Sometimes It's Hard To Be A Woman

I have quite a few women that ask me for advice about playing music and starting a band in Texas.  I live in Texas. I tour in Texas. I promote my music primarily in Texas. I am also open to the possibility that some of my experience (if not all) is a Texas thing.

In November, 2007, John Conquest did a review in 3^rd Coast Music Magazine of Kathleen Hudson’s book, “Women in Texas Music; Stories and Songs”, where he stated:

“The running sub-text of the book is that, even now, women are still second-class citizens in Texas music – as Hudson points out in her introduction, if you scour the lineups of the state’s many festivals, you’ll rarely find a woman’s name.  From many [years of] observation, I would add the corollary that, even in ‘progressive’ Austin, it’s far harder for a woman, even a Marti Brom, to keep a band together.”

Ask yourself first why you’re doing this. If you have a need for acceptance and a spot in the limelight, I can recommend a really good therapist. . . . I’m not joking. For 2 reasons: 1) It’s difficult to find acceptance in the music business for anyone of any gender.  You can release a CD – yeehaw. Unfortunately, that really doesn’t mean anything yet. It’s a calling card. It’s a letter of introduction. It’s the first step. It’s not going to propel you to anything. You’ve got to take that CD and build on it.  You’ve got to establish your name and reputation. You’ve got to release at least 1 and usually many more albums for people to understand that you are an artist. Prove that you’re not yet another band that’s here today and gone tomorrow.  Show that you’ve got talent for more than 11 songs.  Acceptance by fans can typically come sooner, but the fans initially come in small numbers.  Acceptance by the industry takes much, much longer. 2) I firmly believe that your reason for being in ANY business should be because you have a genuine passion for that.  What’s the question that your high school counselor asked you your senior year? “If you could be anything and know that you would make money, what would you be?” THAT is what you should be doing and THAT is the reason you should be doing it for.  If you’re a musician, you’ll know.  It will be something that was inside of you from the very beginning.

I had a discussion with Amber Digby the other day (and I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing this), and realized she and I had similar experiences with music.  We were both obsessed with singing during our teenage years. That’s all we did. We sat in our rooms and listened to music over and over and over and sang along with every note, memorizing every line, every nuance.  THAT is a musician. THAT is someone who’s “eat up with it”, as my Aunt Erma used to say.

OK, so you tell me you’re doing this because music is in your soul. All you do is sing. All you do is play. All you do is write. Good start.

Of course, you’ve got to get a good band together. Initially, I don’t think it’s necessary to have a road band full of super-pickers.  Local guys that generally play in tune and in time can suffice.  Super-pickers are expensive and initially, you’re not playing to large crowds or getting large guarantees to justify how much they’re going to cost you (no offense to my super-picking friends out there).

You’ve got to get gigs.  You need a regular way to get your live show together. And this is the biggest challenge for a woman.  It’s truly unbelievable what you run into. I’ll cite a few personal examples:

1)   There is a particular club in Texas that refuses to book “girl singers”.  When asked if they would play a CD of a woman singer in one of the breaks at the club to see if the crowd would show any interest, the owner flatly refused.

2)   Go back to the quote above about “Women in Texas Music; Stories and Songs”. I challenge you to look at the Texas festival lineups and tell me the ratio of men to women artists.  If you find a festival where the ratio is better than 9:1, call me.

3)   “I don’t like girl singers.” This one baffles me, folks, and I hear it all of the time. I usually just start listing off top 40 female artists to see if they like any of them. . . . they typically do.

4)   I showed up at a club date and was informed that the owner never would have booked me if he would have known that I didn’t also have 2 male singers with me.  After talking to the owner, I didn’t get a good “warm, fuzzy feeling” that I was going to get paid at the end of the night. This is the only date I have ever walked out on in my life.

I could go on but I won’t. You don’t want to hear how many clubs have initially been skeptical of having me “just because I’m a woman” (great Dolly Parton song, btw).

Now you’ve got to figure out how to run a business. No joke.  I’ve had 2 recent conversations with 2 different people in different capacities of the music industry that have stated concerns about the same artist.  Their concern? Intonation? No. Musicianship? No. Talent? No. Looks? No.  Their concern was the artist’s lack of professionalism and commitment to their career.

This is almost 2010. We live in a different age from the balladeer with the guitar strapped on her back that could travel from honky tonk to honky tonk and make a name for herself and even get signed to a record label.  No more.  Record labels want to know how many friends you have on MySpace and fans you have on Facebook. They want to know how many hits you’ve had on your website and they certainly look at Soundscan to see how many units you’ve sold and/or how many illegal downloads there have been of your music (yes, they look at that too).  We are in the Extreme Information Age and it’s all about numbers.

Those of us that are musicians are offended. We turn our noses up. We get our feathers ruffled. “I’m a musician”. Get over it. That’s all I can say. Just get over it.  Use your blogs to rant and rave about your true feelings about what the music industry should be about, but your real-time execution of your career must be about what the industry looks at.  And even from a viral, word-of-mouth perspective, you need this for your own sales and getting people to know you. Numbers. Promotion. Publicity.

The musical world is not a level playing field, and I don’t know that any world truly is.  My experience with Corporate America was that I had to work hard to prove myself and really lean on mentors that cared to help me in my climb up the career ladder.

But the world of music is a long, slow, climb, and if you think success is about the music, it’s typically not.  If you think success is about your suntan or your hairdo or your clothes or your abdominal muscles, it’s typically not.  If you think success is about falsely pumping up numbers on MySpace and Facebook, it’s typically not.  If you think success is about being on a radio chart top 10, it's typically not.  Success in the music business, from what I’ve observed, is just staying in it and finding a genuine way to connect with real fans.  And from my viewpoint, if you’re going to stay in something and try and connect to people in a genuine way, then make it about something that you believe in and something that is genuine to you.

I’ve overquoted this quote and I don’t really care. It’s my mantra. My mission statement.  It’s a quote that George Jones read to Juli Thanki in an interview on www.the9513.com.  The quote is from Waylon Jennings:

“You’ve got to care. You’ve got to care about the music. You work with other musicians who care, and your audience cares. You better care too, hoss, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be doing it. You better not be doing it for the publicity, the fame, or the money. And you sure better not be doing it because it’s a way to make a living, ’cause that ain’t always gonna be easy. You got to believe it, believe in the music, you got to mean it, that’s all.”

Being a woman artist in Texas is a challenge.  It’s harder to get your foot in the door at venues.  Keeping a band together is difficult.  You’ve got to have gigs to keep the band busy, so if it’s harder to find places to play, it’s hard to be able to use the same pickers. And it’s hard to work up a solid live show with revolving band members.  My theory about the reason why there are not many of us women playing the club circuit is partially because a lot of women give up because of how difficult it is. And because there are fewer women, the perception that the gender is the reason why female artists are not as successful is further perpetuated. This is my theory anyway.

If you’re a woman and you want to start a band, I say go for it. We need more of us out there. But I warn you to be doing it for the right reasons. It HAS to be about the music. The desire HAS to come from somewhere inside of you.  You are going to lose money. You are going to face disappointment after disappointment.  You are going to bite your tongue, over and over again.  You will wonder why you are even trying and will want to quit time after time.

But if the reason why you’re staying in it is because of those perfect words above by Waylon Jennings, then the rest of it will just be hurdles that you’ll go through on to a higher path. A path of the soul. A path of connection. A path of your own making and choosing that no one can take away or belittle because it is your own. And really, this is the path that musicians and artists have followed for centuries.

Be true to who you are. Do what you love. That’s about the best advice I could give someone of ANY gender.

Comments

[Michael Devers]

Well, I found one. MusicFest 2010. 7 of the 30 artists are female, but I'll concede the point that it's an exception.

[Miss Leslie]



[Barbara Dyan Cook]

You are absolutely right about all the above!! When I first started in this business we had to have a band name so that people would come to the shows. They wouldn't come if a woman's name was on the marquee! I guess they expected a woman to just sing sad sappy songs! I am convinced that when I won my Terry Award in 2006 for female vocalist of the year, it is because I asked the judges how many other female vocalists that were nominated for the award could not only sing but also managed their own band, booked their own band, dealt with club owners, managed the website and fan emails, and managed to get up on the band stand night after night and put on a great show! I was the only one! The others who were nominated were good girl singers, but were simply accessory pieces to existing guy bands.