female musicians

Carol Kaye is one of the most prolific pop music musicians you've never heard of. She and her 4-6 strings have backed some of the most popular songs, movies, and television series of the past fifty decades, and can be heard "These Boots Were Made for Walking," guitar on Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" and Richie Valens "La Bamba"...among others!

Damn, Anita Blay is badass!
For one thing, you can tell just by looking at her that she’s an odd duck. She is prone, for instance, to wearing poof-y shouldered ’80s jackets and things with polka dots. She claims to have intentionally gained weight because, as she put it in a recent Guardian article, "I don't want to be 'pretty'. I don't aspire to be like the Pussycat Dolls…I want to be an artist who people can believe in." But it’s Blay’s songs that really do it. The twentysomething British songwriter goes by the name thecocknbullkid, and she has created her own musical world, one filled with equal parts quirky soul-pop (Macy Gray-ish), zingy synth-pop (Yaz-ish), and lo-fi computer zings (Midnight-Star-ish).

 

Ellie Greenwich, October 23, 1940 – August 26, 2009

American singer, songwriter, and producer Ellie Greenwich died yesterday of a heart attack. Greenwich was best known for writing and co-writing such girl group classics as "Be My Baby" (The Ronettes), "Da Doo Ron Ron" (The Crystals), "Leader of the Pack" (The Shangri-Las), "River Deep, Mountain High" (Ike & Tina Turner), and many others. Greenwich and Jeff Barry, her former husband and writing partner, had 17 singles in the pop charts of 1964.

 

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