When Drummers Were Women by Layne Redmond

When Drummers Were Women by Layne Redmond

For millennia, the sacred drummers of pre-Christian Mediterranean and western Asia were women. In this inspiring book, Layne Redmond, herself a renowned drummer, tells their history.
Artistic representations reveal that female frame drummers carried the spiritual traditions of many of the earliest recorded civilizations. During those ancient times, the drummer-priestesses held the keys to experience of the divine through rhythm. They were at the center of the goddess worship of matriarchal societies until the ascendance of patriarchal cultures and the loss of drumming as a spiritual technology. With wisdom and passion, Redmond chronicles our species' deep connection to the drum, our rich heritage of inseparable spirituality and music, and the modern-day women reclaiming it.
This book encourages readers--both women and men--to reestablish rhythmic links with themselves, nature, and other people through the power of drumming. Redmond illustrates her message with an extensive collection of images gathered during ten years of research and travel. Woven throughout the book are strands of ancient ritual and mythology, personal stories, and scientific evidence of the benefits of drumming. It is at once a history, a memoir, and a resounding call for spiritual and social renewal.

Layne Redmond (1952 2013) was a composer, author, mythologist, and a lifelong student of yoga who was acclaimed worldwide for her mastery of the frame drum. Layne offered workshops and performed internationally, specializing in the small, hand-held frame drums played primarily in the ancient Mediterranean world. She is the author of When the Drummers Were Women; was named Drum! magazine's 2002 Percussionist of the Year; is only one of two women featured in Planet Drum, the book about ethnic drumming by The Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart; and was the first woman to have a Signature Series of world percussion instruments with Remo, Inc., one of the world's largest manufacturers of percussion instruments.