Alison Fensterstock celebrates women in music with new NPR book

In the new book “How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music,” editor and longtime music journalist (and Gambit veteran) Alison Fensterstock dug deep into the public radio archives for a curated anthology that explores the impacts of women and non-binary musicians.

Fensterstock drew a lot of the book’s material from essays previously published on NPR’s “Turning The Tables” series, which aims to challenge sexism in the music industry with deep dives, criticism and candid interviews with artists.

But she also commissioned new works by contemporary writers and musicians and sourced material from other NPR platforms.

Fensterstock shortened and reformatted many of the previously published essays and included shorter snippets from interviews and other blurbs in the book. And it’s all complemented visually by original illustrations, graphics and photographs.

She likens it to the zines she made in high school in the ’90s.

“I got all these different illustrations from very different artists in different styles,” she says. “It looks kind of like I went to Kinko’s at midnight and got my X-acto knife out, but in a good way.”

The aesthetic is also what helps make the book, which comes out Oct. 1 through HarperOne, easily digestible and user-friendly for readers and music fans who want to jump around. Flipping through its pages is reminiscent of skipping ahead on a playlist to hear your favorite song, and then going back to see what else is in there.

“How Women Made Music” is thought-provoking on a range of topics, like race, gender, politics, fashion, reproductive justice and the emotions that go into both making music and consuming it as a fan.

Some essays are wistful, like country singer Margo Price’s ode to Janis Joplin, who died before Price was even born but nonetheless had a huge influence on her career.

Other pieces are about fighting for equality, like a 2005 Odetta interview addressing the fury and frustration she experienced while growing up during segregation, and how her music represents her determination to push through racial barriers.

Folk singer Joan Baez weighs in about nonviolence as a guiding musical principle.

And there are plenty of tributes about the sheer joy that music brings, as well as stories about those who have broken barriers, from artists like Mahalia Jackson to Madonna, Whitney Houston, Taylor Swift and Beyonce.

A particular highlight is a collection from longtime music producer Jill Sternheimer, co-founder of “Turning the Tables,” and director of public programming at the Lincoln Center.

Sternheimer reflects on her top five favorite moments in live music history, and spoiler alert: One of them happens to be the 2012 Hurray for the Riff Raff performance at Jazz Fest.

Other New Orleans artists and voices also are represented in the book.

There’s a contribution by Melissa Weber, aka DJ Soul Sister, on her love of Mallia Franklin and the women of Parliament-Funkadelic. Georgetown scholar Zandria F. Robinson writes a tribute to Mia X. WWNO’s Gwen Thompkins writes about Mahalia Jackson’s legacy. And New Orleans resident and longtime feminist icon Ani DiFranco’s interview with Fensterstock about abortion and reproductive justice is particularly timely.

Gambit spoke with Fensterstock ahead of her book release, and an excerpt from the book appears after the interview.

The book can be pre-ordered here and will be in bookstores Oct. 1. 

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Gambit: The book is broken up into chapters: “Storytellers,” “Live Music,” “Tradition Bearers and Breakers,” “Warriors,” “Empaths” and more. How did you come up with a way to organize and structure the book?

Alison Fensterstock: (NPR) sent me a memo and they were like, we shouldn’t organize it by genre or chronology, but by theme. It wasn’t really a marching order, but it was a good idea. It’s like how a list [of greatest albums] works …They’re all thrown in together, and then you can expand on that and make the chapters thematic.

There’s a chapter about live music, and we’re throwing in stories with Sleater-Kinney, Etta James, Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl National Anthem, and an article by Margo Price on Janis Joplin.

I love that chapter. It was a way to integrate all these experiences about live music. It can be politically meaningful, like Marian Anderson’s concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (during segregation).

And then we put it next to a Janet Weiss (from Sleater-Kinney) piece, who had great quotes in an NPR interview about how there’s nothing like playing a live show. And I think Jill (Sternheimer’s) essay got that across, too. She knows live music is a totally different experience and an experience that can be really transcendent.

There were connections we were trying to make in each chapter.

Maybe you like Joni Mitchell, who’s in a couple different chapters. She’s in the “Storyteller” section, and then you have Mia X and Mary J. Blige. They’re doing similar confessional, soul-baring things.

I think (breaking it up into themes) is an interesting way to think about music. It’s about all the different ways people express themselves, and all the ways it impacts the world we live in and the relationships we have.

There’s also a chapter about music and activism. We had an article about someone who went to perform at Standing Rock. And Ani DiFranco, who wrote about abortion when she was 18 and then again when she was 50. It’s a way to express the changing world.

Gambit: Speaking of abortion and women’s rights, you’re releasing this book now, in 2024, as women are now facing regressive laws and losing reproductive rights. How does that play into this publication?

Fensterstock: In the middle of working on it, (the Supreme Court) overturned Roe v. Wade. For women my age, we had the first part of our adulthood assuming we had rights, and now we don’t. There are about 20 new essays that were new commissions, like one on Ani DiFranco writing abortion songs.

We were seeing musicians respond to (the Supreme Court decision) in real time, and we were like, that has to go in there.

For some of the other newer essays, we wanted to get some writers in there who’ve never done anything with “Turning the Tables” or we wanted a piece on artists who hadn’t been featured before.

Gambit: In all your years of covering the music industry, broadly speaking, what are some of the biggest changes you have seen for women in music?

Fensterstock: When we were starting the project back in 2019 and 2020, one of the points we were looking at it is that pop music is ruled by women, like Beyonce and Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish.

Even in the time this book has been finished and into production, we have seen the rise of artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan. There’s female chart domination.

But the flip side is, it’s still hard to speak to how the industry is actually treating women. I don’t know if it’s really getting better. Definitely, unquestionably, women are dominating the (charts). But I can’t say we are in the magical salad days of women in music just because they have the top hits, because I think it’s still a mess, and it’s still as fraught as ever behind the scenes.

Gambit: Can you tell us about the audiobook version?

Fensterstock: It’s going to be very cool. Of course, NPR is a broadcast medium, so when you hear the audiobook, you’ll hear all these voices, including the artists who have been on the past 52 years of NPR.

I got to go into the NPR archives, and the archivists were amazing … They had everything.

I got Patti Smith’s interview from around 1976, and that’s excerpted. She’s talking about performing live, so when you listen to the audiobook, you’ll get that heavy New Jersey accent, and it’s baby Patti Smith, who had just put out “Horses,” talking to you.

We have Nina Simone talking to Nick Spitzer and Kathleen Hanna (of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre) talking to Ann Powers in 2019. I love the old ones, like Tammy Wynette being interviewed in the early ’70s on her tour bus, and Etta James being interviewed.

We also have three or four voice actors reading, so you’ll hear very different kinds of voices, which is what the whole project is about.

There’s a huge amount of people who made this all happen. I don’t listen to audiobooks much, but being able to hear them in their own voices is amazing. And it’s really cool to celebrate all these women who have been part of NPR over the years.

Gambit: Any upcoming local events you have planned for the book tour?

Fensterstock: I’m having one with (local author) Jami Attenberg at Octavia Books Oct. 24. Jami has a new novel (“A Reason To See You Again”) coming out Sept. 24. We hang out all the time, and we talk a lot while we’re working on these projects.

Gambit: Who are your new favorite women or non-binary artists?

Fensterstock: I haven’t been on the new music bandwagon much, because (my husband Lefty Parker and I) manage a used record store (Euclid Records in Bywater), and I don’t work at the newspaper writing about contemporary stuff. So I listen to a lot of old music. But in this weird pantheon of female pop stars, I’m really into Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo. I listen to Chappell Roan, and I’m like, this is how I felt as a kid when I used to listen to Cyndi Lauper.

The following is an excerpt from Fensterstock’s new book.

New Orleans soul singer Irma Thomas cut stone classic after classic in the early 1960s on the legendary Minit Records, Allen Toussaint’s first home base as a producer.

The singles she recorded there, ballads like “Ruler of My Heart” and sassy stompers like “Hittin’ on Nothing,” are still her most well-loved songs; maybe that’s because the aching love songs and dance floor fillers had toughness and emotional depth that belied her years.

Her contract with Minit, inked at age nineteen, had led to a fruitful partnership with Toussaint, who wrote, arranged, or produced her run of sides that remain catnip to soul collectors and record nerds, not to mention part of the core soundtrack of New Orleans. (“Irma’s voice stayed in my head all the time,” Toussaint told me during a 2007 interview. “And it still does.”)

In 1963, not long after Toussaint left for the army, Minit was sold to its distributor, and they flew Thomas out to Los Angeles to record 1964’s Wish Someone Would Care, her first long-player.

The centerpiece is the title track, Thomas’s first composition of her own that she had ever recorded.

It’s a song about a yearning that’s deeper than romance or physical want—a purely existential desire for the relief of being seen.

At the time she recorded it, Thomas was twenty-two, the mother of little kids and in the middle of her second divorce.

She was angry and tired, and she wished someone would care. The slow-burning track was as devastating as a hurricane, and it scooted up to No. 2 on the R&B chart and No. 17 on the Hot 100—still her highest-charting hit to date.

Now seventy-six, the woman who’s been working overtime since adolescence shows little sign of slowing down: if anything, after her first Grammy win in 2006, her star has taken on even more sparkle.

But to get to the essence of Irma Thomas, there’s no better key than “Wish Someone Would Care” — a song that, with its agony and honesty, draws heart’s blood.

— Alison Fensterstock, Turning the Tables, Season 1, “Shocking Omissions,” 2017. Excerpted from HOW WOMEN MADE MUSIC, A Revolutionary History from NPR Music, reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2024.

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