Twenty-five years ago or so, I worked as a session singer for a producer in Nashville who actually told me to my face that I should “just shut up and be grateful that I’m in the room”. As the contractor responsible for hiring singers for the session, I was struggling with the fact that this guy had booked many of us for a multiple-day project and then decided to dock our pay because we were “incredible” and knocked it all out in a day. In all honesty, it was this particular producer’s lack of experience and planning that cost us all hundreds of dollars each, but it was also largely due to the fact that we were, indeed, incredible at our jobs. I learned pretty early on in Nashville that I was a great studio singer. I was fast and accurate, and as an hourly wage worker, I also learned that it was not in my own best interest to know this fact or to expect to be fairly compensated for it. And I wasn’t even a woman.
Another producer I worked for back in the day, recently and proudly posted …