Where Is The Spirit Healer?

In the first week of Women's History Month, I examine Women's Music--a self-determined community that created a culture and industry by and for themselves for the purpose of raising consciousness.

From the very inception of God’s Music Is My Life, I’ve written about the profound impact of Women’s Music, a genre that—much like contemporary Christian music—isn’t rooted necessarily in a sound, but rather an intention. As the Women’s Movement was gaining steam in the early 70s, brave lesbian feminists began writing music that reflected their realities, as their voices were often ignored by the mainstream feminist movement. One of the genre’s innovators, Meg Christian, once said that “Women’s music is any music that speaks to us in a really deep and honest way. That’s a very big area and I think we have to be careful to not limit what our concept of women’s music is.”¹

This music came into my life by way of my own mother who was both a minister at my grandparent’s Pentecostal church and a feminist. She frequented Brigid’s, a women’s bookstore in our area where she bought Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Live at Carnegie Hall album and a cassette by Saffire—The Uppity Blues Women, the first two seedlings of this delightfully transcendent and transgressive form in my life. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties in January 2012, however, that it completely upended me and changed the way I looked at the world and listened to music (You can read that broader story here).

Over the course of this project—both God’s Music Is My Life and the Have You Ever Heard…? series—I’ve attempted to integrate Women’s Music so that it is situated alongside gospel and contemporary Christian music. Women’s music represents the possibility of what theologically, politically and sexually emancipated people of faith can create. It reflects a spirit healing process/experience, a way that opens through self-confrontation.

So for this week’s newsletter, I edited some of my favorite moments from a few of those interviews (all less than 5 minutes long) to introduce you to these great artists, their thoughts and their music for this first newsletter of Women’s History Month.

My dear friend, Kathleen Mandeville, is a concert/event producer, ordained minister and great spirit. She was the conduit through which my re-introduction to Women’s Music began. In our conversation about Jade & Sarsaparilla, she recalled the first time she’d ever heard Women’s Music and the impact of that experience. (The recording below the clip is Holly Near’s cover of Alix Dobkin’s “The Woman In Your Life Is You” from the landmark Lavender Jane Loves Women album)

I had the opportunity to have an in-depth conversation with Margie Adam, one of the early Women’s Music artists. We talked in depth about her influences, the synergy between audience and artist and, in the clip below, the ways that the slogan, “the personal is political,” was understood and interpreted, reiterating Meg Christian’s belief that the sky of what could be perceived as Women’s Music was wide open.

In the beginning of the pandemic, singer/songwriter/improvisational artist Rhiannon, was among the first to say ‘yes’ to a conversation about her work. Alive!, a group she co-founded in the late seventies, was one of the early bands to counter the idea that Women’s Music was a folk-centered form only consisting of white women’s strumming acoustic guitars. In this clip from our extensive, rich interview, she sings a verse of the group’s “Spirit Healer” (written by bandmate Carolyn Brandy) and talks of the times that birthed Women’s Music and how they correlate to what we are witnessing in the political arena today.

I was a teenager working in Christian retail in the early 90s when I first heard Patsy Moore. She was signed to Warner Brothers with a unique marketing arrangement through Warner’s Christian division, Warner Alliance, which allowed her to reach the college radio and Christian radio simultaneously. Described by one critic as “a combination of Joni Mitchell, Joan Armatrading, and Dionne Warwick,” Moore’s lyrics reflected a broader sense of spirituality and the divine feminine that was not present in most of the music on Christian radio. In our interview about her most recent album, What Surprises Us, we focused on the influence of the Divine Feminine and Women’s Music in her work.

God’s Music Is My Life is a free subscription service, but your support is appreciated for this and the expanded work that I do as a historian and preservationist of gospel music history. To contribute, please support the GoFundMe that is helping to make the New York Community Choir book possible.

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1. “Christian and Earth Music,” Off Our Backs, Jan. 1975, pg. 19.