Diana Davies: Music for the People

(Ella; The Valley's Journal of Women in Music:

Dec. '96: p.4, by Helen Harrison)

"Half the time I want to listen to music, and half the time I want to play it," says local performer Diana Davies. "I wish there were grants so that people could just go listen to music. I could listen until I pass out."

Davies is not shy when it comes to supporting fellow musicians. Many of us who play locally have been sustained by Davies' enthusiasm - right up front with her head bobbing, always coming up afterward with a kind word - even when, or especially when, it seems like no one else is listening. Maybe her heartfelt support comes from having been there: Davies has been playing her unique brand of "folk-punk" since the '60's, and has faced the challenges of stage-fright, self-doubt, and an often indifferent music industry that all musicians must contend with in some form.

The child of a large farming family from Maine and the Catskill Mountains, Davies became interested in music at an early age. Her parents listened to a lot of jazz and Davies found herself drawn to Jazz and blues singers such as Billie Holiday, Big Mama Thorton, and Nina Simone - an influence you can hear in her own music. At the age of sixteen, she dropped out of high school ("It was ghastly"), and began writing songs on a five-dollar guitar her parents gave her. "It had strings like piano wire. How I could play that thing then, I don't know." She soon traveled to Greenwich Village, then Boston, playing on the street and in cafes. She found the former much easier.

"I felt anonymous on the street. I didn't care if they heard me, but in a club if I looked up and saw people looking at me, I might run out. When I got to be old enough, I'd get really drunk before I played."

Over the years, Davies worked in various music-related jobs, such as running open mics, doing sound and setting up equipment at clubs. She continued to perform, and hooked up with a couple of all-female bands in the 70's. One, called Patchwork, had members who made instruments as well as played them, and worked with kids in the schools, teaching them to make up their own songs. A member of Patchwork was among the first women to pass the Able-Bodied Seaman's Exam, worked on docks from Maine to New York, and researched and sang songs about women and the sea. The group played some "strange places," but the seedier venues were often the best, says Davies. "I've played in a lot of creepy places and I've really loved it. They weren't sophisticated and jaded and that's the difference."

Davies also played in groups with Nan Washburne, who researched classical women composers and co-founded the New England Women's Symphony around that time. "I was fascinated," says Davies. "I'd never heard of compositional works by women before. And I discovered that a Iot of early music was kind of like punk, with weird instruments, and really rough-edged. The poor people's music was a lot different from tbe rich people's music." In 1976, she played at the Michigan Women's Music Festival, backed - to her near disbelief - by Jerene Jackson O'Brien, Big Mama Thorton's guitar player. And in the '80's, composer Kay Gardner recorded Davies' song "Reminiscence" on her album Fisher's Daughter, and asked Davies to play guitar on the track.

For two years, Davies supported herself by street-performing in Cambridge and Northampton, supplemented by dumpster-diving for objects to sell at flea-markets. "It was thoroughly on the edge and thoroughly energetic and I liked it. I felt like what I was doing was honest hard work, although I'm sure everyone would have thought it was hideous, ghastly not-work.

She remembers a time when a marginal-looking fellow stood and listened to her playing for about an hour. "He gave me five bucks and he was dressed in absolute rags. He gave me more money than anybody ever gave me in this town. I wanted to say 'I can't take this,' but I couldn't. It blew my mind. Some people will walk by you playing on the street and look at you like, 'Scum,' like you have rabies or something." Nevertheless, she says, "I like street performing better than almost anything."

Davies' songs often focus on the oppressed or ignored, and always stem from an actual story or personal experience. Two of the songs on her forthcoming tape, "Twelve O 'Clock Girl in a Nine-O'Clock Town" deal with octogenarians playing life by their own rules. "You're not supposed to be outrageous when you're eighty," she remarks, adding, "Rock and roll is not just music for kids. It's outrageous music for everyone." The song "Who Were You Nancy," about Nancy Spungen's (of Sid and Nancy) murder, is one of several by Davies about women given a short-shrift by history. "Every so often, I'd see a male wearing a Sid Vicious T-shirt, and I'd be freaking out, thinking I've got to do something, so finally I wrote a song about it. Not because I'm trying to glorify Nancy, but because something really terrible happened to this woman. It wasn't just Sid."

Davies would love to see the streets of Northampton crowded with street performers, and more outdoor shows like one organized in the Amherst Common last year. "People came who wouldn't pay to see punk in a bar. A lot of little girls got to see women playing punk rock. Where else are they going to see a woman playing bass, or electric guitar, or drums?" Davies says that while there are more women these days playing more types of instruments, "Women playing rock are still treated like a freak show." She adds, however, that the Valley is more supportive of women musicians than any other area she's seen, and feels this support comes from men as well as women. "There's an extraordinary amount of music that's come from this area. The variety and quality are amazing. I don't think people know what they have here in terms of music."

Davies is particularly fond of political music, whether it's folk or hardcore punk - from Neil Young, to folk songwriter Melvina Reynolds, to X-Ray Spex, to Crass. She identifies closely with the young people in the political hardcore scene. "A lot of people who are sixteen now are facing things that I faced when I was sixteen. The schools don't treat them like human beings. A lot of them are having terrible times at home. They know that the world's being run by dictators, people are starving to death, and all the money's going to the military. When I was sixteen I was enraged all the time. I was living on the street. I was right when I was sixteen, and the people I know now who are sixteen - they're right. They know about survival. They know they're brilliant human beings, and that the world does not recognize them as such."

go back