How Carole King Revolutionized ’70s Music

in Gender, Music | June 15th, 2023

In 1960, The Shirelles became the first Black female group to have a #1 US hit with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”.

The song also represented a big break for its composer, 17-year-old Carole King, and her then-husband, lyricist Gerry Goffin.

The two set up shop in New York City’s Brill Building, a pre-British Invasion hotbed of songwriting teams, cranking out pop tunes for others to record.

King and Goffin’s collaboration was a fruitful one for both themselves and the artists they sent climbing the charts:

Bobby Vee with “Take Good Care of My Baby”.

The Chiffons with “One Fine Day”.

The Monkees with “Pleasant Valley Sunday”.

“Little Eva” Boyd (the couple’s babysitter) with “The Loco-Motion”.

Aretha Franklin with “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”.

The late 60s ushered in both a musical and social revolution.

As King writes in her memoir, A Natural Woman, “Had I been forty-two and Gerry forty-five, I might have understood his yearning for the Bohemian lifestyle he’d never had:”

But I was a twenty-two year old wife and mother losing my twenty-five year old husband to avant-garde ideas. I wanted my life back. Unfortunately, yesterday had a no return policy, and today wasn’t where I wanted to be. I could only hope tomorrow would be better.

The couple split in 1968, and King left New York for LA, settling in Laurel Canyon, another hive of musical activity. Here, however, singers like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, and Neil Young wrote their own songs, sharing intimate details of their lives and relationships in the name of creative expression.

King began to explore these avenues, too, though as Polyphonic’s Noah Lefevre observes in the above video essay on her seminal second album, 1971’s Tapestry, the Brill Building’s high bar for solid song craft and catchy hooks had become part of her DNA.

Her first solo recording was little heralded, but Tapestry was a smash from the get go, nabbing King Grammys for both record and song of the year, the first female solo act to be so recognized:

Tapestry changed my life. In an immediate way, it gave me financial independence, which was really wonderful. Less immediate and in an ongoing way, it opened doors.

Released as second wave feminism was cresting, Tapestry’s lyrics resonated with many women who, raised on dreams of marriage and motherhood, found themselves seeking fulfillment elsewhere, whether by choice or circumstance.

Compared to Joni Mitchell’s confessional Blue, Polyphonic’s Lefevre sees Tapestry as a work of “quiet resilience.”

It modeled the soft rock sound that became a 70s staple, and its cover art eschewed the idea of artist as glamorous being, in favor of an approachable human-scale individual.

It also afforded King the opportunity for timely reinterpretations of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “A Natural Woman,” this time as a singer-songwriter.

Listen to Carole King’s Tapestry here.

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Older Women Come Together & Play Punk Rock: Discover The Unglamorous Music Project

in Gender, Life, Music | February 13th, 2023

Punk is not only not dead, it’s getting a fresh burst of energy, thanks to The Unglamorous Music Project, a female collective in Leicester.

In accordance with punk tradition, musical ability is not a primary concern.

Shockingly, life experience is.

With five, six, and seven decades worth, Unglamorous Music Project participants have no illusions about how women their age — with the possible exception of Patti Smith — are perceived.

Rather than content themselves with crumbs and conform to societal expectations, they are going hard in newly formed bands like The Wonky Portraits, Dada Women, BOILERS, Velvet Crisis and The Verinos, above.

“This is definitely not ‘cutesy grannies have a go at punk’ band,” BOILERS’ Allison “Fish” Dunne emphasized to The Guardian:

I’ve got no fucks to give any more about what anyone thinks of me…We write our own music and we’ve got a lot to say about everything we’re angry about. I’ve been enraged for years.

The Verinos’ 61-year-old Ruth Miller, founder of The Unglamorous Music Project, told RNZ how she tapped into an unexpectedly rich reservoir of previously unacted upon mature female musical impulse, when she mentioned her plan to form a band to the friend with whom she drank coffee and talked politics.

The friend confessed that she’d long wanted to take up the drums, and on the strength of that comment was drafted as drummer for the Verinos, after watching one instructional YouTube video.

A “really cool looking older woman” with “sticking up hair” whom Miller approached in a restaurant, asking, “Excuse me, are you in a band?” earned her place by answering “No, but I’ve always wanted to learn bass.”

I think as a woman, you hit a particular age and you think, “Well, I don’t care what anyone thinks. It’s my life, and I really want to do music again, and it doesn’t matter whether people like it or not. They don’t have to listen…”

But they do like it! It’s incredibly appealing, that idea of seeing a group of older women who are just themselves.

Miller believes that rather than paying for private lessons and concentrating on the “proper” way to play music, beginners should let go of their inhibitions and have a go at playing communally.

The principles of the Unglamorous Music Project spell it out even more explicitly:

Choose an instrument that appeals and fits in with others

Find helpful people to lend you stuff and support unconditionally

Form a duo or band with other beginners straightaway

Explore very simple rhythms and sounds

Write your own words about your life

Sing great tunes and backing vocals

Play your song in a confident, cool, challenging way

Get encouragement and applause from friends
Start performing to audiences as soon as possible

Perhaps an unspoken principle, given the Project’s emphasis on fun, is assuming Ramones-style stage names, a la Vim, Vi, Volcano, Vixen and VeeDee Verino.

If you’re inspired to join the movement, mark your calendar for March, 8, International Women’s Day and join Miller’s Facebook group, 66 Days to your Debut.

via BoingBoing

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club: Behold Images from a 15th-Century Fighting Manual

in Art, Books, Gender, History, Sports | January 30th, 2023

Welcome to Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club.

The first rule of Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club is: you do not talk about Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club.

The second rule of Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club!

Why?

The Public Domain Review’s managing editor, Hunter Dukes, wisely argues that it’s because we have so little to go on, beyond these startling images of “judicial duels” between men and women in German fencing master Hans Talhoffer’s illustrated 15th-century “fight books.”

The male combatant, armed with a wooden mace, starts out in a waist-deep hole.

The female, armed with a rock wrapped in a length of cloth, stands above, feet planted to the ground.

Their matching unisex garments wouldn’t look out of place at the Met Gala, and provide for maximum movement as evidenced by the acrobatic, and seriously painful-looking paces Talhoffer puts them through.

Dukes is not alone in wondering what’s going on here, and he doesn’t mince words when calling bullshit on those responsible for “hastily researched articles” eagerly pronouncing them to be action shots of divorce-by-combat.

Such brutal methods of formal uncoupling had been rendered obsolete centuries before Talhoffer began work on his instructional manuals.

In a 1985 article in Source: Notes in the History of Art, Allison Coudert, a professor of Religious Studies at UC Davis, posits that Talhoffer might have been drawing on the past in these pages:

I would suggest that no records of judicial duels between husbands and wives exists after 1200 because of both changes in the reality and the ideal of what a woman could be and do. Before 1200, women may well have battled their husbands. Women understood and defended the importance of their economic and administrative roles in the household. After the twelfth century, however, law, custom and religion made marital duels all but unthinkable.

Why would Talhoffer bother including archaic material if the focus of his Fechtbuchs was giving less experienced fighters concrete information for their betterment?

We like the notion that he might have been seeking to inject his manuscripts with a bit of an erotic charge, but concede that scholars like Coudert, who have PhDs, research chops, and actual expertise in the subject, are probably warmer when reckoning that he was just covering his historical bases.

For now, let us enjoy these images as art, and possible sources of inspiration for avant-garde circus acts, Halloween couples costumes, and Valentines.

Explore more images from the 15th-century Fechtbuchs of Hans Talhoffer here and here.

via the Public Domain Review

How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Century Armor: A Reenactment

Watch Accurate Recreations of Medieval Italian Longsword Fighting Techniques, All Based on a Manuscript from 1404

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized & Put Online

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Cher Play All the Major Parts in a 12-Minute Remake of West Side Story (1978)

in Gender, Music, Television, Theatre | January 9th, 2023

Cher, the mononymous Goddess of Pop, gifted the small screens of the 70s with a lot of over-the-top glamour.

Her work ethic, comedic flair and unapologetic embrace of camp helped her stand out from the crowd, conferring the fame she had longed for since childhood, when she commandeered her 5th grade classmates for an unofficial, and, from the sounds of it, all-female production of Oklahoma, covering the male roles herself when the boys declined to participate.

Some twenty years later, she was a household name — one that was no longer appended to that of ex-husband Sonny Bono, co-host of the popular eponymous variety hour in which they sang, hammed their way through goofy skits, and busted each other’s chops to the delight of the live studio audience.

The 1978 television event Cher…special found her bringing many of those same talents to bear, along with country star Dolly Parton, rocker Rod Stewart, outré glam band, The Tubes, and the crowd-pleasing array of spangled, skin-baring Bob Mackie designs that defined her look.

More shocking than any of Mackie’s creations or the Musical Battle to Save Cher’s Soul, a set piece wherein Parton and a gospel choir endeavor to coax the diva from a kinky disco hellscape, is the star’s 12-and-a-half minute solo version of West Side Story, above.

This is no mere medley. Cher puts the big pot in the little, donning multiple wigs, a facsimile of the chaste white party dress Natalie Wood wore to the dance at the gym, and flats (!) to embody Tony, Maria, Anita, Bernardo and various Jets, sans irony.

Some of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning songs have been transposed to a different key to accommodate Cher’s contralto, and when they haven’t, her famous voice is stretched a bit thin.

Vocally, she makes a more convincing Jet than she does the ingenue, Maria.

(Speaking of which, let’s not forget that that’s ghost singer Marni Nixon, not Wood, as Maria on the 1961 film’s soundtrack…)

Why West Side Story?

Why not Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar? Wouldn’t those fit better thematically with the portion of the special that has Dolly and a white-robed chorus battling the denizens of Satan’s sexy playpen?

Two words:

1. Variety. That’s what Cher was peddling in the 70s.

2. Nostalgia. As Cher recalls in On the Dance Floor: Spinning Out on Screen:

I remember dancing around my living room to West Side Story (1961). I would sing all the parts and dance every single dance, when there was no one else around.

That admission helps us reframe the cringe factor. Before ye cast the first stone, think: hast thou never stood before a mirror singing into a hairbrush?

And if, by some chance, you’re unfamiliar with West Side Story’s dramatis personae and plot, don’t look to Cher for clarification.

Instead, we refer you to Romeo and Juliet, and for some modern context touching on green screens, genderfluidity, and the color-conscious casting of the 2021 remake, the below episode of Chris Frank’s snarky Bad Music Video Theater.

Leonard Bernstein Awkwardly Turns the Screws on Tenor Jose Carreras While Recording West Side Story (1984)

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Untold Story of Disco and Its Black, Latino & LGBTQ Roots

in Dance, Gender, History, Life, Music | December 5th, 2022

As a white Midwestern child of the ‘70s, I received two messages loud and clear: disco was a breathtakingly glamorous, sexy urban scene, and “disco sucks.”

Culturally, the latter prevailed.

It was the opinion voiced most loudly by the popular boys.

Dissenters pushed back at their own peril.

I didn’t know what YMCA was about, and I’m not convinced the ski jacketed, puka-necklaced alpha males at my school did either.

(My father, who sang along joyfully whenever it came on the car radio, definitely did.)

Disco’s been dead for a long time now.

In the four plus decades since disgruntled Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl commandeered a baseball stadium for a Disco Demolition Night where fans tossed around homophobic and racist epithets while destroying records, there’s been notable social progress.

This progress is the lens that makes Noah Lefevre’s Polyphonic video essay The Untold History of Disco, and other investigations into the racial and sexual underpinnings of disco possible.

I certainly never heard of Stonewall as a kid, but many contemporary viewers, coming of age in a country that is, on the whole, much more LGBTQ-friendly than the world of their parents and grandparents, are familiar with it as a gay rights milestone.

Lefevre ties the birth of disco to the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, and a subculture born of necessity, wherein gay men improvised underground dance clubs where they could cut freely loose with same sex partners.

Instead of live dance music, these venues boasted DJs, crate diggers open to any groove that would keep the party going on the dance floor: psychedelic, classic soul, progressive soul, jazz fusion, Latin American dance music, African pop…

(Thus the name discotheque)

A disco sound began to coalesce around existing hits as the O‑jays’ Love Train and Isaac Hayes’ Theme from Shaft.

You can hear it in Jimmy Nolen’s chicken scratch lead guitar for James Brown and session drummer Earl Young’s open high hat and four-to-the-floor beat on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ The Love I Lost.

In the beginning, crowds were primarily Black, Latino and gay at New York City discos like The Loft, which started out as a rent party, and The Sanctuary, housed in a deconsecrated midtown German Baptist church. Mapplethorpe model Leigh Lee recalled The Sanctuary’s cachet to the Village Voice’s Peter Braunstein:

It was supposed to be a secret, but I don’t know how secret it could have been when faggots and lesbians can come out of a church from midnight till sunrise.

As discotheque DJs began driving the record charts, mainstream producers took note, opening the gates for such monster hits as the Barry White-helmed Love Unlimited Orchestra’s Love’s Theme, Donna Summer’s Love to Love Ya, and Chic’s Le Freak.

A glitter-bedecked nude man rode a white horse into Bianca Jagger’s birthday party at Studio 54 on the stroke of midnight, while hinterland squares did The Hustle at their local Holiday Inns.

By the time celebs like the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart starting horning in on the act, disco had already reached its tipping point.

Little twerps like me, whose mothers wouldn’t let them see the R‑rated Saturday Night Fever bought Bee Gees 45s from our local Peaches and sang along to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, as did some of our dads…

(An unexpected pleasure of Lefevre’s video is seeing all those familiar record labels spinning just the way they did on our precious stereos — Atlantic! Casablanca! Polydor! RSO! Somebody pass me a Dr. Pepper and a yellow plastic insert!)

Radio DJ Rick Dees’ novelty hit with Disco Duck seemed so harmless at the time, but it was surely music to the mainstream “disco sucks” crowd’s ears. (Good luck to any punk who betrayed a fondness for Disco Duck )

Disco’s reign was brief — Lefevre notes that its end coincides with the beginning of the AIDS crisis — but its impact has been greater than many assume at first blush.

Disco’s emphasis on turntables and long play versions influenced hip hop and electronic dance music.

Nearly half a century after discomania seized the land, its deep connection to Black, Latino and LGBTQ history must not be tossed aside lightly.

Watch more of Noah Lefevre’s Polyphonic video essays here.

Two Decades of Fire Island DJ Sets Get Unearthed, Digitized & Put Online: Stream 232 Mixtapes Online (1979–1999)

How Giorgio Moroder & Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” Created the “Blueprint for All Electronic Dance Music Today” (1977)

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Her Indiana ties resulted in an invitation to Rick “Disco Duck” Dees’ 1977 wedding. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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The Chemist Alice Ball Pioneered a Treatment for Leprosy in 1915–and Then Others Stole the Credit for It

in Gender, Health, History, Science | December 2nd, 2022

It’s bittersweet whenever a pioneering, long overlooked female scientist is finally given the recognition she deserves, especially so when the scientist in question is a person of color.

Chemist Alice Ball’s youth and drive — just 23 in 1915, when she discovered a gentle, but effective method for treating leprosy — make her an excellent role model for students with an interest in STEM.

But in a move that’s only shocking for its familiarity, an opportunistic male colleague, Arthur Dean, finagled a way to claim credit for her work.

We’ve all heard the tales of female scientists who were integral team players on important projects, who ultimately saw their role vastly downplayed upon publication or their names left off of a prestigious award.

But Dean’s claim that he was the one who had discovered an injectable water-soluble method for treating leprosy with oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra fruit is all the more galling, given that he did so after Alice Ball’s tragically early death at the age of 24, suspected to be the result of accidental poisoning during a classroom lab demonstration.

Not everyone believed him.

Ball, the University of Hawaii chemistry department’s first Black female graduate student, and, subsequently, its first Black female chemistry instructor, had come to the attention of Harry T. Hollmann, a U.S. Public Health Officer who shared her conviction that chaulmoogra oil might hold the key to treating leprosy.

After her death in 1916, Hollmann reviewed Dean’s publications regarding the highly successful new leprosy treatment then referred to as the Dean Method and wrote that he could not see “any improvement whatsoever over the original [method] as worked out by Miss Ball:”

After a great amount of experimental work, Miss Ball solved the problem for me by making the ethyl esters of the fatty acids found in chaulmoogra oil.

Type “the Dean Method leprosy” into a search engine and you’ll be rewarded with a satisfying wealth of Alice Ball profiles, all of which go into detail regarding her discovery of what became known as the Ball Method, in use until the 1940s.

Kathleen M. Wong’s article on this trailblazing scientist in the Smithsonian Magazine delves into why Hollmann’s professional efforts to posthumously confer credit where credit was due were insufficient to secure Ball her rightful place in science history.

That began to change in the 1990s when Stan Ali, a retiree researching Black people in Hawaii, found his interest piqued by a reference to a “young Negro chemist” working on leprosy in The Samaritans of Molokai.

Ali teamed up with Paul Wermager, a retired University of Hawaii librarian, and Kathryn Waddell Takara, a poet and professor in the Ethnic Studies Department. Together, they began combing over old sources for any passing reference to Ball and her work. They came to believe that her absence from the scientific record owed to sexism and racism:

During and just after her lifetime, she was believed to be part Hawaiian, not Black. (Her birth and death certificates list both Ball and her parents as white, perhaps to “make travel, business and life in general easier,” according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.) In 1910, Black people made up just 0.4 percent of Hawaiʻi’s population.

“When [the newspapers] realized she was not part Hawaiian, but [Black], they felt they had made an embarrassing mistake, forgetting about it and hoping it would go away,” Ali said. “It did for 75 years.”

Their combined efforts spurred the state of Hawaii to declare February 28 Alice Ball Day. The University of Hawaii installed a commemorative plaque near a chaulmoogra tree on campus. Her portrait hangs in the university’s Hamilton Library, alongside a posthumously awarded Medal of Distinction.

(“Meanwhile,” as Carlyn L. Tani dryly observes in Honolulu Magazine, “Dean Hall on the University of Hawai‘i Mānoa campus stands as an enduring monument to Arthur L. Dean.)

Further afield, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine celebrated its 120th anniversary by adding Ball’s, Marie Sklodowska-Curie’s and Florence Nightingale’s names to a frieze that had previously honored 23 eminent men.

And now, the Godmother of Punk Patti Smith has taken it upon herself to introduce Ball to an even wider audience, after running across a reference to her while conducting research for her just released A Book of Days.

As Smith notes in an interview with Numéro:

Things have really changed. I think we are living in a very beautiful period of time because there are so many female artists, poets, scientists, and activists. Through books especially, we are rediscovering and valuing the women who have been unjustly forgotten in our history. During my research, I came across a young black scientist who lived in Hawaii in the 1920s. At that time, there was a big leper colony in Hawaii. She had discovered a treatment using the oil from the seeds of a tree to relieve the pain and allow patients to see their friends and family. Her name was Alice Ball, and she died at just 24 after a terrible chemical accident during an experiment. Her research was taken up by a professor who removed her name from the study to take full credit. It is only recently that people have discovered that she was the one who did the work.

“The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Denied Recognition and Written Out of Science History

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Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Person to Win Twice, and the Only Person in History to Win in Two Different Sciences

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Meet Honey Lantree, the Trailblazing 1960s Female Drummer

in Gender, History, Music | November 28th, 2022

Quick, who’s your favorite female drummer?

Hardly a strange question!

(Yes, you are allowed to pick more than one favorite.)

Things were decidedly different when drummer Honey Lantree, the only female member of the 60s British Invasion group the Honeycombs, took up the sticks.

Drums were not her original instrument. Her boyfriend, employer, and eventual bandmate Martin Murray was giving her a guitar lesson when she asked if she could take a whirl at his kit.

Murray recalled his surprise when she started whaling away like a vet:

She was just a born, natural drummer; she hadn’t played before and just went for it. I was aghast, staring at her, and said, “All right, you’re our new drummer.”

Lantree’s gender helped the Honeycombs secure press.

She snagged a celebrity endorsement for Carlton drums and turned 21 with a cake festooned with marzipan bees, and, more importantly, a #1 single, “Have I the Right.”

Of course, her gender also ensured that most of the coverage would focus on her appearance, with scant, if any mention of her musical talent.

Lantree was not the only member of the Honeycombs to find this galling.

As lead singer Denis D’Ell told the Record Mirror in 1965:

How can it be a gimmick just because we have a girl, Honey, on drums? Honey plays with us purely and simply because she is the right drummer for the job. If she wasn’t any good, she wouldn’t hold down the job.

On tour, we don’t have any troubles by having a girl with us. We just operate as a group. Perhaps it is that the novelty has worn off — we hope that fans soon will forget all about this so-called gimmick.

The following year, he quit, along with lead guitarist Alan Ward and Peter Pye, who had replaced Murray on rhythm guitar. Lantree and her brother, Honeycombs’ bassist John, soldiered on with new personnel until the 1967 death of producer Joe Meek.

Still, for a brief period, the Honeycombs’ recordings, tours, television appearances, and yes, press coverage made Lantree the most famous female drummer in the world.

Admittedly, the field was not particularly crowded. Just challenging in ways that outstripped the disproportionate focus on figures, boyfriends, and beauty tips.

Male fans dragged Lantree offstage during a concert in Cornwall, leading her to remark, “You expect this sort of thing but it’s still terrifying.”

Around the same time, another British band, the all-female Liverbirds, were invited to cross the pond for a coveted gig in Las Vegas…provided they’d play it topless. “Can you imagine me on the drums playing topless,” Sylvia Saunders, who shortly thereafter was forced to choose between the drums and a high risk pregnancy, gasped.

Although she is said to have inspired a number of young female musicians, including Karen Carpenter, Lantree, who died in 2018 at the age of 75, rarely shows up on curated lists of notable female drummers.

In a strange way, that spells progress — there are many more female drummers today than there were in the mid 60s, and mercifully more opportunities for them to be taken seriously as musicians.

via Messy Nessy

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The Woman Who Invented Rock n’ Roll: An Introduction to Sister Rosetta Tharpe

New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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A Stunning, Hand-Illustrated Book of Mushrooms Drawn by an Overlooked 19th Century Female Scientist

in Biology, Gender, History | November 7th, 2022

Mushrooms have quietly become superstars of the global stage.

Sure, not everyone likes them on pizza, but who cares?

In the 21st-century, they are hailed as role models and potential planet savers (not to mention a wildly popular design motif…)

Time-lapse cinematography pioneer Louie Schwartzberg’s critically acclaimed documentary, Fantastic Fungi, has made experts of us all.

Go back a century, and such knowledge was much harder won, requiring time, patience, and proximity to field or forest.

Witness Fungi collected in Shropshire and other neighborhoods, a handbound, hand-illustrated 3‑volume collection by one Miss M. F. Lewis, of Ludlow, England.

Miss Lewis, a talented artist with an obvious passion for mycology spent over 40 years painstakingly documenting the specimens she ran across in England’s West Midlands region.

Each drawing or watercolor is identified in Miss Lewis’ hand by its subject’s scientific name. The location in which it was found is dutifully noted, as is the date.

The hundreds of species she captured with pen and brush between 1860 and 1902 definitely constitute a life’s work, and also an unpublished one.

Cornell University’s Mann Library, where the only copy of this precious record is housed, has managed to truffle up but a single reference to Miss Lewis’ scientific mycological contribution.

English botanist William Phillips, writing in an 1880 issue of the Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, noted that he been “permitted to look over [a work] of very much excellence executed by Miss M. F. Lewis, of Ludlow”, adding that “several rare species [of fungi] are very artistically represented.“

The historical significance of Miss Lewis’ work extends beyond the fungal realm.

As Sage writes in Missing Misses in Mycology, a post on the Mann Library’s Tumblr celebrating Miss Lewis and her contemporary, English mycologist and illustrator, Sarah Price, women’s work was often omitted from the official scientific record:

While we’re now seeing considerable effort to rectify the record, the discovery of untold stories to fill in the blanks can be tricky business. It’s not that the stories never happened — the field of botany, for one, is replete with some pretty spectacular evidence of women’s (often unacknowledged) engagement with scientific inquiry, embodied in the detailed illustrations that captured the insights of observations from the natural world. But the published historical record is often woefully scant when it comes to closer detail on the lives and careers of the women who have helped carry modern science forward.

We may never learn anything more about the particulars of Miss Lewis’ training or personal circumstances, but the care she took to preserve her own work turned out to be a great gift for future generations.

Leaf through all three volumes of Miss M.F. Lewis’ Fungi collected in Shropshire and other neighborhoods on the Internet Archive:

Volume I

Volume II

Volume III

Via Public Domain Review

How Mushroom Time-Lapses Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pioneering Time-Lapse Cinematography Behind the Netflix Documentary Fantastic Fungi

The Beautifully Illustrated Atlas of Mushrooms: Edible, Suspect and Poisonous (1827)

Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |