Murderin’ Women No More

This is from an email exchange with a research scholar friend.

She said,

 In your email you talked of men’s violence and its association with war; maybe it is the outcome of war.  I question this because of the prevalence of violence inflicted by men and boys who have not been to war, are generations away from anyone who has been to war.  This has me wonder if war is indeed the outcome of the association of men and violence, and not the other way around.  

I tried to reply but I found it too confusing. At the same time I was recording a song I’d written nearly 2 years earlier. Although I’d performed it a few times I’d hesitated to record it. How could I, a transgender woman, buy into this great and important debate? I felt that I’d been part of the problem. I’d not been violent but I’d certainly been sexist. And until I stepped across the gender line I had no idea how endemic male violence towards women was. How it was not just considered ‘normal’ but somehow a male ‘right’.

Now, as a woman, I was seeing it all anew and aghast.

As a musician and increasingly a songwriter I am always listening. But now old favourites were becoming harder to digest. People like Muddy Waters. People like Johnny Winter. It was Mr Winter who brought me undone. A video interview with him as an old man playing a favourite song of his. You’ll have to wait til 4 minutes in to hear the song.

I had blithely assumed that with age came awareness. I’d assumed also that newer generations of men were listening to what women were saying, were reading the statistics, the news reports, having discussions with their partners. Were standing up and singing, ‘No More Violence To Women.”

So I went to hear a local virtuoso. A brilliant guitarist. Far better than I’ll ever be. His song was titled, “If I Killed You I’d Be Out In Ten”! He said it was a favourite of his son’s.

So my song came into being. In the time between writing it and recording it I’d gone through another transition. I was no longer hiding my male past. Now I was thinking that there were things I could share, things that might help other people. In the recording I decided not to shy away from the depth of my ‘old’ male voice. I would use everything I had in this song.

It’s a blues, it’s a country song, and it’s a 60s protest song. My role models were people like Pop Staples and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Here it is. ‘Murderin’ Women No More’. My tiny drop in the great groundswell that has begun.

I’m not advocating censorship. I’m just asking, guys, that you be conscious of what it is that you’re singing. Look on it as an ‘answer song’, a fine tradition going back at least to Kitty Wells in the 1950s. “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”