Sallie Bingham

  • Events
  • Blog
    • Doris Duke
    • Best of 2024
    • My Favorites
    • Full Archives
    • Writing
    • Women
    • Philanthropy
    • My Family
    • Politics
    • Kentucky
    • New Mexico
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Theater
    • Religion
  • Books & Plays
    • Doris Duke
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Plays
    • Poetry
    • Anthologies
  • Writing
    • Short Stories
    • Poems
    • Plays
    • Translations
  • Resources
    • Audio
    • Video
    • Print
    • Biography
  • About
    • Contact
 
You are here: Home / Art / Something Changes in Me… Music and Revolution

Something Changes in Me… Music and Revolution

July 6th, 2011 by Sallie Bingham in Art 1 Comment

Helen Reddy - I Am WomanMy musical knowledge is severely limited. I can sometimes recognize Mozart but can’t distinguish his work from Haydn’s. And that’s about as far as I can go.

My heart was moved when I was a teenager by the top ten—such hymns to the status quo as “Red Sails in the Twilight” (“We marry tomorrow and she goes sailing no more”) which I listened to avidly after school on my bedroom radio.

To these were added the old-time songs we learned at my girls’ school: “Gaudeamus igitur”—with is ominous description of old age and death; on top of that, the old Christian hymns, peculiarly inappropriate for girls—“Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and Kipling’s Recessional with its warning against “Lesser breeds without the law.” There was glory in singing those songs together, all 150 of us, and perhaps that is what led me to the new songs of the 1970’s.

That’s when Holly Near and Helen Reddy began to hit to charts, and Meg Christian and Chris Williamson. I’d already heard Joan Baez in a smoky bar in Cambridge but her folk songs reminded me uncomfortably of the Kentucky past I was at that point trying to leave behind. “Do you wear shoes?” uppity boys at Harvard used to ask me.

Perhaps we no longer believe we can roar.

But Holly, Helen, Meg, and Chris! One summer, driving to the Adirondacks to begin my novel based on the life of the American poet HD at that blissful haven, Blue Mountain Center, I listened to their tapes over and over and over until I was in a daze of hope. Something could change. I could change something. It wasn’t yet clear to me what—that would come later. But my sense of power was enchanting, energizing, a little delusional, and brand-new…

Even today, Holly’s songs stir my core of rebellion: “Something changes in me when I witness someone’s courage,” or her spine-chilling memorial to the killing at Kent State: “If you can die for freedom I can too”—the first political event to figure in one of my novels, where a genteel wedding is disrupted by the matron of honor’s insistence on talking about Kent State (Matron of Honor, Zoland Books).

Where are these songs today? What teenaged girl listens to them on her bedroom radio—or rather, on her iPod? They were dangerous then, they are dangerous now, because those singers insisted on our responsibility, as women, to fight injustice.

Reddy’s “I Am Woman” was immediately disparaged—“I am woman, hear me roar”—but what she was insisting on was our power and our responsibility to “work for freedom, freedom, freedom.”

Perhaps we no longer believe we can roar. Does that also mean we have given up all responsibility for the world in which we live?

Only Aretha in all her size and dignity continues to appear on the big stages; she will not be suppressed, or forgotten, or ignored. But the white song sisters who meant so much to me years ago have been eclipsed by all the later forms of pop, none of which seem to have much room for the open rebellion, the love of fight and flight, that is so important for women to maintain, if only in a tiny corner of our souls.

Share
Tweet
Share
Buffer
0 Shares

In Art Music

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Fran Randall says

    July 14th, 2024 at 6:40 am

    I want to purchase the song that begins:

    something changes in me by Holly Near

    Do you know the title of the song?

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 

You might also like

  • The High Desert Sax Quartet with Peggy Abbott
    Music Hath Charms
    I grew up with almost no music at all. Music, after all, is not words and only words counted in that world....
  • David Saliamonas
    Genius
    There are so many obligations, so many treats and distractions, that I have failed—until now—to change my life to accommodate the books I still want and need to write....
  • Cameron Carpenter
    The Great I Am
    There remains for me always an uneasiness about those large egos that can so easily trample smaller ones, even when the owner of the ego does not choose to exercise that power....
  • Sweet Honey In The Rock
    Sweet Honey In The Rock: The Other Side of Victimization
    These women were so large... so encompassing in their warmth and passion, even for their audience of white women, that I was stunned—this is the way we can all go, I thought, if we have the courage, we who are all hurt to some greater or le...
 

Subscribe

 

Latest Comments

  • Martha White on The Fruits of the Past Five Years: “Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings: “And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing…” July 6th, 11:14 am
  • Nenita on The Fruits of the Past Five Years: “I like your writings, I can relate to you. If I had been persevering and seriously aware of my interests…” July 6th, 11:13 am
  • Sallie Bingham on Whose Eyes: “Thank you, James – you are correct!” June 29th, 11:19 am
  • Martha White on Feeding the Fish: “Blinkying Report:: Our neighborhood rabbits have been observed leaping into the air three or four feet off the ground. It…” June 29th, 8:10 am
  • Martha White on Whose Eyes: “Subtle. The “b” stays silent—subtle, even.” June 24th, 12:59 pm

Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
Visiting Linda Stein

Visiting Linda Stein

March 3rd, 2025
Back on October 28th, 2008, I visited artist Linda Stein's studio in New York City and tried on a few of her handmade suits of armor.

Listen To Sallie

Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

November 8th, 2024
This event was recorded November 1, 2024 in Taos, NM at SOMOS Salon & Bookshop by KCEI Radio, Red River/Taos and broadcast on November 8, 2024.
Taken by the Shawnee Reading

Taken by the Shawnee Reading

September 1st, 2024
This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

Upcoming Events

Jul 25
July 25th - July 27th

The 9th Annual Taos Writers Conference

SOMOS Salon & Bookshop
Taos MO
Sep 23
All day

How Daddy Lost His Ear – Garcia Street Books

Garcia Street Books
Santa Fe NM
Sep 30
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm MDT

How Daddy Lost His Ear – The Church of the Holy Faith

The Church of the Holy Faith
Santa Fe NM
View all of Sallie's events

Latest Tweets

salliebingham avatar Sallie Bingham @salliebingham ·
1 Jul 1940081262770708499

Years ago a man I was in love with persuaded me to have a large fish pond dug near my studio. I think it was his attempt to be part of my necessarily solitary life there; like other such attempts it failed—and now I'm left with the fish pond! https://buff.ly/fGgnN39 #Koi #KoiPond

Image for the Tweet beginning: Years ago a man I Twitter feed image.
salliebingham avatar Sallie Bingham @salliebingham ·
30 Jun 1939751124925390864

Our wisdom outlasts kingdoms and democracies and tyrannies. It is for all places all people and all times. Unfortunately our wisdom can be bought, suborned, which is what I see in all the pretty women around Mr. T. "Lady Wisdom": https://buff.ly/mKAYBnf #HagiaSophia #DonaldTrump

Image for the Tweet beginning: Our wisdom outlasts kingdoms and Twitter feed image.
Load More

Recent Press

Sallie Bingham's latest is a captivating account of ancestor's ordeal
Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican

“I felt she was with me” during the process of writing the book, Bingham says. “I felt I wasn’t writing anything that would have seemed to her false or unreal.”

Copyright © 2025 Sallie Bingham. All Rights Reserved.

Press Materials   —   Contact Sallie

Privacy Policy

Menu
  • Events
  • Blog
    • Doris Duke
    • Best of 2024
    • My Favorites
    • Full Archives
    • Writing
    • Women
    • Philanthropy
    • My Family
    • Politics
    • Kentucky
    • New Mexico
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Theater
    • Religion
  • Books & Plays
    • Doris Duke
    • Fiction
    • Nonfiction
    • Plays
    • Poetry
    • Anthologies
  • Writing
    • Short Stories
    • Poems
    • Plays
    • Translations
  • Resources
    • Audio
    • Video
    • Print
    • Biography
  • About
    • Contact