Boden Sandstrom & Casse Culver (2021)
“The synergy between the women's music network, the [local], the left community, and all the people working in production and making things happen in Washington, D.C., [is] just an amazing period where people were so cooperative and in touch with each other.”
– Boden Sandstrom
Boden Sandstrom is a pioneering audio engineer, musician, and activist whose presence within the women’s music community was a cornerstone of queer D.C. history, as she explored feminist identity as a counterspace for stories told through music. She created and archived the history of feminist and lesbian musicians in a documentary she co-produced, Radical Harmonies (2002). Boden met her spouse, influential singer-songwriter Casse Culver in 1974. Each made remarkable contributions to the historic D.C. women’s music and cultural movements and created indelible work through their partnership in each other’s lives – most notably co-founding the first all-woman sound company, Woman Sound (later City Sound Productions) in 1975.
Describing the founding of Woman Sound, Sandstrom explained, “This was a period in history where there's a synergy of lesbian owned businesses.” She continued, “And that happened because [of] the coming together of different political movements… political lesbians [were] coming from different places around the country… and were influenced by the civil rights movement and feminism.” Together – and separately – Sandstrom and Culver were cultural powerhouses, using the medium of musical performance to express their identities and uplift other feminist voices.
Boden Sandstrom, born Barbara Carol Sandstrom, grew up in Fairport, NY, and completed her undergraduate studies at St. Lawrence University. While pursuing a master’s degree in library science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Sandstorm’s journey was fueled by the social movements and radical political organizations of the 1960s. After graduating in 1968, she moved to California where she met and married folk/flamenco singer, linguist and Brown Beret member Rogelio Reyes. They moved to Boston in 1970, where she started exploring her identity and experience as a woman and joined a feminist organization called Female Liberation. During this time, Sandstrom came out as a lesbian.
In 1972, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she joined the Socialist Workers' Party and met her future best friend Dee Mosbacher. Together, Mosbacher and Sandstrom created the film Radical Harmonies to tell the story of women’s music. During this time, Sandstrom also began developing her interests in the intersection of women's movement, politics, and music through recording, engineering, and mixing. “The synergy between the women's music network, the [local], the left community, and all the people working in production and making things happen in Washington, D.C., [is] just an amazing period where people were so cooperative and in touch with each other,” Sandstrom said when talking about the reasons why she worked to document the history of women’s music. “And I think probably the sharing is going on all the time because of the resistance that we have here to change, to make things change.”
Sandstrom’s future spouse, Culver, was born in Bethesda, MD, and began her career as a street singer in the early 1970s, writing songs from a distinctly rebellious, woman-centered perspective. “I feel very positive about being a woman and a lesbian,” Culver stated in an interview for The Blade. “My songs reflect that. I accentuate the positiveness and the strength I feel, but I don’t neglect the anger or the pain.” At the 1969 Woodstock music festival, Culver made contacts that led to a record contract with Bearsville Studio. During this time, she came out as a lesbian, which led the studio to drop her and prevent her from releasing a mainstream album. “Hearing the other musicians was a real inspiration to me. They sang about things the straight world doesn’t dare talk about – like menstrual cycles, mammary glands, and masturbation.”
Culver continued her activism within the feminist music sphere, touring both solo and with the Belle Starr Band and playing at women’s music festivals. “Getting the strength to change this rotten world, that's what women's concerts give you,” Culver said in an interview for Off Our Backs. “You have all these struggles, and you feel alone and afraid, and then you're drawn to a women's concert maybe out of curiosity--and you find yourself surrounded by all these other women who are responding to the music the same way you are.”
As Sandstrom and Culver’s personal journeys each delved into music at the intersection of the women’s music scene, the lesbian music scene, and radical political communities, their paths eventually crossed in 1974 at the Olivia Records Farewell Concert. They decided to collaborate, Sandstrom as a sound engineer and Culver as a performer. During their time together, Sandstrom learned mixing techniques, eventually engineering at the National Women's Music Festival in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Eventually, Culver asked Sandstrom to work on her first album, Three Gypsies. During the recording and mixing sessions, Sandstrom changed her name to Boden. These collaborations led to Sandstrom and Culver co-founding Woman Sound, uplifting feminist women musicians and their work.
Throughout her career as a sound engineer and technical producer, Sandstrom worked at major events and with many prominent artists, including at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, Sisterfire, D.C. Gay Pride Days, the 1979, 1987, and 1993 LGBTQ Marches on Washington, as well as the March for Women’s Lives in 2004. In the late 1970s, Culver worked as an organic gardener in Woodstock and later started a landscaping company called Good News Gardening. She later founded a church, Be Heard and Be Healed, focused on serving women and the LGBTQ+ community She served as its Reverend for over a decade. Sandstrom enrolled in the ethnomusicology program at the University of Maryland. She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 and taught in the School of Music from 1996 until her retirement. They married each other in 2013, commemorating their decades-long relationship.
“The synergy between the women's music network, the local, I'm talking local, the left community, and all the people working in production and making things happen in Washington, D.C.,” Sandstrom mused on her work in the women’s music scene. “I think it's just an amazing period where people were so cooperative and in touch with each other, you know. And I think probably the sharing is going on all the time because of the resistance that we have here to change, to make things change.” Through her and Culver’s time together, D.C.’s historical music scene gained two landmark influences dedicated to uplifting queer and feminist voices.
Selected Bibliography
“Oral History with Boden Sandstrom, 1945-,” Rainbow History Project Digital Collections, https://archives.rainbowhistory.org/items/show/1611. Date of Access, November 2024.
“Interview: Casse Culver: 'integrated separatism’” Off Our Backs, Vol. 4, No. 11 (November 1974), pp. 12-13, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25772021 Date of Access, November 2024.
“Blade Interview: Feminist Music” The Gay Blade, March 1975”, p 4. http://hdl.handle.net/1961/dcplislandora:4514 Date of Access November 2024.
“Boden Sandstrom Papers and Woman Sound Records” Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History, https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/989 Date of Access November 2024.