Whistle, Daugher,Whistle
A program of traditional American folk songs that portray the lives of women in history.
Susan plays traditional and mountain folk, old-timey songs she learned from her Aunties, and standard country. Susan sings and plays her two Gibson guitars: a J-200 and a Gibson-12 string, a Collings dreanought, and an Olsen five-string open-backed banjo, played mountain style.
Listen to Susan sing a bit of Housewife's Lament live at the Acoustic Brew in State College, PA. © 1994
Meet the Women of America's past; We see her everywhere. We've felt her presence in our homes and families. Touched her sweat and watched her muscles wring in our kitchens, farms, and factories. She has smiled over us as Mother. Her eyes glinted in the playgrounds and across the hearth. She has heaved and pushed against her fixed roles and mores.
She's a good girl and a bad girl; she's a woman.
Meet Emma Edmonds personified as the comely shipmate. She dressed as a man and passed in the navy. Cleverly sheís donning trousers to lead a better life; receiving such an ironic fortune from brandishing such courage. Meet Deborah Samson and Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, who lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, "Molly Pitcher" to the soldiers of the Revolutionary War because she slaked their thirst, or Juanita Velaquez who spied for the Confederacy. Some of our greatest soldiers were women and unmarked graves believed to be thiers were opened and the remains were reburied with honors. Rare for our country's history, lucky husbands recieved their wive's miitary pensions.
Say "How do" to Corey, a backwoods woman who survives by dint of wit and secret whiskey recipe, ever eluding the revenue man. Or meet Lucretia Mott, a most respected businesswoman who was afforded her opportunity when she was widowed. Her life didn't end with her husband's, she began a new one.
We remember Naomi Wise slain by her brutal lover. We remember her and honor all of the lives curst' with abuse and violence in our past, and still, in our present.
And yonder goes Betsy, leading Ike and the wagon train across 200 miles of wilderness to a new home. Frankie is the symbol for the suffagettes who sing her name as they march for the right to vote.
We'll meet Margaret Sanger, Ida Tarbell, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ethel Payne, Anne Hutchinson, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman, Rosa Parks, Dorothea Dix, Sarah Winnemucca, Pocahontas, and Phyllis Wheatley, and many, many more. Who is the real American woman?
Keep whistling, Daugher.
- Song List