Women who rock aims to open the dialog of popular music to tell the stories of those excluded from the history. A quote that really stood out to me was when they were talking about the importance of the Archive. They said, “Medusa, the Angela Davis of hip hop, emphasized the importance of documenting the conference and collecting oral histories of women in music so that many more contributors can ‘add their voice and their muscle’ to the archive.” This really stuck in my mind when I was reading Mahons piece on Big Mama Thornton, she says “Thornton did not do any published autobiographical writing; as I listened to her music and learned about her life, I began to wish that she had. I wanted to find a way to get a stronger sense of the person behind that compelling voice.” (Mahon 3) This emphasizes the importance of having an archive like women who rock in order to have a better understanding and appreciation to the women who make the music we love. Many stories of women of color in music have gone untold, rewritten or in the case of Thornton she was “reduced to a symbol” (Mahon 4). Reshaping our conventional knowledge of popular music is one of the goals of the women who rock movement and I find this the most compelling claim, I’ve never thought about the history of popular music and reading about Big Mama Thornton and how her songs hound dog and ball and chain were essentially gentrified and stolen it made me frustrated that this story was not told more often.
Two song I would like to connect to the readings we did are George Harrisons My Sweet Lord plagiarized The Chiffons He’s So Fine and Peter Hook admitted that New Order stole Blue Monday off Donna Summer’s Our Love. These are songs from women of color who were stolen and made famous by a white person. This is important to talk about and to let the original artist get credit. I hope that through the women who rock archive these artists will get the credit they deserve and that one day it would lead to them actually getting the money and recognition that they deserve. Giving voice to those who have been pushed aside is can hopefully lead to others can have the confidence to also do so as Medusa hopes.
-Felicity Linville
AFRAM337 