What playing the guitar and singing my originals mean to me

                     

I’ve just had a look at a video I posted on Fb this week – taken by a colleague, at a recent women’s gathering at work. In it, I’m singing my song, Women on the Move, accompanying myself on guitar. It’s a simple song, written on a well-known chord sequence called a 12-bar blues. It’s repetitive and it’s got a cool beat. It’s my song and it makes me happy. It has a message that goes way beyond the obvious. It has meaning to the women listening to it, it has political meaning, but it has a much bigger meaning in my life.

I started playing the guitar in 1978, and within a year had started composing songs.  Over the years, I learnt more from people I met and took lessons with different guitar teachers. Even before I’d started playing, I loved the guitar. I found myself particularly attracted to the warm sound of a classical guitar, which became my instrument of choice.

What I found happening in my romantic relationships was very strange, though, and it was only as I matured on my journey as a woman and started understanding more about men in a patriarchal context that a lot of what had happened acquired a context that did not conclude that I’d been at fault. That’s extremely liberating, and we should make young people aware of these things from an early age, teaching them to love themselves and the difference between healthy and unhealthy interpersonal communication, especially within intimate relationships.

So what happened in my relationships, related to the guitar and the patriarchy? Well, in my longer relationships, most of the men who were attracted to me found the guitar-playing Trudy fascinating. I suspect it was even part of the attraction. But what then happened was really bizarre, because they started resenting that part of my life and all kinds of toxicity emerged. Some of the men desperately wanted to learn to play the guitar, and more than one of them even said outright, “So that I can play better than you.” Right!

But some of the most toxic stuff around my music emerged in my marriage – ironically, to a musician. Here are some of the things I had to deal with:

-          I got asked to sing at a political event shortly after a previous performance. He asked if it was because Tina Schouw (a Cape Town musician who often sang at anti-apartheid events) wasn’t available. Now, while that may well have been true, it wasn’t a nice thing for him to say.

-          He also said that, by asking me, the organisers were really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

-          When friends invited us to a braai and made a point of asking me to bring my guitar, he’d complain for days on end, accusing me of being a conversation stopper and of always wanting to be the centre of attraction. Because the arguing really distressed me and I’d started believing his version of how horrible I was, I’d end up leaving the guitar at home.

-          When my first studio recording was played on radio (by Eric Alan!!), we were tuned in and I was jumping up and down with excitement. I wanted to say, “I did it! I did it!” But he’d also been in the band and I knew he’d feel left out, so I said, “WE did it! We did it!” He stood there, with his arms folded across his chest, a scowl on his face and said, “Don’t think you’ve arrived.”

-          In 1998, we went to California, to visit my brother-in-law. I’d done my first studio demo of some of my original sings in Nov 1997 and took about 20 cassettes (yes!) with me, as gifts and in case I had a chance to drop one off at a record label. We stopped at the robots right next to Capitol Records and I said, I’m going to take one of my cassettes upstairs. He looked at me with disdain and said something like this: “This is not Cape Town, where everyone knows you. This is a whole different world, where very talented people drop off their demos here every day and a lot are turned away.“’ I felt deflated, felt I’d been too full of myself, lost my courage and stayed in the car.

-          I think the worst thing he said was that I should never ever consider singing my originals in public, because they were too personal.

I left my marriage in Nov 2000, after almost 7 years. The first time I did a half-hour set of my originals in an intimate public setting was in 2004, at off Moroka, a restaurant in Adderley Street. Chantel Erfort had been organising regular poetry evenings and invited me to be their featured poet – with a difference.

I taught Chantel when she was in Sub A, impacting on her life the way a Sub A teacher does. I don’t think she realises how she impacted on mine, with that invitation. A whole new world opened up for me. I realised that my songs were going to bring healing to a lot more people than just me. Yes, my songs are personal, but that night, women came up to me and said, “You’ve sung my life story.”  “’I could never write like you, but I’m glad you write, because you say what people like me are feeling.” And so on.      

       

 All of this - and all the other things that men said and did around my guitar playing and my songs -  is the background to who I am today: I LOVE playing my guitar. I LOVE singing. I LOVE sharing my originals with a listening audience.

I love the freedom I have in my life, where I don’t have to deal with a man’s fragile ego and his bitterness about his own lack of courage or talent or whatever else it is he sees in me that he’s afraid to access in his own life. I am attracted to people who are prepared to make themselves vulnerable, who write, who share, who open themselves to others with what is inside of them. I love poets, I love writers, I love singer-songwriters and instrumentalists who play original music, and all other artists who bare their souls and live their lives with authenticity, wide open to whatever happens next.

Here is one of my compositions.

“When I sing my song”

I shared with you my latest song

I closed my eyes – inside I felt so sure

Words flowed from my heart, flowed through my veins

Flowed to my mouth – so strong and pure

You looked at me disapprovingly

Your lack of comprehension

Like a solid door

Slamming in my face

You can’t stop the flow

You will never know

You never did.

When I sing my song

I’m not asking for permission, I’m not looking for applause

When I sing my song

I follow my rules, not yours

I’m swimming in the deepest sea, waves of such intensity

Pounding on my body, pounding on my skin

When I sing.

When I sing my song

I’m not waiting for your ok – I know when I’m right or wrong

When I sing my song

What started as a spark ignites into a flame so strong

A fire burns inside of me

Don’t put it out, just let it be

Warming me, from the inside out

When I sing

When I sing

When I sing

My song”’