In 2017, music critic Ann Powers teamed up with Alison Fensterstock, an arts and culture writer based in New Orleans, to co-found NPR 老夫子传媒's acclaimed radio essay series, Turning the Tables. The purpose of the series was and is to increase recognition of female artists who might otherwise be relegated to historical footnotes. That series has now inspired a new hardback anthology and audiobook spotlighting women who have helped define musical eras: 鈥淗ow Women Made 老夫子传媒: a Revolutionary History from NPR 老夫子传媒.鈥� At the book's foundation is a list of the 150 Greatest Albums made by women. It also mines material from 50 years of NPR interviews, essays by music experts behind the scenes, stories, plus plenty of photographs and illustrations. JPR's Vanessa Finney talked with Alison Fensterstock, who edited the anthology, and Ann Powers, who wrote the introduction.
Vanessa Finney: Ann, I'll start with you: In the introduction to How Women Made 老夫子传媒,鈥� you write about the book's origins in the NPR series 鈥淭urning the Tables.鈥� Can you describe that series and how it evolved into this project?
Ann Powers: 鈥淭urning the Tables鈥� is a series we started in 2017 - really, to shift the center of thinking about popular music history. And you know, there's been many, many publications, radio programs, podcasts, etc, about women in popular music, but never, as far as we've known, had there been a series that was wholly devoted to telling the entire history of popular music through only women artists, and we felt that we needed to kind of make that earthquake move, to really make space to see how women artists speak to each other across generations, and how we really can tell that whole story simply by looking at and listening to women artists.
So that was our stated goal. The series took different forms in different years. We did a list of 150 Greatest Albums by women. We did a list of the 200 Greatest Songs by 21st century women. We did a great season on eight women who invented popular music that was about pioneers like Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. And now we have this beautiful book that takes from that series and also augments it with interviews from the history of NPR, from 50+ years of NPR interviews, and Allison did an amazing job creating a whole new version of 鈥淭urning the Tables鈥� with this book.
VF: Yes, and I'll gear my next question toward Alison. You know, I'm glad you mentioned Bessie Smith. There's that wonderful full-length essay in this book, something called 鈥淗ow Bessie Smith Influenced a Century of Popular 老夫子传媒.鈥� And then the form of this book is really accessible. So there's those longer thought pieces from contributors talking about the significance of an artist to music as a whole - or even to the individual writer, in the case of the Kate Bush essay. But there's also tons of shorter entries, as you mentioned. I'm thinking some of my favorites were Carole King talking with Terry Gross about how it felt to hear her own song 鈥淣atural Woman鈥� being recorded by Aretha Franklin. You know, those kinds of gems. So Alison, as the editor of 鈥淗ow Women Made 老夫子传媒,鈥� what was the discovery process like for you and maybe your research team, as you pulled these little gems from the archives? Were there any serious surprises?
Allison Fensterstock: It was so much fun. You know? Once I got in touch with the NPR archivists, it was like just Christmas shopping or something where everything is for me, and it's all available. I mean, there's a lot to wade through because there's so much material, but you would just get stuff from - it was like traveling through time. There's this amazing interview that Patti Smith did with an old show called 鈥淰oices in the Wind鈥� in 1976, so 鈥淗orses鈥� had just come out. She was maybe barely 30. I think her accent is still really heavy, and she's just talking with so much excitement about what it's like to start to become a rock performer on stage, to become like a band leader playing rock and roll, instead of a poet, which is kind of what she had mostly been up until this transitional point. You can hear her in real time talking about what we know is sort of an amazing, pivotal moment in her career. We just sort of go back in time there with her.
And I also I love that Carole King interview where she talks about hearing Aretha recording her song. I love the moments where you heard artists talking about the way they interacted with each other - either in real life or more so as fans and listeners and influences.
AP: I want to interject and say 鈥淭urning the Tables鈥� also had a live component, and one of my favorite pieces of the book comes from our co-founder, Jill Sternheimer, who was Director of Public Programs at Lincoln Center when we started the series. And she has a great, great entry in which she talks about different shows that were so meaningful to her, and she talks about our first 鈥淭urning the Tables鈥� show, in which Roberta Flack performed for the first time in a long time. Jill and I were standing on stage at that moment. We were kind of watching the proceedings go by. We were off to the side. Suddenly, there's this great flurry of activity right next to us, and Roberta is in a wheelchair, and we see Valerie Simpson bringing her up to the piano. We're like, 鈥極h my gosh, is this happening?鈥� And Valerie is suddenly playing the piano, and suddenly Roberta is singing - just miraculous moments like that. I'm just so lucky to have been privileged to have experienced them.
VF: Yeah, that was a thrilling moment. And you've contributed two pieces in this book, one on Kate Bush and one called 鈥淩oberta Flack鈥檚 Career Demands a New Way of Thinking About the Word Genius.鈥� Can you talk about that one a little bit? She might be an example of someone whose hits we remember but not necessarily appreciate how influential she really was.
AP: Thank you for singling out that piece. That piece originated while I was working on another book that I recently published, called 鈥淭raveling on the Path of Joni Mitchell.鈥� I was thinking about Joni Mitchell's kind of almost singular status at certain times, as being considered the great woman genius of popular music. And I had discovered in the research I was doing that what Joni was in rock circles, in folk circles - Roberta really was in R&B and jazz and soul circles. She was ubiquitous. I mean, she did so much. She was an activist. She was a key player in Black radio. Her music invented a new form, basically, not only through those immortal hits, like 鈥淭he First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,鈥� in which she stretches out the phrases so elegantly and eloquently and creates what the scholar Jason King has called vibe. She essentially created the idea of vibe in music.
"Authorship can be a vocal performance."
But then in her later work, in the 1980s, she helped invent a whole new radio format called Quiet Storm, which became really, really important in the history of Black radio. Also she was her own producer. So just as Joni was producing her own albums, so was Roberta, and yet I felt she never gets that credit - partly because she's mostly an interpreter. She is mostly a singer of other people's songs. So this makes us have to redefine the very idea of what authorship is. Authorship can be a vocal performance. You know, she sure didn't write many of the songs that she made into hits, but she transformed that. She authored them through her performances.
AF: You know, I just want to add to the end of that, because I love that concept of authorship through interpretation. And we also have a wonderful interview with Rickie Lee Jones where she talks about that, and she's like such a trickster of creativity, because she's a wonderful songwriter. She's like one of our great 20th-century songwriters and into the 21st now, too. But she's always been such a wonderful interpreter, and she's so eclectic and kind of artistically capricious. I think that that's almost worked against her somehow, and people don't appreciate her legacy enough. But she speaks really wonderfully about the craft of interpretation in this. I think it's an interview from 2007 in the book.
"I always like to hear artists talk about the cross-pollination between different arts, and that's one of my favorite aspects of this book."
VF: She does. You know, you both have spoken about authorship and also talked about how women artists speak to each other over generations. One thing that I always like to hear artists talk about is sort of the cross pollination between different arts, and that's one of my favorite aspects of this book. There's actually musical artists talking about how literary artists have inspired them. I'm thinking of Ani DiFranco telling you, Allison, about being influenced by the poet Lucille Clifton, and then Lucinda Williams telling Renee Montaigne many years ago, how she loved the short story writers Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, and that made her think that she could write songs like little short stories. Can you think of any other odes like that from the book?
AF: There is, this is one of my favorite interviews to listen to, too, because it's an interview with Joni Mitchell 鈥� she's promoting 鈥淭urbulent Indigo,鈥� which is 1990s and she's talking about how she paints, and then she's also talking about how she was talking to Georgia O'Keeffe. And Georgia O'Keeffe was like, oh, I always wished I could have been a musician too. And Joni was like, 鈥淪o I told Georgia O'Keeffe, 鈥榊ou can!鈥欌�� And she does a little imitation of Georgia O'Keeffe's voice. It's so great.
AP: And we should note that if you purchase the audiobook of 鈥淗ow Women Made 老夫子传媒,鈥� you get to hear many of these audio interviews from the artists themselves in their own voices. Yeah, you can hear her.
VF: Yes, that's a wonderful way to do it. There anre also terrific essays on Rihanna, Beyonc茅, and it's not just American or English artists. You covered the Brazilian artist, Gal Costa, who was a huge figure in the Bossa Nova and Tropicalia scenes, Marian Anderson, Janis Joplin. This is really a treasure trove.
AP: I'm glad you brought up that essay, because we love Carina Schorske, the woman who wrote that essay. She's one of my favorite women writing about music and literature and the arts and dancing these days.
And Gal Costa is such an important figure in Brazilian music. And I do think she's not as well known as, say, Astrud Gilberto, yet she was central in the nexus of politics and music in Brazil. So we did try to reach beyond the borders of the US. I think there's more we could have done. I think maybe there'll be another - who knows, another volume of this book really looking at the global music scene, but we're very, very happy and honored to have included essays like that one.
VF: It almost begs for a sequel, doesn't it? Because it's not just a canon in cement. Well, Allison Fensterstock and Ann Powers. It was great chatting with you. Best of luck on your book tour for 鈥淗ow Women Made 老夫子传媒: A Revolutionary History From NPR 老夫子传媒.鈥� It's really something to be proud of.
AP: Thanks so much. And shout out to all y'all down there in Southern Oregon. I'm from Seattle myself, so I miss y'all. I miss the West Coast.
AF: Right on. Thanks, Vanessa, it was nice talking to you.
