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 excerpts of archival interviews, essays, and best album and song shoutouts.
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.
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“This audiobook is not just about inclusion. It’s a corrective recentering…It’s exhilarating to hear Dolly Parton, Nina Simone, and Queen Latifah in the mix, giving listeners this mosaic of music history. The impact is undeniable. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
“ A buoyant, welcome ode to some of the most influential songstresses.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)“The project endeavors to correct the persistent marginalization of women and nonbinary artists in the music world.”
— Booklist (starred review)“An indispensable survey of the too often neglected role of women in creating the music we all listen to.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Hillary Huber, a Los Angeles–based voice talent with hundreds of commercials and promos under her belt, was bitten by the audiobook bug in 2005. She now records books on a regular basis and has been nominated for several Audie Awards and won numerous Earphones Awards.
Janina Edwards, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a native of Chicago and a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts acting program. Her 2016 performance of Voice of Freedom was a finalist for the Audie Award.
Maggi-Meg Reed has performed as an actress and singer both on and off-Broadway. She is a narrator of many popular audiobooks, including A Very Long Engagement and The Time Traveler’s Wife. She is the winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.
Bradford Hastings is a voice talent and audiobook narrator.
Zura Johnson is a classically trained stage actor. She has performed in stages from her childhood home in California to the East coast, and all the way to Singapore. She has now worked in theater and as a voice actor for more than twenty years. She holds an MFA from the Old Globe Theatre and the University of San Diego.