What can and cannot be said
The Best New Artist award is one of the older and better-known Grammy categories, but the question of the “first woman” to win it is not answered here by a name, because the early winners were a mix of men, women and groups and the account is easy to get wrong. This was also not a 1967 event. The ceremony held in early 1967 honoured recordings from 1966, and the ceremony of early 1968 honoured 1967 recordings, so the category has no “first” that belongs to 1967.
What can be described reliably is how the award works, how its history has gone, and which kinds of acts were competing around 1967.
The award in general
The Best New Artist award was created in the early years of the Grammys. It is meant to honour an artist or group who has broken through during the eligibility period, not a performer who is new to music in an absolute sense. Many winners had performed for years before they were judged to have made their breakthrough.
The rules have changed over time. Eligibility has been defined in terms of a single year of releases, of a breakthrough in public awareness, and of limits on earlier recognition, and these definitions have been adjusted more than once. Those changes mean that comparing winners across decades is less straightforward than it looks.
The record of winners
The list of winners shows an award that has swung between categories of act:
- Solo singers and groups both appear among the early winners.
- Some winners went on to long careers and became major figures.
- Others faded quickly, which has led to the oft-repeated observation that the award can be a mixed blessing.
That last point is often discussed in general terms: because the award goes to a performer at the start of a career, it can look in hindsight like a prediction that did not come true. Whether that reputation is deserved depends on which winners are counted, and it is not a rule.
Controversies in general terms
The award has been the subject of criticism for as long as the Grammys have existed. The recurring themes are well documented:
- Complaints that nominees were not actually new, having been established for years.
- Complaints that certain genres, particularly rock, hip-hop and electronic music, were overlooked in favour of safer pop choices.
- The most notorious case in the award’s history, in which a winner in 1990, Milli Vanilli, was stripped of the prize after it emerged that they had not sung on their own recordings.
These controversies shaped later rule changes. They also help explain why a list of winners is not a simple guide to the most important new artists of any year.
New acts around 1967
The mid-1960s were a crowded time for new music, and the British Invasion had already brought a wave of acts to the American market. The Beatles themselves were recognised in the new-artist category in the middle of the decade, which tells you how the category treated the changes of the period. By 1967 the pool of possible contenders was widening in several directions:
- Soul and rhythm and blues, with performers such as Aretha Franklin, who was well established as a recording artist by 1967 even if her Atlantic breakthrough made her seem like a new arrival to many listeners.
- Pop acts from television, such as the Monkees television band, which became a chart force in 1966 and 1967.
- Folk and country-flavoured songwriters, among them Bobbie Gentry, whose “Ode to Billie Joe” was a major hit in the summer of 1967.
- The San Francisco and Los Angeles rock bands, like Jefferson Airplane and the Doors, whose records appeared in early 1967, including the Doors debut album in January.
This article does not claim that any specific act among them won or was nominated, apart from noting that Gentry was among the notable winners at the ceremony held in early 1968, which recognised the year’s recordings. The Academy’s official records list nominees and winners by category and year.
Why the “first woman” question is unreliable
There are three practical difficulties with naming a first woman winner:
- The earliest years of the category included winners of different kinds, and a list that only looks at solo women will leave out groups with women members.
- Sources sometimes assign winners to the year of the ceremony and sometimes to the year of the recordings, which shifts every date by one.
- A claim made online without a source is easy to repeat and hard to verify.
For these reasons the safest statement is that women were among the winners of the award in its early decades and that the exact first is best checked in the Recording Academy’s own database. The history of the category is better understood as a long, uneven record of how the music industry judged newcomers than as a single milestone.