It was 11:30pm and I was sitting in the parking lot of the last-call post office at the San Francisco Airport, trying to get a batch of my new CDs into the mail before midnight. The car radio was tuned to KPFA and, lucky for me, Cris Williamson happened to be on the air. The mother of the women’s music movement, and the singer-songwriter whose shoulders so many of us are standing on, was talking to the interviewer, Derk Richardson, about her experience starting out in the 1970s, forging a new path for women.
As I watched planes land and circle around to their gates, Derk played a track from Cris’s landmark album, The Changer and the Changed. I put my own CDs aside and sat back to listen.
To say that Cris delivers the truth is a bit of an understatement, but the words she spoke on the radio that night rang particularly true for me. She said that women following the indie singer-songwriter path today don’t fully understand how much of the map had to be drawn from scratch, way back when, in order for women’s voices to get out there. She spoke warmly about her contemporaries from the early years at Olivia Records, and described how they locked the door of the studio while they learned the trades of recording, mixing and producing. It sounded powerful and exciting to me, but I also felt their struggle. There were real roadblocks and exclusions, ones that younger generations can only vaguely imagine.
As a singer-songwriter today, I’m struck by the many ways in which my contemporaries and I benefit from the very community that Cris helped to create. There are also direct ways in which we emulate and reproduce the circles of the past.
Recently, a friend of mine and I started a weekly women’s song circle. It almost seemed like a novel idea in today’s context, but, of course, it’s not, and perhaps at a deeper level we wanted to stay connected to what our foremothers so intentionally began: a cultural space where there is power in women’s words and voices. In our song circle, we build on the same concepts of mutual support and teamwork that were essential ingredients for the very survival for women musicians in the beginning. So, as we celebrate the 40thanniversary of The Changer and the Changed, let me add my voice to the ones saying: Thank you. To Cris and all of the people who helped carve out a space for women in the world of music.
The San Francisco Airport post office is a lonely place at midnight. But even as the parking lot emptied, the planes continued to land, take off, and circle around with powerful engines and visible jet-streams in the cold night air. I walked my batch of CDs into the lobby and watched as the mail clerk applied the date stamp to each addressed envelope. Bye-bye CDs…I hope you know where you’re going and that you remember where you came from, too.
Visit Rachel Garlin’s website to learn more about her and her music: rachelgarlin.com
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