MP3 Beth Elliott - Buried Treasure

If Melissa Etheridge had a hippie big sister who hung out with Lucinda Williams, that would be Beth Elliott.

17 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Modern Folk, ROCK: Roots Rock



Details:
Before "women's music" was a genre, before Olivia Records came to be, there were lesbian hippies. Like all hippies, some of them brought guitars to coffeehouses and sang original songs. One of these lesbian hippies was a young San Francisco Bay Area native named Beth Elliott, who while still a teenager had penned a doo-wop lesbian love ballad. "Teen Love," and a women's liberation answer to the "Stand By Your Man" genre called "The Ballad of the Oklahoma Women's Liberation Front." These turned into lesbian activist favorites in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Running afoul of the emerging radical dyke feminist political correctness police, Beth found herself blacklisted as a writer and musician for a solid decade. Trying to find her way outside the community, Beth took part in the Haight-Ashbury revival of the mid-1970s, gaining neighborhood popularity at coffeehouses and street fairs, and even being heard live on the famous underground FM radio station KSAN. She produced an album, "Kid, Have You Rehabilitated Yourself?," at Oliver DiCicco's Möbius Music in San Francisco's Noe Valley, but women's music distribution channels were closed to the "Okie Womens'/Reflections" single.

Having let loose her inner bass player in the Möbius sessions, she played that instrument in the early 1980s for the all-woman new wave band Satin Food Stamps. In the mid-1990s, she joined those "dykeabilly darlin's" the Bucktooth Varmints, playing bass and harmonizing, and then playing six instruments on the prerecorded backing tracks for Annie Toone and Leigh "Elvis Herselvis" Crowe's drag king musical, "Hillbillies on the Moon."

Beth also went back to writing, still raising hell with whatever new PC police came along. For three and a half years in the mid-1990s, she was a columnist for the weekly San Francisco Bay Area Reporter. In 2003, ENC Press (http://www.encpress.com) published her satirical lesbian time-travel novel, Don't Call It "Virtual".

Working with Webby Award winner Sandi Woodruff on the Hit Comedy streaming audio web site, Beth took on assistant producer tasks in a session in which Woodruff and Top 40 legend Chuck Blore redid Blore's classic WCFL/Radio KYA jingles with Internet-relevant lyrics. And now, with the help of an assortment of Beth's cool and creative friends, some "buried treasure"-Beth and her music-can be heard on a stereo near you.

"Buried Treasure" contains the "Kid, Have You Rehabilitated Yourself?" album tracks, live and studio Satin Food Stamps tracks, and a pair of brand new recordings on which Beth is backed by a who's who of the Pacifica, California music scene.