Dawn Landes‘ new album, The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, was produced by Josh Kaufman and will be released during Women’s History Month (on 29th March); the release reimagines music from the women’s liberation movement, with songs featured in The Liberated Woman’s Songbook, originally published in 1971 – “These tales could not be more prescient; women have been fighting for their voices to be heard for centuries, and these messages are just as timely today as they were then.”
Landes has released a video for the first single, the 1830 song “Hard is the Fortune of All Womankind.” The album notes highlight how the traditional ballad was often sung at protests during the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late ’60s and early ’70s and was recorded by Peggy Seeger in 1954 and Joan Baez in 1961, under an alternate title, “The Wagoner’s Lad.”
In the video, Landes embodies women from the past, including a farmer, a suffragette, a factory worker, famed union-activist and martyr Ella May Wiggins and a protester from the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest in Atlantic City. Similar to the album, the video shows a linear progression to the images, starting with the oldest photo of the farmer and ending with Landes in present day. Landes shares, “There’s a reason this folk song has been around this long and we’re still singing it nearly 200 years later.”
The song also opens our latest Monday Morning Brew Playlist.
Pre-order the album on Bandcamp: https://dawnlandesofficial.bandcamp.com/album/the-liberated-womans-songbook