC Davis with a very young child, managed to attend that concert. And we did “blow the roof off!” We had created a musical performance that literally demonstrated sisterhood.
Soon after that event, Boo invited Vicki, Cris, and me to repeat our Embassy Theater show in Davis and proved herself to be a brilliant producer and promoter of our explosive artistic and political endeavor.
A lesbian feminist advance was gathering momentum all over the country, fueled in part by the meteoric rise of a Women’s Music movement. Word of this woman-loving wave of singer/songwriters and musical groups surged across the country like a slow-rolling tsunami. Women’s Music festivals were super-spreader events, mixing multiple musical genres for hundreds and soon thousands of women who heard their lives celebrated in music and then returned home to tell their friends who told their friends about Women’s Music. Cris and I found ourselves performing solo and together at colleges, universities, and for feminist organizations coast to coast, brought in by lesbian feminists who had heard one or both of us in concert.
We raised a joyful noise from all over the United States and Canada in these early years: Alix Dobkin, Berkeley Women’s Music Collective, Kay Gardner, Izquierda, Jade & Sarsaparilla, Willie Tyson, Gwen Avery, BeBe K’Roche, Ferron, Mary Watkins, the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band, Jane Sapp, Casse Culver. And on and on … .
My life in Women’s Music moved very quickly during these early days. Olivia Records recorded Meg’s album, I Know You Know, in Washington, D.C., in 1974. Meg, Ginny, and the rest of the Olives moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter and produced Cris’ record, Changer and the Changed,in 1975. I learned the ins and outs of studio recording at the knee of Joan Lowe, the sound engineer on both albums and the same woman who alerted Vicki Randle’s manager, Barbara McLean, about the National Women’s Music festival.
I played piano and sang backup vocals on these recordings and began considering my own recording possibilities. By then, Boo Price and I had grown together in a creative and loving partnership, which made launching Pleiades Records inevitable. With Joan Lowe as engineer, and supporting musicians including Woody Simmons, Vicki Randle, Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Kay Gardner, Marcy Dicterow, Diane Lindsay, Linda Tillery, and Harriet McCollum (my mother, on organ!) we released Margie Adam.Songwriter. in 1976.
For me, the culmination of this period in early Women’s Music was an extraordinary 6-city, 9-concert tour entitled An Evening of Women’s Music with Cris Williamson, Margie Adam, Meg Christian and Holly Near. By now, Holly had joined with us through an organic process common in Women’s Music circles. First, by happenstance, one of us shared a gig with her and was struck by her vocal command, her focused intention, and engagement with the audience. Then two of us were on the same bill with her and came back talking about her songwriting. Finally, the four of us ended up in a room with a piano and/or Meg’s guitar and one of our songs, and as we sang into the possibilities of 4-part harmony, we slid into place as a quartet. And, oh my … what a feeling it was to sing into the middle of that forcefield.
The tour was nicknamed “Women on Wheels” and took place over a 12-day period in February 1976. The concert run ended in a performance for the women at the California Institution for Women, a state prison. There were remarkable demonstrations of professionalism from producers like Marianne Schneller and Boo Price, and technicians like Margot McFedries (sound), Leni Schwendinger (lights), and Jennifer James (stage management), all of whom were more than competent to interact with male-only unions in concert settings throughout California.
After this tour, and the release of Margie Adam.Songwriter. my work was focused on integrating Women’s Music with feminist politics, carrying both into mainstream venues with diverse audiences. I joined Sweet Honey in the Rock and Malvina Reynolds for the gala concert at the U.S. State Department’s International Women’s Year Conference in Houston (1977). During a closing plenary session threatened by right-wing protestors, I led attendees in a 3-part harmony version of my song, “We Shall Go Forth!” which was later inducted into the Smithsonian’s Political History Division. Dusty Springfield recorded “Beautiful Soul” after hearing a bootleg tape recording of my 1974 Women’s Building concert. Judy Chicago invited me to celebrate in concert the San Francisco opening of her Dinner Party installation. (1979) The National Women’s Political Caucus sponsored a 20-city concert tour entitled Margie Adam: On the Road for Women’s Rights, in support of pro-choice women candidates (1980). I joined Sweet Honey, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., for an ERA deadline program (July 1, 1982). Boo Price, with her Women in Production associates, Margot McFedries and Leni Schwendinger, collaborated in all these pivotal projects while mentoring others. We also co-produced two more albums on Pleiades records: We Shall Go Forth! (1982) and Here Is a Love Song (1983).
Just to be clear: these vignettes are part of a prismatic memory narrative, what comes to me as a 76-year-old woman who feels deeply privileged and grateful to have been supported and lifted up by feminist and progressive audiences for decades—as an artist and activist in the Women’s Music movement, network, and industry. My intention in writing this piece has been to remind and reaffirm for myself and others that this was a miraculous time in our unique and particular culture, and in lesbian feminist history.
© Margie Adam 2023
Margie Adam, singer, songwriter, and pianist, released nine albums on her label, Pleiades Records, between 1976–2008. Her songs have been recorded by Dusty Springfield, Peter, Paul & Mary, George Lam, Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, and Holly Near. In 2010, Margie completed a Ph.D. in Psychology and currently maintains a practice in integrative counseling. Her commitment to the Women’s Music movement, network, and industry continues to engage her. Find her music at her website (https://margieadam.com/) and at her YouTube channel (https://tinyurl.com/bdhu6a3f). More information about Margie’s counseling work is at http://www.margieadamphd.com/
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Published on June 22, 2023
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