Sallie Martin, Mother of Gospel Music
Kay Norton
Sallie Martin combined fame as a performer with a far-sighted business acumen that brought Black gospel music to a national audience and laid the foundation for the industry that followed. Kay Norton’s biography follows Martin’s parallel careers from her early plans to grow the genre through her celebrity in the 1960s–1970s and eventful retirement.
In-depth and powerful, Sallie Martin, Mother of Gospel Music tells the story of one woman’s role in shaping the music and business of Black gospel.
South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene
Samantha Ege
Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago’s South Side into a wellspring of music making.
A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
“A Glorious Celebration: Mary Lou Williams’s Mass for the Lenten Season”
by Deanna Witkowski
This article examines the creation of composer Mary Lou Williams’s Mass for the Lenten Season in the context of the St. Thomas community, as well as her beliefs regarding the spiritual nature of jazz, where she wanted her sacred music to be performed, and how she repurposed her Lenten Mass into a memorial Mass for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker
Michael McCall, Allison Moorer, and the Staff of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Dolly Parton has enjoyed seemingly effortless success as a singer, songwriter, movie and television actor, author, businesswoman, and philanthropist ever since she first hit the record charts in 1967. The sheer magnitude of her talent and charisma has created the impression that Parton merely fulfilled her destiny in becoming an entertainment icon. But she had to fight for each major step forward, intentionally breaking precedents to follow her instincts, even when music industry veterans advised against her daring moves. This book focuses on risks Parton took and turning points through the decades where she overcame obstacles and ignored naysayers to become one of the most widely recognized celebrities across the world.
Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton
Lydia R. Hamessley
Dolly Parton’s success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton’s compositions like “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music.
Filled with insights on hit songs and less familiar gems, Unlikely Angel covers the full arc of Dolly Parton’s career and offers an unprecedented look at the creative force behind the image.
“More than Divas: Chinese Cuban Women, Opera Performance, and the Construction of Alternative Ways of Being and Belonging in Cuba”
by Edwin Porras
In this article, Porras explores the social and cultural impact of Cantonese opera as a signifier of Chinese identity at the intersection of gender and class in Cuba between 1930 and 1960, especially focusing on the role opera performance played in advancing an alternative definition of the “Cuban woman” category.
Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children
Rose Marshack
As a member of Poster Children, Rose Marshack took part in entwined revolutions. Marshack and other women seized a much-elevated profile in music during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)—Marshack chronicles the band’s day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk’s DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs.
The Life and Times of Patsy Cline, Fourth Edition
Margaret Jones
Foreword by Loretta Lynn
The riveting and heart-wrenching story of country music diva Patsy Cline, from her against-all-odds rise from poverty and a strange, lonely childhood shrouded in secrecy, to her tragic and untimely death at the age of thirty when, ironically, she had finally achieved the triumph she had sought all her life.
“Depiction and Empowerment of Women in Indigenous Igbo Music”
by Ijeoma Iruka Forchu
This article aims to understand how modern Igbo women in a patriarchal, dynamic, and fast-globalizing southeastern Nigerian society interpret and create meaning through the concept and practice of traditional music.
The Lady Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer
Dottie Dodgion and Wayne Enstice
Foreword by Carol Sloane
Dottie Dodgion is a jazz drummer who played with the best. A survivor, she lived an entire lifetime before she was seventeen. Undeterred by hardships, she defied the odds and earned a seat as a woman in the exclusive men’s club of jazz. Her dues-paying path as a musician took her from early work with Charles Mingus to being hired by Benny Goodman at Basin Street East on her first day in New York. From there she broke new ground as a woman who played a “man’s instrument” in first-string, all-male New York City jazz bands. Her inspiring memoir talks frankly about her music and the challenges she faced, and shines a light into the jazz world of the 1960s and 1970s.
Chen Yi
Leta E. Miller and J. Michele Edwards
Chen Yi is the most prominent woman among the renowned group of new wave composers who came to the US from mainland China in the early 1980s. Known for her creative output and a distinctive merging of Chinese and Western influences, Chen built a musical language that references a breathtaking range of sources and crisscrosses geographical and musical borders without eradicating them.
“Gender and Genre: Women’s Performance Practices in Dersim”
by Aylin Demir
Significant numbers of ethnographic studies from different parts of the world emphasize lament as a women’s genre. Focusing on the women’s performance practices in Dersim, a region in eastern Turkey, where Zazaki- and Kurdish-speaking Alevis live, Demir considers how classification of music genres relates to gender and power.