Pretty Good for a Girl by Murphy Henry

Author:Murphy Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

We thought we could do it because

nobody was saying we couldn't.

—Beth Weil

THE

WOMEN IN

CALIFORNIA

According to many women who live there, bluegrass in California was different from the beginning. Kathy Barwick, who played Dobro with the All Girl Boys, says, “You betcha it's different! I think because there was little or no established (entrenched?) tradition of bluegrass in California, women didn't need as much to ‘break in’ to something…the bluegrass tradition was built by men and women together…The Phantoms of the Opry and the Good Ol’ Persons really set a standard for women in bluegrass in the Bay Area: this is something women do—and on an equal footing with men.”

Or as Beth Weil, who played with Laurie Lewis and Grant Street and the Good Ol’ Persons, says, “Music knows no gender here. Men on the West Coast were open to women musicians, even woman bandleaders, because rock-and-roll was that way out here. Joy of Cooking had two women bandleaders [Toni Brown and Terry Garthwaite], and Ace of Cups was an all-woman rock band. It never occurred to us not to play bluegrass—there weren't the problems of an exclusively male tradition like there were where bluegrass was born on the East Coast. We thought we could do it because there was nobody saying we couldn't.”

Yet the Phantoms and the Persons were not formed until the mid-seventies. And there had been bluegrass bands at both ends of California since the late fifties. More to the point, bluegrass historian Neil Rosenberg, who played Bluegrass in the Bay Area in the late 1950s, says when he came back to visit in 1978 he found a “changed bluegrass scene in which women now regularly shared the spotlight with men [emphasis mine].” This seems to imply that before, at least in the 1950s, women in bluegrass were scarce. Yet, as always, they were there. If you looked hard enough, you would find them.

Who were some of these women, the women who tilled the rich California bluegrass soil into the fertile mixture that nurtured the careers of the Good Ol’ Persons, Laurie Lewis, Kathy Kallick, Sidesaddle, the All Girl Boys, Alison Brown, and Sara Watkins, to mention just a few?

Neil's Rosenberg's own band, the Redwood Canyon Ramblers, which formed in the summer of 1959, is considered to be the first bluegrass band in the San Francisco area, a band “who paved the way for bluegrass to exist in the Bay area,” and which generally consisted of all men. But when one of their members got sick on their very first gig, Betty Aycrigg (stage name Betty Mann), an experienced country and folk performer, filled in on bass. She also played other dates with them.

At the other end of the state, in the Los Angeles area, JoAnn White was playing bass with the Country Boys—her brothers, Clarence, Roland, and Eric—later known as the Kentucky Colonels. While still living in Maine in the early 1950s, the young boys were too bashful to sing, so JoAnn sang with them. When they moved

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