March 12, 2025 • 36 mins
History loves to highlight the loudest voices—but so many brilliant women were the true architects behind revolutions in thought, science, and sound, only to be buried in the footnotes or erased entirely. In this episode, we bring light to the women whose legacies shaped the world—and yet, whose names remain forgotten by most. You’ll meet the woman who taught Socrates—yes, Socrates—laying the intellectual groundwork for Western philosophy. You’ll hear the story of a brilliant human computer whose calculations sent astronauts to the moon while NASA basked in the spotlight. We’ll amplify the legacy of a guitar-slinging powerhouse whose gritty, electrifying playing birthed what we now call rock and roll—long before the genre had a name, long before the men who got famous for her sound. And we'll honor the Mazatec mushroom priestess whose scared psilocybin ceremonies bridged ancient wisdom and modern psychedelic science. These incredible women weren’t just behind the scenes—they built the scenes. It’s time to remember them, honor them, and speak their names for all of the universe to hear.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everybody that was leading the forefront, worthies, white males, you
know who are.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Or at least credited for it, right.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
But the people doing the dirty work, well that's a
different story. Her final report on this topic was the
first of his kind from an aerospace mechanic division authored
by a woman.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Ever, and if any of these things are true, she's
essentially one of the forefathers of Western philosophical thought. She
was pre Socrates and pre Plato and pre Aristotle.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
From nineteen eighty six to twenty fifteen is when she's
starting to get recognized. And you're gonna see this as
a trend among the women that we're talking about. They
don't get recognized until either they're gone or it's way
too late.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Jump, dance, Sing so that you live happier, heal yourself
with beautiful love, and always remember you are the medicine.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing.
Sometimes they just have more imagination. A black queer woman. Yes,
I didn't mention that openly queer eventually playing sacred music
in profane ways threatened too many power structures that we're
ready for it.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Launch, all right, So we have heard about the same
historical figures over and over and over. But what about
the historical women who didn't really make it to the
history books exactly?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
And there are loads of them. Today, We're diving into
the stories of women who defied the odds, broke the rules,
and literally shaped the world we live in today. Yet
somehow are not talked about nearly enough.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
From the intellectual rebel who taught Socrates the art of
rhetoric to the woman whose work launched space travel very important,
we wouldn't be here today without her, of course. Get
ready to meet some of history's most badassed, unsung heroines.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Woo, Welcome to inneral world.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
A fire, firefire, it's blowshit a block?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yes, well. In honor of Women's History Month, which should
be every month, we decided this would be an amazing
way to spend our time together this week in space,
So welcome and strap in and get ready to learn
some amazing facts about some incredible women. Do you want
to start it off? Or should I start it off?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
What do you? I don't know what are you feeling?
I feel like ladies first.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So then you so then you. We found ourselves in
a quandary. Here row favorit scissors Okay, rock paper scissors?
Shoot great?
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Oh wow, wow wow good rock paper scissors shoot foom.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Okay, So you go first, okay, because I want Okay,
sounds good and I have a very appropriate person to
start with.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
All right, go for I'm excited.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well, do you know who Catherine Johnson is?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I don't, but I have a feeling you're gonna tell you.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Might know who she is in a way that you
don't realize. But I'm gonna give you a little details
about her life and tell you and tell y'all out
there on Earth how incredible she was and how important
she was, like Jem mentioned for us being here in
orbit today. So Catherine Johnson was born in nineteen eighteen
in August, oh or a month in West Virginia. Her parents.
(03:15):
She was African American and at the time, you can imagine,
you know, access to education, you know, goals, just what
it was like to be alive at that period being
an African American. But her parents were determined that her
and her three siblings would go to college. Okay, obviously
that was super ambitious. So at the time, obviously schools
were still completely segregated and in order to reach the
(03:38):
nearest black high school, they had to move eighty miles away.
So education was so important to them that they went
ahead and did that because that was the way that
they wanted to, you know, teach their kids how to
make it in the world that they were in. She
finished high school when she was thirteen years old, okay,
and then she enrolled in the historically black college West
Virginia State and by eighteen she had already graduated college
(04:02):
with a double degree in French and math. She loved.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
I don't know if you can tell where the but anyway,
she accepted anto invitation to integrate West Virginia University as
one of the first black graduate students ever. Okay. She
soon learned of a job opportunity that she didn't know
she even had access to after all this education that
seemed too good to be true. It was called the
National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics or NAKA NACA. Sound familiar.
(04:30):
At that time, they were hiring women with math experience. However,
it was all like under the radar secretive because everybody
that was leading the forefront worthies, white males, you know, who.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Were or at least credited for it, right, But the.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
People doing the dirty work. Well, that's a different story.
So the women that they hired to do this work,
they called them computers.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Wow, because they were that good.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Not only because they were that good, because if you
say that in conversation, it's not like the women's department
to this, to that, it's easy to disguise the fact
you know who it was that was doing this actual work.
So they completed all of the calculations for all the
male engineers on the staff. So essentially it all started
with these female computers, if you will, and they were segregated,
(05:12):
but it was required by law that there were two
divisions of computer, one for white women and one for
black women. However, the hiring requirements for black women and
white women were different. The black girls needed a college
degree and away hire GPAs, while the white women did not.
So as a result, the male engineers because they of
(05:35):
course preferred the women who are doing their job better
and were more interested in a higher degrees of education
in that field. So two weeks after she started, an
engineer walked into the black computer's office seeking help and
she was signaled out by her boss who said she
was the brightest computer on staff. Can't believe that yeah.
She then went into an office followed him to an
(05:56):
office full of white men, and one of the team
leaders asked her to review a set of calculations they
were working on. Within seconds, she caught an error and
she pointed it out to him. Obviously, he was embarrassed,
but more so, he was excited at how amazing she
was at her job, so she found ways. At this
point she started to demand respect within the organization. Like,
(06:16):
for example, she refused to do the segregated bathroom rules,
she refused to eat in the segregated cafeteria. She would
put her foot down against you. So good at what
she did that they didn't even question her. She demanded
that respect, you know eic. So meanwhile, they put on
the biggest case, which was to send the first astronaut
to orbit the Earth. One of the biggest challenges was
(06:38):
where the ship was going to land, so she volunteered
to calculate the path. Her final report on this topic
was the first of his kind from an aerospace mechanic division,
authored by a woman ever and obviously a black woman,
but first woman ever.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Two years later, John Glenn was preparing to be the
first American to orbit the planet. NASA had a series
of mechanical comput to McKenna his path, but the computers
were not always reliable. Who was the computer Catherine? Again.
After reviewing the plan, John made a specific request. He
told NATHA that if the girl said the math was right,
he was ready to fly.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Wow. Uh huh, okay girl.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
The girl she had mentioned was obviously Catherine, so she
spent two days calculating the path. On February twentieth, he
successfully orbited the planet. The Black Press at that time
was the only press that gave any attention to the
fact that she was the one doing the calculations. It
was never said anywhere else other than there, and obviously,
you know that was not you know, on the front.
When President Kennedy challenged NASA to land on the Moon,
(07:35):
who do they want again? Catherine? And that's exactly what
she did. She helped figure out how to launch a
spacecraft into the Moon and how to connect an orbiting spacecraft,
which the exact one that landed on the Moon that
was also Catherine. And in July nineteen sixty nine, the
US landed on the Moon successfully. Unless you believed the
conspiracy theory, we'll never know over the next seventeen years,
(07:56):
Catherine continued to work tirelessly at NASA. Seventeen years, she
insured all three of her daughters graduated from college the
same way that her family ensured that she and her
sisters were, and she tootored students in advocacy for better
access to STEM education for black girls. She retired from
NASA in nineteen eighty six, and in twenty fifteen she
received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wow, all, look at that.
(08:17):
From nineteen eighty six to twenty fifteen is when she's
starting to get recognized. And you're gonna see this as
a trend among the women that we're talking about. They
don't get recognized until either they're gone or it's way
too late. Now y'all might recognize this name Hidden Figures,
because in twenty sixteen her life was profiled in the
movie Hidden Figures, And in twenty seventeen, NASA named its
(08:37):
new computing facility after her. Oh, Catherine died unfortunately in
twenty twenty at the age of one hundred. She got
to lee.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Wow, but she lived to receive these accomplies.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
She did.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Oh, that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah, And then the only other county I'll say about Catherine.
I have just a couple quotes from her, so we
could hear from her directly. If you lose your curiosity,
then you stop learning. Girls are capable of doing everything
men are capable of doing. Sometimes they just have more imagination.
Go as far as you can see. When you get there,
you'll be able to see further. Wow, it's just one more.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
So all these women deserve their flowers and then and
the Okay, all right, I loved learning about her, so awesome.
Now I want to watch Hidden Figures again with this perspective.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
All right, let's hear about one of your influential Okay.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
So, so this is actually the woman that inspired this
topic and why I brought it to you, and of
course our producer to Now, we wouldn't do this without
her to see if this was something we could move
forward with. Her name was Aspasia of Miletus, So she
was around.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Way way, way, way way back when she was.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Born in four seventy BCE and died around four hundred BC.
Between fourteen and four hundred BC. Obviously, then they didn't
do the best job at keeping these kinds of records,
especially when it came to women, right, so historically she
has been known mostly for her relationship with her consort Pericles,
(10:08):
who was the great statesman who actually lifted Athens into
this golden age by supporting art and philosophy and music,
and that time they weren't allowed to marry because Aspasia
wasn't born in Athens, and you couldn't marry if you
weren't in Athens. There was a whole tax issue. So
while her relationship to Pericles is documented, there are actually
(10:30):
a lot of other aspects of her life that are
still currently being debated by historians today because unfortunately we
don't even have any primary documents of hers well that
we know of being properly attributed to her. So she
actually was a philosopher and educator, a daring woman who
completely went against the rules of her time, especially in
(10:52):
a society that was so incredibly dominated by males. But
she was no ordinary woman. She was brilliant, outspoken, absolutely
impossible to ignore. So in that time period, because she
kind of lived in this gray area of not really
having to apply the rules of Athens to her life,
she actually lived her life outwardly like a man would
(11:15):
in her time. She established a renowned girls' school at
a time where women weren't really supposed to have education.
They were, you know, cast some domesticated roles, and she
led a popular intellectual salon, basically a meeting place in
her home where the most powerful minds, including Socrates, gathered
to discuss politics, rhetoric, philosophy. Plato socrates student in his
(11:39):
satirical dialogue menexinis, I hope I'm pronouncing all of this right,
He actually playfully suggested that Socrates himself learned the art
of persuasion from Aspasia. It said that he marveled at
her eloquence and credited her with being the real composer
of the famous funeral oration that Pericles delivered in honor
of the casualties of the Peloponnesian War. She didn't just
(12:00):
break the mold for herself, but she actually quietly shaped
this new generation of women that were educated with skills
that society tried to deny them.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
She hacked the system, and.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Of course, as all unruly women in history, she had
a lot of male enemies who constantly attacked her. Her
foreign birth and refusal to conform made her prime target
for political attacks, and obviously, given her proximity to Pericles.
It made a lot of sense. So everything that he
accomplished was successful they attributed to him, and everything that
happened that went poorly they attributed to her. They called
(12:31):
her a manipulator, said that she was, you know, conforming
Pericles to her views, and that's why certain things happened
while she was alive. They claimed that she showed disrespect
for the gods. They accused her of causing wars, even
the Samerian War, and they went so far as to
bring a charge of impiety against her. So she had
a real trial that took place in front of fifteen
(12:53):
hundred jurors, and it was only dismissed after Pericles giving
his eloquent speech nearly Braunt drawn to tears that they
dismissed the charge. Whether or not the accusations are true,
obviously are unknown. Historians believe it was an attempt to
discredit her because of all the things attributed to her,
and if any of these things are true, she's essentially
(13:15):
one of the forefathers of Western philosophical thought. She was
pre Socrates and pre Plato and pre Aristotle.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Wild right, which is definitely not alive to see this. No, No,
she's not.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
And this is obviously a pattern in history, right like
women who are powerful are seen as dangerous.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
The ideas are taken uh huh, and.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Over the centuries, unfortunately, her story has oftentimes been warped
and manipulated, and a lot of ancient writers have just
simply reduced her to the role of courtesan, which is
essentially a sex worker for the elite, and they claimed
that her girls' school was actually a brothel and that
(13:58):
she served little more, little to any other purpose to
Pericles than to just be essentially his mistress. So right now,
in fact, modern scholars are reevaluating what her impact actually
was in history and in general, her life is just
a testament to the quiet rebellions that shape history.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I'm sorry it is Spasia, but isn't that incredible. I mean,
in a time where where women weren't even allowed to read,
she was. There's a depiction of her in a painting
where you see like she's orating and Socrates is listening intently,
you know, And a lot of people attribute his talent
(14:43):
for persees of speech and even some of his argument,
some of his thoughts on argument or intellectual discourse to
her ideas.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Espacia, we got you. When the time machines get built,
the first place we're going is back to.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Your ass Espasia of me, Liz.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
We're gonna go back there with an iPhone. We're gonna
document it, and we'll be back over here to make
sure everybody knows.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Some people even think that that wasn't her real name,
because I believe it translates to something related to beauty.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Oh who knows.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Man, I know that we I mean, we have no
primary works that are attributed to her.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Coasonally space travel, I mean space travel. Time travel is
coming in twenty twenty eight. So oh really see that
girl girl student space? Yeah? All right, cool? Yeah, Well,
speaking of time travel, we can take a little break
and when we come right back, we can jump to
the future to nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Ooh love it.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Plug it. That's me plugging it in. I know. Okay,
welcome back, earthlings. We have made it safely to nineteen fifteen.
How do you feel?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
I feel good? I, like I said, I'm bouncing around.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I feel excited. I hear some music.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
The Roaring Twenties are before us. Yes, but there's I
can feel the booze.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
There's something else cigarette or at a jazz there's something
else roaring. Okay, So our next incredible woman who you
may know her name, but I am very excited to
share with you some of the details of why she
truly is as important as she is to the history
of music and more importantly, the history of rock and roll.
(16:32):
Oh and we're talking about sister Rosetta Tharp. So she
essentially is now regarded as the inventor, or one of
the inventors, but really the inventor of rock and roll.
The genre that we call.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Rock and roll sat Elvis Well.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
And we're talking about decades before Elvis, and we're talking
about innovation in a way that so much of the
music that we listen to today, even when it comes
to tonality, is inspired by some of the choices, some
of the bold musical choices that she made badass anyway,
So when she strapped on an electric guitar in the
nineteen forties, she made it scream with distortion, which we'll
(17:10):
get into how important that was. She created a new
musical language, she made a new genre. Every riff, every
stage mannerism, every innovation later attributed to white male rock
pioneers as their own. Again another theme, the rock establishment
systematically erased her from its origin story for a very
very long time. A black queer woman, yes, if I
(17:33):
didn't mention that openly queer eventually playing sacred music in
profane ways threatened too many power structures. They weren't ready
for it. That's another theme that when when you're not
in your.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Time, sometimes they're ahead of their time, right.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
But just innovation in and of itself is never met,
you know, with open arms in a time when you're
going against something that people think, you know, it's like
profane or all or you know, all this stuff. Anyway,
just like you said, she was there before Elvis, before
Little Richard, before Johnny Cash swiveled his hips and strummed
his guitars. It was sister Rosetta Tharp, the godmother of
(18:09):
rock and roll, who turned this musical style into an
international sensation that still to this day is taking notes
from what she did. She was born in Rosetta Nubin
in Arkansas, to Willis Atkins and Katie Bell. She came
from a family of religious singers, so she came from
a musical family, but they were also imagine the time,
cotton pickers and traditional evangelists. She picked up the guitar
(18:29):
at guess what age, Take a guess, six four years old.
She started playing four At the age of six, she
already started accompanying her mother to perform with a traveling
evangelist group and churches around the South. So she's a
church musician through and through. By the mid nineteen twenties,
Starpun her mother settled in Chicago, where they continued performing
spiritual music. As she grew up, she thought of the
(18:50):
idea of fusing Delta blues, New Orleans jazz, and gospel
music into what would be her signature style, her distinctive
voice and a conventional style attractive fans. It was still
the thirties, as you can imagine, and female guitarist in
the thirties still female guitars to this day called female
guitarists instead of just guitars. So imagine in the thirties
(19:10):
talk about paving the way.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Why did they do that? Why did they have to
make the distinction?
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I don't know. But she was young and she had
a vision, and she decided that she didn't care what
people thought. She was determined to keep experimenting with her sound.
With at that time, nobody did so. By nineteen thirty eight,
she joined the Cotton Club Review, a New York City
club that became especially notable during the Prohibition era. So
that's what you were hearing when we started. She was
only twenty three at the time, a feat that was
(19:35):
only amplified when she scored her first single, rock Me,
which at that time even the name and the words
were like.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
People were like rock, what is this? Very suggestive?
Speaker 1 (19:45):
It was a fusion of gospel and rock and roll,
and it had It came with a couple other songs
that had the same style called my Man, That's All
Lonesome Road. I encourage you all to go listen to
her music because it is electrifying. In the lyric of
the music, she flirted with the openness in her sexuality
and love and things like that, things that now everybody
(20:07):
speaks about like nothing. But at that time, again, forget
about males females. Nobody was brave enough to be singing
about that. And it left her gospel audiences speechless in shock.
You know what I mean, Right, that's such a stark change.
Not only that, she was a touring musician, and as
the years went on, obviously racism was still rampant. So
on tour, all the hotels and the places were still
(20:29):
completely segregated, and she had to sleep on the bus,
so she couldn't sleep in the hotels or anything like that.
She had to go around the back of the restaurants
to get her food and they wouldn't let her in obviously.
So eventually she met her partner which she was with
and created a band with her name was Mary Knight.
Think about this, she meets a woman, they literally started
(20:50):
a band together. They're out there performing, you know, these
two queer rock and rollers, all right, uh huh. It
was radical. People didn't know what to do with it
at this time. When they were about to pop off,
white men caught on and you know the other side
of the industry caught on to what she was doing,
(21:11):
and that was all it took. They started to copy
the styles. They started to copy her sound and Chuck
Berry sound, take her writing format and what she had
created and just completely appropriated and obviously once again not
give any credit to its origin or amplify these you know,
these artists. So obviously, as you can imagine, as rock
(21:33):
and roll took off with these faces, as the mascots
for it. She faded Yeah, she faded away. Yeah. So
it's it's really sad, but I'm glad to say that now.
You know, we still live in a time she definitely
wasn't around to see the impact of what she did.
You know, she wasn't inducted into the Rock and Roll
(21:54):
Hall of Fame until twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Oh my gosh. And when did she die.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
She died in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Oh yeah, so yeah posthumously.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, well yeah, but twenty eighteen that they should have
done it in nineteen seventy four, They should have done
it in yeah, nineteen sixty five, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
But I'm glad. You know.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
So now, one tiny musical geek out thing about her
that makes her the details of why she was able
to create some of the sound that she did and
why it's so unique for it. Okay, it's about her guitar.
It's about the details of how she played guitar, and
that has so much to do with rock and roll, which,
by the way, including some of the bon't to boon't
(22:32):
to bunt to bom boonm that's a clove. Have you
not noticed that?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
So? Oh my god, everywhere anyway.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Okay, So number one, she had a style where she
attacked the strings she actually played. She had a fingerpicking
style where she played with her thumb to pick and
that's such a bigger pad area and so like deep.
And she often performed in vestibule tuning, which is like
da d F sharp ad. It's like a different kind
of tuning. So as a result, like the sounds, you know,
(23:05):
get a little bit lower, and it just as a result,
the way you even voice chords on the guitar sounds
completely different. And she had like a very percussive style
in the way that she played. It was like bombastic
and exciting, you know what I mean, so very much
in the style of Chuck Berry, who came after her,
who is even then you know it is also black.
(23:27):
But they attribute you know, they were like, oh no,
he's the father of rock and roll. But I'll tell
you a little bit about what Chuck Berry said about yeah, exactly.
Second of all, she played electric guitar, which was already
a big thing because not a lot of people at
that time, especially females, you know, they were all it
was acoustics or if it was an electatric guitar. It
had an acoustic sound. It was just to amplify it. It
(23:50):
wasn't using the electric component in the way that she did. Also,
this is the most important her distorted tone, because she
wasn't the first person to use distortion. And what distortion
is is amplifiers for guitars have these things called tubes
in them. Not a lot of them anymore, but the
tubes heat up, and if you heat up the tubes
too much by overdriving them, it crunches the sound that's
(24:12):
coming out of the ant. That's the results of the
tubes getting super hot and like pushing the tubes to
their limit. So she saw that sound where other people
were like, oh, this is nasty or this is broken
or whatever, she leaned into it, which is the rock
sound that we all love. Obviously right now, she didn't
want the clean sound. She wanted the nasty, gross sound.
(24:32):
The other thing which is amazing about her is Les Paul.
Have you ever heard that name? Of course, uh huh,
Well she actually it's bold claim because obviously Les Paul
himself was the one who popped you know, made Les Paul,
but she was the one who popularized it and used
it during the fifties, heavily used it and it was
subsequently like made the wave of the British blues rockers
(24:53):
because they would see her use this instrument, including even
Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck. You start to use use Less
Paul's and then the funny thing is that Gibson SG.
They made a model called the SG, which is the
one that you kind of see here in all the
pictures with the one that like acdc uses and everything,
you know, like the one with the two little horns
that's thinner, and she was like, I love that it's
light and I can move my fingers faster, and Less
(25:14):
Paul himself was like, nah, I don't like this thing.
And the SG is such an iconic figure of rock
and roll, and she was the one who started to saying, yeah,
I love the SG, like I'm gonna use it.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So yeah, now rock star for real.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
I know. And now the Smithsonian Archive contains multiple pictures
of her using the earliest incarnation of the nineteen fifty
two Less Paul gold top with the trepeze style bridge,
which is really cool ethic. So anyway she is, I
can imagine she would have been like a gear head
and a nerd, and she really started to push the
limitations of the instrument which attributed to that distorted sound,
which helped her create the sound which became rock and roll.
(25:49):
So when you hear distortion and music, thinks sisters and
thank her. And the quote about Chuck Berry that I
just mentioned, who is credited by a lot of people
to be the father and father of rock and roll,
he said, ended quote, My entire career was one long
sister Rosetta Tharp impersonation.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Wow, thank you Chuck Berry for being an honest man.
Sister Rosetta Tharp.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Sister Rosetta Tharp, who was.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Quere icon, who s Consett all the time?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Can no man play like me? And probably can't?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Baby, Yeah, I want to be her friend.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
She seemed really cool, awesome, really really cool.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Really cool, brave, really rock and roll.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Love it. I love her, all right, Babe.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
We're on our last woman learning so much.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Okay, I know, I know, I love this. I love
celebrating women me too, all right, So I'm gonna take
it back just slightly, Okay, not too not too far
wait put in Wow that was fast. We arrived to
(27:07):
eighteen ninety four. Oh the birth of Maria Sabina Magdalena Garcia,
or the Great Mushroom Priestess.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I already love her.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
So. Maria Savina, as she's commonly referred to as, was
born into the Masatek indigenous community in Wahaca, Mexico. She
began using psilocybin mushrooms, which she referred to as her
Nino santos in healing ceremonies, at just ten years old.
She was married at fourteen, and at twenty she became
a kurandera and was known for her velalas, where she
(27:40):
would use mushrooms to diagnose secure illnesses. She was illiterate,
so she would express herself through the voice of the
mushrooms or her holy children, and she claimed to see
them as children dancing and playing instruments. And her chants
were first translated from Masa Tek, her natural language, into
English and then later into Spanish. Still she's considered one
(28:05):
of Mexico's greatest poets.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
It took a man, of course, to get her recognized.
In nineteen fifty five, R. Gordon Wasson, a New York
banker and ethnomycologist with a fascination for hallucinogenic mushrooms attended
one of her ceremonies. He later wrote in an article
a Life magazine in nineteen fifty seven where he talked
about his experience with her, and this actually popularized the
(28:29):
use of psychedelic mushrooms in Western culture because after the article, celebrities,
artists musicians like Bob Dylan, John Landon, Timothy Leary traveled
to Wahaka hoping to be guided by the mushroom priestess.
She never wanted to be famous, and this influx of ice,
outsiders and people who were traveling to her community actually
(28:49):
disrupted the community's traditions, so the locals started to resent
her and it led to serious social and economic hardship
for her. Unfortunately, her final years were filled with pub
in illness as a result of how her community kind
of alienated her. Her son was killed and her home
was burnt down by villagers, and she essentially ended up
(29:09):
dying in the same poverty.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
That she was born in.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
But her rituals and the knowledge of psilocybin mushrooms played
a crucial rise in the use of psychedelic therapy and
scientific research into psilocybin. Today, sosocybin mushrooms are being studied
for their potential to cure depression, cure PTSD addiction, and
it essentially makes her a massive influence in medicine. And
(29:33):
I also want to share a quote of hers that,
as we now know, was first translated into English, that
I think that everybody can benefit from. Cure yourself with
the light of the sun and the rays of the moon,
with the sound of the river and the waterfall, with
the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.
(29:54):
Heal yourself with mint, with nime and eucalyptus. Sweeten yourself
with lavender, rosemary camobile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean
in a touch of cinnamon. Put love into tea instead
of vinegar, and take it looking at the stars. Heal
yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and
the hugs of the rain. Get strong with bare feet
(30:15):
on the ground and with everything that is born from it.
Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking
at the world with the eye of your forehead your
third eye. Jump, dance, sing so that you live happier.
Heal yourself with beautiful love, and always remember you are
the medicine MM.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Whow I feel for her. I've actually read about her before,
and I had seen that she personally grew up doing
these ceremonies for herself because I guess she had lost
a lot of people in her life, like a prior
husband or something, and she could always heal. And she
said that after her ritual was tainted by the influx
(31:01):
of all these people because a lot of some of
them went for healing, but a lot of them were
just going to get high right curiosity, And now we're
actually making the loop. Sorry, but anyway, so what she
claimed is that after that that the mushrooms stopped working
for her and she wasn't able to heal that way anymore,
and as a result, you know, had all the hardships.
(31:22):
She isn't at the end of her life. But I
feel for her. But you know what, look at all
the studies being done and the microdosing and the respect
now that people have for the psychedelic healing community, and
essentially she I mean, she was a shaman.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
She was a shaman. She was a shaman an orator,
you know, and she died, I mean not too long ago,
in nineteen eighty five. So I don't think that being
that she you know, she was the most recent woman
that we've discussed. I don't think that the effects of
her influence have been truly felt yet. What we know
about using psychedelic mushrooms in a medicinal way is has
(32:00):
yet to be truly explored. There's so much that's a
that's a question mark. But she she would always say
that visible spiritual world was never far from us.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
I have a surprise.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
You do.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Influential overlooked woman. Oh yes, and it's also a suhadance. Yeah,
a suggestion for all of you out there all right. Obviously,
these women that we talked about today are extraordinary in
many ways and way ahead of their time. Yeah, but
there are many women in your lives that I'm sure
also underappreciated that you don't realize just sound incredible and
(32:38):
how much they do. So I think you are an
influential me. Yes, woman, Oh please. And I'd like to
think in my in my universe, in my life, you know,
and as a result, as everybody's that you that you touched,
So take a moment and think about women in your
life that that make it better, that inspire you, that
you learn from, and you know, give them a call
(32:59):
and say thank you, because because these aren't the only
women that are underappreciated, but they definitely did a lot
of cooler shuit don't we do. But anyway, I appreciate
you the same way you do so many things that
are not you know, met with the recognition you deserve,
including steering this ship that so many of us get
(33:20):
to enjoy, including me. So thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
You're very welcome. It's my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
And if you want to appreciate me for something cool,
we can talk about it. Advice about saying today news
space news. All right, space news. Let's going on in
space this week? Everybody, I'm dying to know. I'm just
reporting what the truth is. There's no way I know
what's on this paper. I'm just more on the news,
all right. Mars may have a solid inner core, just
(33:48):
like Earth. When scientists began looking into this phenomenon, to
no surprise, they found that Mars has a rigorous ab
routine centered around calisthenics and floorwork. That's why they have
the strong core. Leg day and arm day, though are
reportedly twenty seven hundred light years away. Oh sorry, Mars,
he's got the apps, all right. Next the second ever
(34:10):
privately funded spacecraft has touched down on the Moon. It
has an onboard vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis,
a drill to measure temperatures as deep as ten feet.
Also on board is a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust. Unfortunately,
it has also been confirmed that the in flight meals
are just as vile as the other on Earth flights.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Oh man, yeah, they gotta do something about that.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
We'll figure it out. No, we won't.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Just why is the sandwich and is it bucked back
better than flight meals?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
I don't get that horrible at all?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Weird, we'll see.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Lastly, it will soon be a year that those poor
astronauts have been stranded on the International Space Station.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
So I totally forgot about that.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
I know we've been reporting it for a while, but
they're still up to the rescue. Missions have been failing,
patients is running thin, and nobody knows if they're going
to be able to actually return. Trump sent a special
message to these abandoned astronauts and joked that he may
go along for the rescue. Personally, I think that's the
most incredible idea he's ever had. And this has been
(35:14):
space news.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Yeah, I suggest that Elon Musk puts Trump on his
next test fight just saying crazy idea.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I know, they should all go together.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
They can make it one of the ones that like
explodes it to a million pieces in the sky. Which,
by the way, four out of his eight space flights
space test has failed, which like if we all remember
in school, a fifty percent grade is an F so
I would say.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Failure. No, well, this isn't next week's space news. But
they found out that all he did was just glue
cyber trucks together, no wonder.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, I remember seeing that press uh that little
press release that I.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Don't want to talk about that.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, forget all of that.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah, anyway, the point is space is But the point
is that, you know, I think that it's a duty
that we have to continue to look back in our
past and rectify things that, you know, make things right,
and learn more and be inquisitive. And obviously for some
of them we don't have access to those records that
(36:17):
we never will, but that doesn't mean that we can't
continue to search for the absolutely and you can continue
to search for us online at Inner Own World PLOD.
We love flying with you and.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
We will see you next week. Love you guys, Jakes,
Double James. Bye Launch. This podcast is brought to you
by Moonflower Productions in partnership with Iheartsmike.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Will do that podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
For more podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Everybody that was leading the forefront, worthies, white males, you
know who are.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Or at least credited for it, right.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
But the people doing the dirty work, well that's a
different story. Her final report on this topic was the
first of his kind from an aerospace mechanic division authored
by a woman.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Ever, and if any of these things are true, she's
essentially one of the forefathers of Western philosophical thought. She
was pre Socrates and pre Plato and pre Aristotle.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
From nineteen eighty six to twenty fifteen is when she's
starting to get recognized. And you're gonna see this as
a trend among the women that we're talking about. They
don't get recognized until either they're gone or it's way
too late.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Jump, dance, Sing so that you live happier, heal yourself
with beautiful love, and always remember you are the medicine.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing.
Sometimes they just have more imagination. A black queer woman. Yes,
I didn't mention that openly queer eventually playing sacred music
in profane ways threatened too many power structures that we're
ready for it.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Launch, all right, So we have heard about the same
historical figures over and over and over. But what about
the historical women who didn't really make it to the
history books exactly?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
And there are loads of them. Today, We're diving into
the stories of women who defied the odds, broke the rules,
and literally shaped the world we live in today. Yet
somehow are not talked about nearly enough.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
From the intellectual rebel who taught Socrates the art of
rhetoric to the woman whose work launched space travel very important,
we wouldn't be here today without her, of course. Get
ready to meet some of history's most badassed, unsung heroines.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Woo, Welcome to inneral world.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
A fire, firefire, it's blowshit a block?
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Yes, well. In honor of Women's History Month, which should
be every month, we decided this would be an amazing
way to spend our time together this week in space,
So welcome and strap in and get ready to learn
some amazing facts about some incredible women. Do you want
to start it off? Or should I start it off?
Speaker 2 (02:16):
What do you? I don't know what are you feeling?
I feel like ladies first.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So then you so then you. We found ourselves in
a quandary. Here row favorit scissors Okay, rock paper scissors?
Shoot great?
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Oh wow, wow wow good rock paper scissors shoot foom.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Okay, So you go first, okay, because I want Okay,
sounds good and I have a very appropriate person to
start with.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
All right, go for I'm excited.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well, do you know who Catherine Johnson is?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
I don't, but I have a feeling you're gonna tell you.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Might know who she is in a way that you
don't realize. But I'm gonna give you a little details
about her life and tell you and tell y'all out
there on Earth how incredible she was and how important
she was, like Jem mentioned for us being here in
orbit today. So Catherine Johnson was born in nineteen eighteen
in August, oh or a month in West Virginia. Her parents.
(03:15):
She was African American and at the time, you can imagine,
you know, access to education, you know, goals, just what
it was like to be alive at that period being
an African American. But her parents were determined that her
and her three siblings would go to college. Okay, obviously
that was super ambitious. So at the time, obviously schools
were still completely segregated and in order to reach the
(03:38):
nearest black high school, they had to move eighty miles away.
So education was so important to them that they went
ahead and did that because that was the way that
they wanted to, you know, teach their kids how to
make it in the world that they were in. She
finished high school when she was thirteen years old, okay,
and then she enrolled in the historically black college West
Virginia State and by eighteen she had already graduated college
(04:02):
with a double degree in French and math. She loved.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
I don't know if you can tell where the but anyway,
she accepted anto invitation to integrate West Virginia University as
one of the first black graduate students ever. Okay. She
soon learned of a job opportunity that she didn't know
she even had access to after all this education that
seemed too good to be true. It was called the
National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics or NAKA NACA. Sound familiar.
(04:30):
At that time, they were hiring women with math experience. However,
it was all like under the radar secretive because everybody
that was leading the forefront worthies, white males, you know, who.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Were or at least credited for it, right, But the.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
People doing the dirty work. Well, that's a different story.
So the women that they hired to do this work,
they called them computers.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Wow, because they were that good.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Not only because they were that good, because if you
say that in conversation, it's not like the women's department
to this, to that, it's easy to disguise the fact
you know who it was that was doing this actual work.
So they completed all of the calculations for all the
male engineers on the staff. So essentially it all started
with these female computers, if you will, and they were segregated,
(05:12):
but it was required by law that there were two
divisions of computer, one for white women and one for
black women. However, the hiring requirements for black women and
white women were different. The black girls needed a college
degree and away hire GPAs, while the white women did not.
So as a result, the male engineers because they of
(05:35):
course preferred the women who are doing their job better
and were more interested in a higher degrees of education
in that field. So two weeks after she started, an
engineer walked into the black computer's office seeking help and
she was signaled out by her boss who said she
was the brightest computer on staff. Can't believe that yeah.
She then went into an office followed him to an
(05:56):
office full of white men, and one of the team
leaders asked her to review a set of calculations they
were working on. Within seconds, she caught an error and
she pointed it out to him. Obviously, he was embarrassed,
but more so, he was excited at how amazing she
was at her job, so she found ways. At this
point she started to demand respect within the organization. Like,
(06:16):
for example, she refused to do the segregated bathroom rules,
she refused to eat in the segregated cafeteria. She would
put her foot down against you. So good at what
she did that they didn't even question her. She demanded
that respect, you know eic. So meanwhile, they put on
the biggest case, which was to send the first astronaut
to orbit the Earth. One of the biggest challenges was
(06:38):
where the ship was going to land, so she volunteered
to calculate the path. Her final report on this topic
was the first of his kind from an aerospace mechanic division,
authored by a woman ever and obviously a black woman,
but first woman ever.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Two years later, John Glenn was preparing to be the
first American to orbit the planet. NASA had a series
of mechanical comput to McKenna his path, but the computers
were not always reliable. Who was the computer Catherine? Again.
After reviewing the plan, John made a specific request. He
told NATHA that if the girl said the math was right,
he was ready to fly.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Wow. Uh huh, okay girl.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
The girl she had mentioned was obviously Catherine, so she
spent two days calculating the path. On February twentieth, he
successfully orbited the planet. The Black Press at that time
was the only press that gave any attention to the
fact that she was the one doing the calculations. It
was never said anywhere else other than there, and obviously,
you know that was not you know, on the front.
When President Kennedy challenged NASA to land on the Moon,
(07:35):
who do they want again? Catherine? And that's exactly what
she did. She helped figure out how to launch a
spacecraft into the Moon and how to connect an orbiting spacecraft,
which the exact one that landed on the Moon that
was also Catherine. And in July nineteen sixty nine, the
US landed on the Moon successfully. Unless you believed the
conspiracy theory, we'll never know over the next seventeen years,
(07:56):
Catherine continued to work tirelessly at NASA. Seventeen years, she
insured all three of her daughters graduated from college the
same way that her family ensured that she and her
sisters were, and she tootored students in advocacy for better
access to STEM education for black girls. She retired from
NASA in nineteen eighty six, and in twenty fifteen she
received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wow, all, look at that.
(08:17):
From nineteen eighty six to twenty fifteen is when she's
starting to get recognized. And you're gonna see this as
a trend among the women that we're talking about. They
don't get recognized until either they're gone or it's way
too late. Now y'all might recognize this name Hidden Figures,
because in twenty sixteen her life was profiled in the
movie Hidden Figures, And in twenty seventeen, NASA named its
(08:37):
new computing facility after her. Oh, Catherine died unfortunately in
twenty twenty at the age of one hundred. She got
to lee.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Wow, but she lived to receive these accomplies.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
She did.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Oh, that's amazing.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
Yeah, And then the only other county I'll say about Catherine.
I have just a couple quotes from her, so we
could hear from her directly. If you lose your curiosity,
then you stop learning. Girls are capable of doing everything
men are capable of doing. Sometimes they just have more imagination.
Go as far as you can see. When you get there,
you'll be able to see further. Wow, it's just one more.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
So all these women deserve their flowers and then and
the Okay, all right, I loved learning about her, so awesome.
Now I want to watch Hidden Figures again with this perspective.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
All right, let's hear about one of your influential Okay.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
So, so this is actually the woman that inspired this
topic and why I brought it to you, and of
course our producer to Now, we wouldn't do this without
her to see if this was something we could move
forward with. Her name was Aspasia of Miletus, So she
was around.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Way way, way, way way back when she was.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Born in four seventy BCE and died around four hundred BC.
Between fourteen and four hundred BC. Obviously, then they didn't
do the best job at keeping these kinds of records,
especially when it came to women, right, so historically she
has been known mostly for her relationship with her consort Pericles,
(10:08):
who was the great statesman who actually lifted Athens into
this golden age by supporting art and philosophy and music,
and that time they weren't allowed to marry because Aspasia
wasn't born in Athens, and you couldn't marry if you
weren't in Athens. There was a whole tax issue. So
while her relationship to Pericles is documented, there are actually
(10:30):
a lot of other aspects of her life that are
still currently being debated by historians today because unfortunately we
don't even have any primary documents of hers well that
we know of being properly attributed to her. So she
actually was a philosopher and educator, a daring woman who
completely went against the rules of her time, especially in
(10:52):
a society that was so incredibly dominated by males. But
she was no ordinary woman. She was brilliant, outspoken, absolutely
impossible to ignore. So in that time period, because she
kind of lived in this gray area of not really
having to apply the rules of Athens to her life,
she actually lived her life outwardly like a man would
(11:15):
in her time. She established a renowned girls' school at
a time where women weren't really supposed to have education.
They were, you know, cast some domesticated roles, and she
led a popular intellectual salon, basically a meeting place in
her home where the most powerful minds, including Socrates, gathered
to discuss politics, rhetoric, philosophy. Plato socrates student in his
(11:39):
satirical dialogue menexinis, I hope I'm pronouncing all of this right,
He actually playfully suggested that Socrates himself learned the art
of persuasion from Aspasia. It said that he marveled at
her eloquence and credited her with being the real composer
of the famous funeral oration that Pericles delivered in honor
of the casualties of the Peloponnesian War. She didn't just
(12:00):
break the mold for herself, but she actually quietly shaped
this new generation of women that were educated with skills
that society tried to deny them.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
She hacked the system, and.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Of course, as all unruly women in history, she had
a lot of male enemies who constantly attacked her. Her
foreign birth and refusal to conform made her prime target
for political attacks, and obviously, given her proximity to Pericles.
It made a lot of sense. So everything that he
accomplished was successful they attributed to him, and everything that
happened that went poorly they attributed to her. They called
(12:31):
her a manipulator, said that she was, you know, conforming
Pericles to her views, and that's why certain things happened
while she was alive. They claimed that she showed disrespect
for the gods. They accused her of causing wars, even
the Samerian War, and they went so far as to
bring a charge of impiety against her. So she had
a real trial that took place in front of fifteen
(12:53):
hundred jurors, and it was only dismissed after Pericles giving
his eloquent speech nearly Braunt drawn to tears that they
dismissed the charge. Whether or not the accusations are true,
obviously are unknown. Historians believe it was an attempt to
discredit her because of all the things attributed to her,
and if any of these things are true, she's essentially
(13:15):
one of the forefathers of Western philosophical thought. She was
pre Socrates and pre Plato and pre Aristotle.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Wild right, which is definitely not alive to see this. No, No,
she's not.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
And this is obviously a pattern in history, right like
women who are powerful are seen as dangerous.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
The ideas are taken uh huh, and.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Over the centuries, unfortunately, her story has oftentimes been warped
and manipulated, and a lot of ancient writers have just
simply reduced her to the role of courtesan, which is
essentially a sex worker for the elite, and they claimed
that her girls' school was actually a brothel and that
(13:58):
she served little more, little to any other purpose to
Pericles than to just be essentially his mistress. So right now,
in fact, modern scholars are reevaluating what her impact actually
was in history and in general, her life is just
a testament to the quiet rebellions that shape history.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I'm sorry it is Spasia, but isn't that incredible. I mean,
in a time where where women weren't even allowed to read,
she was. There's a depiction of her in a painting
where you see like she's orating and Socrates is listening intently,
you know, And a lot of people attribute his talent
(14:43):
for persees of speech and even some of his argument,
some of his thoughts on argument or intellectual discourse to
her ideas.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Espacia, we got you. When the time machines get built,
the first place we're going is back to.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Your ass Espasia of me, Liz.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
We're gonna go back there with an iPhone. We're gonna
document it, and we'll be back over here to make
sure everybody knows.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Some people even think that that wasn't her real name,
because I believe it translates to something related to beauty.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Oh who knows.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Man, I know that we I mean, we have no
primary works that are attributed to her.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Coasonally space travel, I mean space travel. Time travel is
coming in twenty twenty eight. So oh really see that
girl girl student space? Yeah? All right, cool? Yeah, Well,
speaking of time travel, we can take a little break
and when we come right back, we can jump to
the future to nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Ooh love it.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Plug it. That's me plugging it in. I know. Okay,
welcome back, earthlings. We have made it safely to nineteen fifteen.
How do you feel?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
I feel good? I, like I said, I'm bouncing around.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
I feel excited. I hear some music.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
The Roaring Twenties are before us. Yes, but there's I
can feel the booze.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
There's something else cigarette or at a jazz there's something
else roaring. Okay, So our next incredible woman who you
may know her name, but I am very excited to
share with you some of the details of why she
truly is as important as she is to the history
of music and more importantly, the history of rock and roll.
(16:32):
Oh and we're talking about sister Rosetta Tharp. So she
essentially is now regarded as the inventor, or one of
the inventors, but really the inventor of rock and roll.
The genre that we call.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Rock and roll sat Elvis Well.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
And we're talking about decades before Elvis, and we're talking
about innovation in a way that so much of the
music that we listen to today, even when it comes
to tonality, is inspired by some of the choices, some
of the bold musical choices that she made badass anyway,
So when she strapped on an electric guitar in the
nineteen forties, she made it scream with distortion, which we'll
(17:10):
get into how important that was. She created a new
musical language, she made a new genre. Every riff, every
stage mannerism, every innovation later attributed to white male rock
pioneers as their own. Again another theme, the rock establishment
systematically erased her from its origin story for a very
very long time. A black queer woman, yes, if I
(17:33):
didn't mention that openly queer eventually playing sacred music in
profane ways threatened too many power structures. They weren't ready
for it. That's another theme that when when you're not
in your.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Time, sometimes they're ahead of their time, right.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
But just innovation in and of itself is never met,
you know, with open arms in a time when you're
going against something that people think, you know, it's like
profane or all or you know, all this stuff. Anyway,
just like you said, she was there before Elvis, before
Little Richard, before Johnny Cash swiveled his hips and strummed
his guitars. It was sister Rosetta Tharp, the godmother of
(18:09):
rock and roll, who turned this musical style into an
international sensation that still to this day is taking notes
from what she did. She was born in Rosetta Nubin
in Arkansas, to Willis Atkins and Katie Bell. She came
from a family of religious singers, so she came from
a musical family, but they were also imagine the time,
cotton pickers and traditional evangelists. She picked up the guitar
(18:29):
at guess what age, Take a guess, six four years old.
She started playing four At the age of six, she
already started accompanying her mother to perform with a traveling
evangelist group and churches around the South. So she's a
church musician through and through. By the mid nineteen twenties,
Starpun her mother settled in Chicago, where they continued performing
spiritual music. As she grew up, she thought of the
(18:50):
idea of fusing Delta blues, New Orleans jazz, and gospel
music into what would be her signature style, her distinctive
voice and a conventional style attractive fans. It was still
the thirties, as you can imagine, and female guitarist in
the thirties still female guitars to this day called female
guitarists instead of just guitars. So imagine in the thirties
(19:10):
talk about paving the way.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Why did they do that? Why did they have to
make the distinction?
Speaker 1 (19:14):
I don't know. But she was young and she had
a vision, and she decided that she didn't care what
people thought. She was determined to keep experimenting with her sound.
With at that time, nobody did so. By nineteen thirty eight,
she joined the Cotton Club Review, a New York City
club that became especially notable during the Prohibition era. So
that's what you were hearing when we started. She was
only twenty three at the time, a feat that was
(19:35):
only amplified when she scored her first single, rock Me,
which at that time even the name and the words
were like.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
People were like rock, what is this? Very suggestive?
Speaker 1 (19:45):
It was a fusion of gospel and rock and roll,
and it had It came with a couple other songs
that had the same style called my Man, That's All
Lonesome Road. I encourage you all to go listen to
her music because it is electrifying. In the lyric of
the music, she flirted with the openness in her sexuality
and love and things like that, things that now everybody
(20:07):
speaks about like nothing. But at that time, again, forget
about males females. Nobody was brave enough to be singing
about that. And it left her gospel audiences speechless in shock.
You know what I mean, Right, that's such a stark change.
Not only that, she was a touring musician, and as
the years went on, obviously racism was still rampant. So
on tour, all the hotels and the places were still
(20:29):
completely segregated, and she had to sleep on the bus,
so she couldn't sleep in the hotels or anything like that.
She had to go around the back of the restaurants
to get her food and they wouldn't let her in obviously.
So eventually she met her partner which she was with
and created a band with her name was Mary Knight.
Think about this, she meets a woman, they literally started
(20:50):
a band together. They're out there performing, you know, these
two queer rock and rollers, all right, uh huh. It
was radical. People didn't know what to do with it
at this time. When they were about to pop off,
white men caught on and you know the other side
of the industry caught on to what she was doing,
(21:11):
and that was all it took. They started to copy
the styles. They started to copy her sound and Chuck
Berry sound, take her writing format and what she had
created and just completely appropriated and obviously once again not
give any credit to its origin or amplify these you know,
these artists. So obviously, as you can imagine, as rock
(21:33):
and roll took off with these faces, as the mascots
for it. She faded Yeah, she faded away. Yeah. So
it's it's really sad, but I'm glad to say that now.
You know, we still live in a time she definitely
wasn't around to see the impact of what she did.
You know, she wasn't inducted into the Rock and Roll
(21:54):
Hall of Fame until twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Oh my gosh. And when did she die.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
She died in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Oh yeah, so yeah posthumously.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Yeah, well yeah, but twenty eighteen that they should have
done it in nineteen seventy four, They should have done
it in yeah, nineteen sixty five, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
But I'm glad. You know.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
So now, one tiny musical geek out thing about her
that makes her the details of why she was able
to create some of the sound that she did and
why it's so unique for it. Okay, it's about her guitar.
It's about the details of how she played guitar, and
that has so much to do with rock and roll, which,
by the way, including some of the bon't to boon't
(22:32):
to bunt to bom boonm that's a clove. Have you
not noticed that?
Speaker 2 (22:39):
So? Oh my god, everywhere anyway.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Okay, So number one, she had a style where she
attacked the strings she actually played. She had a fingerpicking
style where she played with her thumb to pick and
that's such a bigger pad area and so like deep.
And she often performed in vestibule tuning, which is like
da d F sharp ad. It's like a different kind
of tuning. So as a result, like the sounds, you know,
(23:05):
get a little bit lower, and it just as a result,
the way you even voice chords on the guitar sounds
completely different. And she had like a very percussive style
in the way that she played. It was like bombastic
and exciting, you know what I mean, so very much
in the style of Chuck Berry, who came after her,
who is even then you know it is also black.
(23:27):
But they attribute you know, they were like, oh no,
he's the father of rock and roll. But I'll tell
you a little bit about what Chuck Berry said about yeah, exactly.
Second of all, she played electric guitar, which was already
a big thing because not a lot of people at
that time, especially females, you know, they were all it
was acoustics or if it was an electatric guitar. It
had an acoustic sound. It was just to amplify it. It
(23:50):
wasn't using the electric component in the way that she did. Also,
this is the most important her distorted tone, because she
wasn't the first person to use distortion. And what distortion
is is amplifiers for guitars have these things called tubes
in them. Not a lot of them anymore, but the
tubes heat up, and if you heat up the tubes
too much by overdriving them, it crunches the sound that's
(24:12):
coming out of the ant. That's the results of the
tubes getting super hot and like pushing the tubes to
their limit. So she saw that sound where other people
were like, oh, this is nasty or this is broken
or whatever, she leaned into it, which is the rock
sound that we all love. Obviously right now, she didn't
want the clean sound. She wanted the nasty, gross sound.
(24:32):
The other thing which is amazing about her is Les Paul.
Have you ever heard that name? Of course, uh huh,
Well she actually it's bold claim because obviously Les Paul
himself was the one who popped you know, made Les Paul,
but she was the one who popularized it and used
it during the fifties, heavily used it and it was
subsequently like made the wave of the British blues rockers
(24:53):
because they would see her use this instrument, including even
Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck. You start to use use Less
Paul's and then the funny thing is that Gibson SG.
They made a model called the SG, which is the
one that you kind of see here in all the
pictures with the one that like acdc uses and everything,
you know, like the one with the two little horns
that's thinner, and she was like, I love that it's
light and I can move my fingers faster, and Less
(25:14):
Paul himself was like, nah, I don't like this thing.
And the SG is such an iconic figure of rock
and roll, and she was the one who started to saying, yeah,
I love the SG, like I'm gonna use it.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So yeah, now rock star for real.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
I know. And now the Smithsonian Archive contains multiple pictures
of her using the earliest incarnation of the nineteen fifty
two Less Paul gold top with the trepeze style bridge,
which is really cool ethic. So anyway she is, I
can imagine she would have been like a gear head
and a nerd, and she really started to push the
limitations of the instrument which attributed to that distorted sound,
which helped her create the sound which became rock and roll.
(25:49):
So when you hear distortion and music, thinks sisters and
thank her. And the quote about Chuck Berry that I
just mentioned, who is credited by a lot of people
to be the father and father of rock and roll,
he said, ended quote, My entire career was one long
sister Rosetta Tharp impersonation.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Wow, thank you Chuck Berry for being an honest man.
Sister Rosetta Tharp.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Sister Rosetta Tharp, who was.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Quere icon, who s Consett all the time?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Can no man play like me? And probably can't?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Baby, Yeah, I want to be her friend.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
She seemed really cool, awesome, really really cool.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Really cool, brave, really rock and roll.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Love it. I love her, all right, Babe.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
We're on our last woman learning so much.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Okay, I know, I know, I love this. I love
celebrating women me too, all right, So I'm gonna take
it back just slightly, Okay, not too not too far
wait put in Wow that was fast. We arrived to
(27:07):
eighteen ninety four. Oh the birth of Maria Sabina Magdalena Garcia,
or the Great Mushroom Priestess.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I already love her.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
So. Maria Savina, as she's commonly referred to as, was
born into the Masatek indigenous community in Wahaca, Mexico. She
began using psilocybin mushrooms, which she referred to as her
Nino santos in healing ceremonies, at just ten years old.
She was married at fourteen, and at twenty she became
a kurandera and was known for her velalas, where she
(27:40):
would use mushrooms to diagnose secure illnesses. She was illiterate,
so she would express herself through the voice of the
mushrooms or her holy children, and she claimed to see
them as children dancing and playing instruments. And her chants
were first translated from Masa Tek, her natural language, into
English and then later into Spanish. Still she's considered one
(28:05):
of Mexico's greatest poets.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
It took a man, of course, to get her recognized.
In nineteen fifty five, R. Gordon Wasson, a New York
banker and ethnomycologist with a fascination for hallucinogenic mushrooms attended
one of her ceremonies. He later wrote in an article
a Life magazine in nineteen fifty seven where he talked
about his experience with her, and this actually popularized the
(28:29):
use of psychedelic mushrooms in Western culture because after the article, celebrities,
artists musicians like Bob Dylan, John Landon, Timothy Leary traveled
to Wahaka hoping to be guided by the mushroom priestess.
She never wanted to be famous, and this influx of ice,
outsiders and people who were traveling to her community actually
(28:49):
disrupted the community's traditions, so the locals started to resent
her and it led to serious social and economic hardship
for her. Unfortunately, her final years were filled with pub
in illness as a result of how her community kind
of alienated her. Her son was killed and her home
was burnt down by villagers, and she essentially ended up
(29:09):
dying in the same poverty.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
That she was born in.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
But her rituals and the knowledge of psilocybin mushrooms played
a crucial rise in the use of psychedelic therapy and
scientific research into psilocybin. Today, sosocybin mushrooms are being studied
for their potential to cure depression, cure PTSD addiction, and
it essentially makes her a massive influence in medicine. And
(29:33):
I also want to share a quote of hers that,
as we now know, was first translated into English, that
I think that everybody can benefit from. Cure yourself with
the light of the sun and the rays of the moon,
with the sound of the river and the waterfall, with
the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds.
(29:54):
Heal yourself with mint, with nime and eucalyptus. Sweeten yourself
with lavender, rosemary camobile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean
in a touch of cinnamon. Put love into tea instead
of vinegar, and take it looking at the stars. Heal
yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and
the hugs of the rain. Get strong with bare feet
(30:15):
on the ground and with everything that is born from it.
Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking
at the world with the eye of your forehead your
third eye. Jump, dance, sing so that you live happier.
Heal yourself with beautiful love, and always remember you are
the medicine MM.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Whow I feel for her. I've actually read about her before,
and I had seen that she personally grew up doing
these ceremonies for herself because I guess she had lost
a lot of people in her life, like a prior
husband or something, and she could always heal. And she
said that after her ritual was tainted by the influx
(31:01):
of all these people because a lot of some of
them went for healing, but a lot of them were
just going to get high right curiosity, And now we're
actually making the loop. Sorry, but anyway, so what she
claimed is that after that that the mushrooms stopped working
for her and she wasn't able to heal that way anymore,
and as a result, you know, had all the hardships.
(31:22):
She isn't at the end of her life. But I
feel for her. But you know what, look at all
the studies being done and the microdosing and the respect
now that people have for the psychedelic healing community, and
essentially she I mean, she was a shaman.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
She was a shaman. She was a shaman an orator,
you know, and she died, I mean not too long ago,
in nineteen eighty five. So I don't think that being
that she you know, she was the most recent woman
that we've discussed. I don't think that the effects of
her influence have been truly felt yet. What we know
about using psychedelic mushrooms in a medicinal way is has
(32:00):
yet to be truly explored. There's so much that's a
that's a question mark. But she she would always say
that visible spiritual world was never far from us.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
I have a surprise.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
You do.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Influential overlooked woman. Oh yes, and it's also a suhadance. Yeah,
a suggestion for all of you out there all right. Obviously,
these women that we talked about today are extraordinary in
many ways and way ahead of their time. Yeah, but
there are many women in your lives that I'm sure
also underappreciated that you don't realize just sound incredible and
(32:38):
how much they do. So I think you are an
influential me. Yes, woman, Oh please. And I'd like to
think in my in my universe, in my life, you know,
and as a result, as everybody's that you that you touched,
So take a moment and think about women in your
life that that make it better, that inspire you, that
you learn from, and you know, give them a call
(32:59):
and say thank you, because because these aren't the only
women that are underappreciated, but they definitely did a lot
of cooler shuit don't we do. But anyway, I appreciate
you the same way you do so many things that
are not you know, met with the recognition you deserve,
including steering this ship that so many of us get
(33:20):
to enjoy, including me. So thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
You're very welcome. It's my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
And if you want to appreciate me for something cool,
we can talk about it. Advice about saying today news
space news. All right, space news. Let's going on in
space this week? Everybody, I'm dying to know. I'm just
reporting what the truth is. There's no way I know
what's on this paper. I'm just more on the news,
all right. Mars may have a solid inner core, just
(33:48):
like Earth. When scientists began looking into this phenomenon, to
no surprise, they found that Mars has a rigorous ab
routine centered around calisthenics and floorwork. That's why they have
the strong core. Leg day and arm day, though are
reportedly twenty seven hundred light years away. Oh sorry, Mars,
he's got the apps, all right. Next the second ever
(34:10):
privately funded spacecraft has touched down on the Moon. It
has an onboard vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis,
a drill to measure temperatures as deep as ten feet.
Also on board is a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust. Unfortunately,
it has also been confirmed that the in flight meals
are just as vile as the other on Earth flights.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Oh man, yeah, they gotta do something about that.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
We'll figure it out. No, we won't.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Just why is the sandwich and is it bucked back
better than flight meals?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
I don't get that horrible at all?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Weird, we'll see.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
Lastly, it will soon be a year that those poor
astronauts have been stranded on the International Space Station.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
So I totally forgot about that.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
I know we've been reporting it for a while, but
they're still up to the rescue. Missions have been failing,
patients is running thin, and nobody knows if they're going
to be able to actually return. Trump sent a special
message to these abandoned astronauts and joked that he may
go along for the rescue. Personally, I think that's the
most incredible idea he's ever had. And this has been
(35:14):
space news.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Yeah, I suggest that Elon Musk puts Trump on his
next test fight just saying crazy idea.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
I know, they should all go together.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
They can make it one of the ones that like
explodes it to a million pieces in the sky. Which,
by the way, four out of his eight space flights
space test has failed, which like if we all remember
in school, a fifty percent grade is an F so
I would say.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Failure. No, well, this isn't next week's space news. But
they found out that all he did was just glue
cyber trucks together, no wonder.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, I remember seeing that press uh that little
press release that I.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Don't want to talk about that.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, forget all of that.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah, anyway, the point is space is But the point
is that, you know, I think that it's a duty
that we have to continue to look back in our
past and rectify things that, you know, make things right,
and learn more and be inquisitive. And obviously for some
of them we don't have access to those records that
(36:17):
we never will, but that doesn't mean that we can't
continue to search for the absolutely and you can continue
to search for us online at Inner Own World PLOD.
We love flying with you and.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
We will see you next week. Love you guys, Jakes,
Double James. Bye Launch. This podcast is brought to you
by Moonflower Productions in partnership with Iheartsmike.
Speaker 1 (36:44):
Will do that podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
For more podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Gemeny Hernandez
Emily Estefan
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