Olivia Records was a collective founded in 1973 to record and market women’s music. Olivia, named after the heroine of a pulp novel by Dorothy Bussy who fell in love with her headmistress at French boarding school, was the brainchild of ten lesbian-feminists (the Furies Collective and Radicalesbians) living in Washington, D.C. who wanted to create a feminist organization with an economic base. In 1973, the collective put out a 45 with Meg Christian on one side and Cris Williamson on the other. They made $12,000 with that 45, enough to put out singer Meg Christian’s first record; and soon after, Williamson’s groundbreaking album The Changer and the Changed. Olivia stopped putting out new records and instead performed a series of 15th anniversary concerts in 1988. Olivia Records founded Olivia, the lesbian cruise line, also in 1988. (More from Wikipedia)
Another lesbian singer-songwriter Meg Christian once interviewed Cris Williamson, and this connection led to the creation of Olivia Records, the foremost record label in what became known as “women’s music”. Their first release was a single in 1973, with Meg singing the Carole King/Gerry Goffin song “Lady” on one side and Cris singing her own song, “If it Weren’t for the Music” on the other.
Olivia Records was conceived as a recording company that would be geared to gay women, but as discussed below, it was more than just that. The title of the label’s very first album, I Know You Know (1974) by Meg Christian is not hard to figure out; nor are the implications of the best-known song from this album, “Ode to a Gym Teacher” (written by Meg and performed live to an enthusiastic audience). However, women’s music is not overtly sexual, or at least I have never heard any that was. For the most part, the romantic songs are addressed to the lover; as with Melissa Etheridge, the gender is beside the point, lending the music appeal to all listeners.
The Changer and the Changed (1975) was Olivia Records’ second album release, and this album by Cris Williamson quickly became the biggest seller in women’s music, eventually selling 500,000 copies. Allmusic gives the record its highest rating (five stars), and Stewart Mason has a rave review on the website: “The simple but rich arrangements set Williamson’s glorious voice and piano against strings, flute, and Jacqueline Robbins’ jazz-inflected fretless bass, giving the album a timeless sound and putting the focus entirely on the songs and Williamson’s elegantly passionate performance of them.”
Cris Williamson and Meg Christian celebrated the 10th anniversary of the founding of Olivia Records by holding a joint concert at Carnegie Hall with several other women’s-music stalwarts, as documented in the double album release, Meg/Cris at Carnegie Hall.
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After touring with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden in their “Indochina Peace Campaign” in 1971 and 1972, Holly Near began writing songs and performing in the Los Angeles area. Unable to land a record company deal, she released her debut album in 1973, Hang in There on her own label, Redwood Records (which she started a few years before Olivia Records came along). She often toured with Olivia Records artists and performed on some of their albums, including The Changer and the Changed; but her early albums were released on Redwood.
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Melissa Etheridge is the first successful rock musician who is well known to be a lesbian. Melissa is from Leavenworth, Kansas and took up the guitar at age 8; she was performing in country music groups during her teenage years and later attended the Berklee College of Music. Melissa Etheridge sent a demo recording to Olivia Records in 1985 (they turned her down), and she also performed in lesbian bars in the Boston area while she was in college. However, Etheridge has never made an issue of her sexual orientation one way or the other, so she was not widely known to be a lesbian when she was signed by Island Records in 1986.
(January 2014)
