WOMEN IN BLUEGRASS MUSIC

Twenty-one years ago in his JAF [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 musicians, who are culturally aligned with life in the rural, Upland South, who play certain non-electrified string 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. Implicit 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 folksong, 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 folksong 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 folksong 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 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 Afro-American tradition. Not one of the early illustrations and references to banjos and large drums cited by Dena Epstein suggest 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. "1 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 Afro-American instrument.

Many southern mountain women born in the last quarter of the 19th century apparently played the 5-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 workman-like 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 Bumgarner 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 Cousin Rachel Veach were spirited banjo players who also specialized in comedy acts; and 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 LuIu BeIIe & Red Foley, or LuIu BeIIe 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 hiIIbiIIy 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 second fiddler, having succeeded Art Wooten, the first fiddling Blue Grass Boy. Forrester played several times with Monroe, but his first stint lasted until he joined the Navy in 1942 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."

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 inspirational role model for today's generation of women bluegrass musicians. 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 Bluegrass 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 & Songs In Scruggs Style,”2 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 womens' 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; that is, 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, and 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 & 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 the image of that culture. 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 American women as well as for modern American 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."3 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 band leader 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 Cousin 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's” 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, bass and guitar, 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 came to be enough really good women bluegrass musicians -- women who were not only competent, but excellent -- to begin to break down the exoteric 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 principal 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 severe 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 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 in Bluegrass Breakdown that the banjo is "the only stringed instrument in the American tradition which has not been feminized,"4 but he was only reiterating an observation made frequently 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 Ol' Persons," or even "all-girl" professional bluegrass bands. I believe bassist Gloria Belle was part of an all women 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), 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 the Buffalo Gals were there called them "Five Easy Pieces" because she felt they overstepped the bounds of propriety in their 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.

Lexington, Kentucky
Thomas A. Adler
October, 1986  

NOTES:

1. Robert E. Toll, Blacking Up, p. 138.

2. Folkways Records FA 2314, ”American Banjo Songs & Tunes In Scruggs Style,” with notes by Ralph Rinzler. Recorded in 1957, copyright 1961.

3. Neil V. Rosenberg, Bluegrass: A History, p. 367. 

4. Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown, p. 219.