This story is part of the series 8 Over 80, celebrating artists and cultural figures over the age of 80 who continue to shape the greater Bay Area.
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erry Garthwaite can’t remember every inane comment she’s received from a man who seemed threatened or confused by her. She’s 85, and after breaking molds for more than 50 years, there are just too many to count.
Together with her friend Toni Brown, Garthwaite fronted Joy of Cooking, a seminal blues-rock band that offered something unheard of when it bubbled up out of Berkeley in the late ’60s: a mixed-gender band in which the women wrote the songs, sang and played the lead instruments. The group released three albums on Capitol Records in the early ’70s, after which Garthwaite forged a career as an independent singer, guitarist, composer, producer and teacher, with more than 100 credits to her name.
But Garthwaite can cite a few memorable slights — like the time, circa 1970, when she went to a guitar shop to buy strings, and a guy who had been to a Joy of Cooking show approached her. “He said, ‘If I close my eyes and forget that there are women in the band, it sounds really good,’” recalls the musician, with a hint of bemusement. “And that was, in a nutshell, the perspective. Same thing with the bloody record companies.”
Seated in the front room of her tiny wooden cottage in San Geronimo, where she’s lived since 1971 — that’s Marin County, 10 minutes east of Samuel P. Taylor State Park — Garthwaite speaks in a low, measured voice, with a hint of the rasp that earned her comparisons to Janis Joplin. Her demeanor is gentle but straightforward, with a sharp wit and very little tolerance for bullshit.
Her Gibson six-string guitar is propped next to her, near a hand-painted marimba and a binder of news clippings about her music, including an Annie Leibovitz photo of Joy of Cooking. The 1979 edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide sits alongside Garthwaite’s self-published song books, like Verbal Remedies: Songs to Soothe the Spirit. Crystals line the windowsills. Two diplomas advertise Garthwaite’s bachelor’s in sociology from UC Berkeley (1965) and her certification from Joy Gardner-Gordon’s Vibrational Healing Program (2001). Only the latter is framed.
“So,” she says. “You wanted to ask me some questions?”
Terry Garthwaite’s first love was the blues. A true child of Berkeley — her grandfather was a sea captain who settled in North Berkeley, and all her aunts and uncles lived nearby — Garthwaite grew up at the corner of Scenic and Vine, in a house where she and her two brothers’ creativity was encouraged. Their father was an illustrator who also played violin, self-published poetry books and belonged to the Bohemian Club; their mother was a dancer and ballet teacher. They gave their daughter her first guitar, a Martin acoustic six-string, when she was 14.
She was drawn to bluesmen like Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Pops Staples from the Staple Singers was especially influential in her guitar playing, says Garthwaite. “And I still think of Mavis Staples as being my mentor. I never met her, but I just loved her style.”
While she completed her degree at Cal, the clubs and coffeehouses of ’60s Berkeley provided the rest of Garthwaite’s education. She met singer-songwriter Toni Brown at a house party in 1967: Brown sat down to play the piano, Garthwaite picked up her guitar, and the alchemy was instantaneous. “I liked her writing and she liked my singing,” says Garthwaite. “So we decided to get together and experiment.” They recruited a three-person rhythm section that included Garthwaite’s younger brother, David, on bass.
By 1969, Joy of Cooking had a weekly gig at Mandrake’s, a club at the corner of 10th and University that hosted B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton. On stage, Garthwaite and Brown refined their salty-sweet vocal dynamic, performing adventurous songs with driving, danceable rhythms and feminist themes woven subtly throughout the lyrics. For a time, it seemed Joy of Cooking was the house band not just for Mandrake’s but for Berkeley: They were the entertainment at People’s Park on the storied day in 1969 when the neighborhood hippies first came together to plant trees and construct a playground there, kicking off an idyllic few weeks before the University tried to take it back.
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Within a year, Bill Graham was booking the band at the Fillmore West and Winterland Ballroom, opening for the likes of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Joy of Cooking also shared stages with the Band, Santana, Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg, an early version of Jefferson Airplane (“it was at a little club in San Francisco called the Matrix, we got paid $11”) and Janis Joplin — who reportedly felt competitive with Joy of Cooking.
“I think we were a threat to her. Somebody told me that: that I was a threat to her,” says Garthwaite. “Which I was not. But Joy of Cooking was an up-and-coming band.” She shrugs. “Too much attention.”
That dynamic speaks to the sexism of the time: for women musicians, there really was only a sliver of attention — and money, and festival slots, and airtime — to go around. Garthwaite remembers being on tour after Joy of Cooking released its self-titled debut LP in 1971, and doing a promotional stop at a radio station. “The DJ said, ‘Oh, we already played our limit of women for the day,’” recalls Garthwaite. “There was a quota.”
A 1971 TIME magazine article (headline: “Female Rock”) further illustrates the prevailing attitude of the era. A Detroit group called Pride of Women is described as “four leggy but irate girls” who make music that’s “ferociously antimale.” Of L.A.’s all-female rock band Fanny: “The sound is not impressive. But the sight of four young girls making rock-’n’-roll music is still a novelty, and the girls have been able to start a tour.”
Joy of Cooking fares the best here, with a positive (albeit patronizing) blurb: “The one outfit so far that can compete with top-level male band quality is Joy of Cooking, and it is only partly female,” it reads, describing Garthwaite as “a tough rock singer” and Brown as “a pretty Bennington graduate … [who] writes songs about what it is like to be a woman.”
“It remains to be seen,” the piece concludes, “if the male-dominated world of rock music is really ready for Women’s Lib.”
Garthwaite doesn’t seem bitter about what she experienced in those years: the misogyny, the pigeonholing, the condescension. But there’s no denying that she’s spent the decades since Joy of Cooking disbanded consciously turning away from the commercially oriented, capital-I industry.
She has defined herself, instead, by following her passions — and by refusing to be defined.
“I don’t classify myself,” she says. “I don’t put myself in a bin.”
This attitude permeates both her personal life and her work: She’s had relationships with women and men, but declines to put a name on it; she’s always been adjacent to Berkeley’s lesbian folk scene and the women’s music community, but not strictly part of it. She has skirted jazz, spoken word, New Age music, protest songs. When she watches TV here at her cottage, she’s fascinated by The Voice. But she also worries about the contestants.
“These young people so badly want to win, and they want to go on the road and they want to, you know, be with the record company,” she says. “And I just hope that they can maintain a sense of their own integrity and not get shoved around by the industry. Because the industry wants to put you in pockets. I never wanted to be in somebody’s pocket.”
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Her post-Joy of Cooking resume illustrates that handily: notable entries include a half-dozen solo records; two full-length collaborations with former bandmate Toni Brown; and touring in the ’80s as part of a New York Times-noted jazz/folk/poetry trio with Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Rosalie Sorrels (including a live album recorded at the Great American Music Hall).
But it was her son Sasha’s birth in 1976 that sparked the most dramatic change in her music. “I started writing lullabies for him while we were still in the hospital,” she says, her voice tender at the memory. Nearly 50 years later, some of those songs exist as sheet music taught to school kids across the country.
Drawn to the power of short, mantra-like rhymes, Garthwaite began writing what she calls “spirit jingles” and “affirhythms.” She got into crystals, then vibrational healing, which involves using color, light and sound to treat physical ailments. She started self-publishing her songbooks and leading singing circles; one group of students has been with her weekly now for 20 years. At the time of our interview, she’s preparing for her 17th year co-leading a singing retreat for more than 50 women at a spiritual center north of Santa Fe. By all accounts, she’s a natural teacher.
“One of my earliest memories is being at her house when I was maybe six, and she was doing a little singing group for kids,” recalls Oakland songwriter and musician Oona Garthwaite, whose father is Terry’s brother David, the bass player. She grew up close by, in rural Marin County, thinking all grown-ups were musicians.
“It was partly learning to sing in harmony, and she taught us some of her chants. But then our homework was, like, to make percussion instruments out of Tupperware,” she says. (Terry makes her own percussion instruments by scouring thrift stores for pots and pans, then attaching the lids to beams of wood.) “She was the first person I ever knew doing 8-track recording at home. It was all about the delight of exploration, experimentation, following things that were interesting to you, no matter what.”
But the main thing her aunt taught her, says Oona, was to take up space.
“Especially as a young woman, when you say ‘Yeah, I’m an artist,’ with a certain kind of confidence, people look at you sideways. Like, ‘Who are you to be so sure of yourself?,’” she says. She remembers being at the Fillmore as a kid during a Joy of Cooking reunion show, realizing how many fans they had — and seeing that the people who raised her were there on the wall in the poster room alongside Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.
“I think my family history gave me this sense of belonging … like I had a right to be there. Even though I grew up on a dirt road, as far away from the industry as you can get, I didn’t have to prove myself as worthy of the music community. It was my birthright.”
Lately, Oona has been helping Terry with digitally mastering her catalog; her niece wants to make sure nothing gets lost to the temporality of vinyl and tape. New generations are discovering Garthwaite’s music all the time, after all: When she got a sync request last year from HBO — the network wanted to use the Joy of Cooking song “Three-Day Loser” for authentic ’70s music in the show Minx — Capitol finally put Joy of Cooking’s entire catalog up on streaming sites.
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The HBO paycheck was nice. But Garthwaite isn’t particularly consumed with business these days. She’s deciding what songs she wants to teach at circle next week, and which board games she’s going to play with her grandkids this weekend.
She has also begun to think about her legacy a bit, especially as some of her friends have passed away: Toni Brown, who lived nearby in Woodacre, died last August after a long illness. “That was a blessing that she finally went,” Garthwaite says softly, “because she wasn’t happy being here anymore.”
Garthwaite wants to be here. She plans to write, sing and play guitar into her 100s, as long as her body keeps up with her. She’s penning a memoir; chapter titles include “Surrounded by Light” and “Sing Yourself Happy.” And she finds herself more focused than ever on making music that gives people hope. Asked what gives her hope, she lists names: Rachel Maddow. Sonia Sotomayor. Dolly Parton. Greta Thunberg.
She has no regrets. Advice she would give her younger self? She thinks.
“Probably not to fret,” she says. “Don’t worry so much. Do it your way, you know? If you don’t follow your heart, who will?”
