How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music

Fensterstock, a contributor to NPR’s Turning the Tables, a “multiplatform series” that celebrates the women who shaped American popular music, draws from it and more than 50 years of the station’s coverage in a rich and resonant collection of essays, interview excerpts, and ephemera. The tone of the entries varies widely: Michelle Mercer fondly captures how Ella Fitzgerald became a “folk hero synonymous with cassette technology” with a 1972 commercial in which a recording of her high notes shattered glass (“Only Ella Fitzgerald, in the living, singing flesh, could have become the Memorex Lady. She was an American original”), while Harmony Holiday paints a visceral, uneasy picture of how Tina and Ike Turner’s abusive relationship turned live performances into spectacles of “eroticized violence” in which the audience unconsciously takes part (onstage, Tina is “mimicking sex, pretending she doesn’t hear or notice him slyly threatening her life onstage”). Other essays explore musicians’ intimate influences on listeners, including how Kate Bush’s The Dreaming (1982) gave shape to Ann Powers’s conflicted feelings about shame and femininity. Spanning from Joan Baez to Rihanna, the collection captures the varied ways women have innovated the American musical landscape, in the process powerfully giving due to music as a cultural artifact, a public artistic expression, and a site of personal meaning. It’s a buoyant, welcome ode to some of the most influential songstresses of the 20th and 21st centuries. Photos. (Oct.)