Recovery and Integrity: The Music of Meg Christian

Abstract

For Meg Christian, integrity involves not merely an otherdirected ethic but an ethical responsibility to the self. Her and culture in general help us validate our struggles for wholeness in a patriarchal system that fragments and alienates women. Meg Christian has been one of the creators of contemporary culture; in fact, without her, contemporary as we know it might not exist. She speaks to us, I think, more directly than any other woman musician about her struggle toward integrity, about the development of her political principles, and about the conflicts between her individual needs and the political needs of her audience. Each one of her songs tells a separate story, but heard together, in the order she has recorded them, the songs also tell two stories about her life-stories that reflect and illuminate our own life stories. The first is about Meg Christian the performer, who interprets the songs she hears on the radio and then discovers that she, too, can write music. Since she makes this discovery as a result of working with the movement, her at first almost always addresses specific feminist political issues. Half the songs on her first album, I Know You Know (1974), were written by other musicians and revised or reinterpreted for the album. The other songs are about her coming out as a lesbian in the community. The second stage in Meg Christian's creative development is her realization of her own artistic power. The second album, Face the Music (1977), consists mostly of her own songs, and most of these songs explore issues of concern to an audience of politically aware women. In the early eighties, she began to include in her repertoire more instrumental and more songs about the relationship between external, political life and internal, emotional life. On her 1981 album are several lyrics, such as the title song Turning It Over and Southern Home, concerned with the integration of the political and the personal. Her decision to include two guitar pieces on the album shows that she has extended her definition of women's music to embrace not only lyrics with explicit feminist content but also any other that springs from a feminist consciousness. She recognizes and helps her audience to recognize that the community must create a world in which women can express themselves honestly, whether that expression includes or does not include explicit ideology. So the first story that we hear when we listen to Meg Christian's is about how one woman lives in the real world, about the process by which she defines her world, and about how she works to make her world better. The second story in these songs is about the process of self-discovery. Meg Christian's early songs tell about her sexual awakening, her political awakening-to the problems not only of women but of all oppressed groupsand her dedication to the movement. Later songs, especially on her last album, From the Heart (1984), explore her experiences as a recovering alcoholic. The