Women in music 2

Jazz in the 20th century[edit]

Lil Hardin Armstrong (1898–1971) was a jazz songwriter.
While jazz songwriting has long been a male-dominated field, there have also been women jazz songwriters. In the 1930s, Ann Ronell (1905–1993) wrote the songs "Willow Weep for Me" and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?."[22] Irene Higginbotham (1918–1988) wrote almost 50 songs, her best-known being "Good Morning Heartache."[22] Dorothy Fields (1905–1974) wrote the lyrics for over 400 songs, some of which were played by Duke Ellington. She co-wrote "The Way You Look Tonight" with Jerome Kern, which won the 1936 Oscar for Best Song. She co-wrote several jazz standards with Jimmy McHugh, such as "Exactly Like You", "On the Sunny Side of the Street" and "I Can't Give You Anything but Love."[22] Lil Hardin Armstrong (1898–1971) played piano in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. Her song "Struttin' with Some Barbecue" has been recorded 500 times. Armstrong also recorded "Doin' the Suzie Q", "Just for a Thrill" and "Bad Boy."[22] Billie Holiday (1915–1959) was a singer who co-wrote "God Bless the Child" and "Don't Explain" with Arthur Herzog, Jr. and she penned the blues song "Fine and Mellow."[22]
Jazz music was a propelling force to help women with liberation in the early 20th century. Jazz music also helped pave the way for more jobs for women. This increase of a very male-dominated career until the 1920s allowed more women to be in a performing arts career. In return for this increase, Showboat, the first jazz Broadway musical, was produced. Showboat discusses the hardships of family in Mississippi and the reunification of family.[23] Jazz music was an influence in helping women gain jobs, as well as opening the environment for post-war equality and freer sexuality in the early twentieth century.[citation needed] Many of the women in jazz music at the time helped influence the genre and many jazz women musicians were people of color. These factors helped grow the genre to what it is today.[citation needed]
Many women influenced jazz music by producing, composing, and performing jazz music. An influential woman in jazz music was Bessie Smith, also known as the Empress of the Blues. She lived from 1894 to 1937. She is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, and 1989 Smith was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[24] Another woman who made history in the jazz industry is Dolly Jones, the first woman jazz trumpeter to be recorded.[25] Many women do not get credit in this genre as their male counterparts do. Women like Sweet Emma Barrett, who performed in the Original Tuxedo Orchestra, toured domestically and internationally. One of Barrett's hit songs is "A Good Man is Hard to Find". More women such as Billie Pierce, Lovie Austin, Jeanette Kimball, Mary Lou Williams, Alice Coltrane, and Hazel Scott, all had an impact in the jazz genre.[26] These women made their mark especially by being women in a very male-dominated genre.
Many of these women who are well-known in the jazz world are not seen to receive as much recognition as they deserve because of their male competitors.[citation needed] Not only were women influential as jazz singers, but there are so many jazz musicians that also do not get their credit. One woman was Ingrid Monson, who brought to the attention that when women first started to play the piano, they also gained more social acceptance in the music industry. Typically women would be seen to play in an all-women's jazz group, but when they would step into the "professional jazz world" they would be an instant hit.[27] One woman, by the name of Valaida Snow, was also known as the "queen of the trumpet."[28] Another woman, Nona Hendryx, was a jazz vocalist who also played many instruments and got the chance to work with many talented hip-hop artists like Prince.[28] There are many such accomplished women whose names are not known.
These women had a lot of success, but for some it was short-lived. These women rose to fame when men were drafted into World War II. However, once the men came home from being deployed, the jazz musicians who were women were then faced with difficult hardships. Problems such as sexual harassment and harsh criticism from their other band members and fellow jazz musicians were seen.[citation needed]

Pop in the 1960s[edit]

In the 1960s pop music scene, "[l]ike most aspects of the...music business [in the 1960s], songwriting was a male-dominated field. Though there were plenty of female singers on the radio, women ...were primarily seen as consumers:... Singing was sometimes an acceptable pastime for a girl, but playing an instrument, writing songs, or producing records simply wasn't done."[29] Young women "were not socialized to see themselves as people who create [music]."[29] Carole King "had a successful songwriting partnershi[p] with husband Gerry Goffin, penning hits like "The Loco-Motion," "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", "Up on the Roof" and "Natural Woman." "King was the first female recipient of the 2013 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song."[29] Ellie Greenwich and her husband Jeff Barry wrote "Then He Kissed Me", "Be My Baby" and "River Deep, Mountain High." Laura Nyro penned "Wedding Bell Blues", "Eli's Coming" and "And When I Die." She stated "I'm not interested in conventional limitations when it comes to my songwriting...I may bring a certain feminist perspective to my songwriting."[29] During the 1960s, both King and Goffin demonstrated the changing nature of American music as well as the emergence of new romantic and sexual patterns. "Musicians represented one of the leading edges of sexual and romantic change in American society",[30] impacting and shifting the youth's social standards. During the late 1940s and 1950s, young people began settling into marriages and adult responsibilities at a very young age.[30] However, King challenged the date, marriage, sex sequence by demonstrating that sex after marriage and the conventional practice of dating, is not captivating. She promoted the casualness of relationships between people and highlighted the trend of those of the opposite sex "becoming friends"[30] with her song "You've Got a Friend."
Lotti Golden, Lower East Side c. 1968

1960s: New wave of female singer-songwriters[edit]

By the late 1960s, a new wave of female singer-songwriters broke from the confines of pop, writing more personal songs in the confessional style of poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The artists spearheading this movement were featured in Newsweek, July 1969, "The Girls: Letting Go": "What is common to them – to Joni Mitchell and Lotti Golden, to Laura Nyro, Melanie, Janis Ian and to Elyse Weinberg, are the personalized songs they write, like voyages of self-discovery."[31] While innovating, these women also faced many struggles such as discrimination. In a male-dominated publishing world, female songwriters such as Joni Mitchell want to be seen outside categories of race and gender, and into the category of pure artistry.[32] In her 1994 interview with Alice Echol, Joni Mitchell rejected feminism but voiced her animosity towards discrimination, sex-based exclusion, and gratuitous sexualization. Echol places Mitchell's "discomfort with the feminist label into the context of her artistry."[32] Women songwriters want to be seen as good musicians without having their talents marginalized because of their gender. Moreover, Grace Slick, a former model, was widely known in rock and roll history for her role in San Francisco's burgeoning psychedelic music scene in the mid-1960s. In The Guardian, 26 January 2017, author Laura Barton describes the radical shift in subject matter – politics, drugs, disappointment, the isolation of the itinerant performer, and urban life.[33] Native New Yorker, Lotti Golden, in her Atlantic debut album Motor-Cycle, chronicled her life in NYC's East Village in the late 1960s counterculture, visiting subjects such as gender identity ("The Space Queens [Silky is Sad]") and excessive drug use ("Gonna Fay's"). The women in the 1969 Newsweek article ushered in a new age of the singer-songwriter, informing generations of women singer-songwriters from the 1970s to the present day.[31][33]

Musical theatre[edit]

In musical theatre, "female songwriters are rare in an industry dominated by males on the creative end. Work by male songwriters is more often produced, and it was only [in 2015] that an all-female writing team made history by winning the Tony Award for Best Score."[34] In 2015, for the first time, an all-female writing team of Lisa Kron (Best Book) and Jeanine Tesori and Kron (Best Original Score)[35] won the Tony Award for Best Score for Fun Home, although work by male songwriters continues to be produced more often.[34] In 2013, Cyndi Lauper was the "first female composer to win the [Tony for] Best Score without a male collaborator" for writing the music and lyrics for Kinky Boots.[35] Female songwriters in musical theatre include singer-songwriter and actress Lauren Pritchard, who wrote Songbird; Zoe Sarnak, who wrote A Lasting Impression and The Years Between; and Katie Thompson, who would like to "see women characters...that are complicated and strong and vulnerable."[34] Thompson stated that in the musical theatre industry, "when you fight for something as a woman, especially an artistic thing ..you are either perceived as being a bitch or you are perceived [as] 'emotional'", a label that enables others to dismiss you.[34] The gender imbalance in musical theater exists well into the twenty-first century with women being only 3% of wind band composers and 12% of the choral composers.[36] Despite the stigma and lack of women in musical theater, over fifty women have received international artistic recognition for composing full-length musical scores on Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters.[36]
Abbey Lincoln (1930–2010), was an American jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress, who wrote and performed her own compositions. She was a civil rights advocate during the 1960s.[37][38]

Black women[edit]

According to LaShonda Katrice Barnett, a college and university teacher and author of a book on black women songwriters, of the "over 380 members of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, just two are black women (Sylvia Moy and Valerie Simpson)."[39]
African-american women have made historical contributions to jazz, blues, rock, gospel, and other genres over the years. Several women have led the way for young Black girls hoping to become singers or rappers one day, from trailblazers like Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, and Diana Ross to modern idols Missy Elliott, Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, and Rihanna. Female musicians, especially Black women, nevertheless experience their jobs differently than their male counterparts, as do women in many other industries.
A persistent issue is the underrepresentation of black female artists in both recognition and representation. One of the top musicians in the business even decided to leave the music business early due to the long-ignored problem. When Teyana Taylor, who was once contracted to G.O.O.D Music/Def Jam, released The Album in June 2020, it immediately shot to the top of the Top R&B Albums chart on Billboard. Despite its popularity, Taylor's album was overlooked for a Grammy nomination in the Best R&B Album category, where all of the nominees were men. The Recording Academy, however, has a commitment to increasing its diversity initiatives. On Twitter, she commented, "Y'all was better off just stating best MALE R&B ALBUM coz all I see is d*ck in this category". Taylor made her official retirement from music in December 2020 after stating she felt "super underappreciated".[40]