Cris Williamson was a teacher before she became a singer-songwriter. In 1973, when she was in her mid-twenties, she played one of her first post-teaching shows at a small venue located in a Washington, D.C. coffee shop, and drew a crowd far larger than she anticipated. When she launched into her first original song, “Joanna,” the room broke into knowing applause.
Baffled, Williamson tried pressing on. Then the audience began singing every word, startling her enough that she lost her place. One voice cut through the rest. It belonged to Meg Christian, a musician and lesbian separatist who had been covering Williamson’s songs across the city, and who had brought her own devoted coffeehouse following with her.
At the end of the set, as Williamson packed her guitar into its case, Christian introduced herself. She asked the question she had already put to the other lesbian musicians who’d come through D.C. before her, as well as any female musician of medium notoriety, including Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt: “What do you think of women’s music?”
Williamson hesitated, confused. “What are you talking about? What do you mean by that? Do you mean women singing music?”
“Yes,” Christian said. “But also more.”
Shortly after, more came in. Several dykes of the radical lesbian collective the Furies muscled into the room, introducing themselves, “and scaring the shit out of me,” Williamson later recalled. One of them, notebook in hand, repeated Christian’s question: “What do you think of women’s music?” Before Williamson could try another answer, they demanded her response live on air, for their late-night radio show.
The Furies brought Williamson downstairs into a small room with a round table, mic in the center, and a woman manning the control board. They tried another question: “What about sexism? Have you experienced much of that?” She rambled a little—“Well, you know, I’ve been pretty lucky…”—and then she turned to them: “What about you, Furies? What are you going to do about it?” The Furies told her they’d been brainstorming enterprises where women would be leaders, investors, and employees. They toyed with the idea of a women-only restaurant. Williamson suggested, “Why don’t you start a record label?” The next day, Olivia Records was born.
In the early ’70s, nine women left their jobs as lawyers and teachers to establish Olivia. Although Williamson ultimately did not participate in the label’s founding, she became its bestselling artist. Bonnie Raitt described her voice as “like honey dripping from a cello.” “Cris has been a whole lot of women’s heroes, including mine,” she said. Williamson’s Olivia debut, The Changer and the Changed, was released in 1975; it went on to sell over 500,000 copies, reigning for decades as one of the bestselling albums from an independent label, and inspiring the wave of mainstream lesbian musicians who followed, including k.d. lang, Tracy Chapman, and Melissa Etheridge (whose demo Olivia once rejected). Today, most have never even heard of The Changer and the Changed. The record, even its rare editions, goes for as little as a dollar on Discogs.
The Changer and the Changed was made in a cloistered world: A lesbian separatist state spread across D.C. and into Oregon—communities where women were committed to idealizing lesbianism in practice rather than in posture, as though taking today’s “DUMP HIM” tees at their word. Back then, you had your lesbian-owned business, your lesbian record label, your lesbian festivals, your lesbian potluck where someone would absolutely bring a lentil dish. You had your lesbian audience and your lesbian rules. It was all, briefly, a dyke utopia. No wonder honorary dyke Jonathan Richman found himself so happy to be dancing at the lesbian bar.
Williamson’s album was the most successful document of this time, and of the ’70s “womyn’s music” movement in general—a term dutifully respelled, to take the stank out of it. Womyn’s music functioned both as a listening genre and a kind of feminist praxis, bringing women-run operations and grassroots folk traditions into a cohesive recording and performance network. Like the political folk and civil rights freedom songs of the ’50s and ’60s, from which the movement drew, the womyn’s music movement of the ’70s produced a social justice soundtrack, giving shared form to a repertoire designed for collective recognition, participation, and circulation.
With Williamson as its flagship product, womyn’s music was an attempt to raise a new kind of feminist and lesbian consciousness, one that still runs through the pipes today. When scholar Suzanne Cusick, two decades after the womyn’s movement, asked whether there existed a lesbian musical aesthetic—an identifiable set of sonic preferences, practices, or ways of listening—we can return to the ’70s for the answer: Yes. What cabaret is to gay men, and electronic bleep-bloop to trans women, the soft, sexless, après-garde folksiness of The Changer and the Changed is to lesbians. Here, in embryo, lies the aesthetic criteria of a lesbian sonic identity, carefully made and now stabilized through certain conventions and throughlines, a criteria that still, amazingly, lingers in much of what we call “sapphic” pop music today, from Lucy Dacus’ muted indie rock to Clairo’s brushy soft-focus.
The Radicallesbians, a group aligned with the Furies, deliberately set out to forge this new consciousness in 1970, shortly after the start of the women’s liberation movement: “As the source of self-hate and the lack of a real self are rooted in our male-given identity, we must create a new sense of self,” they wrote in a manifesto. Olivia Records was instrumental in cohering this lesbian identity into style and sound, its music and live performances granting experiential form to political ideology. Music was the best way to spread their polemic, as one of the founders, Judy Dlugacz, told lesbian journalists Pamela Brandt and Lindsy Van Gelder, since it “hits your heart before your intellect.”
Williamson’s music in particular leaned into romantic stories and moods, conveniently avoiding didacticism: “Sweet woman risin’ inside my glow/I think I’m missin’ you,” she sang on “Sweet Woman.” Romance was a core issue for the base. At first, the collective considered calling their new venture Siren Records, but the name “Olivia” won out at Christian’s suggestion. It was the title of a 1940s pulpish novelette by the unfortunately named Dorothy Bussy, about a schoolgirl’s education in the least accredited sense. Its sentences predate Olivia’s separatist utopianism, already arriving breathless and a little overdressed for the occasion: “Every portion of me open to receive each softest caress ... down, down, toward some unknown, delicious sea.”
Williamson’s music had sensual aspirations. The Changer and the Changed was built on heightened receptivity, tactility, and the whole sensorium of pleasure and pain present in lesbian romance lit. But it wasn’t exactly ahead of the curve musically, which was mostly the point. “Music was just a by-product,” Dlugacz said later. The songs followed, easy and tuneful; sturdy and serviceable. It made lesbianism a peculiar engine for fandom, the audience arriving already convinced, a phenomenon still evident today. Would there be any reason for people to listen to Hayley Kiyoko or Fletcher otherwise?
Music has always been key to the construction of a positive lesbian feminist identity, argue sociologists Jo Reger and Sam Heintz in the journal Sexuality & Culture. And womyn’s music came with clear aesthetic mandates, defined just as much by what it was as what it shouldn’t be: cock rock. It was as though these musicians were anticipating Susan McClary’s gender essentialist text Feminine Endings, in which she argued that dominant Western music privileged masculinist songforms, which she labeled as tension, climax, and resolution.
Williamson was already intuitively countering these “masculinist” ideals in The Changer and the Changed, avoiding dramatic peaks and allowing the song to sustain itself. She held feelings in equilibrium, rather than discharging them. Across The Changer and the Changed, everything glides in warm, mid-toned roundness. The lyrics are gravely sincere; the words “light,” “soul,” “love,” and “home” are everywhere, and every time she sings them, Williamson lifts the vocal line.
On “Waterfall,” a song worthy of the Great American Songbook, she continually delays harmonic resolution, her voice a high-lonesome soprano—somewhere between Carole King’s and Laura Nyro’s—as she augments rather than letting the dam break.
She builds outwards, adding suspensions and additive tones to the rivulet like silt and stones. She holds all of her songs in this single stream, this continuous present.
While the album, and many others that came from Olivia—notably Christian’s I Know You Know and Teresa Trull’s The Ways a Woman Can Be—superficially resembled folk music, the sparse arrangements stood apart from the era’s other female folk artists. Joni Mitchell, for instance, was exploring jazz fusion in the mid-1970s; King was expanding into lush, studio-driven pop production; and Baez was moving toward politically charged, orchestrated arrangements. In contrast, early womyn’s music cultivated a deliberately spare, traditionally inspired folk sound: acoustic guitar and piano, minimal percussion, no electric guitar, and multiple female voices layered in harmony. Rooted in community and protest traditions, folk music already carried liberatory ideals, making it a natural vehicle for womyn’s music. For Williamson, who was an ecofeminist and Lesbian Lander before those terms even existed, the draw lay more in its association with rural, earthy notions of authenticity.
Born in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1947, Williamson grew up moving through Colorado and Wyoming as the daughter of a forest ranger. On Sundays, her mother would lay out the linen on the kitchen table and play music from a wind-up Victrola (the family had no electricity). Williamson fell in love with folk music, studying the work of Bob Dylan and Judy Collins, learning her own style through imitation by drawing from the well of rootsy broadside ballads like “Silver Dagger” and “Banks of the Ohio”—songs, Williamson said, “that were ‘always sad…always beautiful.’”
This sadness, this beauty in Williamson’s music strikes a balance not unlike the hymnody her ears were trained on as a churchgoing child. In The Changer and the Changed, she found a way to crack open the hymn, filling it with the ardor of her own romantic experience. She redirected the devotional intensity away from the hypostatic God and towards God the Woman, a kind of piousness that set the bedrock for womyn’s music later on.
Williamson first discovered the link between God and girls in Gertrude Horn, the female minister at her Congregational Church in Colorado. At the end of each sermon, Horn would ask the congregation what hymn they’d like to sing in closing. Williamson always suggested “Open My Eyes, That I May See,” a Methodist hymn written by Clara Scott in 1895. She later repurposed that song—and the participatory nature of religious worship more generally—into The Changer’s most anthemic number “Song of the Soul.” She plays a boom-chuck accompaniment, staying close to the progression of the original hymn, her rhymes strophic and simple, rounding out every other line. “And we’ll sing this song/Why don’t you sing along?” Williamson chants with a chorus of women flowering around her.
Williamson drew a devotional crowd. She had a saint-like grace and an obvious beauty. She was tall and deer-like, a finalist in the Miss Wyoming pageant (the other contestants voted her Miss Congeniality). While still living in Sheridan, Wyoming, she performed on a local radio station and soon drew the attention of listeners, three of whom raised $300 and founded Avanti Records, the label that would release her first three albums before her Olivia debut. After graduating, she eventually settled in Sonoma County in Northern California. While performing at a San Francisco folk club, she was discovered by a manager who secured a deal with Ampex Records. Williamson’s first album recorded in a studio, for Ampex, was jaunty and poppy, more Carly Simon than the McGarrigle sisters. She played in the tradition of—gasp—rock and standards.
When the Furies asked what she thought of “women’s music” in 1973 after finding a copy of that album, they were using the question to try to convert her towards their self-styled lesbian separatism. The following year, they recorded The Changer and the Changed in a studio space rented from far-right Christians. They advertised Williamson’s music in magazines like the Lesbian Connection, calling for listeners and voluntary distributors to help spread the lesbian gospel with the promise that “no men will profit from the sales.”
Toward the end of 1975, Williamson supported the album with a nationwide tour, where audiences of up to 2,000 women swayed in congregation and sang along in liturgical communion. They clutched their records close to their chest and often became so overwhelmed during Williamson’s set they had to run to the bathroom to hold one another and weep. “It’s been a long time since I’ve sung among strangers, and the sensation brings me back to the Catholic hymns of my childhood,” said Williamson.
Moments like this would soon find a recurring home at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a central gathering point on the emerging womyn’s music circuit. In its earliest years, the festival was so under-resourced that nearly everything had to be borrowed or rented, even the lumber. And yet, for thousands of women coming out in the early 1970s and beyond, attending became a self-fashioned rite of passage, an immersion in a women-only space that opened onto a range of consciousness-raising experiences. There, Williamson urged the crowd into song as they broke bricks of granola at the lesbian Eucharist. “Lean on me, I am your sister,” thousands sang, hand in hand, a collective body shaped as much by its solidarity as its exclusions. The festival was governed by a transphobic “womyn-born-womyn” policy and drew a largely white, WASPish clientele, imposing rigid and generalized definitions of what a lesbian was, or ought to be.
Williamson hardly had any notion of who she was singing for or why. As she later recalled in an interview at Berklee School of Music: “I had no idea what women’s music was.” She generally found Olivia Records “very strict”; she was an integrationist rather than a separatist, standing firmly apart from the womyn’s music polemic, even as its greatest success. On The Changer and the Changed, Williamson’s many songs about Earth and birds drew from a strain of feminist spirituality that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, when countercultural thinkers began to reimagine womanhood itself as divine. It was a time when many white lesbians gravitated toward Wicca and pagan traditions, elevating visions of a pre-Christian matriarchy over the symbols of mainstream religion, excluding the Black theological thought that influenced these ideas.
Olivia Records—and much of lesbian separatism in general—obscured the Black traditions that had influenced them. Lesbian separatism, as sociologist Todd Gitlin theorized, was built on Black separatist traditions. And, as Angela Davis argued in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, womyn’s music itself drew from the Black lesbian songbook of the 1940s Harlem Renaissance, a time when blues artists built their own form of lesbian aesthetic and style—one that never made it out of their underground networks and into broader lesbian-feminist consciousness. These singers, despite performing decades earlier, were far more explicit about their lesbianism: “It’s true I wear a collar and a tie…Talk to the gals just like any old man,” sang Gertrude “Ma” Rainey.
Olivia’s only Black artists, Linda Tillery and Mary Watkins, left the label after only two years, both of them disappointed by low album sales. Tillery complained that she hadn’t fit in, that the womyn’s music movement was really “the white womyn’s music.” Sandy Stone, the legendary trans woman who mixed Williamson’s album, was taunted by a camo-dressing paramilitary group called the Gorgons, who threatened to kill her with their live weapons, because of her association with Olivia.
But it was, of course, the white, middle-class, mostly cisgendered version of lesbianism that won out and came to occupy our contemporary aesthetic associations with “sapphic” and all its attendant branches. Just as women of the ’70s were using “Do you listen to Cris Williamson?” as a pick-up line, sapphics today ask the same question but with girl in red.
Listen to her, or many musicians in her “sapphic pop” cohort, and you’ll hear the fixings of womyn’s music: folksy, simple, hushed. The music appears like an afterimage of a 1970s separatist cultural project that fused politics, aesthetics, and community into a deliberate musical ideology that’s never quite left lesbian consciousness. What began as a deliberate counter to masculine rock energy has become, over generations, an intuitive taxonomy. Fans identify “sapphic-coded” music without necessarily articulating why, because the criteria have been internalized at the level of perception. Being a lesbian is no longer a requirement.
In 2021 piece for Artforum, Sasha Geffen recognized in Taylor Swift’s pandemic albums Folklore and Evermore an analog with the sound of Williamson’s era: “The harmonica, distant slide guitar, and springy acoustic chords on ‘betty’ do, in fact, nod to decades of lesbian musicianship, from the women’s-music movement of the 1970s to the latest wave of artists.” Since 2013, listeners have also tagged the Irish singer Hozier as “sapphic,” not because of his own identity but because his music eerily mimics the aesthetic criteria of womyn’s music. Like Williamson, his songs are quasi-religious (take me to church!), and treat women as devotional deities, with songs like “Sunlight” and “From Eden” rendering women as elemental, nature-bound forces, while weaving in Biblical and mythological allusions. In her blog post “What Is It With Lesbians and Hozier?” Toronto journalist and poet Jordan Currie writes that she can “hear an echo of [Sappho’s] spirit” in his “mythic depictions of women and femininity.”
Today, Hozier may be the closest we get to the faded dream of the womyn’s music movement. Olivia Records ceased operations in 1990 due to dwindling sales, rebranding as a lesbian travel company. After taking out a $50,000 loan to buy a ship, it’s become a modestly successful cruise line—famous enough to cameo in an episode of The L Word—but the fantasy it sells is, quite literally, a vacation from reality. The lesbian utopia, once imagined as a place you might live, now departs from port on a fixed itinerary. On land, there are roughly 36 remaining lesbian bars across the United States. For many young sapphics, “community” flickers around TikTok hashtags: #wlw, #girlkissing, #queerdaddy. Elder dykes gather on Reddit’s r/OlderLesbians to mourn what has been lost.
While Olivia Records would eventually wind down, it didn’t entirely mark the end of the lesbian-feminist label model. Mr. Lady Records, founded in 1996 by Kaia Wilson, carried that lineage forward, and her own band, The Butchies, covered Williamson’s songs, folding them back into a living continuum and reframing them within a queercore context.
Today, Williamson lives in Seattle, playing shows in much smaller rooms. She distanced herself from the womyn’s movement in 1980, when she committed its greatest sin: following up The Changer and the Changed with a rock album. The womyn’s music movement ultimately failed Black women, trans women, and even Williamson herself. Yet The Changer and the Changed, an album so exquisite, so beautiful, still opens imaginative space for other ways of living and relating. From the failures of the movement that birthed it, other possibilities can take shape—like the chance to loosen Williamson’s reputation from the limits of the movement that once held her.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.
