About A Girl

Los Angeles, 1957. In the time of drive-in movies and sock hops, high school student Donna Ludwig liked to sneak out of the house to have fun with her friends. On one night out, she met a young guitarist named Richard Valenzuela and was immediately smitten. As Ritchie Valens, he would have a chart-topping hit with a song he wrote for her, before his life was tragically cut short. Learn more about...

In rural Alabama circa World War II, a farm girl named Audrey Mae Sheppard was at the tail end of a series of bad decisions. An ill-fated marriage and a pregnancy made her a single mother at the age of 18, and she’d had to move back home. An aspiring singer herself, she one day discovered an unassuming, lanky singer-songwriter named Hank Williams, and they fell in love. Their tumultuous union was...

In 1959, an American teenager named Priscilla Beaulieu, daughter of an Air Force officer, was living in West Germany. Lonely and bored, she was introduced to another American who understood the feeling. Elvis Presley, already a huge star, was serving a stint in the U.S. Army, and fell in love with the beautiful, though very young girl. The troubling relationship only became more complicated as the...

In 1962, the Caribbean island of Jamaica gained independence from Great Britain, and the fledgling nation yearned to establish an identity of its own. Two years later, Rita Anderson was a teenage single mother living in the impoverished Kingston suburb of Trenchtown, in search of something beyond her circumstances. She would find it as a singer in a rocksteady group. That would lead her to discove...

By the time she was seventeen, London actress Jane Asher had already made a name for herself, onstage, in films, and in 1963 as a panelist on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury, a popular musical variety show. Due to her youth and popularity, she was offered an opportunity: interviewing The Beatles after their upcoming Royal Albert Hall concert. This simple assignment would be the start of a five-year relati...

In the early 1970s, actress Peggy Lipton was at a crossroads. She was the beautiful star of The Mod Squad, admired by girls and desired by men. And yet, she could not make a real relationship last, not until she met Quincy Jones, bandleader, record producer, and composer of Oscar-winning films. Sure, he was 13 years her elder, twice (and still) married with four kids. And never mind the roiling le...

Mary Austin, shopgirl. Farrokh Bulsara, art student. They formed a bond that didn’t have a name and couldn’t be defined. Even as he metamorphosed into the superstar the world would know as Freddie Mercury, their connection would last until the end. SOURCES: The Freddie Mercury Story: Who Wants To Live Forever (Documentary) Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story (Documentary) Mary Austin interview with...

In the mid-1960s, Los Angeles was a mecca of American music, and it was where Pamela Courson decided she wanted to be, escaping her suffocating conservative community in nearby Orange County. Pam was an intelligent but restless young woman, and she found a home among the outcasts of her generation who frequented the nightclubs and parties all over town. On one of these nights, she’d meet a sensiti...

In the summer of 1969, people all over the world were gripped by space fever in the wake of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, which would successfully land men on the moon. In London, nineteen year old Angie Barnett, freshly out of boarding school, was searching for an identity of her own. She found it one evening in an up and coming singer named David Bowie, whose single “Space Oddity” was rocketing to t...

About A Girl is a new podcast about the influential women behind the musical legends - women who inspired, supported, and challenged icons like David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, and Bob Marley on their way to greatness. About a Girl is executive produced by Jake Brennan of Disgraceland and premieres November 30th, 2020. Search for and subscribe to About A Girl on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,...