Cris Williamson

Just as baseball historians can only speculate about how players in the old Negro leagues would have fared in the absence of segregation in the major leagues prior to the arrival of Jackie Robinson in 1947, so music historians may ponder what status Cris Williamson might have assumed if she had emerged at a time when admitted homosexuals were not subject to exclusion from major record labels. By the 1990s, openly gay women artists Melissa Etheridge, Indigo Girls, and k.d. lang were able to maintain major-label contracts and sell records in the millions (although none of them had proclaimed their sexual orientation when they were signed in the 1980s). But when Williamson acknowledged being a lesbian in the 1970s, it relegated her to independent-label status and minimal coverage in the mass media, even though her lyrics made only minor reference to her romantic preference and her music conformed to conventional styles of pop/rock. She made a virtue of her exclusion, however. As part of the feminist movement, she became the leading light of the style known as "women's music," inspiring the formation of a label, Olivia Records, devoted to the style, and recording an album, The Changer and the Changed, that became one of the best-selling independent releases of its time. Thereafter, she continued to record and tour regularly, later maintaining her own label, Wolf Moon Records. Williamson was born in Deadwood, SD. Her father was a forest ranger, and she grew up without electricity in Colorado and Wyoming, listening to music on a wind-up phonograph. While living in Sheridan, WY, she began performing on a local radio station, and three listeners pooled their resources to come up with $300 to found Avanti Records, for which she cut her first album, The Artistry of Cris...