Murphy Hicks Henry, author of Pretty Good for a Girl, is both a professional bluegrass banjo player and a chronicler of women in bluegrass. The book title comes from hearing from males that her banjo playing was “pretty good for a girl.” Henry thought the expression degrading. In the America of the 1950s, within which Henry grew up, saying that someone ran or threw like a girl meant that the running or throwing was substandard. If someone told you that you played the banjo “pretty good for a girl,” it meant that because of gender, you were not expected to play well. Even if uttered in jest, it was in practice damning by faint praise.
In her introduction, Henry presents the stereotype that women cannot hold their own in a bluegrass band. She also writes that the history of women in bluegrass has been more than community members’ dismissing women’s abilities to play the music. Important scholarship written by folklorists Mayne Smith and Neil Rosenberg defined bluegrass as men’s music. As a result, one reason for writing Pretty Good for a Girl was to lend balance to the historical record by bringing female voices to the fore. Indeed, one of the outcomes for Henry was that once she started looking for bluegrass women, she found a greater number than even she expected.
Henry bases Pretty Good for a Girl on interviews she conducted, along with the writings of professional researchers and articles and record reviews in the bluegrass press. Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass contains forty-five chapters. Each of the first forty-four is a crafted biography of an individual woman bluegrass musician, and the forty-fifth is the chapter that summarizes women’s progress in bluegrass music. With its publication, the book becomes the leading reference about women in bluegrass. In addition, because the book is organized in historical time periods, with several women represented in each time period, the book creates a narrative—it proceeds from the bad old days to the current scene.
Regardless of gender, stories recounting professionals making sacrifices in order to play are common. Both men and women musicians tell about lengthy car rides between shows, low pay, and venues that treat musicians poorly. But some women musicians have paid special forms of dues. Henry writes about Gloria Belle, a member of Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys, as a case in point. Many bands include a female singer whose role it is to provide vocal variety. Gloria’s role in the Sunny Mountain Boys was to sing lead on a few songs in a show, and to sing harmony parts to Jimmy’s lead. Playing and singing with a bluegrass icon like Jimmy Martin would seem to be a great job. However, Henry tells us that in 1968, when it was time for the Sunny Mountain Boys to cut a commercial LP album, Gloria was the only band member not permitted to perform in the recording session.
Jimmy’s abrasive attitude made it difficult for any band member to work with him. But he may have reserved some of his most degrading band leadership efforts for Gloria. Henry quotes a 1969 Bluegrass Unlimited piece reporting on a Sunny Mountain Boys performance: “Jimmy cavorted from one end of the stage to the other, making ungodly faces at her, sticking out his tongue, and inviting the audience to boo her performance.”
This book also documents many instances of the bluegrass press disrespecting the roles women have played in bluegrass bands. For example, Henry cites a 1967 Bluegrass Unlimited review of a Stoneman Family LP. The reviewer praised the work of Pop and his son, Scotty. However, the reviewer chose not to write about the musical contributions to the LP of Pop’s daughters Roni and Donna. Instead, the reviewer focused on negative comments about Donna that were printed in a fanzine (67). Henry notes how casually Roni and Donna’s abilities were ignored. About Gloria Bell, Henry writes that after performing in the band of bluegrass icon Jimmy Martin, she found it difficult to catch on with another major act. Henry says that if she were a man, there would have been no trouble continuing her career at the highest level of bluegrass (110). These are just a few of the many instances the book reports of gender playing a role in women advancing or not in the field of bluegrass. At times, a reader might think that Henry selects instances upon which to reports that advance her point of view. However, the amount of evidence is weighty and the patterns convincing.
To some in the bluegrass musical community, the presence of a woman in an otherwise all-male band gives the appearance of an intimate relationship between the woman and one of the band members. The all-woman band sidesteps this issue, as there are no men involved to cause speculation regarding who is sleeping with whom, and all-woman bands have existed for a long time. In many cases, bluegrass women learned the business of bluegrass just to be able to participate as performers. If no established band would hire a woman for whatever reason, you could always start your own band, and hire as many or as few female players as you desired. That is what Lynn Morris did (see page 238). When enacted by a band leader, actions that might be viewed as related to romance are often viewed as part of business.
Murphy Hicks Henry makes a compelling case that the true frontier for women in bluegrass is in securing work as a band member, a role frequently called a sideman. On performance schedules that necessitate sleeping in hotels, men and women with no romantic connection might not be comfortable sharing a room, either because of their personal levels of comfort, or because of the appearance of illicit intimacy. Kristin Scott Benson started playing the banjo with Larry Stephenson in 1995 and she held the job till 2000. Henry views Benson’s time with Stephenson’s band as a landmark because it was the first time, in a major touring band, that a woman not romantically connected to any male band member played a major role as a sideman. Because in the history of bluegrass, it is so common for a woman to be included in a band setting because of a marriage connection, Sally Jones eschewed performing with her husband, Chris Jones. She wanted to be viewed as a player, and not as Chris’s wife (342).
The musical biographies in this book advance the study of bluegrass music. In addition, through her methods of interviewing and chapter organization, Henry makes gender an important dimension of bluegrass history. The book plainly displays the role gender has played in bluegrass culture, and how bluegrass people have viewed their music and themselves.
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[Review length: 1128 words • Review posted on July 4, 2014]