I once asked the question, in a song I wrote called "hey god", "Why are almost all of my CDs by men?" The recent, totally off-the-cuff, subject-to-change, somewhat misleading (in that I actually just named the first artist of the year in 2007) list of the "Artists of the Year" winners dating back to the year I was born was almost completely composed of men. This did not really register with me, but was brought to my attention by a reader of my blog.

Music, like History or any other human endeavour, is an area in which women's contributions are marginalized in every way it is possible to be marginalized. Who are the biggest selling music acts of all time? Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Garth Brooks, etc. How far down the list does one have to go before a woman shows up? I don't know and I don't have the money for a research department. (Partly because I don't appear on this list at all.) Madonna and maybe Alanis Morisette would have to show up at some point.

Let's go back even further. Name a single female composer or musician from before 1900. Hmmm. Stumped? Yeah, me too, and I have three semesters of music history on my college transcript. I think the first woman we studied was Laurie Anderson and her song "O Superman" from the 1980s album Big Science. Name a female musician who is not known primarily as a singer. Uh, Lita Ford? The chick who played some awesome guitar for Natalie Merchant on Tigerlily?

Why? Why is it like this? Can it change? Should it change?

I always sense irony when I see a "strong woman" on, say, Saturday Night Live, singing a woman-positive message with eight men in her band and no women. I am no stranger to this myself, having played guitar on Jubilant Dogs' "Queso Profundo" with two other men on bass and drums. Why was that band not composed entirely of women? Why is it that I don't personally know any women who could have done what we, the men, did? Why, on the other hand, did I know at least one man who could have replaced any of the three of us?

As a guitar teacher, I had several good students who were female. Still, overall the boys outnumbered the girls at least two to one. Why? Did my very manliness skew my clientele? In the nine years I taught guitar and bass in Northfield, why was there never a female guitar teacher in town?

Who are some female artists I really, really like? Tanya Donnelly, Kirsty MacColl, Liz Phair, Zhanna Bichevskaya, Madonna, Sarah MacLachlan, Joni Mitchell, and Natalie Merchant. Still, compared to the benchmarks of my fandom for male artists (total albums owned, regular spins in my stereo, songs learned to play myself, bootlegs and rare tracks sought out, concerts attended, etc.) female artists are woefully underrepresented. There is not a single woman from whom I own more than three or four discs. I have nothing even approaching a "complete works" colection by a woman. The only woman I've seen in concert twice is Liz Phair.

In the most marked possible contrast, I have every single officially released Bob Dylan CD (some of which I've bought two or even three times in various formats and editions), several bootlegs, seen five concerts, and learned dozens of his songs to play myself over and over. Here is the most shocking sentence in the essay: I have approximately three times as many Bob Dylan CDs as I do total CDs by all women.

Are there people for whom their music fandom is a photo negative of mine? Is there a woman (or a man) out there who is totally obsessed with Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, The Bangles, Jewel, etc. and finds only the occasional, obscure man worth buying? And how totally self-conscious is that person about it? Is it a conscious effort to support women in music?

Personal, Historical, Illustrative Digression

I remember about ten years ago, after I bought the gold CD edition of Born To Run and Phish's Junta, I resolved that I would stop buying CDs by men and only buy CDs by women. I got Unplugged and Our Time in Eden by 10,000 Maniacs, both of which are great. Somehow they qualified even though OTiE, for example, was music played by four men and one woman and the album was recorded, mixed, mastered, and produced entirely by men. Next was Julianna Hatfield's Hey Babe, which was just disappointing. It was a classic token purchase, since I hadn't heard any of the songs and just liked the title and the colors of the cover. (Bright green and purple, which I still remember, even though the album has long since gone to Cheapo.)

I started to slip when I got a live Beatles tribute from the Knitting Factory, which had some female acts, but I mainly got it because Alex Chilton sang "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Next was a Duke (University) Chorale CD, which, while directed by a man, at least featured altos and sopranos.

I kind of gave up after I read Greil Marcus' book Mystery Train and felt that I had to hear There's a Riot Goin' On by Sly and the Family Stone. (Incidentally, of the six artists profiled in this legendary book, zero are women.) The Family Stone did have some women, I think, but the I.R.S. Years, bonus track-havin', import version of R.E.M.'s Document, my next purchase, did not. (And yes, for a long time I kept a list of every CD I bought in the order in which I bought them and it's on this very computer so that was not, technically, difficult research.) The great experiment was over.

Return Here if you Skipped That

But anyway, the original question was, "How do you like someone like Etta James?" And it seems like the answer is "not nearly so much as I like someone like Bob Dylan." Is this because I am a man and I have male concerns that are most eloquently addressed by other men? Maybe, but if there is anyone - either male or female - who has a majority of women in their music collection, I want to hear from you. Why did it turn out that way? Did you consciously and intentionally build your music fandom?

Sorry I don't have any better answers here, just the same old questions. Why is music totally and completely dominated by men? Why were there so few women on my fake "artist of the year past winners" list? I didn't set out to exclude women from the list, it just happened. Just like I never set out for my music collection to be so astonishingly one-sided - I just bought what I liked at the time. I'm not some pig guy who hates women. I had a minor in Women's Studies for God's sake! It seems horribly unfair somehow, but I don't know what's to be done about it.

Maybe if Hilary can just get elected president there will be a trickle-down, evening-out of such things. Ask me again in February 2009. I'd like to imagine my daughters and their girl friends will have every chance to be great, successful musicians if they choose that road, just like the (ick) boys of their generation. What is the deal with this and how can it change? What do YOU think?

Memphis Evans said some clever, unlikely thing about himself right here usually.

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p.s. I actually saw Etta James live in 1995 at the Mill City Music Festival, which I attended mainly to see (gasp!) Alex Chilton (a man). She was quite an entertainer. She was huge, sat in a chair the whole time, and did R rated things with the microphone while her (all male) backing band (led by her son) kept a tight groove going, supporting her big, powerful voice. It was a great show and left quite an impression on me.

So how do I like not just someone like Etta James but Etta James her own self? By seeing her incidentally at a now-defunct festival then never buying anything by her or seeking out more information. Ha ha ha. Sigh. This is just sad and it's almost 11 now so I have to go to bed.