This title fits in. The women musicians are dangerous. Lady ! Everything is here. And then this wonderful photo. This African-American woman. This electric guitar. That dazzling smile. This blood and velvet red. Joy and injustice. Shadow and light. We will understand in the book that this woman musician, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, before Chuck Berry, well before Hendrix, extirpated what we would call rock’n’roll from her inventive, percussive and enjoyable playing, mixing the secular and the religious, sex and the sky. Sister Rosetta: irrepressible performer, inspiring creator, striking force… and shamefully underrated musician.
Still now. There are a few thousand of us, at most, spreading the good news, amazed as we have been since the release of archive footage on YouTube. Annie Coste, in the double page she devotes to this dangerous woman in her book, specifies that it was not until 2018 that the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame (the museum and pantheon of rock’n’roll ) — established in 1983 — finally inducts him into the category of pioneers. Sixth woman among a few dozen essential and celebrated men, from Robert Johnson to Les Paul.
Why so late? The work addresses the fundamental question: yes, “women musicians are dangerous” in the history of a patriarchy always afraid of the reduction of its power. The book is also a gesture: against all odds, they managed to stand out. At least a few.
About sixty heroines
Annie Coste points out around sixty… since Antiquity. It’s little, it’s huge. It depends on the look. All are essential. In all eras. If we generally recognize the achievements of Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush or Barbara, this book does not find its “dangerous” only on the popular music scenes of the 20the and XXIe centuries. To understand how the muses became musicians, Coste goes back a long way and allows the general public to discover the “ancient and medieval prophetesses” (Hildegard of Bingen) as well as the “brilliant baroque and classical” (Maddalena Casulana), as well as the “musicians learned and transgressive 19th centurye century” (Emilie Mayer): vast program, often terrible stories, between forgotten masterpieces and truncated careers.
The jazz chapter also allows us to give a worthy place to musicians whose marriages have kept them in the shadows: we can see the extent to which Lillian Hardin Armstrong “will drive and shape the career” of her famous Louis “to his detriment” . Coste similarly recalls the battle of Alice Coltrane for the recognition of her art while she is “dissolved in the aura of her husband”, even after the death of the too-cult “Trane”.
We will appreciate the inclusion of a Marguerite Monnot, Piaf’s supplier, and a Françoise Hardy among the chosen ones in this anthology. A few more pages would not have been too much for a Brigitte Fontaine, a Véronique Sanson, a Catherine Ringer. And some “dangerous” Quebecers, like Clémence to Klô. To be continued, hopefully.