Who would be in an all-female Traveling Wilburys?
The Traveling Wilburys feels like the kind of band that can only come once every lifetime. Although most people like the idea of a supergroup, only 5% of them could claim to make the kind of music that these legends made together, each of them perfectly balancing out each other’s egos whenever they walked in. If the gender was reversed, though, there’s a good chance that we could have seen one of the greatest female-led supergroups of all time with a few female rock icons in the mix.
Then again, it’s hard to think of this challenge as a one-to-one comparison. There’s hardly anyone who matches the softspoken perfection of George Harrison, and anyone who ever claimed to be a better lyricist than Bob Dylan is either lying to themselves or delusional about their own abilities. However, there are still a few ways for things to overlap in terms of the style of music and their approach.
Every member of the original Wilburys brought a unique spin to the group, so having a female version around the same time makes sense, given the context. Since the supergroup’s inception happened a few years shy of the first Lilith Fair festival, they could have been instrumental in welcoming the female-led revolution into the world, only without the more fierce bite of the riot-grrl movement.
While there have been modern incarnations of what an all-female supergroup could be, like Boygenius and The Highwomen, this is the kind of ‘what-if’ scenario that would bring all of the rootsy female rockers under one roof. The original Wilburys certainly have their place in history, but seeing the gender roles reversed would have made for a great introduction to a new wave of rock and roll.
Linda Ronstadt
Anyone working in a supergroup needs to have been around the block a couple of times. Even though it’s easy to make music among friends, everyone needs to put in hours to work with as many creative dynamos as they can. And in the case of Linda Ronstadt, she would have been a seasoned veteran before the band even started.
Outside of working with the Eagles on her first records, Ronstadt lent her voice to the Trio album with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. In lieu of turning this into a second stab at that supergroup with two more hired guns, though, Ronstadt would be the perfect stand-in for that side of the band’s genre. Things were still squarely focused on rock and roll, but there would always be pieces slightly trailing back into the roots of folk and country music.
Joan Baez
No one in the Traveling Wilburys could get by simply being a good singer. The whole idea was to have a group that had the best of the best, and getting Roy Orbison in the mix was like getting anointed by a musical god. And while Joan Baez may have been a bit further into the folk side of music, her immaculate voice would have been the perfect foil to how versatile Ronstadt’s voice could be when she first began.
Although Baez is far from one-note in her performances, hearing what she could do with Bob Dylan’s material, as well as originals like ‘Diamonds and Rust’ could make for a spellbinding performance if she had a legion of the best backup singers in the world slowly trailing behind her. Though she could normally get the job done and leave audiences spellbound with only her and an acoustic guitar, bringing an entire band around her could have been her way of making an all-female retort to Dylan’s infamous line about how women can’t be poets.
Joni Mitchell
The core foundation of any good supergroup is about pushing music forward Anyone can get together to play covers for the rest of their lives, but it’s up to everyone in the band to make something that can outlast the typical rock and roll on the radio. And in Joni Mitchell, this female Wilburys could take the ethos of what the original band had done and make it far more musically sophisticated.
Despite George Harrison showing some versatility by using the sitar on a couple of songs, Mitchell’s vast knowledge of jazz harmony and open tunings would have given a nice texture to the rest of the group. Even though she has been known to work better when having a jazz ensemble behind her, the thought of Mitchell adding the right chord or maybe a melodic fragment to the odd song would often be the icing on the cake when playing through traditional folk-rock tunes.
Lucinda Williams
Of all the members of the original Wilbruys, Tom Petty functioned as the group’s secret weapon. He may have been slightly younger than the rest, but he had the kind of old soul that put him on the same level as Dylan and Orbison the minute he picked up the bass and started playing alongside them. And while the last few entries have all been legends in their own right, Lucinda Williams could have easily hung with the best of them if they had debuted around the early 1990s.
While the heartland rock genre had become a little bit played out by that point, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was a firm indication that people still very much wanted to hear something that was a bit less polished than the glossy sounds of the 1980s. Most people might have tried to play down the new girl in town when promoting this kind of supergroup, but considering the country boom was about to come in in full force in the 1990s, having Williams in the band would have endeared the group to the stripe of fans more likely to buy a Garth Brooks CD.
Carole King
And now for the resident production genius to tie everything together. Although most people would stop at having four megastars in a supergroup, there tended to be some magic in bringing legends together that extended beyond their phenomenal voices. While Carole King might not have had the biggest profile of every member of this imaginary supergroup, the respect she had amongst her fellow songwriters is something that no one else could touch.
Ronstadt had already covered songs like ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,’ but given King’s knack for fantastic melodies, the female Wilburys could have had some serious potential on the charts should she have been behind the writing of many of their hits. After all, she had been going through her own touring regiment and was even gaining the respect of artists like Slash around this time, so seeing all of these women would be enough to shatter the boy’s club that most supergroups tended to fall into.
