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The Flash Girls are a now defunct folk music duo based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. The duo consisted of Emma Bull, a noted science fiction author, and Lorraine Garland, also known as "The Fabulous Lorraine". Garland is also notable as Neil Gaiman's personal assistant; the group formed at a Guy Fawkes Day party at Gaiman's home. [1] The connections that both Bull and Garland had with the science fiction and fantasy communities allowed them to have an unusually notable group of people writing songs for and with them, including Jane Yolen, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman. These songs are mixed in with their own original works, traditional songs such as Star of the County Down and Lily of the West, as well as poems put to music, including works by Dorothy Parker and A.A. Milne.
The group has three albums, The Return of Pansy Smith and Violet Jones (1993), Maurice and I (1994), and Play Each Morning Wild Queen (2001). Following their second album, the pair split up due to Bull moving to California to pursue screenwriting. Since then, Garland joined the band Folk UnderGround. During their time apart between "Maurice and I" and "Wild Queen," the duo continued to write material, and in early 2001 Bull flew back to Minneapolis for an intense two-weeks of recording sessions. They intended to perform a concert with the new material, but while the band was setting up for the concert Bull fell and broke both her arms. The Flash Girls did manage to do a few performances in 2001 with a session musician covering Bull's guitar parts, but apparently have performed together infrequently since.
One recent appearance was at ConFusion 2005, aka 31 Flavors of ConFusion, where Bull with Will Shetterly were Author Guests of Honor. ConFusion is held in the Metro Detroit area every January. Garland and Bull performed together, per Steven Brust, ConFusion's Toastmaster that year.
Bull and Garland somehow landed their third-ever gig as the opening band for Warren Zevon to a packed crowd at Minneapolis' First Avenue Club. They were both extremely nervous, having been together for only a month. Garland said that if they screwed up in front of such a huge crowd, she was going to change her name to Pansy Smith and move into Gaiman's basement; in his blog, Gaiman says this was his suggestion. Bull agreed and said she'd join Garland and change her name to Violet Jones. Although the concert went off without a hitch, the pair adopted these names as their alter egos and made up a fictional history of a female Irish folk duo in the 1920s and used it as a theme for their first record, "The Return of Pansy Smith and Violet Jones." Pansy Smith and Violet Jones became characters in the DC Comics series Sovereign Seven , where they run a coffee shop.
The group's name came from the old Irish slang term "flash," which means well-dressed and of dubious reputation, or "knowing more than is socially acceptable." A number of folk songs mention "flash girls," most notably the one attributed by Bull's husband Will Shetterly as being the source for the group's name, "House-husband's Lament (Rocking the Cradle)." The line in question goes, "Come all you young men with a notion to marry/Oh, pray, won't you leave those flash girls alone."
Both The Flash Girls and Bull's former group, Cats Laughing, have been mentioned in Shetterly's stories for the fantasy fiction shared universe Borderland.
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and screenplays. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and the novels Good Omens, Stardust, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. In 2023, he starred as the voice of Gef the talking mongoose in the black comedy film Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.
Steven Karl Zoltán Brust is an American fantasy and science fiction author of Hungarian descent. He is best known for his series of novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos, one of a disdained minority group of humans living on a world called Dragaera. His recent novels also include The Incrementalists (2013) and its sequel The Skill of Our Hands (2017), with co-author Skyler White.
The 22nd Annual Grammy Awards were held on February 27, 1980, at Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, and were broadcast live on American television. They recognized accomplishments by musicians from the year 1979. This year was notable for being the first year to have a designated category for Rock music.
Urge Overkill is an American alternative rock band, formed in Chicago, consisting of Nathan Kaatrud, who took the stage name Nash Kato (vocals/guitar), and Eddie "King" Roeser. They are widely known for their song "Sister Havana" and their cover of Neil Diamond's "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon", which was used in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Oui, their latest album, was released in 2022.
John Milo "Mike" Ford was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, game designer, and poet.
Folk UnderGround is a musical group from Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, who blend traditional music and new songs with dark and darkly comic themes. The members include Lorraine Garland, Trevor Hartman, and Paul Score.
Emma Bull is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Her novels include the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated Bone Dance and the urban fantasy War for the Oaks. She is also known for a series of anthologies set in Liavek, a shared universe that she created with her husband, Will Shetterly. As a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, she has been a member of the Minneapolis-based folk/rock bands Cats Laughing and The Flash Girls.
Sovereign Seven is a creator-owned American comic book series, created by Chris Claremont and Dwayne Turner, and published by DC Comics.
Lorraine Garland is a folk musician from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She sang and played fiddle with science fiction author Emma Bull in folk duo The Flash Girls, with the band Folk UnderGround, and in the goth / folk / rock / traditional Celtic duo Lorraine a' Malena with Malena Teves, which whom she also contributed to Chris Ewen's The Hidden Variable. She is currently one half of the folk / rock / Celtic duo Paul and Lorraine with Paul Score.
War for the Oaks (1987) is a fantasy novel by American writer Emma Bull. The book tells the story of Eddi McCandry, a rock musician who finds herself unwillingly pulled into the supernatural faerie conflict between good and evil. War for the Oaks is one of the first works in the subgenre of urban fantasy: although it involves supernatural characters, the setting (Minneapolis) is decidedly real-world.
Amanda MacKinnon Gaiman Palmer is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and performance artist who is the lead vocalist, pianist, and lyricist of the duo the Dresden Dolls. She performs as a solo artist and was also a member of the duo Evelyn Evelyn and the lead singer and songwriter of Amanda Palmer and the Grand Theft Orchestra. She has gained a cult fanbase throughout her career, and was one of the first musical artists to popularize the use of crowdfunding websites.
50 Tracks is a Canadian radio program, which aired on CBC Radio One in 2004 and 2005. The show, hosted by Jian Ghomeshi, was a listener vote to determine the 50 most essential songs in pop music history, through a mix of listener voting and selection by celebrity guests.
Will Shetterly is an American writer of fantasy and science fiction best known for his novel Dogland (1997). The novel is inspired by his childhood at the tourist attraction Dog Land owned by his parents. He won the Minnesota Book Award for Fantasy & Science Fiction for his novel Elsewhere (1991), and was a finalist with Nevernever (1993); both books are set in Terri Windling's The Borderland Series shared universe. He has also written short stories for various Borderland anthologies.
NESFA Press is the publishing arm of the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc. The NESFA Press primarily produces three types of books:
Cats Laughing is a folk rock band, founded in the late 1980s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and revived in 2015. Several of its members, including Emma Bull and best-selling author Steven Brust, are better known as writers of fantasy and science fiction.
This is a list of works by Neil Gaiman.
The Borderland series of urban fantasy novels and stories were created for teenage readers by author Terri Windling. Most of the series is set in Bordertown, a dystopian city near the border between "the Elflands" and "The World". The series consists of five anthologies and three novels. The series has spawned fan groups, gaming groups, costumed events, and was discussed in The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the US-Mexico Border by Claire F. Fox.
Neil Citron is a Toronto-born Canadian guitarist, Grammy Award-winning recording engineer, and songwriter who has played with Lana Lane, and briefly with heavy metal band Quiet Riot in 2006, among numerous other music industry credits. He has also worked on the films My Big Fat Greek Wedding, That Thing You Do!, and Ricki and the Flash.
Boiled in Lead is a rock/world-music band based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and founded in 1983. Tim Walters of MusicHound Folk called the group "the most important folk-rock band to appear since the 1970s." Influential record producer and musician Steve Albini called the band's self-titled first album "the most impressive debut record from a rock band I've heard all year." Their style, sometimes called "rock 'n' reel," is heavily influenced by Celtic music, folk, and punk rock, and has drawn them praise as one of the few American bands of the 1980s and 1990s to expand on Fairport Convention's rocked-up take on traditional folk. Folk Roots magazine noted that Boiled in Lead's "folk-punk" approach synthesized the idealistic and archival approach of 1960s folk music with the burgeoning American alternative-rock scene of the early 1980s typified by Hüsker Dü and R.E.M. The band also incorporates a plethora of international musical traditions, including Russian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Scottish, Vietnamese, Hungarian, African, klezmer, and gypsy music. Boiled in Lead has been hailed as a pioneering bridge between American rock and international music, and a precursor to Gogol Bordello and other gypsy-punk bands. While most heavily active in the 1980s and 1990s, the group is still performing today, including annual St. Patrick's Day concerts in Minneapolis. Over the course of its career, Boiled in Lead has released nearly a dozen albums and EPs, most recently 2012's The Well Below.