{"id":31629,"date":"2026-03-01T00:11:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T08:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/?p=31629"},"modified":"2026-02-26T14:35:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T22:35:13","slug":"the-extraordinary-power-of-women-making-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/the-extraordinary-power-of-women-making-music\/","title":{"rendered":"The Extraordinary Power of Women Making Music"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jazz singer Betty Bennett. Photo courtesy of Claudia Previn Stasny.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In honor of Women\u2019s History Month and International Women\u2019s Day in particular, it seems only right to talk about women in music, particularly a couple I\u2019ve known rather well: my mother, Betty Bennett Lowe, and first stepmother, Dory Langan Previn. Vastly different women, but each a marvelous musician in her own right.<\/p>\n

Women have always been musicians, but I didn\u2019t truly learn that until I was almost 30 years old. Little wonder: my music teachers, the band leaders, orchestra conductors, and major musical figures I knew were all men. My mother, a jazz singer with big bands and in jazz clubs for decades, known and respected by musicians both here and across the pond, taught me that\u2014particularly early in her career\u2014women were dismissed, denigrated, or just forgotten, and I raged inside at the inequity and utter shortsightedness of the opinions and behaviors that shunted us collectively to the sidelines. Growing up in Hollywood, I was all too aware of the personal professional hurdles that were demanded<\/em> of women.<\/p>\n

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Ancient Egyptian women playing music.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In the ancient world, for example, surviving records show that women were the first drummers in powerful societies. Priestesses played frame drums and led spiritual rituals to divine the truth and the future, and their ceremonies shaped and affected group emotions and behaviors. Through vibrations, music transmits states of mind directly from consciousness to consciousness. Women substantially controlled sacred music and dance in Egypt, in Biblical lands, and in ancient Greece. History suggests that, politically, men felt their authority threatened by the powerful hold these early priestesses had on the populace (but that\u2019s the subject of a very different article).<\/p>\n

Music can resonate simultaneously on numerous levels\u2014emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical\u2014far more than words alone. As music initiates changes in group consciousness, it can affect vast social and economic cycles. Despite women being the primary percussionists of the ancient world, the political impact of their ceremonies threatened European patriarchal sensibilities and, in reaction, male leaders denied them the opportunity to learn music. (I\u2019m grateful that didn\u2019t stop our forebears. When music is in your soul, it cannot and must not be denied, in my never-humble opinion.)<\/p>\n

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Chilean Mapuche medicine women playing the drums, 1908.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Despite men\u2019s efforts to thwart them, women were not inactive\u2014there have always been female musicians! We\u2019ve long known how to shield our learning and wield our power (in secret if necessary), but as developing civilizations increasingly centered around male-dominated rulership and religion, we were relegated to obscurity. Particularly, during the past 30 to 50 years, professional women musicians have proliferated, and even a shallow dive into music history reveals how women struggle with a double standard and far more scrutiny into personal minutiae than recognizing talent and skill. Women have had to create their own significance.<\/p>\n

Early in the last century, many venues barred women from performing, and discrimination was rife on the road, on the radio, and in recording studios. I learned about a lot of the women-as-second-class musicians from my mother, who started singing with big bands in her late teens. She had to deal with predatory band leaders; some players and leaders dismissed her outright despite her talent and beauty, simply because she was a woman relegated to window-dressing rather than a contributing musician. \u201cWhen you\u2019re not singing, just sit there and look pretty, and look like you\u2019re having a good time.\u201d She was still<\/em> offended by the objectification and harassment when she told me about it decades afterward.<\/p>\n

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Dory Previn<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

As best she could, she stood up for fellow singers further cruelly treated because they were black. Once she and a black singer were about to catch a train to their next gig, but the platform guard denied entry to the black woman, and my mother said to him, \u201cWell, you\u2019d best turn me away too, I\u2019m just as black as she is.\u201d This caused the gate guard no small consternation: my mother was pale-skinned, had luxurious, smooth, honey-blonde hair, and features that proclaimed her Irish and English heritage. But she wouldn\u2019t leave her friend! \u201cSome of us pass more easily than others, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

We had lots of LPs of female musicians in our household, especially singers. I learned to love so many marvelous jazz singers and players, such Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, Anita O\u2019Day, Annie Ross, Marian McPartland, Mary Lou Williams, and Toshiko Akiyoshi, a top-level selection of the women in music we listened to while I was growing up. When I was about nine years old, she took me to the Light House Caf\u00e9 in Hermosa Beach\u2014she was friends with Howard Rumsey, one of the owners. We heard Carmen live, singing and playing some tunes for herself, and even at that young age I was knocked out by the fluid, masterful musicianship reflected in her playing and singing as well as her phrasing that drew on her talents in both. I saw and heard others there, but that Carmen evening was the highlight.<\/p>\n

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Blossom Dearie<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A few years later, when I was in sixth grade, we went to England for the second time and lived in London because she\u2019d befriended Ronnie Scott himself and often sang in his club. To my delight, she counted Blossom Dearie among her friends, and when Blossom came to London as part of a tour, she stayed with us in our Chelsea flat for a week! The house was even more<\/em> filled with music, and creativity, and laughter, and gorgeous impromptu concerts because Blossom played our upright piano beautifully and she and mama sang. Nothing quite like home-grown, world-class musicians in one\u2019s living room!<\/p>\n

Like any \u201cgirl singer\u201d my mother expressed opinions about other singers, and shared them freely with me. I quickly realized her biases were almost exclusively based on the singer\u2019s vocal and breathing techniques, as well as melodic choices my mother either disagreed with or disapproved of! It was not personal.<\/p>\n

My first stepmother was Dory Previn, and as I grew into my teens we became friends. She met my father (Andr\u00e9) when she was his assigned lyricist for songs intended for films at MGM. They received several Academy Award nominations for their collaboration. She was an original! Her lyrics skillfully navigated and narrated irony and honesty, love, religion, society, sexuality, and psychology, and I count myself incredibly lucky to have been around while she wrote many of the original songs for her six albums. She took me on a cruise as her companion on a round trip between Los Angeles and Cabo San Lucas, a week down and a week back, because I was the only person, she said, she thought she could stand to be around for the entire trip. She\u2019d had a troubled childhood\u2014her father had deep psychological problems and he became the entire family\u2019s jailor for several months when she was young; the stories horrified me. She coped by writing prose and wonderful songs that revealed so much about life and, often, a women\u2019s place in relationships and life.<\/p>\n

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Carmen McRae<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

During the last couple of years of my mother\u2019s life, I\u2019d spend many evenings with her and, while we ate dinner, we\u2019d listen to a Singers and Standards<\/em> radio program, featuring numerous singers she had known. The stories about their lives and their music fascinated me, because she knew the humanity behind the hype for so many famous vocalists, and some of them had been friends. It was a remarkable gift to hear from someone who\u2019d been there and experienced all of it, the exquisite and glorious to the profane and sad of her contemporaries. It felt rather like that program in Danish libraries, continued by the Human Library Organization that \u201clends\u201d real people to readers, who are encouraged to ask difficult questions and get a real answer. May you have the joy of a person like that in your life, especially if she\u2019s a musician.<\/p>\n

I invite you to celebrate all the women in music you know, and hear them live if you can. And discover new music this month (check these pages for plenty of ideas). Or create and perform music that inspires passion, justice, freedom, love, and life. Who better than life-bearers, songwriters, and drummers to do that? Sue Palmer writes a monthly column in this publication called Women in Jazz and Blues, covering many of the musicians above, plus plenty more. https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/?p=31509<\/a><\/p>\n

Claudia Previn Stasny<\/em><\/strong> is a singer, actor, editor, and writer, who lives in the gorgeous little mountain town of Julian, California, with her husband, Jeffrey, two dowager cats, and a houseful of books and musical instruments. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In honor of Women\u2019s History Month and International Women\u2019s Day in particular, it seems only right to talk about women in music, particularly a couple I\u2019ve known rather well: my mother, Betty Bennett Lowe, and first stepmother, Dory Langan Previn. Vastly different women, but each a marvelous musician in her own right. Women have always been musicians, but I didn\u2019t truly learn that until I was almost 30 years old. Little wonder: my music teachers, the band leaders, orchestra conductors, and major musical figures I knew were all men. My mother, a jazz singer with big bands and in jazz clubs for decades, known and respected by musicians both here and across the pond, taught me that\u2014particularly early in her career\u2014women were dismissed, denigrated, or just forgotten, and I raged inside at the inequity and utter shortsightedness of the opinions and behaviors that shunted us collectively to the sidelines. Growing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":31684,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-stories"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31629"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31683,"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31629\/revisions\/31683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}