Halfstack Highlights Ep. 48: Woman Walk the Line - Female Artists Influencing Lives
Update: 2017-08-14
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Music has the power to change lives. Each of us has experienced what music can do at some point in our lives. Remember those tough preteen/teenage years? Life was challenging. Where and how do I fit in? You retreated to your room to listen to music and brood when suddenly, THAT song came on. At last, someone who understands what you are going through. This artist really gets it.
Music’s influence continued as we got older and wiser. With your earbuds in, listening to your playlist on your favorite streaming service, you don’t care your boss is a jerk or that the third train in a row has raced past your El platform traveling express.
Nashville-based music critic, academic, and artist development consultant Holly Gleason remembers experiencing the transformative power of music as a student at a Catholic high school in suburban Cleveland. As she entered a local record store to purchase some new music to help fuel her growing interest in country music. As Gleason entered the store she looked up to find herself face-to-face with a life-sized cutout of country star crossover rock queen, Tanya Tucker, promoting her new album TNT. There Tucker stood at the end of the aisle, a fiery red-head in a skin-clutching red spandex outfit, dropped low in the back, with her back to the camera and head tossed high in a half challenge, half come on. Staring at the cut out in her college prep school uniform, Gleason felt the challenge… “Come on, take a chance, give it a listen.” Feeling Tucker’s eyes follow her around the store, Gleason bought the album. (Hey, it was discounted to $5.99) As she listened to the swagger of a buzzing electric guitar and the pumping of the drums, Tucker opened Gleason’s eyes and ears to a whole new world.
After an injury sidelined Gleason’s dreams of a professional golf career, she continued her pursuit of music. She began covering country music while attending the University of Miami. Gleason went on to have her work appear in Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, HITS, Musician, CREEM, No Depression, and Paste. She is the Editor and a contributor to Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives. Gleason collected essays from 27 writers discussing how the women of country music influenced their lives. Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt’s unabashed visual and musical influence, and a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considers the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee.
Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass, and the women who make them, Women Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America’s most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection – and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener. Woman Walk the Line will take the reader back to their own music transformation. It is definitely worth the read.
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| Woman Walk the Line Editor Holly Gleason Photograph by Allison Ann |
Woman Walk the Line is scheduled for release in September by the University of Texas Press.
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Thanks for listening to this episode of Halfstack Highlights ! If you like what you hear, make sure you subscribe to our RSS Feed or to iTunes and Internet Archive so you can keep up with all of the latest episodes. If you liked the music you heard today visit www.tracycollettomusic.com to support this amazing singer/songwriter. While you’re online make sure you check out halfstackmag.com and keep up with us on all social outlets @halfstackmag.
Thanks again for your support!
-Louis Vasseur
Thanks again for your support!
-Louis Vasseur
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