In nine bars, cafes, art galleries, and shops across Lockhart, 54 women songwriters will tune up their instruments and pour out their hearts to eager audiences Sept. 19-21 at the first Texas Women Songwriters Festival.
Mandy Rowden, a singer-songwriter herself and the owner of women-centered music school Girl Guitar, started plotting the festival after wrapping up her master’s thesis on women songwriters in Texas. She hoped to get 20 or so performers onto intimate stages, pegging nearby Lockhart over Austin as a well-suited, laid-back setting for the intimate performances she envisioned.
“It all just kind of grew from the air,” Rowden says now, astonished. “Sometimes in life, you can just tell you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing because – I won’t say this has been easy, because we’ve worked our asses off but – it has unfolded in a way that’s been very natural and been blessed on some level, like this is supposed to happen.”
Destined or not, TWSF is undoubtedly a long time coming. Though songwriters have a long history in the Lone Star State, Rowden’s graduate school research showed her over and over again that, as in so many other fields, women had consistently been overlooked.
“I’ve always known what a boys club, particularly the Texas songwriters, has been,” says illustrious Texan songstress Tish Hinojosa. “[It’s not] that I don’t love the good old boys of Texas, but we girls need to get a little more credit.”
The festival’s lengthy lineup, featuring artists ages 17 to 75, proves that not getting the credit they deserve has hardly kept Texas women off the stage. Hinojosa joins a colorful lineup of headliners. Prolific progressive country writer Kimmie Rhodes will share Friday night’s stage with activist-artist Sara Hickman, followed by a performance from guitar-driven singer Rosie Flores. Saturday night’s final performance features multitalented country artist Pauline Reese and, finally, Hinojosa herself.
Hinojosa grew up in the Mexican neighborhood of Downtown San Antonio, where her she first began to dream of performing. As a young woman, Hinojosa spent her weekends singing covers Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez covers on the Riverwalk and in bars and lounges, until Kerrville Folk Festival’s Rod Kennedy heard her voice in 1979. “He said, ‘I’d love for you to play the Folk Festival, but you have to be a songwriter.’ And guess what? I became a songwriter, and then I won New Folk that year,” Hinojosa says with a laugh.
Writing proved again and again to be a natural fit for Hinojosa, who quickly found her voice as a songwriter and subsequently landed record deals that would take her around the world, bringing her distinct blend of Texican influences to global audiences.
“I wrote songs that were important to me, songs about farm workers and about immigrants and migrants, and started writing songs in Spanish and bilingually,” Hinojosa says. “I never really fit into any big thing, but at the same time, it’s led to having a very colorful career.”
Not really fitting into genre conventions or traditional music scenes is, as far as Rowden can tell, what truly unites Texas musicians. Listening to songwriters’ stories as she assembled her thesis, the most consistent theme was what she considers to be “an outlaw streak.”
Like Hinojosa, Vanessa del Fierro grew up in San Antonio, surrounded by Mexican American culture and performing songs written by others. As a mariachi musician, she got a taste of the male-dominated music space. With her own outlaw streak, she decided to do something about it.
“There was a lot of education for mariachi in high schools and college,” Fierro says, explaining that women and girls often play in those groups but aren’t brought into paying performance opportunities after graduation. “I just felt like there wasn’t enough visibility for women.” Fierro started her own all-women mariachi band, Mariachi Las Coronelas. The group, known for playing a mix of classic rancheros, boleros, and unexpected covers, will be the only non-songwriting ensemble to perform at TWSF, closing the festival’s Sunday brunch.
Though she still enjoys performing mariachi, Fierro found songwriting when she visited Austin years ago and soon after recorded her first solo album, Pistolas y Leyendas, in 2015. A decade later, she’s preparing to release new work under the stage name Vanessa Cherry. Performed with her band, the Texas Martini, her uniquely influenced sound blends country and conjunto – with a swirl of mariachi, of course.
“A lot of us don’t fit in with the big industry machine,” Rowden says of her fellow genre-blending Texan women, like Fierro. “We don’t belong at the freaking popular kids table in the lunch room or whatever. We’ve chosen to be outliers in what we’re doing.”
The promise of a land for musical misfits has drawn musicians from across the country – and globe – to Texas. Shawnee Kilgore grew up in Bellingham, Washington. When she decided to leave home, she found that the universe “badgered” her into coming to Austin. A weekend trip turned into 15 years. In that time, Kilgore has charmed local audiences with her sometimes silly, sometimes serious musical stylings, including a collaborative album with Hollywood’s Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers). For Kilgore, as for so many of the other lyricists on the festival’s long bill, songwriting has provided a consistent, often therapeutic, outlet.
“There’s a special feeling of profound joy that comes from taking the worst pain you’ve ever felt in your life and being able to capture it,” Kilgore explains. “That’s a joyful experience, but it’s also crushingly sad.”
Lyrical composition has also provided a space to play and explore. For as many heart wrenching tunes as Kilgore has penned, it’s the silly songs that stick with some fans.
“I wrote a really dumb rap song about being an elevator operator. My friend Jenny’s 90-year-old mom is like, ‘That’s my favorite. Please play that song,’” Kilgore says, somewhat reluctantly performing an a cappella rendition of the opening verse.
Kilgore found a home, and an audience, in Austin. The community she gathers at Wonder What Wednesdays, her weekly songwriters salon at Quack’s Soundspace, is reminiscent of the community gathering around TWSF – a group of artists who often work in solitude, coming together to share and celebrate their differences in the form of original music.
“It’s kind of sad that we didn’t start this 30 years ago,” admits Hinojosa, reflecting on the positive impact a women’s festival like this would’ve had on her and her peers as young songwriters in the Eighties and Nineties. “We were all too busy trying to maintain our careers,” she explains. “I was being a girl, trying to make it in a boys’ world business.”
Men may still dominate the popular canon of Texan musicians, but Rowden and the long list of songwriters taking the stage in Lockhart this weekend are doing their best to establish women alongside the great outlaw figures of Lone Star music, from every generation and genre standpoint.
“We’re unified by being different from each other,” Rowden says. “If you want to dig one level deeper, we’re talking about a bunch of women in a very established man’s world so we’ve got a little bit of an outlier thing [there] and then we’ve got another layer [of] outlier beyond that: here we are doing something solitary, writing songs in a non-industry area, and we’re not even the main demographic for this profession, yet we need and seek out and want and crave community.”
Texas Women Songwriters Festival takes place in Lockhart Sept. 19-21.
