Read no. 19

Greetings!

My Master’s Degree is complete! Although I don’t yet have the diploma in hand, that stage of my life is now behind me. It was fun, but now I’m moving on. In June, I will help my son Christopher move to Florida to start school, and will also help my sisters plan and celebrate our parents’ 50th Wedding Anniversary. So, my plate is looking kinda full, as I’m sure all your plates are.

Now let’s talk about bluegrass. You’ve probably already mailed in your first-round ballots for the IBMA’s annual awards. I hope you didn’t forget about our strong women performers when you voted. As always, I’m not suggesting that you vote for them because they are women, but because they are good. This year quite a number of women have released excellent recordings under their own names, but, unfortunately, few of these songs or CDs have reached the charts. From November 1998, when this year’s current releases started hitting the charts, through May 1999, there were just two women on the Bluegrass Unlimited chart: Suzanne Thomas and Valerie Smith. (BU lists the most-played current bluegrass songs on radio.) In June, even as Valerie and Suzanne moved off the chart, Kathy Kallick and Jeanette Williams moved on. But still, only two women.

On the Bluegrass Now chart, which tracks the best-selling albums in the country, from July 1988 until May 1999 there were a total of three women listed: Alison Krauss, Valerie Smith, and the New Coon Creek Girls. I am in despair when I look at these charts. I am also in despair when I peruse the radio playlists that are sometimes posted on the internet via Bgrass-L. So few women. We’ve certainly come a long way, but “don’t that road look rough and rocky” sometimes?

My question to you is, are we doing all we can do to support women in bluegrass? How many of us bought recordings by women in the past year? Are we guilty of not putting our money where our mouths are, where our hearts are? I know I certainly could have been more financially supportive of women in bluegrass. I am vowing from this moment on that I’m going to buy more recordings by women! I hope you will do the same. This month, starting right here on the front page, WIB is proud to publish for the first time an oral presentation given by folklorist Tom Adler in 1986 at the annual meeting of

the American Folklore Society. I was reminded of this wonderful work, originally titled “Women in Bluegrass Music,” by Ken Irwin. Because I wanted to run Tom’s entire presentation in one issue, there was space for only one more article, the second part of my interview with Betty Fisher. Next time, we hope to be more diverse. Happy reading! —Murphy Henry

Is There a Link Between Bluegrass Musicianship and Sexuality?

By Thomas A. Adler

Twenty-one years ago, in his Journal of American Folklore article “Introduction to Bluegrass,” Mayne Smith helped us all by formulating a clear and informed sociomusical definition of this music. Bluegrass, said Smith, though not in these exact words, is music performed by groups of four to seven male musicians, who are culturally aligned with life in the rural, upland South, who play certain non-electrified stringed instruments—you all know which ones—in a tightly-organized and

highly-constrained set of tradition-based styles, and who sing together in as many as four parts, creating and re-creating a repertoire that includes many textually-traditional songs. Explicit in Smith’s discussion was the assumption that bluegrass music-making is a purely male enterprise, and he wrote that most bluegrass aficionados are young men under forty who own instruments and attempt to play the music. But “twenty-one years, boys, is a mighty long time,” and there have been significant developments in every aspect of the demographics of bluegrass.

To give the topic of women in bluegrass music the proper background, we really should begin by considering the historic sexual division of artistic roles in the various root traditions that precipitated bluegrass. Anglo-American folk song, viewed in broad generic terms, has certainly always been supported as much by female tradition bearers as by male ones. Remember, some of the largest song repertoires ever collected have been those of women ballad singers like Mrs. Brown of Falkland; Texas Gladden of Virginia; or Almeda Riddle of Arkansas. And unaccompanied ballad performance has frequently been assumed by trained folklore collectors to be dominated by women singers. For example, when Henry Belden collected folk song texts in Missouri in the 1940s, he pointed out that both sexes shared participation in the ballad tradition there, but his actual words were: “Men and boys sing... [ballads] equally with women and girls,” with the implication that that was not typically the case elsewhere in the country. So anecdotally, at least, we should begin by noting that women have long been tradition bearers in the venerable parade of folk song and balladry that led towards bluegrass.

But bluegrass is more easily definable instrumentally than vocally, and women’s participation in instrumental Anglo-American music presents a very different picture. Among the ranks of fiddlers and pipers who brought traditional instrumental skills and repertoires from the British Isles to America, women apparently always formed a very tiny minority, though, as usual, reliable quantified data are lacking. We should note that throughout most of European and American history, the cost and the value of musical instruments has been relatively high. Men, as the heads of households, have often been the nominal owners of all property, and the unequal division of instruments themselves would obviously contribute to generic male “ownership” of folk instrumental traditions. Women seem always to have “participated in tradition,” in folklorist Kay Cothran’s general sense, but perhaps not so much in the past by playing the instruments themselves as by responding appropriately to male-dominated instrumental music with socially-complementary singing and dancing.

Tangentially, I’d note a similar domination of instrumental music by males in the African-American tradition. Not one of the early illustrations and references to banjos and large drums cited by Dena Epstein suggests that women were ever seen performing on them in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 19th century, minstrelsy remained almost exclusively male until after 1870, when a number of all-female minstrel troupes came suddenly into being, but these shows were a parody of the minstrel parody itself, and chiefly existed, according to Robert Toll, to sell “a revealing glimpse at scantily clad women.” At any rate, the banjo and other instruments of minstrelsy were presented in that popular forum for nearly a half century in association with men only. By the 1880s, many women outside the rural Southeast had indeed taken up the banjo, but typically to play it in the popular “parlor instrument tradition,” the transmission of which was grounded in written instruction books, printed sheet music, and a rhetoric of elitist white European assimilation and improvement of the humble African-American instrument.

Many Southern mountain women born in the last quarter of the 19th century apparently played the five-string banjo, but almost without exception they confined the exercise of their art to the family circle. Very few early women instrumentalists crossed the boundary from amateur to professional status, or even semi-professional status, as entertainers. Even purely local string bands assembled on a temporary basis to play for home and community dances seem always to have been dominated by men. This pattern surely represents both the male assertion of a perceived primary male right to engage in men-only socializing and the perception, on the part of both sexes, that playing music in a band, even for friends and neighbors to dance to, is a kind of work outside the home, and therefore construed as men’s business, whether it’s enjoyable or not. In support of this last point, we should recall how many early bluegrass bands have

been described as workmanlike and “poker-faced.” It seems right to reinforce the point that bluegrass, like a lot of other men-only enterprises, has always been an uncommonly serious-looking form of "playing.”

If we turn to the broad history of commercial country music prior to the crystallization of bluegrass in Bill Monroe’s 1945 band, a modest number of semiprofessional and professional women stars will come immediately to mind. And these were not always women who dreamed of being stars, but rather women who extended the tradition of their music-making beyond the family circle where they had developed it. Many of them were certainly talented instrumentalists: Eva Davis and Samantha Bumgamer were pioneering recording artists in the fiddle-and-banjo duet tradition; Maybelle and Sara Carter’s autoharp and guitars carried the melody of many Carter Family performances and spawned 50 years of imitators of their own; the Coon Creek Girls, invented first in the imaginative minds of John Lair and Lily May Ledford, played and recorded some rousing mountain string band music; Cousin Emmy and Rachel Veach, who played with Roy Acuff, were spirited banjo players who also specialized in comedy acts. Then there were many male-and-female duet groups whose artistic presentations-of-self always played on the homology between vocal harmony and romantic harmony. These groups generally featured women who were competent and comfortable, if not virtuosic, in instrumental performance: think of Lulu Belle and Red Foley, or Lulu Belle and Scotty, or Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper, or James Roberts and Martha Carson, or Lynn Davis and Molly O’Day.

I believe none of these women stars of early country music would be identified as bluegrass musicians by the other members of this panel, even though almost all the women whom I’ve named profoundly influenced the development of bluegrass song repertoires, and many of them were excellent instrumental performers. Like their male counterparts in commercial hillbilly and old-time country music, early women performers featured instruments and styles and tunes and songs that overlap with those of the bluegrass canon, but in general their performing careers antedated the invention of bluegrass music. More to the point, none of them ever played in a bluegrass band created in the instrumentally-participatory image of Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, in which each member has an obligation to pursue and demonstrate both instrumental virtuosity and mutual instrumental support.

But there were a few women who got involved with bluegrass music in the early days, when the “sound” was emerging and just starting to become the “style.” In fact, at least five different women might lay reasonable claims to having been the first female bluegrass musician.

Taking their cases chronologically, we begin with Wilene Forrester, wife of Tennessee fiddler Howard “Howdy” Forrester. Howdy was Bill Monroe’s third fiddler, having succeeded Art Wooten and Tommy Magness. Forrester played two times with Monroe, but his first stint lasted until he joined the Navy in 1943 and was replaced by Chubby Wise. About that time, Monroe hired Wilene “Sally Ann” Forrester to play accordion, probably to insure Howdy’s return and also in partial response to Roy Acuff s hiring of Jimmy Riddle to play accordion in his band; but in compiling his monumental bluegrass history, Neil Rosenberg found a 1943 Billboard article in which Monroe says he really hired Sally Ann as a tribute to the memory of his own mother’s accordion playing. No matter why she was hired, Sally Ann was the first woman to perform regularly as a nominal “Blue Grass Boy,” and her musical imprint is stamped indelibly on the first Columbia recordings of such songs as Rocky Road Blues, Nobody Loves Me, Come Back to Me In My Dreams, and Footprints In The Snow. [Editor’s note: My own research into Sally Ann’s life points out that she was not hired to insure Howdy’s return, but rather because she was an accomplished musician in her own right who pulled her own weight in the show.]

The second woman “Blue Grass Boy,” was Bessie Lee Mauldin, from North Carolina. Bessie Lee has been almost completely overlooked by writers of fan magazine biographies and is acknowledged only sketchily in the stack of scholarly literature produced by today’s distinguished panelists and others. This neglect is somewhat surprising since she played hundreds of live shows and took part in 31 recording sessions with the Blue Grass Boys between 1955 and 1964. Rosenberg has published a few early 1960s photos of Monroe’s band in which Bessie Lee can be seen. And Bessie Lee Mauldin’s name is certainly preserved in the memories of many of today’s practicing bluegrass musicians, even if it’s only spoken in the midst of late-night sessions of Bill Monroe reminiscences, where it certifies the speaker’s depth of knowledge of Monrovian bluegrass. In such contexts, too, Bessie Lee is sometimes alluded to by male bluegrass musicians with winks, leers, and the implication that her ties to Monroe were more sexual than musical. Apparently she considered herself to be Monroe’s common-law wife, but he did not; there have been tales of a real or threatened lawsuit over this issue in the past few years. Regardless of the actual truth behind Mauldin’s extra-musical relationship with Monroe, I raise the point now because I intend to return later in this paper to the critical concept of a link between bluegrass musicianship and sexuality. At any rate, since she played string bass only, and, at least to my knowledge, never sang with the Blue Grass Boys on stage, Bessie Lee remained in the musical background throughout her career, and is almost never referred to as an inspiring role model for today's generation of women bluegrass musicians. [Editor’s note: New information indicates that Bessie Lee did, indeed, sing with the Blue Grass

Boys on stage. Two of the songs she sang were the solo Answer to the Wild Side of Life and high harmony on Walking in Jerusalem Just Like John.]

Sally Ann Forrester and Bessie Lee were the only “Blue Grass Girls,” that is, the only women musicians employed by Bill Monroe. But among the daughters of pioneer recording star Ernest V. Stoneman, three played important parts in the early days of the bluegrass style. I am, of course, referring to Patsy Stoneman, who plays guitar and autoharp, Donna Stoneman, who plays mandolin, and Veronica (“Roni”) Stoneman, who plays banjo and is famous for her music and comedy performances on Hee Haw. All three women played in various Stoneman family groups of the post-World War II years, and Patsy, the oldest, also worked in the early 1950s as a single musician and singer with notable bluegrass musicians like Bill Emerson and Wayne Yates. Around 1956, the Stoneman family band coalesced as the Blue Grass Champs, and Donna and Roni began to really come into their own as instrumentalists. Donna had begun to play mandolin seriously during the years of the Second World War, and in 1956 Roni, already married to a good Virginia Scruggs-style banjoist named Eugene Cox, was herself a good enough Scruggs-style player to take second place in an open banjo contest. In 1957, Roni recorded Lonesome Road Blues on the important Folkways record American Banjo Tunes And Songs In Scruggs Style, and on and off through the rest of the late 1950s and the early ’60s the Stonemans performed in various family-based configurations, maintaining the visibility of both Donna and Roni as lead instrument-playing women bluegrass musicians.

In the latter half of the ’50s and early 1960s, a few other women began to shift from western, folk, old-time, gospel, or other country music genres into bluegrass, but most of them continued in the proven female roles of vocalists and/or rhythm instrument players. Such women as Ola Belle Reed, Rose Maddox, and Gloria Belle all come to mind here; all helped pave the way for those that followed in bluegrass, but none made or enhanced their reputations because of instrumental prowess. Miggie, Polly, and Janis Lewis of Georgia’s bluegrass-gospel Lewis Family began their careers during this period, too, but as vocalists only; they are the prototypes, in bluegrass, of a performance role that allows women, and women only, to participate in bluegrass without being instrumentally competent. Though Polly did play bass for a time in the fifties, and the Lewis Family’s women members are sometimes seen keeping time with a tambourine, the band’s lead instrumental roles have been filled by the men: Pop, Wallace, Talmadge, Little Roy, Travis, and Lewis Phillips. The women’s roles in the Lewis Family followed the general trend in country music, where there has been a slow steady separation of vocalist and instrumentalist roles, both for men and for women. Fifty years ago on the Opry, a much higher percentage of the performers accompanied themselves instrumentally as they sang and had reputations as instrumental virtuosos.

Where bluegrass played by men preserves the old ratio of at least one instrument per performer, women could and did begin to participate in family-based bluegrass bands in a way that owed more to popular music than country music, without becoming instrumentalists at all. For such women, the art of bluegrass was recentered on vocals, and instrumental virtuosity remained a male prerogative.

It was similar in the bluegrass-gospel singing Sullivan family. Margie Sullivan was featured from the beginning as a vocalist and only secondarily as a rhythm guitarist. The serious instrumental work of playing Sullivan Family bluegrass was left to Enoch, Emmett, Arthur, and Aubrey Sullivan, and later on to talented Sullivan Family sidemen like Joe Stuart, Marty Stuart, and Carl Jackson.

During the 1960s, two important developments changed forever the way women related to bluegrass. First was the Folksong Revival, which stimulated the exposure of bluegrass far beyond its original regional and cultural provenance. The second was the beginning of weekend bluegrass festivals in 1965, which created a new context for unmediated presentations of bluegrass in general, and for family-based secular bluegrass performance in particular.

The Folksong Revival and various pop-cultural events of the 1960s, like the Beverly Hillbillies television show and later on the soundtrack to Bonnie and Clyde, brought the sound of bluegrass—specifically the influential sounds of Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys—to huge new audiences outside the rural Southeast. The story of the first bluegrass college concerts and the incredibly influential urban Folk Festivals at New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Chicago, and in other northern cities and towns has already been told in part. I only wish to remind you here that among the millions who heard bluegrass through national mass media at that time were a great many women who were moved by what they heard, and who quietly began to take up bluegrass instruments in earnest.

Part of the attraction of bluegrass to new listeners certainly lies in the sound of the music itself, but I would argue that a significant part of the attractiveness of bluegrass for those raised outside the cultural region of its origins is the way it provides ready rhetorical access to an exotic and interesting culture, or at least its image. Bluegrass has thrived because it offers all its willing exponents not only a musical art form to learn, but also a kind of voluntary and controllable participation in tradition. To post-sixties generations, north and south, urban and rural, male and female, bluegrass offered the useful burden of its associations, its history, and above all its model of a formulaic musical and social architecture that enables strangers to come together in the image of a family and, in the name of tradition, to make complex, beautiful, improvisational music.

This is a model that fulfills needs for modern urban women as well as modern urban men, and the mass media’s inevitable separation of traditional bluegrass music from traditional bluegrass culture made it easier for women to move into any bluegrass roles they chose, including those of lead instrumentalists.

Because the concept of family is so critical to this whole discussion, the bluegrass festival movement should be understood as a novel amalgamation of bluegrass performance with the safe context of family togetherness. The participation of actual families who set up temporary home sites and became the constituent units of bluegrass festival audiences marks the beginning of the festival era as a clear watershed moment in the history of women’s participation in bluegrass. Neil Rosenberg flatly states in his history that “women . . . were practically unknown as bluegrass musicians prior to the beginning of the festival movement.” And the handful of exceptions I’ve reviewed so far certainly prove the rule about the importance of family, for before diffusion of bluegrass and the rise of festivals—and to some extent, even now—a woman’s only safe route into bluegrass was via direct kinship with male musicians. From the 1920s on, any unmarried woman who tried to be a professional hillbilly musician outside the safety of the family circle, and any bandleader that tried to employ her, had to endure or circumvent the presumptions of promiscuity and loose living commonly held of all popular musicians. This was a problem for pre-bluegrass women performers like Rachel Veach, and this reinforces the point I was trying to make about Bessie Lee Mauldin’s role as a Blue Grass Girl. Where men could form hillbilly and bluegrass bands in which the sidemen were described as “boys,” “ramblers,” “cut-ups,” and “playboys,” women had to grow up in a real singing family, like the Stoneman and Lewis sisters, or had to have some other direct kinship relationship to a male musician (like Sally Ann being Howdy’s wife). The performance rhetoric of family membership in hillbilly bands, which had always provided a reason for unrelated or distantly-related band members to adopt the fictitious role of “brothers,” was therefore crucial for women, too. And it’s fascinating to note that once the festival movement provided the opportunity, married women in families moved into bluegrass principally as players of the supporting instrument roles, much as they play a critical supporting role in the family’s emotional life.

After these two watershed events of the 1960s, the absolute number of women bluegrass musicians began to rise dramatically, and women’s participation in bluegrass, like other tangible evidences of the Women’s Liberation movement, became a divisive topic of conversation among men. Many men have resisted and continue to resist the very idea of women’s participation in bluegrass. Some flatly assert that women can’t pick bluegrass, can’t sing bluegrass, and don’t belong in bluegrass. Probably many more, including me, have tried to take a more tolerant stance, but we still probably

greeted our first sights of competent women bluegrass musicians with the startled realization, and maybe even the infuriating vocalization of the thought: “She picks pretty good, for a girl.” And we kept on picking in groups that were mostly male anyway, whether or not we consciously wanted to exclude women from bluegrass, because—as with any vernacular music—there are lots more so-so learners than accomplished virtuosos. Bluegrass defines a performance arena in which instrumental virtuosity was valued right from the start, especially on the lead instruments that women were so late to take up. So even though women began to be seen playing bluegrass in the 1960s, it was a long time before there began to be enough really good women bluegrass musicians—women who were not only competent, but excellent—to begin to break down the male observation that women couldn’t pick.

While I want to concentrate here on the different implications and connotations of instrumental performance for the two sexes, I have to take at least a moment to address the crucial question of singing. There is no doubt that a real difference in average vocal range distinguishes women from men, and this difference is enough all by itself to cause problems. As the woman banjoist and banjo teacher Murphy Henry put it, “Women cannot sing ‘traditional’ songs in the ‘traditional’ ‘right’ keys. This confuses most men. And when you get away from ‘traditional keys’ and move to a higher range, who can tenor a woman? Only another woman. Who can then sing baritone? It’s too high for conventional men baritone singers, yet usually too low for another woman....So usually women are confined to singing tenor to a man or occasionally giving a solo lead or sometimes high baritone. How could you have a woman’s gospel quartet? Who would sing bass? If you can’t sing lead in a conventional key, you can’t have any control at a jam session of average musicians. You can’t say ‘Let’s sing Uncle Pen,' and then sing it—you have to say, ‘Does anyone know Uncle Pen? I can tenor it’—quite a handicap.” Compounding the problem of vocal range, the narrative orientation of many traditional bluegrass songs is purely and unalterably male. Some women respond by writing new songs, or by bringing songs into bluegrass from country or popular music that represent a woman’s viewpoint (Blue Kentucky Girl may be the most popular of all these), but a significant response is also the simple avoidance of songs that are unequivocally male, like Dirty Dishes or Home Run Man.

Another set of challenges to women pickers relates to the social dynamics of instrumental bluegrass. The bluegrass performance arena has always been one in which musical assertiveness is the norm and outright musical competition or dueling is a principle mode of “play.” Assertiveness in bluegrass means stepping up authoritatively to take your break, and it means playing the lead instruments forcefully, hard. The aesthetic vocabulary of banjoists and mandolinists is filled with terms like “cut,” “chop,”

“punch,” “drive,” “spark,” “bark,” “spang,” “wang,” “power,” and “pop,” all of which suggest the bundling of enormous and tightly-controlled energy in the timbre of each properly-played note. When women pickers first came along in significant numbers, they often seemed to pick in a soft, relaxed, or even languid manner deemed inappropriate by many male bluegrass critics. One has to learn to channel musical energy through an instrument, and that takes time. Today, those women who have first perceived and then achieved an appropriate assertiveness in their own bluegrass are likely to be the most vocal critics of beginning women players, especially those who “use being a woman as an excuse for ‘dinky’ playing.”

Additionally, the musical dueling that takes place between all-male bluegrass bands has been likened to all-male team sports competitions. Most of us here probably already know about Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys baseball teams and his own positive views of both music-making and sports as arenas for tough competition. When women first entered the male bluegrass world, they sometimes felt they were being treated as competitors, and they were, but they were not always expecting that. To the eyes of non-pickers, the cooperative aspects of band membership probably are more apparent than the competitive ones.

Another dimension of meaning follows from this pattern of male bluegrass assertiveness and competition, namely the use of one’s musical ability as a kind of romantic or courtship display. Many of the young male bluegrass musicians I’ve interviewed through the years have commented frankly that their membership in bands and their ability to pick bluegrass were assets when it came to picking up girls. Some women—including a significant number of the women I interviewed and corresponded with last summer in preparing this paper— freely acknowledged that they found male bluegrass musicianship romantically attractive and effective in a courtship sense. I heard and read comments like “yes, boys use bluegrass to get girls; in fact, that’s what drawed me to Timmy.” A more complex description of one California woman musician’s motivation to learn began: “My mother wanted me to be a symphony musician. When my best girlfriend started banjo lessons, I decided I had to myself. I loved the sound of the banjo. Then I developed a mad crush on my banjo teacher, so I was inspired [to learn] by rebellion, competitiveness, emotionalism, and lust.”

Many male pickers have, no doubt, been inspired by the same factors. The connection between the competitive performance of bluegrass and the romantic presentation of one’s self to the opposite sex involves what psychologists would surely call a kind of sublimation; and the understanding that this function underlies male bluegrass performance goes a long way towards explaining the reluctance of women themselves

to invade the bluegrass arena in ways that essentially challenge the masculinity of male pickers.

In this connection too, I may as well refer once again to the “gender” of instruments themselves. Robert Cantwell may have startled some readers with his assertion that the banjo is “the only stringed instrument in the American tradition which has not been feminized,” but he was only reiterating an observation made often before about the generalized symbolic phallic use of bluegrass instruments. Whatever connotations of maleness and femaleness may be read into the instruments of bluegrass themselves, the traditional ways of playing and competing in bluegrass bear the full historic burden of male association, and thus present inescapable mental obstacles for women, especially women with no direct ties of kinship or impending kinship to one or more men who already play in a band.

One fascinating response to the many dilemmas bluegrass presents for women has been the formation of “liberated” mixed-membership bands, like the group called the “Good Of Persons,” or even “all-girl” professional bluegrass bands. I believe bassist Gloria Belle was part of an all female bluegrass band in the mid-1960s, and Betty Fisher, who began fronting her own band in 1972, had talked to Bill Monroe a couple years before about an all-girl bluegrass band. “He told me it was a good idea,” she said, but “he thought I would have a hard time finding girls in one area who played well enough.” Since the early 1970s, a few bluegrass bands have been formed entirely of unmarried women pickers (e.g., the Buffalo Gals, the New Coon Creek Girls, Sidesaddle, the Wildwood Pickers, Cherokee Rose, Sweet Dixie, Mountain Lace, and Feminine Grass), most of which write and perform bluegrass songs with a female, if not always feminist, point of view. Even so, such bands create as many cognitive problems as they solve for bluegrass audiences. For example, the women in an all-girl band may still be stereotyped as promiscuous. Neil Rosenberg recounted to me the interesting story of a woman performer at the Mariposa Folk Festival whose singing partner, the year a five-member all-female bluegrass band was there, called them “Five Easy Pieces” because of their behind-the-scenes flirting with male festival performers. If jealousy enters into such assessments, it only underscores my assertion of a thoroughgoing link between the presentation of one’s gender-identity and the presentation of one’s self as a bluegrass musician.

Participation by women in bluegrass music is the focus of some genuine tensions between tradition and innovation, but such participation is a fact, and it will undoubtedly continue to increase and to reshape the sound of the music itself. While individuals, both male and female, will always make their own accommodations to women’s

presences in bluegrass, their varied responses affirm that the sexual identity of performers is rhetorically critical for all traditional bluegrass musicians. WIB

BETTY FISHER— FROM BANDLEADER TO SIDE MUSICIAN

By Murphy Henry

[Part II, continued from WIB18.]

It is now 1973. Betty Fisher, 37, has just formed the Dixie Bluegrass Band. No longer called the Dixie Bluegrass Boys, because I, age 20, am playing bass, the band also features three teenaged boys. Betty had known none of us before. This was a man’s way of forming a band—the idea had come straight from Bill Monroe. Did women do things like this? Betty did. Her husband and booking agent, J.T., who carried his cigarettes in one pocket and his Maalox in the other, was completely supportive. When Betty started the band, she was living near Athens, Ga., but she soon moved to Marietta, Ga., near Atlanta. The band had been together only a few weeks when, in March, we went to Nashville to record an album, Born To Be Free, for K-Ark Records. The next year, we would record a second album, Leaving Town, in Pageland, S.C. Festival promoter Roy Martin had taken a liking to the band and booked Betty at most of his festivals. He didn’t pay much, but it was great exposure. The band played at Lawtey, Fla., in April, followed by Lavonia, Ga., in July, and Myrtle Beach, S.C., in November. These festivals included the biggest names in bluegrass: Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Jim and Jesse, the Lewis Family, Reno and Harrell. Betty was old friends with many of the players from her days on the Carolina Bam Dance, and these friendships stood her in good stead as she launched her bluegrass career.

When the band had been together for about a year, J.T. approached Bill Monroe about booking Betty at Bean Blossom. Bill’s answer to J.T. was brusque: “I’ll let her play sometime.” But Betty understood his reply. “He would not talk business with J.T. I didn’t take that as a turnoff. Bill had known me and Daddy, and he didn’t want to talk to J.T. So far as doing business, he always dealt with me. Later we were at a show, and Bill had a list, which is his way of always doing things with me. He said, ‘I want to show you who’s gonna be at Bean Blossom.’ And he gave me the list, and he had my name written in there. And I said, ‘You’re kiddin’ me!’ And he said, ‘That suit you?’

“And the first time we ever went [June 1974], we went a day early so we’d be sure and get there. And when we got there, they were having the sundown jam session, and Bill wanted us to come over there and be a part of the thing. So we all go over and

everybody’s picking together, and he turned around to me and said, ‘Do Little Georgia Rose.' I didn’t know Little Georgia Rose. I had no idea. And what you did was you sang a verse, then Bill came in and sang the chorus. And the McLain Family had done Rose of Old Kentucky. And I said to Raymond McLain, 'I don't know it.’ So Raymond stood behind me and whispered the words. I knew the tune to it, and Bill came in, and then it went on to somebody else. But I was as nervous as a cat on hot tin roof having to do that.

“But we played the show Friday and Saturday, and when he called me into the office to pay me, I went not knowing if we were going to get five dollars or five hundred dollars. But he paid me for three days. And I said, ‘But we only worked two days.’ He said, ‘Well, you sang a song Thursday night. You were on the program.’ So he always took up for me. Of course, we were back at Bean Blossom a couple of other times, too.” Bill Monroe was a powerful person to have on your side. One time, Betty says, they were playing a festival in South Georgia with the Osborne Brothers, Jim and Jesse, and Bill Monroe. Unfortunately, it turned unseasonably cold and the folks simply didn’t turn out for the show. The promoter called a meeting of all the bandleaders and started going down the list asking the bands how much they could cut their price to help her out. It was all out in the open. Betty says they weren’t getting much but “a hundred dollars to us was like a thousand dollars to another group.” The promoter came to Betty and asked her how much she could cut. “I started to open my mouth and Bill says, ‘She can’t cut any because they are on rock bottom as it is already.’ ” Betty got the amount she was booked for.

But changes in band personnel were always a problem. When banjo player Tommy Jackson left around August 1974 for a brief stint with Jim and Jesse, Ted Belue, from Florida, took his place. I left in the fall of 1974, as did fiddle player George Gillis, and Betty’s son Tommy took over on bass. By now, Dale Tilley was on banjo. Marvin Tuck remained for a short while on mandolin and was replaced by Randy Carrier. This group stayed together about two years. Never again would Betty would have another woman in her band. I asked her about this.

In your search for young people to play in your band, you never had any other women. Was that a bad experience?

“Murphy, there was not a reason for not having another girl in the group. I had done a lot of soul-searching especially earlier when I was looking for other people. But I really never had another girl to apply. A girl never came to me and said, ‘Betty, I would like to be a part of your group.’ It was just one of those things.”

Around 1976, Betty moved to Augusta, Ga. The band now consisted of Ricky Rakestraw on banjo, Dennis Tibbits on guitar, Doug Flowers on mandolin, and Tommy Fisher on bass. When Tommy went into service, Phil Wimette took his place. When Phil quit, Talmadge Flowers came on board.

In 1979, J.T. took a job in Houston. Betty’s band, however, was still in Atlanta, so “it was real expensive to try to get us all to the festivals.” Occasionally she would fill in with other musicians, but she says, “It just wasn’t me. I was not happy with what I was doing. The musicians were wonderful but there’s just gotta be a feeling in a group for it to come across good.” For some of the festivals, she was having to fly, and her band from Atlanta was having to fly. “Then,” she says, “you would get to the festival and the boys would want to go socialize instead of practice, which we hadn’t done for six months.” Betty felt like she was losing her authority, and that the band members, who had been playing together in Georgia, were wanting to do their own thing and leave her out of it. “This was about the same thing that I had run into once before.” So in August 1980, at a festival in Ottawa, Ohio, Betty decided she’d had enough. It wasn’t fun anymore. With no forewarning to the band, she announced on stage that this was their last show. Did J. T. knew you were going to do this?

[Emphatically.] “No. J.T. did not know I was going to do this. I had talked to him and told him about the trouble I was having with the boys, and he said, ‘If they don’t want to pick, just get you some other boys.’ But I couldn’t do that.” She decided to finish out the dates she had with other personnel.

“I felt like we had really accomplished a lot. During that time, we were fortunate enough to be on the Grand Ole Opry five times. Three of those was for the Early Bird Bluegrass Festival, but two times [we were] actually a guest on the Grand Ole Opry. So it was a thrill.” She had also recorded three more albums, including a gospel album. About this time J.T. was having back problems, so he and Betty returned to Walhalla, S.C. J.T. had surgery on his spine, and Betty took a day job. They bought an old farmhouse and started remodeling it. But Betty couldn’t stay out of music for long. Soon, she was playing lead guitar in a Southern Gospel group called the Good News Singers. “It was totally different from anything I had ever been exposed to. It was a man and his wife and they had electric bass and a piano and drums.” J.T. bought Betty an electric guitar, but she told him she couldn’t play “anything except an acoustic guitar.” So he got her her first Martin—a Shenandoah model. She stayed with the group for two and a half

years. “If you can imagine a hillbilly picker with a Southern Gospel group. But it worked out good.”

When the group started playing two or three time a week, Betty decided that was too much, so she asked them to replace her. She next joined forces with the Baker Family in another gospel group, but just as a harmony singer—she didn’t play guitar at all. After about a year, this also become too time-consuming. Betty’s granddaughter Bridget had come to live with them, and Betty wanted to stay home, work her part-time day job, and take care of Bridget.

But an old friend, David Deese, soon dragged her back into the bluegrass business. Betty says, “David had been a sideman for the Jones Brothers [out of North Carolina] for twenty some years. And he wanted to do something different.” Their agreement was that David would be the leader of the group. “I didn’t even want my name as a part of it. Just David Deese and whatever. But the rest of them got together and decided that was not the way it was going to be.” The band was called Betty Fisher, David Deese, and Dixie Bluegrass. Betty didn’t mind the band using her name, but she most emphatically didn’t want to lead the band. “Being the leader of a group, there is a responsibility that the sidepeople just don’t know that much about.”

Betty was determined to be a side musician, but she was not pleased with the way things were going. From the earliest days, Betty had always been a stickler for practice but now, “We would get together and it was just like one jam session. There was no working on any one particular song. Somebody’d just start something out and everybody else would just follow in.” And although J.T. and Betty had always provided money for Betty Fisher and the Dixie Bluegrass Band, they did not want to be responsible for the finances of this group. Betty said, “I wanted to do my very best and be a complement to the group, but I didn’t want the responsibility of having to make a program out, making sure that everybody had on a clean shirt and their trousers were pressed. That’s what I didn’t want.” She was also not pleased with how the shows came across. “The leader has got to say, ‘We are going to do this.’ Sure, everybody should do what they want to do, but there’s got to be one decision made. And that’s where the leadership comes in.” Betty summed up her feeling this way: “Although we were having a real good time at it, we weren’t accomplishing anything.” They did, however, record two self-produced cassettes, I'm Branching Out, and I'm Just A Stranger Here. In December 1993, J.T. was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Betty knew where her loyalties lay—she pulled out of the band.

On Memorial Day weekend, Betty did a reunion show in Augusta with the last configuration of the Dixie Bluegrass Band. Due to J.T.’s illness, they could only rehearse

the night before the show, but Betty said, “It was just like we had never been apart. It had been 1980 since I had played with the boys and this was ’94. Fourteen years since we had seen each other. We did two shows. It was just a thrill beyond words for us to have received the reception that we did get.” Betty brought back a tape of the show for J.T. He told her, “Betty, y’all’ve just got it.” A week later J.T. died. Betty still lives near Walhalla, S.C., in the farmhouse she and J.T. renovated. Bridget, who is going into the seventh grade, lives with Betty, who stays busy raising her. Betty rarely plays her guitar anymore, but she still enjoys listening to bluegrass. As she put it, “I don’t feel like I’m over the hill yet, but I just don’t feel like picking that much.” She still makes occasional guest appearances, is active in her church choir, plays bass in a church group, and, about once a month, is called on to sing a “special” at church. Apparently you can’t take the girl from the music or the music from the girl. As we closed our interview, I asked Betty a few questions about being a woman in bluegrass. How was it to be a woman leading a bluegrass band?

Speaking specifically about the last breakup of the band, Betty said, “If I had been a man, I still think it would have been the same thing. I asked each [band member] individually what could I have done differently to have made the relationship stay longer. All the rest of them said everything was fine. Except one of them told me he thought I tried to mother the guys too much—that I did a mother role more so than a leader role and he didn’t need that. And that was what I was asking. Because if I started another group, where was I making my mistakes? Because it was like about every two years, I would have a change over. And I really didn’t know where my mistakes were. I still don’t know. Other than maybe it wasn’t a mistake, it was just time to move on and do something else.”

Other bands have that kind of turnover.

“Well, that is basically what Bill [Monroe] told me and what Charlie Waller said. Don’t let a changeover knock you down. Just keep on going, because there’s guys out there that want to pick. Just find that right person to do it.

“I guess it was just me. I got tired. If you’re doing a job, if you’re working for the railroad, after you’ve done that job for forty years, you want to stop and do something else. But there’s very few of them—and I think Ralph Stanley is one of the fine examples as well as what Bill Monroe was—that is going to go on and do it. They are going to be doing it until they die. And that was not where it was for me.

“I guess of all the roles in life that I have played, I enjoy being a grandmother above everything else. Now, I love entertaining. I loved being with the people. I can’t say that the stage was where it was for me because at bluegrass festivals, the being with the people, the fans, was really more important to me. That was the part that I took back home with me. Being on the stage, looking out in the audience, and if you could just find one person and see that that person is enjoying what you’re doing, then that’s worth all of the practice, all of the miles that you have driven. That’s the fulfilling part of it. Sometimes the band members wanted to know why I stayed at the record table. I enjoyed it. Sure, one of them could have been there, but if I hadn’t’ve been there and a fan had wanted to come by and talk to me, I would have missed it. So that part of it, I did that for Betty. And that was being selfish. But I loved it.

“But after a while, I don’t see how the people do it, being on the road. And although that was a part of my life, it wasn’t my whole life. And I hope that the Lord still continues to give me the talent that he gave me when I was just a kid to be able to sing until the day I die. But not in a leader of a group capacity. And I guess several years ago I would have been shocked at myself saying that. Because I loved it so much.”

I pointed out to Betty that, so far, she has received little recognition for her lead guitar playing. And, if there are few women lead guitar players now, there were even fewer back in the early ’70s.

“Well, Murphy, I don’t think I was that great a guitar picker. And I say that from the standpoint that when I listen, I could hear all these beautiful sounds that are coming out of the guitars that other people are getting out. Mine is just a very simple picking.” But still there were no other women.

“That is true. And I’m sure they could have done it. But I don’t think a lot of them were given the opportunity to do it. They just had to do rhythm and that was it. But two rhythm guitars, just whang, whang, whang— you’re just not getting anything out of that. “I guess the biggest compliment that I ever received in my life—and it’s one of those things that I still can’t hardly believe that it happened—but we were playing up in North Carolina at a bluegrass festival [Angier, July 1974], and Doc Watson was on the show then. He had received three or four standing ovations, and Bill Monroe was to follow him. Bill would not follow Doc. So the promoter of the show sent us word that we were going to follow Doc Watson. So we did. But there had been a little boy, a six-or eight-year-old banjo picker with overalls on, that had been backstage all during this festival. And he was wanting to pick. And the crowd was just so hot for Doc Watson, it

was just unreal. So when we got there, Doc finally would not go back out anymore. The man was exhausted. So he sat down backstage. So J.T. took this little banjo picker and said he is going to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown. So we go on stage, and this little banjo picker, he did Foggy Mountain Breakdown and that crowd never let down from Doc Watson into what we did. We did a fantastic show, but it was because that little boy had kept their attention. Doc Watson sat behind stage the whole time we were on stage and caught our whole show. When we came off, Merle came to me and said, ‘Daddy wants to talk to you.’ So I went over to him, and he said, ‘I just want to touch your fingers. Any woman who can pick a guitar like that, I just want to compliment her.’ And that to me was the highest compliment I could have ever been paid.

“I listen to Tony Rice and so many of the people, they pick up and down. I’m just strictly a down picker. I’m not an up picker at all. At the time Dennis and Ricky and Doug were playing with me, Dennis played guitar, so I got to do a lot more picking out. I was not a [strong] rhythm picker and if I hadn’t had this strong mandolin and bass, my guitar playing would have really been a let-down.

“I think the thing that I was more proud of than anything else was that I think I had an ear to pick the talent to work with me that was complementary. It wasn’t what Betty did or how Betty sounded that made the group good, I think it was the group that I had that sounded good—they complemented each other. And I had some of the finest talent. I just don’t think there were any kids anywhere that were any better than what I was able to work with. Just like working the shows with Bluegrass Alliance. Lonnie Peerce—he reminded me of myself a lot. Lonnie was a good fiddle player, but his group was what sounded good—it wasn’t Lonnie. And I felt the same way about me—it wasn’t me that sounded that good, it was my group. And the group made me sound better.

“I think that everything is so professional now that it really takes an outstanding group—it would take something more than an old woman to get an audience’s attention. Now if I did anything at all it would have to be—what do you call it?—resting on your laurels? Of what you had done, rather than what you were going to do, and that is not how I want to be remembered. Everything was good in the ’70s. We were, I feel like, at the top. Because I don’t know of any professional group that was playing any more than what we were. We were playing the same festivals, they were just getting a whole lot more money! [Laughs.] But it was an experience, and everything was exciting. But we did not have any idea of how important it was. Just like the noses that we rubbed then. The time that the County Gentlemen came to our house in Marietta, that was a throwback to the years before when the guys would come to Mama and Daddy’s. So it was a big thrill to me to get to cook for the guys to come over. Out of that group was Ricky Skaggs and Doyle Lawson. And look where they are now.

“And we worked several festivals with Bluegrass Alliance. I loved their music because it wasn’t the traditional bluegrass. Now I loved both of them, and I tried to include some traditional as well as contemporary. Carl Story, he just about give me a spanking one time. Because he says, ‘Betty! You’re not playing bluegrass.’ And I says, ‘Well, I might not be playing bluegrass, but the crowd seems to like it.’

“But it was like if you’re gonna play bluegrass, you’ve got to play such and such songs. Well, that’s not the way I did. Especially when Dennis and Ricky came with me. Dennis was really into folk or pop. Anyhow, the Bellamy Brothers’ Let Your Love Flow, that was our biggest song when he was with us. And we were invited to the Opry and that is the song that we sung and got a standing ovation. You just don’t expect something like that. So it didn’t have to be Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms. We could do other songs and the bluegrass audience responded to it. But the way I wanted to gear a show was to do as many different things as I could in a show to reach as many different people as I could. You’ve got to have a good mixture.”

Do you think it’s harder to be an older woman in the business than it is to be an older man?

“Being older, I would say yes. I don’t think it would be easy at all now for me to try to do anything. And I’d say number one because of my age. Not because of the picking or the singing, if I was practiced up. But who would prefer to look at an older person as opposed to a younger person? And we’re talking just strictly eye appeal.” But that doesn't seem to be a problem for older men.

“No, it’s not a problem with them. But women it is. And I think the men view it that way. If there were two women sitting in a restaurant and a man came in which one would he go to talk to? It’s that sort of thing. Now I have not been snubbed in any way whatsoever, so it’s not a personal experience that I’ve had, it’s just from the viewpoint that I see. I think who you have working with you makes a big difference, too. Now Wilma Lee, she has hung in there. And she has got older people that are working with her. But she does a traditional mountain music. Which is totally different from what we do. But who else does that? Nobody. She is the only person that does that. There’s not room for two of those. And there are so many good women in bluegrass now. I really think that an older woman would have a difficult time trying to make her mark.”

What advice would you give to other women who are thinking about leading their own bands? What are the things you think are important?

“Well, the important thing is to decide if you are willing to sacrifice what it takes to be the leader of a group. Now there is a total difference between being a leader and being a band member. If that is your dream, go for it. Go for it all the way. But make sure you’re willing to give it the time and energy. And I guess the thing I hold above everything else is respectability. Don’t get an agent or manager that takes advantage of you. Just about every group has to have one. I was extremely fortunate to be able to have my husband as my manager although I would never admit that he was my manager. [Laughs.] But he was the one who called the shots. And he and I had a marriage that was built on love, respect, and trust. So I never had to worry about doing anything or saying anything that I would have to apologize to him for when I got back home. And having been with my dad when I was young and meeting all these older musicians then, my dad he showed respect. He didn’t drink, and he didn't allow me to be around people who did. J.T. was the same way. If we got in a real tight spot, he removed us real quickly from it. We just were not exposed to those sorts of things, so I was very protected. Back then, for a woman to be on the road, she just automatically wasn't much to her. Not that she had done or said anything at all, it was just the general idea, I guess. So I had to watch myself. I had to make sure that nobody could misconstrue anything that had happened. “A lot of times when we would be at the shows, and I would go to Bill Monroe’s bus, he and I would sit and talk. That was all that ever transpired between Bill Monroe and myself was talk. It was the utmost respect. But the word got back to me one time there was a group that was not invited to [play on] the Early Bird Bluegrass Show. And their group was good. But the gentleman said that he would have to have had a skirt on before Bill Monroe would let him play on the show. And Bill was the one that made up the list. Which I kinda took as a slash. And I didn’t appreciate it. Because me having a skirt on didn’t have anything at all to do with being invited to be on the show. I felt like I had a group that was worthy of being invited. If Bill Monroe had wanted [this man’s] group to have been [on the show], it wouldn’t have mattered whether they had skirts on or whether they had pants on. So the shows that I got were not given to me because I was a woman. I think it was because the group that I had was worthy of the invitation.” Do you think you ever lost out on any shows because you were a woman bandleader? “No, as a matter of fact, I think being a woman helped us get dates. Because there were not that many [women in bluegrass]. Unless we played a show with the Lewis Family, I would be the only woman there. So therefore we got a little bit more attention. I don’t feel like we were turned down on shows, but I think the reason that [I] got the show was because I was Betty—part of Betty and Buck. And we had formed some friendships back then that carried through all those years.”

So you think if you hadn't had that foundation it would have been a lot harder? “Oh, yes. Most definitely. Because like I say, the first bluegrass festival I went to, I hadn’t seen those guys in years. And it was Betty and Buck. Well, where is Buck? That sort of thing. And then when I got back into it, I do not know of anybody that tried to stab me. It was, ‘Let’s help you.’ And the particular help came from Jim and Jesse and from Bill Monroe.”

[Betty would also like to recognize the help and support she got from Marie Boykin, the president of her fan club.] WIB

Women on Top

I’m in the middle of reading a most interesting book about women in music called Women on Top: The Quiet Revolution That’s Rocking the American Music Industry. Its focus is on women in pop/rock music, but it also covers country music and even includes a snippet about the Good Ol’ Persons with quotes from Laurie Lewis. Author James Dickerson also features pioneering female executives and women who work behind the scenes in the music industry. (I wish he had included Louise Scruggs.) Dickerson points out that 1996 was a “landmark year” for women in popular music. “It was the year female solo artists out-charted their male counterparts on the Top 20 charts for the first time in history.” He says, that “(a]n analysis of the chart positions from 1954 to 1989, based on gender, leads to only one possible interpretation: American popular music was the sole preserve of male recording artists.” Wonder what he’d have to say about bluegrass?

I’m sure you’ve noticed the new look of WIB. No more turquoise paper, which made the WIB so easy to spot in the pile of mail you get everyday. Well, sorry about that, but I just felt like WIB would be easier to read—and the pictures would look better—if it were on white paper. So, basically, I’ll see if I like the new look when it comes off the press, and we’ll proceed from there. Comments welcome. WIB