The Devil You Know

Craig Werner on Rickie Lee Jones, "How Women Made Music," and learning to listen

(Craig Werner is our friend, teacher, colleague, and collaborator, as well as one of our favorite writers. Earlier this year, he made his No Fences Review debut with a great essay on Ann Powers’ great book Traveling: On The Path of Joni Mitchell, which he discusses below. We’re so glad to have him back, with an essay about an older album he missed, a new book he loves, and the reasons why they’re connected. As with all of Craig’s writing, it’s a deep and beautiful meditation. Thank you, Craig, for letting us publish it.)

My album of the year for 2024 – Rickie Lee Jones' The Devil You Know – was released shortly before Barack Obama's reelection in 2012. As far as I remember, I was totally unaware of it at the time. Even if I'd given it a listen, there's almost no chance I would have been able to hear it with the depth it requires and repays. There's a small story and a larger story explaining the tangled up "why"s. Both stories were shaped by the invaluable work of women making and writing about music. As a standard issue white boy who's published several books of music history, taught college classes on Black Music and American Cultural History, and served on the Nominating Committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I've always thought of myself as one of the good guys: a co-conspirator with the women dedicated to revising the "White Boys with Guitars" history of rock and roll. Most of that work was worth doing; I resigned from the Rock Hall in a dispute over what I still think was a set of shady machinations designed to minimize Chaka Khan and Joan Jett's (as well as Los Lobos') chances of being elected.

But.

Gradually, and at an accelerated pace over the last year and a half, I've become aware of how much – some relatively little things, some huge – I'd missed.

I'll begin with The Devil You Know, which I first heard the week after America in its infinite wisdom decided to send the Devil we damn well should have known better back to the (increasingly and apparently indelibly) White House. I came across the album in a brief excerpt from a National Public Radio interview included in How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History, edited by Alison Fensterstock and based on National Public Radio's series "Turning the Tables." Reflecting on the "glamour associated with singer-songwriters that wasn't being given to just singers," Rickie Lee Jones reminds us that once a singer interprets a song "it's yours. It doesn't really - to me, it doesn't make it more mine because I wrote it."

Thinking about mixes I've compiled of "covers" by Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Joan Baez, and Otis Redding, I nodded in agreement. Jones goes on to talk about her take on the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." Immortalized as the soundtrack to murder at Altamont and embraced as an anthem of the nihilistic wing of the failed 1968 revolution, the Stones' version speaks to the dark heart of a tormented time.

In the interview, Rickie Lee Jones describes the song as a "kind of evocation," "a powerful, frightening, fun romp through the upper echelons of hell." Curious, I ran down the song online, hit play, and was reduced to rapt silence. When Jones when into the studio with producer Ben Harper, Donald Trump was still a reality television joke. Heard today, her take feels like the summoning of powers better left alone. Where Mick Jagger's voice burst with demonic glee, Jones moans, stretches syllables like spirits from Robert Johnson's midnight Delta. Where Jagger conjures a history of revolution and betrayal, Jones evokes a future we didn't want but are now living in.

Listening to the song in 2012 must have been strange. There's never been a shortage of demonic voices in the American chorus, but . . . well, let's just say Mitt Romney looks a bit less horrifying than I thought at the time.

From "Sympathy to the Devil," I went on to the rest of an album that's remained on the heavy side of my heavy rotation ever since. Most of the songs Jones chose are familiar Sixties near-clichés: Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe," Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," Van Morrison's "Comfort You," Rod Stewart's "Seems Like a Long Time." When Jones wraps the lyrics around Harper's blue-inflected production, there's nothing familiar about them. As my feminist artist wife Leslee Nelson said when she walked through the room while Jones’ reimagining of Robbie Robertson's "The Weight" was playing: "Wow, she really made that her own." Every song on the album repays careful listening and more appreciation than this platform allows, but listen to the Stones' "Play with Fire," and Donovan's "Catch the Wind" back-to-back and the fires burning in Gaza and every embattled border just outside the room. What remains is holding each other in the warm holds of our aching minds.

The Devil You Know forced me to come correct with myself on the fact that I'd allowed myself to more or less ignore the music Rickie Lee Jones has released since the early 1990s. I haven't been alone; her last album that charted was 1991's Pop Pop. The last time I listened carefully to one of her albums was probably Pirates (1981) or The Magazine (1984). For someone who's participated in significant conversations on what music matters, that's inexcusable, if not unusual.

And it's not just about Rickie Lee Jones. Which points to the larger story I sat down to write about.

I could trace the story back in several directions, including my career teaching in the African American Studies program at the University of Wisconsin where my colleagues in the "Culture Area" for three decades were all women of color. But I'll begin with two books that challenged my understanding and deepened my experience of music and life over the last couple of years: Caryn Rose's Why Patti Smith Matters and Ann Powers' Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell: The Making of a Legend. Unlike Rickie Lee Jones, I hadn't "lost" either Smith or Mitchell. But reading Rose and Powers made it crystal clear that I'd listened to some important work only perfunctorily, something I never would have done with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, or Stevie Wonder. On the aesthetic and spiritual and emotional levels, I owe Rose and Powers for enriching my musical life, which can't be separated from anything else I do.

The books sparked a process of rethinking just how much half- or quarter-aware patriarchal premises have distorted my sense of music history. For a music historian, that's a big deal. As the light bulb flickered on and slowly brightened, I kept asking myself just why I'd stomped down on this particular landmine and more or less ignored the debris raining around me. I engaged in a sometimes heated conversation with Rose after I wrote what I thought was a laudatory review of her Patti Smith book. Basically I said I wished she'd devoted more of the space to her insightful readings of Smith's music and less to – I think the word I used was "complaining" – about the way male critics had shortchanged or distorted Smith's work at every turn. I'm not apologizing for wanting more of her razor-sharp musical writing. I knew Rose was locked into a limited word count and choices had to be made. But she held her ground without giving an inch, bestowing the difficult gift of letting me know just how much I didn't get about the importance of how the culture generally, and women musicians specifically, are framed. We more or less agreed to disagree.

As I listened to more and more of Smith's music, read her memoirs, I stopped thinking consciously about the questions Rose raised. They bubbled back up to the surface and exploded when I read Traveling, which I reviewed for No Fences. As I made my way slowly through Mitchell's music, including her collaborations with Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter – all on my short list of Jazz Heroes – it become depressingly clear to me that I'd been ignoring music that had the power to make me a better historian and to clarify some of the most important experiences in my life. As a not-quite-side-note, I've been immersed in Jungian dreamwork for a half-century. The psychological processes, many of them dealing with questions of gender and sexuality, have been interwoven with music: Miles Davis, Dylan, Van Morrison, Al Green, Leonard Cohen. It's now obvious to me that Joni belonged at the absolute center of that mix. (For a quick sample, listen to her invocation of the "Anima rising" in "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow.")

All of that prepared me for How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music. An ongoing communal project carried out by more than a hundred women who have been involved in making, writing about, and living with music, the book is a joyous celebration of performers, songs, and albums that remain undervalued in salient ways. Formally, the book is more mix tape than traditional anthology. It includes short reviews originally published as part of NPR's 2017 celebration of the "150 Greatest Albums by Women"; appreciations of a scattering of the songs on the 2018 list of "200 Greatest Songs by 21st-Century Women"; and excerpts from interviews with and statements by musicians. The highlight of the volume is the dozen or so long essays in which writers explore their responses to and relationships with the tradition's ancestors (Bessie Smith, Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe, Big Mama Thornton, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Maybelle Carter, Celia Cruz, Janis Joplin), elders (Roberta Flack, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Debbie Harry, the Pretenders) younger elders (Ani DiFranco, the Indigo Girls, Kate Bush, Gillian Welch, Tracy Chapman) and a sampling of the women moving the music down paths we can only start to imagine (Rhiannon Giddens, Beyoncé, Lorde, Gaga, St. Vincent, Meg White, Janelle Monáe, Rihanna, Robyn).

Clearly, this is a mix that can and should and will evolve along with the music. (I'm not digitally savvy, but I'm guessing some of that's online in some form now). How Women Made Music knows it's not definitive. What it is is an energetic, engaged set of calls and responses: artists responding to their changing worlds with calls that elicit responses from listeners, including artists, critics, and historians. Those responses in turn become calls, such as those in the personal essays. There'll be places where every reader will have different understandings and responses and that's just fine. I've found myself sending friends links not only to The Devil You Know but also to albums and artists I hadn't known about: the Detroit Cobras, Mia X, and the marvelous Brazilian singer Gal Costa.

And that's the center of the story that took shape for me as I continue to listen to Rickie Lee, Joni, Patti Smith and countless others. Like Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock and Soul, Why Patti Smith Matters, and Traveling – Ann Powers contributes a incisive introduction and a couple of evocative essays to How Women Made Music – this book is pretty much guaranteed to take you deeper into music you already love and outward into regions you may not have explored like Diamanda Galás's harrowing Wild Women with Steak Knives, an older and much stranger cousin to The Devil You Know.

One of the major claims threaded through How Women Made Music is that you can tell the sonic history of the 20th and 21st centuries through the music women made. There's no style, movement, or sound that women haven't put their individual or communal stamps on. That doesn't mean you want to toss out Highway 61 Revisited and Songs in the Key of Life. It's not either/or, it's both/and. We have Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson; Aretha and James Brown; Ruth Brown and Ray Charles; Janis Joplin and . . . well, I'm not sure how to finish that pairing, which is kind of the point. It's been more or less impossible for women in the music world to minimize or ignore the boys. It's been all too easy for me and my sometimes benighted brothers to remain blissfully unaware of the power of the music sounding from rooms we walk on past.

Near the start of this essay, I wrote that I'd explain the "why"s of the blindness that led me to overlook The Devil You Know and so much more. My friend Missy Kubitschek, a feminist literary critic who challenged me to weave women's music more deeply into my book A Change Is Gonna Come, pointed out, correctly, that I haven't really fulfilled the implied promise. And I realized that, for now, I can't. It wasn't like I lacked an understanding of the central issues. I can, and have, delivered lectures on the importance of not just including women in the male-centered stories we tell, but of rearranging the pieces in response to women's lives and work. To some extent, I think my failure here grew out of having participated in conversations, both academic and "popular," that had been powerfully shaped by patriarchal ideas. But that's not entirely true and in any case not adequate. Danny Alexander, whose book on Mary J. Blige echoes many of the points raised by Rose and Powers, convinced me long ago that if you want to know what's important in pop music this week, pay attention to what teenage girls are listening to. The year-end mix I compile each year has had more music by women than men for more than a decade. There's no obvious answer to why, despite knowing better on multiple levels, what happened happened. And it's not like Patti Smith or Joni Mitchell's genius needs my affirmation.

So I guess the best I can do is say that my blindness bears witness to the immense power of patriarchal "thinking." It's not a matter of assenting to propositions, saying the right thing. It's a matter of being vigilant even, or especially, when you think you’ve got things covered. To come correct with yourself when you fall short. I hope this essay serves as a jazz improvisation, a testing and revising, and hopefully clarifying of established phrasings. If it says nothing else, it's that the undervaluing of women's writing and music has simply got to stop.

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