T H E S TAT E | I N S I D E R
Women of Song
The Tulsa Sound is not just a brotherhood, after all.
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Debbie Campbell will be one of several female Oklahoma musicians honored at the Women of Song event on May 15 at Cain’s Ballroom. Photo courtesy the John Wooley Collection
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OKLAHOMA MAGAZINE | MAY 2022
hose of you who regularly visit this space know that I’ve written a great deal about that elusive musical genre known as the classic Tulsa Sound. It’s something I first started researching in earnest almost four decades ago, when I went to work for the Tulsa World newspaper as an entertainment writer, and it’s been a continuous source of fascination for me ever since. Along the way, I’ve gotten to know many of its practitioners – some of whom have dismissed it as just a bunch of hooey, and others who not only disagree with that assessment, but have
very specific, concrete ideas about what it was and is. After all those years of studying and writing and listening and interviewing and thinking, I’ve just about come to the conclusion that the classic Tulsa Sound simply boils down to a brotherhood, created and perpetuated by a group of area musicians who played in each others’ bands, came out to see and support one another, soaked up similar musical influences, and became, in effect, brothers in arms, each giving his own spin to their unique collective sound. I called it a brotherhood. After talking with Brenda Cline, however, I realize it was a sisterhood as well. On May 15, Cline’s event – called Women of Song – is scheduled to take place at the Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa. A fundraising show for what she describes as “a multi-tier project” that includes a recording and music video spotlighting 20 female artists from Oklahoma, along with a documentary film, this initial event focuses on three top Tulsa performers who first made their marks in the ’70s and ’80s: Gus Hardin, Debbie Campbell and Betsy Smittle. The reason Cline started her whole project with that trio, she says, is that none of them are still with us, and she doesn’t think they should be forgotten. So their music will be presented as a tribute by others, including musicians who actually performed with them decades ago. “I just felt that in order to keep the authenticity of the Tulsa Sound, for this particular show, I wanted the real players that were back there in the day, in the ’70s and ’80s, performing at certain clubs like the Nine of Cups, Magician’s Theatre and Boston Avenue Market – as they called it, the Devil’s Triangle,” she says with a laugh. “To get everybody to agree to perform, I promised them we’d keep it authentic, about the Tulsa Sound and that certain era. I told them, ‘If you’re not on Medicare, you can’t be on the stage.’” (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say [a] that Brenda Cline asked me to emcee this benefit, which I’m happy to do, and [b] I’m on Medicare.) Cline, who spent 30 years in Nashville as an artist manager and record-label executive, returned to her home state in 2015. Well before that, however, she had begun an annual Oklahoma-centric event dubbed the Tulsa-Nashville Transplant (or TNT) Celebration.
