John Rudoff

Singing at the Phila Folk Festival in 1963

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."

Toni Armstrong Jr

Alix with Vicki Randle

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."

Cathy Cade

Sue Fink leading me & the OLOC pickup chorus at the 2008 OLOC Gathering in LA, CA.

"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)

Highly Regarded

Peggy Seeger (big influence)
Pete Seeger (bigger influence)
Barbara Kingsolver
Louise Fishmen
Keith Olbermann
Alan Furst
Barbara Tuchman
Gore Vidal
Paul Wellstone
Julia Penelope
Virginia Woolf
Mary Oliver
Carolyn Gage
Ginny Apuzzo
Nick Park
Jane Powell
Eleanor Powell
Ella Fitzgerald
Alison Bechdel
Meryl Streep
J.S. Bach
Margaret Sloan Hunter
Del Martin
Phyllis Lyons
Sojourner Truth
Eleanor Roosevelt
Frances Perkins
Gloria Steinem
Fanny Lou Hamer
Gerald Stern
Joy Behar
Christine Delille
Wangari Maathai
Rev. Al Sharpton
Elisabeth Warren
Little Lulu
Ohio State Rep. Nina Turner
Stephanie Miller & crew

Irene Scot

Alix with Peggy Seeger & a stuffed friend, Asheville, NC, February, 2004

Nancy E. Zucchino

Alix with Melissa Etheridge, Albany, NY 1992