Alix Dobkin (Folk / USA)

Kay Gardner, Pat Moschetta, and Alix Dobkin at a recording session in 1973

Alix Dobkin (born August 16, 1940) is an American folk singer-songwriter.

Instruments: vocals, guitar

Years active: 1973 - present

Like everyone else's story, mine begins before I was born, which is what My Red Blood is about. The memoir describes the beginnings of my career in the late 1950s, when Philadelphia was a hotbed of do-it-yourself culture that magnetized folk music on the East Coast. I was a teenaged, guitar-totin', card-carrying comrade grounding myself in mushrooming crowds of progressive Jews, self-taught musicians and other local subversives.

Immediately after graduating from the Tyler School of Fine Arts I headed east to NYC's world-famous Gaslight Cafe, and from that rich, heady, heart of Greenwich Village in the early '60's, I launched my full-time, professional folksinging career.

Focusing during the first decade on a traditional, international, and contemporary/protest repertory, I then came out as a Lesbian in 1972 and turned to writing and singing for women in general and to building Lesbian culture in particular."

In 1973, with Kay Gardner and Marilyn Ries, I produced "Lavender Jane Loves Women", the very first album by, for and about Lesbians in the history of the world. From then until now, I have focused on the lives, concerns and perspectives of women who love women.

Over the last 25 years I have traveled to hundreds of women's communities in this country and many others. It has been my privilege and pleasure to gather elements of our common culture and to create a body of stories, songs, observations, and opinions, to share with you. They honor and reflect our unique feminist style, substance, issues and values. In addition to seven recordings, I have one songbook, many years worth of columns and articles, a shelf full of awards to my name; and was voted "All Time Favorite Performer" by Hot Wire magazine, and have been known to some as "Head Lesbian!" Spin magazine called me a "womyn's music legend" and the FBI reported that I was a "trouble maker."

Most commonly defined as "music by, for, & about women," the category of Women's Music has been entertaining and enlightening a vast network of Lesbians, our friends and supporters at concerts, festivals, conferences, gatherings and parties, on vinyl, tape, disc, and songbook since the early 1970s.

"My career in women’s music sprang from the soil of J. S. Bach, The Red Army Chorus, Louis Armstrong, and Broadway shows, topped off by the folk music scene of the 1960s, and has granted me a life rich, challenging, and satisfying beyond my wildest dreams." (from the Epilogue of My Red Blood)

Text: Alix Dobkin


Wiki:

In 1965 she married Sam Hood who ran the Gaslight Cafe. They moved to Miami and opened The Gaslight South Cafe, but moved back to New York in 1968. Their daughter Adrian was born two years later, and the following year the marriage broke up. A few months later, Dobkin came out as a lesbian, which was uncommon for a public personality to do at the time.


She has since released a number of albums as well as a songbook and has toured throughout the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand promoting lesbian culture and community through womyn's music. Dobkin has been a highly vocal opponent of women-only space through her consistent exclusion of males. In one letter to the National Center for Lesbian Rights, she explained, "For over twenty years men have declared themselves 'women,' manipulated their bodies and then demanded the feminist seal of approval from survivors of girlhood.... [My lyrics] are not 'oppressive' but refer to those of us who have a girlhood & a clitoris, & no one else." Her controversial criticisms of postmodernism, sadomasochism, transgenderism and other issues, including her piece "The Emperor's New Gender", have appeared in several of her written columns, "Minstrel Blood."



Discography:

Albums:

- Lavender Jane Loves Women (1973)
- Living with Lesbians (1975)
- Xx Alix (1980)
- These Women (1986)
- Yahoo Australia! Live from Sydney (1990)
- Love & Politics (compilation, 1992)
- Living with Lavender Jane (CD re-release of first two albums, 1998)




Lavender Jane Loves Women : https://youtu.be/bLWIwYsOYu8 :

(produced by Alix Dobkin, Kay Gardner and Marilyn Ries, 1973)





Bibliography:

- (Not Just A Songbook) (1978)
- Alix Dobkin's Adventures In Women's Music (1979)

- My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement (2009)



Sources: website Alix Dobkin and Wikipedia