Only fierce felines on Wednesday’s Vintage Vinyl.
As the semester winds down, I’ve been trying to figure out what a good playlist should be for this next show. I really do put a lot of thought into what to feed my listeners every week, and I was originally thinking about doing another installment of Pirate Radio. However, I have decided to postpone that until finals week, so this week will instead be another installment of what I like to call “Sister Songs.”
This is really just a fancy way of saying that we’ll be listening to music by some fierce women.
I did a show like this before I started blogging on the KJHK website, so I never had a chance to explain why I chose such a theme. It’s simple really. It ends up that most of the music in my collection is recorded by men. Not for any particular reason. And I don’t have some bias either. It just happens that I buy music performed by men or male groups. But this week, it’s time for the ladies to shine.
I think it’s really fascinating how women in music have evolved ever since the 1950s. Their music back then was sugary sweet, speaking of love or longing or longing to be loved or losing love… It’s all very “Johnny, why don’t you love me?” Don’t get me wrong, I love it! I eat that stuff up. It’s so sappy and cutesy and sometimes, it feels good to listen to silly music. But once the 1960s came around and soul took over, we get a whole new brand of female. Powerful women who instead start singing about how the lover who jilted them is going to get his, or how some man isn’t going to get her down. It’s such a drastic shift into female empowerment and I think it really mirrors the times in which this music was produced.
So for my next show, I’ll be doing an exploration of women’s music. You can expect to hear classic ladies of the 1950s like Connie Francis, The Poni-Tails. We’ll move to the 1960s and hear from Petula Clark, Lesley Gore, The Shangri-Las. We’ll take a look at Motown and soul and get a visit from Diana Ross and the Supremes, Etta James, Alpha Zoe, Ruth Brown. And we’ll go into the 1970s with disco greats like Donna Summer and the ever-feisty Miss Jean Knight. It promises to be a powerful show.
by emily scholle
tune in to Vintage Vinyl every Wednesday night from 10 p.m. to midnight.