RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesVocalist and guitarist Lindsay Lou had played songs such as Ricky Skaggs’ “All I Ever Loved Was You” and Ralph Stanley’s “I Only Exist” in bluegrass jam sessions for years, before realizing that some of the songs so closely associated with the bluegrass canon’s most popular trailblazing male artists were actually written by women.
“You’ll hear these songs in almost every jam, so to find out they were written by women felt like this beautiful piece of encouragement, to find out that all along there have been women’s voices in this music, and they are pinned to some of the most-jammed songs, like ‘I Only Exist,’ ‘High on a Mountain,’ and ‘Freight Train.’”
Lou’s new album, Bluegrass Women , out Friday (Aug. 14) on Work of Bart Records/Soundly Music, aims to balance the scales, placing a long-overdue spotlight on an older generation of women bluegrass songwriters whose musical creations have been often overlooked. Lou co-produced the album with Shani Gandhi.
For the album, and an accompanying four-part mini-documentary about the making of the project, Lou assembled a who’s who of today’s top women bluegrass stars; alongside Lou, there’s Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, Aoife O’Donovan, Alison Brown, Sarah Jarosz, AJ Lee, Gena Britt, Laurie Lewis and more.
“I just started keeping a list of songs like this. And the timing just happened to be perfect,” Lou says of the album that has been a decade in the making. “We’re living in this time where government websites, NASA websites are being scrubbed of articles that mention the word ‘woman.’ You can’t scrub the word ‘woman’ from the project that’s called Bluegrass Women . The sort of political climate, the social climate felt like the right time.”
Lou points to projects such as Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken and David Grisman’s Home Is Where The Heart Is as models of works that have paid homage to classic songs, though they are oriented toward the music of male stars.
“All of these projects are these men in bluegrass and country honoring the pioneers who paved the way and have cross-generational sessions. [But] these projects like this [haven’t] been done in bluegrass with a group of women, honoring other women,” Lou says. “I’m not pointing a finger at anybody, I’m just kind of telling it like it is. That’s just been the history, the way it’s played out. And so it felt like an important enough project that I wanted to capture as much of it as I could.”
Bluegrass Women includes a version of “All I Ever Loved Was You,” recorded by Skaggs and Keith Whitley and included on their collaborative album Second Generation Bluegrass . The song was written by Skaggs’ mother, Dorothy Skaggs. Elsewhere on Bluegrass Women , the work of Rosa Lee Watson, songwriter and wife of Doc Watson, is highlighted on “Your Lone Journey.”
“I Only Exist,” included on Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys’ 1969 album Hills of Home , was written by Stanley’s wife Jimmie Stanley and her friend Joyce Morris.
For Lou, hearing some of these classic bluegrass songs, and knowing they were written from a woman’s perspective shifted how she connected with the songs.
“Music in general, but especially bluegrass, can sort of deliver these hard truths in a way that’s easy to receive because it’s bluegrass and it’s got this energy to it. So it felt like songs [about loss] like ‘I Only Exist’ and ‘Your Lone Journey,’ as a new mother, it’s like I can’t even say these words without getting verklempt, but perhaps a mother having lost a child and her writing those words, it hits on a new level.”
Appalachian folk singer and banjo player Ola Belle Reed is one of the few women of that generation whose songs did make it into the spotlight; Reed released a series of albums in the 1960s and 1970s, and Bluegrass Women includes two songs from Reed – “High on a Mountain,” which was later included on bluegrass group Hot Rize’s 1979 self-titled album, while “I’ve Endured” has been recorded by Del McCoury and Tim O’Brien.
“People may not realize that they were written by her, but she brought us so many songs and was such a force, a woman that did hold her place on stage and in the spotlight. Those two songs were such big songs in the picking scenes,” Lou says.
For many women bluegrass artists, participating in those picking scenes and jam sessions in a male-dominated music community often meant being the sole woman involved.
“I think everyone who’s come up who’s a woman in bluegrass has mostly had the experience of being often the only woman in the room,” says Grammy winner and two-time IBMA fiddle player of the year Bronwyn, who plays on the album’s versions of the Kate Wolf-penned “Like A River” and Elizabeth Cotten-written “Freight Train.” “And as much as the guys are awesome and we love them, there is just going to be this feeling of feeling a little different if you’re the one person of something in a room. So the more that you go to a festival and the person playing right after you is also a woman, it just makes it feel more normal and you don’t have to think about it as much, which is kind of nice.”
It was equally important to Lou that the studio exuded a sense of camaraderie and support for the musicians taking part in the project.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun on a recording session,” Lou says. “First of all, all of these women are monster players, and I wouldn’t think that any of them would struggle with confidence — I was reading a book about imposter syndrome and confidence and how women in the highest positions, CEOs, still struggle with imposter syndrome– [and] I noticed it when I invited everybody to be on the sessions and people were texting me beforehand, [asking] ‘Do you have any rough demos? I want to make sure I’m prepared.’”
Lou gave the same advice to everyone. “I told everyone the same thing — ’You’ve been preparing for this your whole life....
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