You're My Home: Teresa Trull's Feeling Music

Her 1980 album "Let It Be Known" attempted a different kind of crossover. This prolific singer/songwriter/producer/musician shares her story with me.

Teresa Trull—Let It Be Known (Live in 1981)

I was a Teresa Trull fan from the moment I heard her sing a line of a song called “Tell The Truth” in the Radical Harmonies documentary. Her voice was that kind of primal wail that is simply southern. Her sound is original. I can’t think of anyone who sounds like her, but I can compare the feeling of her to other southern artists like Russ Taff, Dianne Davidson, and a name that came up quite a few times in my interview with her, Aretha Franklin.

When I began the Have You Ever Heard…? series at the beginning of the pandemic, Teresa, who now makes New Zealand her home, was one of the first people on my list to talk to. In the decade since I first discovered her music, she has certainly become one of my most played artists. In December of 2019, I got up the nerve to approach her and she kindly obliged me and we had an incredible conversation about her 1980 sophomore album, Let It Be Known, which turned 40 in 2020.

This past Saturday, Teresa and her long-time collaborator Barbara Higbie and long-time friend and comrade, Vicki Randle, performed a rare show together at The Freight and Salvage in the Bay Area. It was an incredible reminder that, at sixty-eight years old, she is still a force of nature. In light of that performance, I wanted to share our conversation again and acquaint the most recent God’s Music Is My Life subscribers with this incredible singer/songwriter/producer/musician in our fourth newsletter for Women’s History Month.

I was interested in hearing about Teresa’s youth in the South as a native of Durham, North Carolina and the ways that that informed her incredibly diverse sense of style/sound that encompasses gospel, soul, blues, country, bluegrass, rock and pop. A singing child, she joined a rock band at the age of fifteen and soon branched out on her own, performing at restaurants and clubs.

“I was a lesbian then and I sang songs about relationships with other women, but I was sort of naive about it. I expected the world to accept it. I didn’t expect to ever make it big in music. I was doing it because I loved to do it. Pretty soon, women started coming into the restaurants when I was singing and after a while it was three-fourths women. After that, women would come and wait in front of the restaurants for hours. Soon, it was a totally women’s audience. Finally, some women asked me to sing for women’s functions and started giving me things to read. And all of a sudden, I came to the startling realization of what the women’s movement was.”¹

“Grey Day” from The Ways a Woman Can Be

Teresa’s 1977 debut, The Ways a Woman Can Be, was produced by the brilliant Linda Tillery, a performer and musician in her own right, who came to the Women’s Movement with a decade of performing and recording under her belt. The Ways A Woman Can Be captured the plethora of styles in Teresa’s lexicon, ranging from the swinging jazz of “I’d Like To Make Love to You” to the funky swagger of “Give Me Just a Little Bit More” to the twangy “Grey Day.” The most indicative of her next creative endeavor was their feminist re-dressing of Ronnie Shannon’s “Baby, I Love You” (retitled “Sister, I Love You), most famously covered by Teresa’s favorite, Aretha Franklin.

(“Sister, I Love You” from The Ways A Woman Can Be)

In the same kind of way that Amy Grant’s Unguarded or Tramaine Hawkins’ The Search Is Over would shock (and sometimes repel) their core audiences in the CCM and gospel worlds, Teresa’s 1980 follow-up, Let It Be Known, caused a ripple of controversy in the Women’s Music world.

Musically, the album expanded on the funkier elements that The Ways A Woman Can Be hinted at. With a bad-ass band of women—that included Sheila E. on percussion, Linda Tillery on drums, Julie Homi and Mary Watkins on keyboards and Linda Wiggins on organ—from the worlds of soul, jazz, gospel and rock, Let It Be Known delivered the closest thing to Teena Marie, Women’s Music had ever gotten.

While in reality, the album remained rooted in a lesbian feminist perspectives (“There’s a Light,” “You’re My Home,” and Bernice Johnson Reagan’s “Every Woman” in particular), some felt the album was not Women’s Music and not at all feminist. A writer from the Feminist Connection complained, “Let It Be Known is slick, packaged, commercial….[“You’re My Home] used to be a song that caused an audience of women to lock arms, sing along and feel a sense of communion wash over them. Now someone will plug a quarter in a shiny machine and the song will come blasting out to fill a smoky, crowded room where tight-panted polyester legs will bump and grind to its rhythm.”²

The cover itself, a contrast to the flannel shirt and jeans she sported on her debut, caused its own share of controversy. At the end of an over-all positive review, Womennews took “strong exception” to the album’s cover, which they felt “pandered to male-identified tastes that are so prevalent on record albums in disco and rock music. It is slickly designed and airbrushed, using diffused lighting and softening techniques. The cover shows Teresa whispering in the ear of another woman, perpetuating a typically male view of women’s sexuality.”³ In our conversation, Teresa relays what motivated her to make Let It Be Known and the reception the album received.

But forty-two years later, Let It Be Known stands up and still stands out. It was a vibrant, pulsing example of a talent ready to break out of a singular community to be seen and heard by a broader audience, taking the values and messages of Women’s Music with her. Such ambitions, however, are not always embraced by core communities. In CCM and gospel circles, rhetoric, not unlike the kinds of critics in the aforementioned reviews, is often utilized to portray artists who attempt to crossover as watering down the message or compromising the gospel. As Teresa herself would note in an interview with Hot Wire in 1988, “Let It Be Known was real woman-identified if you want to go by [the broader interpretation]. It had ‘You’re My Home’ and it had three lesbian songs on it and people still yelled at me about how it wasn’t ‘as woman-identified.’”⁴

She assembled an all-star band of women that was comprised of many of the players from the album (listen to the clip at the top of this article for proof!). They delivered a power-packed show that included some of the new songs Teresa had been co-writing with Roy Obiedo (which in the ensuing years would be recorded by Gwen McCrae, The Whispers and others) and covers of classics like The Sweet Inspirations’ “Sweet Inspiration.” Audio from a performance at the West Coast Women’s Music Festival reveals a performance that was unabashedly lesbian and ready for the mainstream.

The album, as Teresa notes in the above clip, ended her tenure with Olivia Records, but began her career as a producer. Throughout the eighties, she produced over a dozen albums for artists like Deidre McCalla, Romanovsky & Phillips and Cris Williamson. It also set her entirely free to follow her own muse as a solo artist, making what she says her father called “feeling music.” She began, what is now, a lifelong collaboration in 1983 with their album, Unexpected, and released her last full-length solo album with 1986’s A Step Away, a masterpiece that received similar criticisms as Let It Be Known. She told Hot Wire, “People who say my record is ‘slick’ are just naive; the industry would consider my record commercially risky, and not because of the content, but because musically it’s more eccentric and diverse.”⁵

She began a career in horse-training in the mid-80s and, today, does that work full-time. Her shows in the States, typically with Barbara Higbie or Cris Williamson, are powerful, tour de forces that remind listeners of the musical diversity and passion that have driven her career for the past forty-six years. “I feel like my happiness has to come first,” she told Hot Wire. “Out of that, there’s bound to be the best music.”

1. Kaplan, Bunny, “Backstage: Teresa Trull,” NewGayLife, April 1978, pg. 8.

2. Dick, Sarah, “Times they are a-changing,” Feminist Connection, Jan. 1981, pg. 13.

3. Roth, Audrey, “Teresa Trull’s Let It Be Known,” Womannews, March 1981, pg. 13.

4. Brandt, Kate and Armstrong, Toni L., “A Step Away,” Hot Wire, March 1988, pg. 22.

5. ibid.