AudioFile’s Jo Reed spoke with Ann Powers, critic and correspondent for NPR Music, and editor Alison Fensterstock about collaborating on HOW WOMEN MADE MUSIC, AudioFile’s spring Audiobook Club pick. A mosaic of essays with archival recordings of the artists, HOW WOMEN MADE MUSIC: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music is an Earphones Award winner and was one of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2024. Listen to their full conversation about the project and creating the audiobook on our Behind the Mic podcast below:

Partial transcript:

Jo Reed: Let's begin with Turning the Tables, since HOW WOMEN MADE MUSIC is drawn in large part from that project and as well as the NPR archives. So Ann, can you describe Turning the Tables and its origins?

Ann Powers: Absolutely. In fact, Alison was there at the birth of Turning the Tables. The project originated from a conversation that Alison and I had with our friend and frequent collaborator, Jill Heimer, who at the time was the director of Public Programs at Lincoln Center. We were in New Orleans at a festival and had seen the guitarist, Barbara Lynn, play an amazing rip-roaring set, and we're thinking about her as a pioneer of electric guitar. I mean, I think when we saw her play, she was maybe in her seventies, and we just started talking about how she's never on those lists of the greatest guitarists of all time. And that led to a larger conversation about how women are often either excluded from these kinds of lists of musical greats or kind of banished to the mid area. Maybe Joni Mitchell would be number seven. Aretha Franklin would be number five on a list, never number one. And we just generally continued this conversation for a couple of years about how to think differently about music history through the lens of women artists, women at all levels participating in music culture. And that led us to create this platform called Turning the Tables. And over the course of several years we did shows, we published a lot of material on the web, we had a podcast, we made videos, all intended to celebrate, honor, and expose people to artists who were underrepresented, overlooked, hidden in plain sight. And what we discovered in doing that is that telling the story of popular music through the stories of women changes how we think about popular music entirely.

JR: Alison, what did you want to do with HOW WOMEN MADE MUSIC? What was the impetus for the book and the audiobook?

Alison Fensterstock: This was an idea that came from NPR Music. I think at the time when the book turned into an idea, it'd been five years of Turning the Tables material, and it went all over the place. It started with a list of the 150 greatest albums by women in music. Then there was a series of essays about pre-album-era originators of blues and gospel and jazz and early country. And then there was sort of a future-gazing series where all of these critics and reporters sort of opined and crystal-ball gazed about which artists that were just emerging at that time would come to be the most influential in the future. And it had all happened organically and rolled forward without top-down organization, which made it really wonderful and spontaneous and organic feeling.

And then it seemed like a natural idea to compile it into a book. And we also had access to this wonderful treasure trove, which was the NPR archive itself from the whole entity going back to its founding in the early seventies. And so we had these amazing broadcast interviews with artists from different times in their career that we were also able to mine and use and put beside these critical takes and these scholarly explorations that were looking back at legacies of women in music. So we also had the artists’ own voices, and that was a really crucial part of the audiobook. Just having a recording of Patty Smith in 1976 or Tracy Chapman in 1989, and they're talking to each other across time, they're talking to the critics, and the critics are responding to them. I think it creates this really dynamic call and response experience, especially in the audiobook where the real voices are there.

JR: What I find so interesting about the project and now the book are the writers and the way they write about the musicians. Can you give me a sense of how you brought the writers into the project and how you chose them?

AP: One of the main goals of Turning the Tables was to be a multi-layered project. And the way we understand music history, it's one thing to approach the subject of women in music and musicians who are not men. It's another to engage those people who are actually creating the histories and creating new kinds of criticism, new kinds of reporting, new kinds of audio, radio pieces and video pieces. And it was very important to me as someone who's devoted my life to music writing to highlight this incredible community and in fact, web of communities of scholars, writers, public radio producers and editors and hosts, and artists, all of whom play a role in reshaping music history. Every year of Turning the Tables focused on a different community of writers as well as artists. So there's this incredible community of thinkers out there who are just changing the way we think about everything to do with music

JR: Alison, can you talk a little bit about how you put the audiobook together? Because of course, when we're listening to the book, we actually hear these fabulous voices.

AF: I gave Harper Audio all of the audio that I had in my files, and I did all the sequencing. The sequencing is the same as it is in the book, and it's intended to do that call and response that I was talking about, to hear a real artist's voice and then maybe hear a critic being read by a voice actor saying something that elaborates on it or goes more in depth on it. Like Ann's wonderful deep dive on Roberta Flack, who we just lost, which is a tour de force that really just explores the depth of her virtuosity and her genius and her meaning. And then you have Roberta's voice pop right in with a few comments, and it punctuates it in this amazing way when you're listening to it that I think is different than reading it.

This is an excerpt—listen to Ann and Alison’s episode on the Behind the Mic podcast to hear their full conversation.

Ann Powers photo by Emily Allen Photography, Alison Fensterstock photo courtesy of the author