Two years ago, when North Carolina singer-songwriter Dawn Landes was first inspired to make an album based on a 1971 book of feminist folk songs and poems dating back across two centuries, her first thoughts concerned how best she could interpret them. Next, her thoughts turned to whose help she might enlist to help her put her own contemporary yet timeless stamp on them.
By the time she had collaborated with producer Josh Kaufman and singers such as Rissi Palmer, Emily Frantz of Watchhouse and The Lone Bellow’s Kanene Pipkin to create The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, released in March of this year, she was already planning to take the project to a whole new level – presenting the album in a live setting.
The possibilities are considerable because, as Landes explains, there was always going to be plenty of room to roam within these centuries-old compositions. “A lot of the original lyricists were not musicians,” she says of the book, which she found in a thrift store near her Chapel Hill home. “They were taking other people’s songs and changing the lyrics. So in some cases we felt able to take their lyrics and change the song.” Now she’s found that bringing the songs to life on-stage lends them new impact. “When we do the full show, it’s just so powerful, because there’s this great feeling of solidarity between women.”
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The show has a chronological structure and, in its latter stages, features some very special guests. “We did it in North Carolina with [bluegrass legend] Alice Gerrard, who turns 90 this year, and in London we’ll have [89-year-old] Peggy Seeger. These women were making music when the book was published, so it feels really great to have their participation and support.”
“The Liberated Woman’s Songbook is extraordinary, as is Dawn Landes’ CD of the same name,” Seeger tells Uncut. “Some of the songs are descriptive, some leading to or actively demanding change at every level. I’m very much looking forward to several of us women singers getting together onstage at the Barbican. This will be a seminal event – the first of many to come, as more and more of us write about where we all are in this ongoing battle for equality plus more.”
One album highlight is “Hard Is The Fortune Of All Womankind”, an anthem of defiant female independence dating back to the 1830s that was later reinterpreted by Seeger, Joan Baez and others under the title “The Wagoner’s Lad”. Landes has made a promotional video for it in which she sings the song in various guises, from 19th-century farmhand to 1970s Miss World protester, which gives a glimpse of some of the ways she’ll depict the different eras of song onstage.
“Projections and costumes in the show represent the times the songs were originally written in, and help people really place themselves in the music and its history, to feel the progression of women’s struggles through music,” she explains. “In some ways it highlights the fact that similar battles are still happening with things like Roe v Wade being overturned, but it also makes me feel hopeful. People have told me they walk away feeling empowered and wanting to do positive things.”
Landes is still writing her own new material, but she also hasn’t ruled out doing further projects like this. “I feel like the research never stops. Looking into the history of folk music and protest music in general, I’m particularly drawn to women’s take on things because it wasn’t well documented. And so whenever I do come across something, it’s like finding a diamond in the rough.”
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Dawn Landes & Friends perform The Liberated Woman’s Songbook at the End Of The Road festival this weekend and also at Moseley Folk & Arts Festival, Birmingham (Aug 31), West Malvern Social Club (Sept 3), Lending Room, Leeds (Sept 4), The Cluny, Newcastle (Sept 5), the Barbican, London (Sept 7) and Komedia, Brighton (Sept 8)
