Best Female Drummers: An Essential Top 25 Countdown
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Combining groove with a sense of songcraft, drummers are the driving force of any group. Here we present the best female drummers of all time.
Photo: Niels van Iperen/Getty Images
Female drummers have been around since at least the 19th century. Consider the English folk ballad “Female Drummer” (covered by Steeleye Span and others), in which the title character disguises her gender to follow her sweetheart into the army. She gets discovered and sent home, but nobody ever complains about her drumming. She is, in fact, recognized as “the best of them all.” So, the best female drummers on this list – a stellar line-up drawn from jazz, punk, rock and pop – continue solidly in that tradition.
Here are our best female drummers of all time.
25: Claudia Gonson (The Magnetic Fields)
Very much the power behind the throne, Gonson is Stephen Merritt’s manager as well as his most frequent musical collaborator. Between drums, keyboards and vocals she’s responsible for the subtle shadings that Merritt’s songs require. It can’t be easy to play drums when you’re not in a conventional rock band – or really a rock band at all.
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24: Dottie Dodgion
Another jazz innovator whose work is largely lost to history, Dottie Dodgion began a 50-year career during the 50s, playing briefly with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. She became a fixture at West Coast jazz festivals in later years, playing with the Brecker Brothers and others. Like Viola Smith, Dodgion never recorded much, aside from one vocal album released in 1996. The one available video clip of her comes from 2013, and she must have been one of the best female drummers in her younger years if she can do this kind of elegant brushwork at the age of 84.
23: Tennessee Thomas (The Like, Jenny Lewis)
Power-pop fans need to immediately do themselves a favor and check out Are You Thinking What I’m Thinking? by The Like. It’s perhaps the single most overlooked album in that genre for the past 15 years. Drummer Tennessee Thomas and singer/guitarist Z Berg were the nucleus of that band, whose songcraft was stellar and whose playing was highly inventive. Lately, Thomas has been playing with another first-rate writer, Jenny Lewis, in her side band Nice As F__k.
22: Debbi Peterson (The Bangles)
Ever heard a good garage band without a killer drummer? We haven’t either. And The Bangles were very much a garage band in their formative days, when they regularly covered The Seeds and The Yardbirds onstage. Debbi Peterson’s playing grew as the band branched out, but she always kept their roots in mind. Check the power on “Hazy Shade Of Winter.” Extra points for singing backup or lead vocals on virtually every tune, truly cementing her place among the best female drummers.
21: Dee Plakas (L7)
Nobody who’s ever played in L7 is anything less than a complete badass on her instrument: the band’s mix of musical ferocity and subversive humor demanded nothing less. Seeing Plakas and bassist Jennifer Finch locking back into groove was one of the many pleasures in L7’s recent reunion tours.
20: Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo)
Together for more than a quarter-century now, the trio line-up of Yo La Tengo has the kind of synchrony most bands would die for, and it allows them to get into the mystic improvisational zone on a regular basis. In their early days, Hubley was pegged as a Moe Tucker-type drummer (simple parts, perfect feel) but she’s long since transcended that with a jazz flexibility that her role model never had. Listen to any of YLT’s jammier tracks for proof that she is one of the best female drummers, but her subtle brushwork on their ballads is also a thing of beauty.
19: Linda Pitmon
Formerly part of the underrated Minneapolis band Zuzu’s Petals, Linda Pitmon is now part of a floating collection of hipsters that includes R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and Peter Buck, The Young Fresh Fellows’ Scott McCaughey, and her husband, Steve Wynn. She’s also in Filthy Friends, the group built around Buck and Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker. But her best work may be the four albums she made with Wynn’s Miracle Three, on which she displays both an affinity for songcraft and an ability to loosen up and go with the improvisational flow.
18: Viola Smith
Someday a documentarian will do us all a favor and tell the full story of this musician, which appears to be a remarkable one. Possibly the first professional female drummer, Viola Smith began performing in the 20s, later played in the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and made her Broadway debut in the original run of Cabaret. Her trademark was a massive kit, heavy on the toms, that drew Gene Krupa comparisons. What remains of her work is sadly not much. She made no records and the best surviving video clip is from 1939 with the all-woman band The Coquettes.
17: Patty Schemel (Hole)
As much as any of her bandmates, Patty Schemel fully lived out the glamour and decadence that was Hole. Like many of her peers, she later suffered from addiction, but her drumming style – primal punk matched with a bit of sophistication – never faltered