Jean Shepard is telling me about the time she met Hank Williams backstage just before he played a show in Bakersfield, California, near to where she grew up. "I was a young girl with big ambitions and I told him I was going to be a country singer. He said: 'Oh yeah? Well, there ain't much room in this business for a woman country singer.' That was the general attitude back then, but it only made me more determined. Weren't nothing going to stop me doing what I wanted to do, which was singing traditional country music the way it's supposed to be sung."
Some 60 years after that disappointing encounter with one of her heroes, Shepard, now 78, is still singing traditional country in the honky-tonk style that made her famous. Back in 1953, her second single, A Dear John Letter, a duet with Ferlin Husky, reached No 1 in the country chart before crossing over to become a mainstream hit. The themed follow-up, Forgive Me John, followed suit as did several subsequent solo singles. In the mid 1960s, after a decade in the wilderness, she had another crossover hit, Second Fiddle (To an Old Guitar), the first of 15 consecutive top-40 country singles. She was the third woman singer to join Nashville's most revered institution, the Grand Ole Opry, and, after 57 years, is now its most senior – and outspoken – member.
Shepard is a pioneering woman in a masculine, often ultra-conservative, genre, who has stayed true to the rough house roots of country. She describes honky-tonk as "pure country played in a beer joint for real people" and has little time for the slick, over-produced affectations of mainstream contemporary country. "It's manufactured, it don't tell a story and it don't sound like it means what it says. So, on three counts, it ain't country."
You can hear two contrasting examples of Shepard's down-home singing style on Country Soul Sisters: Women in Country Music 1952–74, an illuminating new compilation on the Soul Jazz label. Her version of the country standard, A Satisfied Mind, is soulful and reverential, but Two Whoops and a Holler, recorded in 1959, and written by a man, Joe Franklin, is a proto-feminist anthem. The penultimate verse gives a sense of its general message:
"If all the gals would stick by me, we'd change the world around,
We'd make the men walk on their knees and sleep out on the ground,
What I'm really tryin' to say and I know you'll understand,
The women ought to rule the world 'cause the men ain't worth a damn"
On Country Soul Sisters, Shepard takes her place alongside a select group of other female pioneers, all of whom give the lie to the notion that vintage country was an irredeemably macho genre in which strong women did not have a strong voice. The big names are there – Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette and Dolly Parton – alongside some powerful singers who have attained a cult status among fans of country's more soulful side: Jeannie C Riley, Jody Miller and, of course, the great Bobbie Gentry. (No sign, though, of the late-60s black country soul singer, Linda Martell, whose take on the Winston's soul song, Colour Him Father, is an all-time country-soul classic.)
In his sleeve notes, album compiler Stuart Baker writes: "Prior to any collective theoretical consensus of feminism ... these women were already doing it on their own terms." Many of the singers featured on the album came from poor, uneducated backgrounds, making their way successfully in a man's world through a mixture of raw talent, determination and, as Bonnie Guitar puts it, "just wanting to do what we loved doing, which was singing and playing country music".
Before the great Kitty Wells came along, a woman's role in country music was to be a backing singer for a male performer. Interestingly, Wells's first big hit, It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels, which is on the compilation, was a riposte to Hank Thompson's Wild Side of Life. The latter mourned the bar-room infidelities of certain so-called wild women, while the former reversed the point of view.
Wells, alongside Minnie Pearl and Patsy Cline, opened the door for women singers in country music, but Bonnie Guitar remains a relatively unsung pioneer who successfully challenged all the rules of what women could do in the music business. Born Bonnie Buckingham in 1923 in the town of Oberon, near Seattle, she became a singer, a session guitar player (for the likes of Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash and Ned Miller), a producer, an A&R executive and the owner of her own record label. In 1957, she had a solo hit with the dreamy Dark Moon, which wasn't very country at all. "I guess I didn't fit," she laughs now, from her home in California. "Or I just broke the rules naturally. Either way, it worked."
Two years later, against the advice of her male business partners, she produced Come Softly To Me, a quietly persuasive ballad by a vocal harmony trio called the Fleetwoods, who had just graduated from high school. Recorded in the basement of a house in Seattle, where she used several strategically placed microphones to capture the group's singularly intimate sound, the song took six months to perfect, with Bonnie playing and overdubbing all the guitar parts herself. It was her first production, the debut release on her own label, Dolton, and it subsequently became her second million-seller. She also produced the Ventures' instrumental hit, Walk Don't Run in 1960, making her a still-unsung pioneer of American guitar-led surf-pop.
"I paid my dues working for a guy called Fabor Robinson, who was what we would now call a music business entrepreneur," she recalls. "He was a genius and the angriest guy I ever met. We'd work at night in his studio in Malibu Canyon and he'd have a loaded 45 on the recording desk because of the death threats he kept getting from all the people he'd crossed in the business. He was an ornery guy and real hard to work with but that just made me more determined to get it right every time. I learned a lot about how the business worked from him."
Working with Robinson also prepared her for the wilder side of life on the road when, later, she became an in-demand guitar player. "A lot of those country guys were living hard and playing hard. I worked with Johnny Cash and he was pretty stoned most of the time. He still was a real gent, though. I went to see Jerry Lee [Lewis] one time and I swear to God he was playing on a different planet. But, you know, I was accepted by all of them because I was a good guitar player. I could do my job and they respected that."
Being a strong woman in a male-dominated music business, did she experience any discrimination at the time? "Hell, yeah, but it's only looking back that I can see how tough it was. The world was different then and I can see that some of the things that happened to me, particularly when it came to getting paid, was to do with me being a woman in a man's world.I've always been out there on my own, more or less. I was the only woman session guitar player and the only woman producer. It seems kind of strange to me now but at the time, I was just doing what I wanted to do."
Like Shepard, Bonnie has no regrets. "Country music's been good to me, but I don't live in the past. I'm 89 years old and I enjoy every day as it comes. I'm still playing, and I'm still producing. I love the studio. You have to be creative and you have to be technical. I feel like that's more and more the way the world is now, but I've been like that for years."
