Description

Drawn from NPR Music’s acclaimed, groundbreaking series Turning the Tables, the definitive book on the vital role of Women in Music—from Beyoncé to Odetta, Taylor Swift to Joan Baez, Joan Jett to Dolly Parton—featuring archival interviews, essays, photographs, and illustrations.

What if the history of popular music could be seen through the lens of the women who made it?

This remarkable anthology expands on NPR Music’s celebratory and provocative multi-platform series Turning the Tables, examining the crucial and historically understated role women have and continue to play in popular music. Before Turning the Tables launched in 2017, best album lists in magazines or online included few works by women, and female artists would claim only a few places of honor in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But Turning the Tables helped change that.

How Women Made Music inaugurates a new phase in NPR’s ongoing mission to infuse canon-making with life. With an introduction by acclaimed critic and Turning the Tables co-founder, Ann Powers, and edited by co-founder Alison Fensterstock, this impressive history draws from every Turning the Tables season and is enhanced with new material—representing more than fifty years of NPR’s exclusive coverage of women in popular music—as well as new text, interviews, and reporting from deep inside the NPR archives, including:

• Joan Baez talking about nonviolence as a musical principle in 1971
• Patti Smith describing art as her “jealous mistress” in 1976
• Nina Simone, in 2001, explaining how she developed the edge in her voice as a tool against racism.
• Taylor Swift talking about when she had no idea if her musical career might work
• Odetta on how shifting from classical music to folk allowed her to express her fury over Jim Crow

Destined to become a classic, this incomparable volume is not only a vital record of history; it reveals much about how music is made, how musical lives are maintained, and how tastes and trends change from generation to generation.

About the Author

In July 2017, NPR Music launched Turning the Tables—a groundbreaking, celebratory, and provocative multi-platform series examining the important and equal role women play in popular music. Now in its fifth season, Turning the Tables has reached millions of listeners and is considered one of NPR Music’s most successful, critically acclaimed programs. How Women Made Music is the book that continues this vibrant conversation and finally presents women at the center of the discussion about popular music.