Musicking In and Out of Mormonism: the Making of Heavy Music Mothers: Extreme Identities, Narrative Disruptions

Illustration by Shelley Turley

By Julie Turley

Researching rock moms for what eventually became  our forthcoming book Heavy Music Mothers—an exploration of women and heavy music and the ways in which women have engaged with musicking as mothers—was not my idea. Credit goes to fellow librarian and co-author, Joan Jocson-Singh, whose involvement in extreme metal became her anthropology thesis. Many of the women she interviewed during her thesis research worried that future children would disrupt their heavy music participation, which was crucial to self care and identity. Noting their concerns, Joan decided to narrow the focus to mothers for a subsequent study. Pregnant with her second daughter, Joan was introduced to me—mother of two—at a New York City library conference, and she asked if I would assist her with this research. Saying “yes” was easy. Did a more interesting topic exist? Five years later, I still don’t think so.

Our research started as an academic social science-y online survey, collecting demographic and related information on mothers’ music participation, their particular role, their connection, and history. We then reached out to some of these moms for one-on-one interviews. We wanted their complex, nuanced heavy music stories, how they’d found music and how it had shaped them. Joan and I were merely hoping to publish a peer-reviewed paper of this research. We continued to gather data and present at a variety of academic conferences, from the Museum of Motherhood conference in Manhattan to our dream conference: the Modern Heavy Metal Music (MHMM) conference held in Helsinki, Finland in June of 2019. When the world locked down for COVID, we appeared in Zoom conferences. An editor from Rowman Littlefield, an academic press, was in one of them. Eventually, we were offered a book contract. A book! And from what we know, as of its writing, it’s the first (soon-to-be) published academic monograph on mothers and heavy music. 

While primary, original research is the heart of our book, we have depended upon the research of theorists and musicologists, most notably Christopher Small’s 1998 book Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening gives us a key term for navigation. “Musicking” covers a range of active participation: from singing in a church choir to performing a thunderous drum solo on stage at Madison Square Garden, to swaying to a Spotify track on the subway platform, to physically responding to a musical performance on YouTube or on Instagram live. The heavy music mothers we interviewed embody this range. In our book are stories from under-the-radar rock musicians, to a rock writer/music doc producer, a deejay, and many, many listeners and lovers of music. Identity is key. All of the mothers in our study claim a public facing music identity that they assert is just as crucial as their mothering one. This shuttling between and among identities is one that all working mothers negotiate. Like my sister’s luminous illustration that accompanies this article, Joan and I were interested in the conjunction or conflation of extreme identities: the “softness” that has conventionally  characterized “motherhood” and the hardness of rock, realized at times in inhospitable, abrasive, child-unfriendly spaces where music takes place, rule-breaking and ear-splitting to rampant sexism and misogyny. The interviews are valuable in that they are documents of this extreme identity negotiation. Like in Joan's thesis, our book’s mothers are largely in agreement: maintaining some kind of authentic connection to music is crucial to their self care. And when musicking takes the form of a high profile music career, the dynamics are more intense. Our chapter on what we’ve called the “Rock Mom Memoir” spotlights the musicking journeys of  famous female rockers, most often huge stars: Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Belinda Carlisle, to name a few. From our point of view, what’s most interesting about these rock ‘n’ roll narratives is how motherhood complicates and disrupts it. These narratives aren’t presented as mothering stories. These aren’t  Anne Lamott-esque accounts of caring for an infant: motherhood is the surprise Easter egg in each. Despite their privilege, access to nannies, the song remains the same: mothering is hard, more intense than a six-string F chord and with more sustain. In these high profile contexts, when a rocker becomes a mother a lot of the people making money off her are deeply annoyed: “Mothers aren’t sexy,” Pat Benatar’s record company told her when she announced her first pregnancy. The rock machine resists being held up for diaper changes and feedings. But we discovered that the mothers who got off the machine or who detached from this music identity felt incomplete. And there was an overwhelming impulse to return to it, an often difficult journey, back to that identity.

Our book is built from both an ethnographic practice in its one-on-one interviews and at the same time one of autoethnography—that is, Joan and I open the book with an analysis of our own respective motherhood and musicking stories. How do we as the authors fit within our subject of study? For me, born into Mormonism, motherhood takes on a peculiar resonance. In the book’s introduction, I write that motherhood is an identity that was handed to me, part of a system I’m born into and one that was presented as an imperative: one day I will marry and birth children in order to achieve the highest degree of celestial glory. At least that’s the plan, not one I had a hand in, but one with promised blessings in store. Divine motherhood was an essential part of ‘70s and ‘80s era Beehive-through-Laurel lesson manuals. And I absorbed that messaging. My patriarchal blessing confirmed it: I would be a mother. Having a life map handed to you can be comforting, especially when one’s own mother, diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum in 2012, troubles the ideal. I write about that, too. Mormonism umbrellas my musicking journey, as well. It’s not a secret that Mormons musick—like motherhood, it’s almost a divine imperative. But it’s not until I get out of my then isolated low desert town and into Brigham Young University in Provo that I discover alternative music scenes: new wave and punk. My first punk show was with a group of actively musicking and practicing Mormons from Deseret Towers. From then on, hard music would be an integral part of my front facing Mormon girl identity. No doubt it kept me from finding a husband on campus by graduation unlike many of my girlfriends. As art often does, it revised the map. Marriage outside of Mormonism descended. Then daughters. The marriage ended. Music and daughters endure. We hope this book, the result of a lifetime of gestation and a year of labor, will inspire other scholars. Mother work is never done.