Women who Rock: Part 1

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of music by women.  The way I figure it, I am a woman. And I wanna hear how modern women express themselves through music.   Not like, the way a pop diva does, by singing songs which are half the time written by men, and most of the time singing about the Y-chromosomed sex in a questionable way. (i.e. "My Humps" by good ole Fergie Ferg.)  Lately, I wanna hear music that is totally the creative baby of a woman, and not with the end of giving a dude a stiffy. 

So I've been wanting to write about some of the badass musicians I've discovered on this journey, but this whole journey begins a long time ago.  In my History of Rock and Roll class with Dr. K in college, I was impressed that, during the birthing pains of all things Rock, we studied practically no significant contributors who were female.  Because there were practically no significant female contributors. 

One of the first things Dr. K said in this class was, "Rock and Roll is... Rhythm and Blues played by white people."   When rock music first came to be, it was because Rhythm and Blues was being born in America and white people got really stoked about it and tried to participate.  As far as the nuts and bolts go, the instruments and chord progressions of the genres were the same, but the stylings were different.

Anyway!  There were a few women on the ground floor of rock, starting with pre-R&B blues and jazz singers like Bessie Smith.  Most of these women were black, both because blues was essentially invented by African-Americans, and because it was a bit more widely acceptable for a black woman to sing about love in speakeasies since African-American ladies were already so marginalized by society. 

The first woman to really begin to break out of the lady-blues/jazz-singer mold, and therefore, my first "Woman who ROCKS" was...

1. Memphis Minnie - called by Groves dictionary "the only significant female blues instrumentalist."  One of the first guitarists to take up an electric guitar, and definitely the first woman to do so, she was a hard-drinkin, hard-fightin', tobacco-chewin' woman you didn't mess with, and she contributed innovations in rhythmic accompaniments to the beginnings of rock and roll.  Thank God that the Mother of Rock and Roll was a total badass.

In order to totally make that stylistic jump from Blues and R&B over to rock n' roll, we've gotta add some white chicks to the mix.  First, was...

2.  Wanda Jackson.  Known as the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda has the honor of being the first woman to record a rock n' roll song.  Unfortunately, the "scandalous" rock music that she got her start with was never that successful, and her money-makers were pop hits as well as country and gospel stuff later in her career.  I once made the unilateral decision one summer that Let's Have a Party would be the official party song, and every time we got drunk my dear, patient housemates had to endure me blasting it and insisting that we were about to have a hoot n' a holler. 

The most commercially successful early woman of rock was the adorably precocious child star...

3. Brenda Lee.  But really, her commercial success came from the fact that she, like our charming super star Taylor Swift, was way more country and pop than she was rock.  She also discovered much earlier than Wanda the advantage of going in a pop and/or country direction.  Check out this saccharine little number, her biggest hit:  I'm Sorry .  While she was kind of a rocker when she was a kid, she smoothed out her sound considerably by age 15.  Make sure you stick around for the spoken word section of I'm Sorry.  Priceless. 


These three ladies were the first significant female contributors to rock-and-roll-badassery, and all Women who Rock today owe at least a little sumpin' sumpin' to their daring contributions to musical history.  Let the saga continue...