The Berkeley Music Collective Songbook was one of the first pieces of merchandise the Collective sold. Nancy Henderson did the transcriptions, Nancy Vogl did the lettering, and Debbie Lempke and three other artists—Karen Berkan, Gail Hodgins, and Virgin Atkin Murray—contributed drawings. The band printed it using Oakland’s Women’s Press Collective, with which Suzanne was involved.
Though released before the Collective’s first, self-titled album was recorded, the songbook includes transcriptions of the songs off the album. Notably, the transcriptions include both standard musical notation and chord names: the Collective put a premium on making their music accessible to anyone, whatever their background or training in music. The songbook even explained how a fledgling guitarist might make sense of tablature notation:
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The graphics in the songbook are often quite striking, opening up fresh interpretations of the songs they’re attached to. Here, for example, is the (uncredited) illustration that accompanies Suzanne Sheinbaum’s “San Francisco Bank Song,” about a bank teller who suffers through the grind of her boring and demeaning job, but is also attending meetings (presumably for women’s liberation) while learning to fix her own car and “gathering strength to travel far”.
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Below you can listen to a playlist with their complete first, self-titled album (featuring the songs “The Bloods,” “Take the Time,” “Fury,” “‘No Thanks Mister’,” “We’re Hip,” “San Francisco Bank Song”, “Janet’s Song,” “Mercy Me,” and “Gay and Proud”).