In their own voices: Oral histories of festival artists

Frontiers, 1998 by Morris, Bonnie J

Storytelling is one of the oldest means for women to pass on important knowledge. As a young lesbian feminist, I began attending women's music festivals in 1981 in order to hear the messages delivered through songs and stage speeches by grassroots lesbian feminists who had either been scorned or ignored by mainstream media. I found the oral narrative tradition alive and well in the women's music scene that had burst forth in the 1970s. Within this emerging community I was privileged to meet and work with the founding mothers of the women's music movement. Women such as Maxine Feldman, Alix Dobkin, Margie Adam, Kay Gardner, Linda Tillery, June Millington, and Sue Fink acknowledged my interest in their work and welcomed me into their hearts and their homes. Despite the excitement of contemporary mainstream media reports on women in rock (the Lilith Fair for example), which falsely imply an encounter with a brand new phenomenon, the oldest women's music festivals, in fact, are about to turn twenty-five. Since their beginning, these festivals were important venues for talented artists whose woman-identified lyrics went unplayed on the radio. I quickly recognized, as well, that ingatherings at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, Campfest, and the Northeast Women's Music Retreat (NEWMR) were rich subcultures, absolutely unknown to outsiders. My discovery of and immersion into the festival circuit coincided with my years of graduate study in women's history. My graduate school experience during the 1980s was often homophobic and dismissive of lesbian history. The academic skills I developed and the credentials I earned, however, made me useful to festival artists and organizers whose legacy begged documentation. I became "the" festival anthropologist gradually. Although I am neither a songwriter nor a trained stage technician myself, I nonetheless ended up either onstage or backstage in various capacities: as an emcee, as a girlfriend to certain artists and techies, even as a backup singer with those artists I'd befriended. I therefore gained multiple perspectives on festival performance, production, and philosophy. As a historian, my attendance at women's festivals in the early years was sometimes received with mistrust. I was often questioned: "What paper do you write for? How will you use this interview? Are you an FBI agent?" In contrast to these initial inquisitions, there is now a healthy appreciation for the historian's role. Many of my later encounters with artists at women's music festivals were marked with mutual respect and admiration. For example, I once remarked upon meeting a favorite performer, "Wow, you're the artist!" To which she replied, "Yeah, and you're the writer!" Like my childhood role model Harriet the Spy, I always had my notebook with me to preserve my observations and the quotes I overheard at women's music festivals each summer. However privy I may have been to gossip and intrigue, my serious goal of writing women's festivals into history never wavered. I had the opportunity to publish my articles in HOT WIRE The Journal of Women's Music and Culture until 1994, when it ceased publication.' I thus became one of the first "second generation" lesbian feminists to spend her twenties and thirties documenting festival culture; I began collecting festival stories at age twenty and am now thirty-six. I was starved for a nonexistent tribal history, so I built an archive of my own. I took shameless risks in collecting what I refer to as "guerilla oral history": I attended seventeen years' worth of festivals with my tape recorder turned to "on" without asking anyone's permission. In this manner I collected what I feel represents the essence of festival culture: speeches, impromptu announcements, and tributes from the stage. It's now a pleasure to review the many festival narratives I've taped. As I dip into this well of interviews to publish, however, I adhere to strict guidelines of seeking permission and have found that most artists and festival producers are delighted, rather than irked, that I undertook my private oral history crusade. My perspective of women's music is very much linked to my generational location: I spent all of my twenties and thirties witnessing the impact of women's music festivals on North American lesbian culture. The maturing of the festival "movement" coincides with my own approaching middle age. Because I am located between two distinct age groups-older lesbian role models who mentored me from the stage, and younger women now clamoring for an updated musical sound-I have often felt that my tape recorder and I act as a conduit, transmitting important history to a new lesbian feminist generation. My goal is to preserve the voices of women who have tirelessly offered their energies to festival performances and networking, but who have not yet attained mainstream recognition. Though overviews of women's music typically begin with the "big four" of the 1970s-Holly Near, Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, and Margie AdamI wish to educate students and fans of women's music about the first women who recorded and performed openly lesbian music in the very early 1970s: Alix Dobkin and Maxine Feldman, whose histories are documented here along with those of Margie Adam, Linda Tillery, and Jamie Anderson.