Sex, Freedom, and Marianne Faithfull’s Voice in the Afterlight of the 1960s

Abstract

At the outset of her career, Marianne Faithfull’s voice was a folky soprano, a sonic emblem of 1960s youthfulness. By the end of the decade, in the wake of scandal and drug use, it had transformed. This chapter examines these vocal changes in the context of changing rock culture’s gendered constructions of freedom. It looks at Faithfull’s performances—and public reactions to them—at three particular moments in her career: her early recordings of songs like “As Tears Go By,” which construe her as an ingenue; her late-1960s performances of “Sister Morphine,” which reveal how rock’s politics of authenticity proved exclusionary to women; and recent albums like Horses and High Heels (2011) and Negative Capability (2018). The chapter shows how her vocal performances of trauma become a means of asserting musical authenticity, both subverting and reinforcing the ideas of rock authenticity that shaped her early career.