While one might argue that a story on the musical auteurs of Memphis who happen to be women should run during Women’s History Month, we at the Memphis Flyer have come to realize that such extraordinary artists know no season, no time or age. Despite the music industry still being dominated by men, and Tennessee typically ranking low as a champion of progressive causes, the women of Memphis are clearly bringing it 24/7 — against all odds. We can boast high achievers in only their second decade of life (teen Zariya Scullark, guitarist for Above Jupiter) and in their eighth (Joyce Cobb, a force of nature in jazz and soul). This city spawned one of the world’s earliest punk “girl groups” — the KLiTZ, dating back to 1978 and celebrated in Rolling Stone at the time — and they in turn inspired others in their wake, from the Marilyns to the Hellcats. Indeed, all of them are still active today, from ongoing shows by the KLiTZ Sisters, to WYXR’s celebration of the Hellcats’ debut album in April, featuring all of the original band members, to the Marilyns’ record release show last month.
The ladies have been tearing it up in the hip-hop world for a long time as well, starting some 30 years ago with rap pioneer Lola Mitchell, aka Gangsta Boo, sadly departed last year. The reigning queen of all that is of course GloRilla, who, since her 2022 breakout hit “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” has rolled from success to success, including her double-platinum hit remixes “Tomorrow 2” and this year’s “Wanna Be,” both featuring Cardi B, the latter also featuring Megan Thee Stallion and reaching the top 15 of Billboard’s Hot 100.
GloRilla’s ascendance to the top of the heap was cemented when she opened for Megan Thee Stallion on her sold-out Hot Girl Summer Tour this year, including a triumphant hometown appearance at the FedExForum in May. This year, GloRilla has had no less than three singles in the Billboard Hot 100, with her album Ehhthang Ehhthang also spawning the top 30 Billboard Hot 100 song “Yeah Glo!” and her Rihanna-cosigned hit “TGIF.” And only last week she released her new video, “All Dere,” featuring her CMG labelmate MoneyBagg Yo, wherein Glo enlists MoneyBagg to be her gym partner. What’s more, GloRilla achieves all this as she projects a powerful sexuality, describing her music as “crunk and dominant.”
But we shouldn’t let Glo’s red-hot trajectory distract us from the legions of women working at a less spectacular level, while still achieving artistic success. Slimeroni, now based in Atlanta, is steadily building her own catalog on her own terms and boasts nearly 160,000 followers on Instagram. Alicja Trout, fronting Sweet Knives, and Amy LaVere, performing with partner Will Sexton, both recently completed summer tours. The latest episode of Beale Street Caravan featured Memphis’ own Alexis Grace, and the show has featured strong women from Marcella Simien to Elizabeth King. Cyrena Wages, who will headline at the Overton Park Shell on September 7th, just played the Troubadour in Los Angeles in June. And veterans like Susan Marshall or Reba Russell both fill rooms and work behind the scenes. Russell and engineer/producer Dawn Hopkins call their celebrated production team
the “Blue Eyed Bitches.”
As our writers surveyed the landscape of Memphis women in music, we were overwhelmed by such success stories, collectively rattling off a list of more than 50 female or gender-fluid musical auteurs, all of whom confront the wall of male privilege on a daily basis as they ply their trade. Some women have seen those obstacles and taken action as organizers. Native Memphian Ebonie Smith, pursuing a career in recording engineering at Atlantic Records before making her name as an independent producer, founded Gender Amplified, “a movement empowering women and gender-expansive music producers,” when she was still a senior in college in 2007. Though she’s immersed in production projects, she calls the nonprofit her “passion work” and has seen it grow steadily.
“Warner Music Group gave us a pretty sizable grant a couple years ago,” she told the Flyer last year, “so we’ve been hiring staff and doing our music production camps in New York. We also did an event in Memphis with 4U Recording, for Women’s Equality Day in August of ’21, and that was a fabulous experience; we want to do more with them. It’s just a matter of setting it into motion.”
And two years ago, a recent Memphis transplant who goes by Miz Stefani launched the recurring Women in Memphis Music (WiMM) showcase series at B-Side bar (the next will be on August 28th), not to mention the online Radio Memphis show, That Time of the Month. When she worked alongside WEVL DJ Liz Lane and Fa Bahloul to found the inaugural Women in Memphis Music Festival at the Hi Tone last year, it gathered steam as a full blown movement. And a wide-ranging one. Scanning the artists featured on WiMM’s Instagram page (@womeninmemphismusic), one is struck by the sheer volume and eclecticism of female and female-identifying artists in this city.
Underscoring this point, Miz Stefani points to one of her favorite quotes from a man who attended last year’s WiMM Fest extravaganza. “On his Facebook page he said that if, by some freak accident, all the male musicians were somehow eradicated from Memphis, he had no doubt that Memphis music would prevail with just the females that were left in the city.”
Furthermore, having worked for EMI and Blue Note Records in New York, Stefani has witnessed music scenes elsewhere, yet she’s struck by the sheer eclecticism of women’s music here. “I think there’s not a music genre that we have not covered in Memphis,” she says. “Whereas in other places, I can’t find such a wide variety of women performers.
“I mean, girls are everywhere here. They’re in reggae, Americana, jazz, hardcore, punk, rock, and hip-hop. And there are some doing genres that I don’t even have names for. Suroor Hassan is one of the artists that we’ve had on [the WiMM showcase] and she does this kind of hypo-industrial music. I wouldn’t exactly know how to put a one-word genre description on it. We’re all over the map, and it’s unbelievable. We can’t be pigeonholed.”
With that in mind, here is a small sample of the startling variety of women artists who’ve emerged from the Bluff City. While they’ve not all blown up like Julien Baker or GloRilla, they are their equals in terms of their artistry, vision, and sheer determination to thrive in male-dominated world: a veritable sisterhood of sound.
— Alex Greene
Brezay
In an era of fleeting fame caused by TikTok snippets and audio remixes, Breanna Mitchell knows she wants her career to have longevity. Our interview in itself is an extension of her legacy, as we initially chatted about her streetwear brand, Brezerk, marked by its one-of-a-kind statement pieces enhanced by Memphis flair and her uniquely archetypal vision.
Now, months later, Mitchell is focused on promoting her new self-titled EP, Brezay, and meeting different artists such as SWV, Xscape, and more. This release is a notable one for Mitchell as she bares all as a rapper, allowing her to further display her versatility as an artist.
“It basically showed a different side of me,” Mitchell says. “This was a very creative, hip-hop, commercial EP, and it’s a mix of everything. It’s about me being myself and not really focusing on the distractions and what people say because I went through that a lot — figuring out my sound and where I wanted my career to be and stuff.”
Music has played a major role in Mitchell’s life since she was in high school. She and her producer Jeffrey Williams, aka Jkidd, began pursuing their artistry together as classmates, despite fellow students who made fun of them and the music they were making. Mitchell admits their music wasn’t “good at all” then, but that was just her starting point. Rather than let the negativity define her, Mitchell sought to improve her musicality and the staying power of her work.
While she’s a jack of all trades, rapping was still fairly new to Mitchell before this EP. She admits that the creative process was nerve-wracking. She workshopped ideas with rapper Fresco Trey on a beat produced by Jkidd, also Mitchell’s manager and CEO of Grind City Records. Fresco Trey originally rapped on the beat, and tapped Brezay to hop on the track with them.
“I was like, ‘I ain’t ever rapped before; what you mean you gonna put me on the song?’” Mitchell says. “The next day I got home and I just started writing to it — and it came out quick, too.”
The end product, “Pull Up,” marked a major turning point for Mitchell, as she realized she could hear herself on any type of project. That had always been a goal of hers, but it was at this moment that she was able to pinpoint her growth.
Part of that growth involved invoking intentionality in her work, making sure that her music wasn’t fleeting or an attempt to hop on a viral trend, only to vanish. “Music is deeper than just going in the studio and hoping it goes viral,” Mitchell explains. “You have to put a lot of effort behind it and my pop music definitely involves that.” Mitchell says she wouldn’t describe her pop music as complex, but she says there’s a lot that goes into creating her sound, including input from producers, writers, and musicians.
As we talk about her trajectory and her aesthetic profile, she describes herself as a pop star. It’s a refreshing moniker, reflecting her quest to have a career that transcends not only time but genre. She’s reminded of the influence that artists like Michael Jackson and Ciara still have on her life, as their work, whether upbeat or somber, has had the power to initiate conversations and discourse, regardless of the era.
As a Black female artist in Memphis, she calls her journey navigating Memphis’ sound and audiences “interesting.” There’s what the industry and city audiences want, but there’s also what Brezay wants.
“It’s tough when you have to get people to recognize you because they’re used to a certain thing, so it takes a little processing and dedication, but it’s definitely teaching me a lot,” Mitchell says.
— Kailynn Johnson
Follow Brezay on Instagram @ brezay__.
Haley Ivey
If you’ve spent any time in Midtown’s music venues the last couple of years, odds are you’ve seen Haley Ivey, either in her punk incarnation, Little Baby Tendencies, or sitting in with other bands on flute, or maybe even dancing in a burlesque or flow arts show. Being a woman in the notoriously bro-y punk world “is something that I think about a lot, but it’s also something I don’t think about at all,” she says. “I’ve always been very strongly sensitive to covert sexism. I’m very hard-pressed about pushing my way into male-dominated spaces, because why the fuck not? When I was in high school, there was a guitar club that started, and it was all boys. I asked if I could join the club, and the teacher just kind of laughed me out of it. Being that young, I was just like, ‘Oh, I guess you’re right. I guess it’s silly that I would want to play guitar.’”
The Mississippi native has a degree in music but dropped out of graduate school for flute performance to pursue her own muse. “When I started the punk project, I saw some local women doing it — not necessarily playing the guitar, but fronting bands. It was never about me being like, ‘I’m a woman and I’m doing this.’ It was just like, ‘This is what I wanna do.’ When I first started, I kind of picked up on ambivalence and judgment from men in the scene, just kind of assuming I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I came across a lot of mansplaining. There was some verbal violence in the beginning. But I will say at this point, having been a couple of years into it, I feel very welcomed and respected. I think a lot of men in the scene are very chill and nice and have opened their eyes.”
One set is all it takes to prove any sexist doubters wrong. Little Baby Tendencies’ jackhammer riffs, punishing speed runs, and full-throttle vocals are inspired by classic punk rock she first encountered on Spotify. “System of a Down was my first love because of their amazing riffs. But also, when I was a kid, it was my first introduction to people talking about that kind of stuff. But also, I pull being kind of being ridiculous from them. I love that aspect about them, too. Dead Kennedys are really fun because it’s kind of the same deal. Great risk, speaking on issues, and also being ridiculous … The way they express their feelings through words, it’s not necessarily poetic, except in its own way. The music is like short, clipped bursts of emotion. And the political stuff — it was refreshing to hear people just say what they wanted to say, pretty much in any way they wanted to say it. And the riffs. Hella riffs. Love me some riffs.”
There are a few different versions of the story behind the name, Little Baby Tendencies. The most common one she shares is, “I lived with a cat named Little Baby, who was kind of an insane cat. … At this point, the name to me is just like the tendencies of being a little baby and being a human. The songs mostly center around environmental and political issues — I would say human rights issues over political issues — and mental health. I guess it is like an idealistic little baby because really what I’m saying behind the microphone is, ‘What the heck, guys? Why aren’t we prioritizing the health and wellbeing of human rights?’ It’s more like, ‘What the fuck?’”
LBT’s first album Bad Things keeps it short, sharp, and shocking. None of the nine songs reach the three-minute mark, but they are all crammed to the brim with inventive riffs and drummer Tyler Harrington’s hairpin turns. Above it all are Ivey’s confrontational lyrics, delivered in mocking snarls and vocal cord-rending screams. And there’s more where that came from. “We just recorded our second record, and it’s supposed to come out this year,” says Ivey. “I’m not trying to make it a statement piece for myself, but there’s just a lot of really messed up stuff going on. … Being absolutely yourself is an act of resistance. My whole life I’ve been asked why I do this or had people telling me not to do this. And it just makes me want to do the thing even more.” — Chris McCoy
Follow Little Baby Tendencies on Instagram @littlebabytendencies.
Suroor Hassan
When she moved to Memphis three years ago, Suroor Hassan didn’t know she’d find herself at home in the music scene here. At the time, she had just begun her Ph.D. program in philosophy at the University of Memphis, and she was just starting to rediscover her passion for music.
Growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, Hassan says she had limited access to the internet and cable, so her exposure to music was mostly through her mom. “She wasn’t like a musician or anything,” she says, “but she was just really into music. She had this huge cassette selection. She really liked pop music, but she also listened to a bit of everything. We would listen to American music but also Pakistani music on the same drive to school. We would listen to Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park, Michael Jackson, but then we would also listen to Nazia Hassan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, all these Pakistani artists.”
Inspired by these musicians, the young Hassan would write songs, but by her teenage years, her interest waned. “I felt bored with being a singer-songwriter,” she says. “That wasn’t my vibe.”
Then she moved to Iowa to study at Grinnell College. “It’s kind of the middle of nowhere,” she laughs, but that’s where she discovered electronic music. “It opened a whole new world. I went down a rabbit hole of like, ‘Oh my God, these are such cool sounds that I can actually create.’”
Electronic music was what she’d been waiting for, something to scratch that creative itch. “I just didn’t have the resources before,” Hassan says. “There’s so much freedom [to it]. It’s like you’re literally giving birth to sounds. You’re starting with the waves and you’re manipulating the waves, and from there you can do whatever the fuck you want with it [to] mold it into songs. … That’s kind of like how my brain works creatively.”
Without any formal music training, Hassan went on to release her first album Lavender Showers in June 2023. Listeners can note 2000s pop influences at some points in Hassan’s music, and Pakistani at others. “Some of my songs are in Urdu; that’s my native language,” she says. “One thing Pakistan does really well and really uniquely is percussion. We have these special percussive instruments like tabla and khol that make really cool sounds. And compositionally, [Pakistani artists] tend to write really cool rhythms that make you want to move your body in very strange ways. When you blend in those percussive sounds with electronic music, you end up with a very crazy musical experience that you’ve never experienced before.”
With this in mind, classifying Hassan’s music into a genre isn’t an easy task. “When people ask me what genre my music is, I’m just like, ‘I don’t know.’ There’s just so much baked into it,” she says. “I think ‘industrial hyperpop’ is a good distillation. It’s like pop music, but more experimental and distorted and maximalist, but I also like to add a lot of harsher, more industrial elements to it.”
Her collaborator and friend W1NDOW, self-described as a hyperemo artist, also understands the issue of genre. Together, they run the DIY music label/artist co-op Purgatory Pressings. “We’re really trying to bridge the music scene in Memphis in terms of all the different subgenres that there are here,” Hassan says. “Both of us have noticed that it’s very siloed. The hard-core scene sticks to itself. The rap scene sticks to itself. The singer-songwriter scene sticks to itself. They’re all really good, and our vision is to make all these different blooming subfields interact, and that way Memphis as a whole is really going to bloom as a music scene when we get all the cool stuff done and interact with each other.”
So far Purgatory Pressings has put on several mixed-bill shows at venues like the Lamplighter and Hi Tone, and they’ve taken over putting on Trans Nights at the Lamplighter at least twice a year. This June, Purgatory Pressings also hosted their first Purg Fest with 15 artists on the lineup. “We had never seen anything like that before in Memphis or anywhere, really, where you have so many different artists from so many different genres,” Hassan says. “We are planning on making it an annual thing.”
In the meantime, Hassan has plans to make more music after a busy year of performing and touring. “My first performance was last year,” she says, “and after doing more and more shows, I’ve gotten more comfortable. Now I always want to be performing. When I get on stage, there’s a part in my brain that clicks on … but it’s been really good to be back home and be in the studio and exploring sounds and music. I’m very excited for what’s to come.”
— Abigail Morici
Suroor Hassan will perform at Hi Tone on August 2nd at 6:30 p.m. Follow her on Instagram @suroor.901.
To see more of photographer James Strickland’s work, follow him on Instagram @strickland.photo .