When Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry first started performing with her band, named for the nickname truckers used to shout toward her on the street, she had no idea—or intention—that she would become one of the most influential women in rock ‘n’ roll history. Despite the box the media tried to paint Harry in, she never felt like her gender was a contingency to her music, just a coincidence.
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Harry’s ability to command the stage stemmed from many factors: the thick skin one needs to live in New York City, her commitment to her craft over everything else, and the skeptical eye she kept on the performers who came before her.
Blondie’s Debbie Harry Used This Rock Frontman As Inspiration
Debbie Harry was no stranger to the scene by the time she began fronting Blondie. By the late 1960s, Harry was living in New York City and trying her hand at multiple musical projects, including a folk-rock outfit called The Wind in the Willows and a punk group called Stilettos. The singer-songwriter witnessed the transition from folk revival to punk to disco and managed to find her place within all of these musical categories, never once shaking from her utterly cool, stylish stage persona.
Harry never set out to become a feminist icon; she just happened to be a female singer in a male-dominated industry. The “sex symbol” descriptor came later as media outlets tried to find ways to commodify Harry’s singular artistic presence into something interesting and sellable. In a 1976 interview with ZigZag magazine, Harry and Chris Stein, guitarist and co-founder of Blondie, compared their new-wave band’s approach to the stage to the Rolling Stones.
Harry and Stein argued that, like the Rolling Stones, they didn’t create Blondie to fit a specific mold or target a particular audience. Harry’s confident, assertive stage presence was as natural as Mick Jagger’s flamboyant, flashy persona. The main difference, of course, was that Harry was more likely to be vilified in a musical culture that punished women’s sexuality while celebrating men’s.
“I don’t think we [play into sex appeal] any more than the Stones did with Mick Jagger,” Stein told ZigZag (via Far Out Magazine). “So many girls come up to me and say, ‘Great, keep going, do it,’ ya know. They say that to me. I’m not making enemies of girls,” Harry added. “I’m making fans of girls.”
A Female Frontwoman Legacy To Avoid
Although she might not have started Blondie explicitly to add to the legacy of women in rock ‘n’ roll, Debbie Harry wasn’t oblivious to the long-lasting implications of her career as a female rock star. “Rock and roll is a real masculine business, and I think it’s time girls did something in it,” Harry told the New York Rocker in May 1976. “I don’t want to sound like a libber, but I want to do something to make people change the way they think and act towards girls. Janis Joplin did that, but she had to sacrifice herself. Every time she went out on stage, she had to bleed for the audience. I don’t feel like I have to sacrifice myself.”
As influential as Harry might be, the Blondie frontwoman doesn’t necessarily think she was the first woman to avoid sacrificing herself post-Joplin. “But,” she said in a 2020 interview with Steve Pafford, “there was definitely a shift around the time of punk, and I was part of that shift, along with Patty Smith and Siouxsie Sioux. I was changing the way women in bands were perceived. I wasn’t going to be told by my record company how to look; I didn’t have a stylist advising me what outfit would make an impact.”
“It was a whole new era,” Harry said. “We were like warriors.”
Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images
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