A knot of dread and anxiety twisted in the pit of my stomach last Thursday as I sat around with a group of 26 strange women, making small talk and taking polite bites of tikka masala. By Sunday night, we’d all formed rock bands and fallen in love.
We are the third St. Pete Ladies Rock cohort, a group of five bands born over three days on the campus of Allendale United Methodist Church.
Most of us joined after hearing about Girls Rock St. Pete, where campers aged 8-17 get a whole “power week” to form a band, write and perform an original song. Between bonding exercises, instrument lessons and band practice, campers learn about activism and intersectional feminism.
“I wish I had that as a kid,” is the echoed sentiment. But so many women, trans and nonbinary people (included in Girls and Ladies Rock) could use it right now.
Here’s what I learned going from a journalist to a keyboard player in a blues-rock band called Maiden Mother Crone.
Anyone can rock. No, really
Sex-ed prepares us for the agony of puberty. Female-bodied people know that someday, menopause will come with hot flashes and other vague, unspoken horrors. Then there’s this third thing in the middle, around 30.
I didn’t have kids, but my body still changed. I look at pictures of the loud, hot, confident person I was in my 20s, and I don’t remember when I stopped feeling like her. Somewhere between getting laid off and a barrage of GLP-1 ads, I stopped being loud or feeling hot.
My fellow campers, ages 26-64, are nurses, teachers, veterans, government workers, civil servants and estate lawyers. They’ve survived cancer, trauma and abuse and live with disabilities and chronic illness. They’re queer, nonbinary, Black, Latina, Palestinian, and yes, very white. And even the ones who are roller derby skaters, ultramarathoners and semi-pro tackle football players admitted to feeling beaten down in the same way I did.
Girls Rock St. Pete founder Rachael Sibilia, executive director Jesse Miller and their team of volunteers based the program on the punk, feminist Riot Grrrl movement of the ‘90s. The motto “girls to the front” assured us we didn’t have to earn or achieve anything to take up space.
I should note here that Girls Rock is a nonprofit, and camp tuition is $500-$700. Since I came in to write a story, I did not pay. But I thought about this number a lot, especially as I died a little inside doing silly dance moves and making up handshakes for ice breaker after ice breaker. I wondered how the hell this would translate to being able to play a show. And then women who said they felt invisible once their hair went grey were headbanging on guitar and slapping bass like nobody’s business.
“We are reclaiming, celebrating and bringing back into the light what belongs to women, especially Black women.”
Jesse Miller, executive director of Girls Rock St. Pete
Rock is herstory
The words “rock and roll” are practically synonymous with “penis.”
Google’s search result for “rock bands” is an extensive list of all-male bands, from The Beatles to Coldplay. Women are seen as the rare exception to the rule. But we started it all.
Girls Rock and Ladies Rock pay tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a Black guitarist from Arkansas who, in the ‘30s and ‘40s—along with a few other women like her lover Marie Knight—turned gospel music into blues and R&B. Tharpe’s use of finger picking and distortion created the modern rock n’ roll sound that men like Elvis, with his cover of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” co-opted.
Tharpe also pioneered the tour bus. The symbol of glamor and exclusivity for today’s bands was a necessity for Tharpe, who wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotels as her white crews and promoters while touring the Jim Crow South. And to perform on TV, she’d often have to promote skin whitening creams and laxative chewing gum.
During Ladies Rock and Girls Rock camps, an altar to Tharpe sits at the base of the stage at Allendale. Candles flicker around a framed illustration of Tharpe playing her signature Gibson SG guitar, with angel wings on her white fur coat. The altar moves to Bayboro Brewing for concert night.
Miller taught campers about Tharpe in a “Herstory of Rock” lesson, noting that Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash paid tribute to her.
“All these musicians started making music based off her sound,” Miller said.
“We are reclaiming, celebrating and bringing back into the light what belongs to women, especially Black women.”
Mistakes can make you happy
I had a breakdown on Saturday. I came out of my first keys lesson feeling confident that I’d remembered enough from my childhood piano lessons to play well. But in our first band practice, I got lost in the noise of guitar, drums and bass all playing at once.
I felt like the only one who didn’t know when to come in and kept messing up chords. I knew I didn’t have to play with two hands, but kept trying to make myself do it anyway. I was confident again in the next keys practice, then bombed trying to play simple chords in front of my classmates. Their applause and praise felt like sympathy.
Miller caught me trying not to cry at lunch and pulled me into the courtyard.
“You could play one note with one finger, or not play at all, and that would be an accomplishment,” she assured me. “You’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself. I don’t want you to be miserable.”
The tears came.
“I know I’m not supposed to care what people think, but I do,” I cried. “And I can’t stop.”
“My priority is that you have fun here, no matter what,” Miller said.
“I don’t care about anything else.”
So I stopped caring about anything else, too.
At the next practice, I learned all my bandmates felt the same way I did. We didn’t have a full song written, we didn’t know our parts and none of us could nail the little we did know. Our singer was frantically writing lyrics outside.
But soon, we had a badass song with lyrics based on a Maya Angelou poem. I turned up the volume on my keys, and when I missed parts or messed up, I smiled and kept going. A few hours later, we were nailing it. And we nailed it the following night at a nearly sold-out Bayboro.
After our performance, I hugged my friends and pulled them back into the crowd. “They’re so good!” found myself saying when each band went onstage. “That’s my friend!” I screamed, pointing at a woman I’d met 72 hours ago. “She’s so good!”
I don’t know if I’ll perform again. But from now on, when I think of rock n’ roll, I think of us.
This article appears in Feb. 12 – 18, 2026.