Pioneer female songwriter Katherine Lee Bates wrote for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain and for purple mountains in 1893. Chicago musician Cat Catalani sings for her grandmother and for female songwriters throughout history this month.

Catalani, a member of the Illinois Humanities Council, pays tribute during Women's History Month to female songwriters whose words are long remembered but whose names have often been forgotten.

Libraries in Crete, Crest Hill, Dolton and Lansing invited Catalani to put the lyrics of female songwriters in context. Her concerts pull examples from the 1800s to current day, highlighting choruses that audiences know by heart.

Catalani, a master of fine arts who taught poetry at Stanford University, wrote her first song at age 40. Soon after, her curiosity spurred research on her foremothers.

Bates' "America the Beautiful" and other well-known patriotic songs, such as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," came from progressive women in the 1800s.

Bates was college educated in a time when women weren't, and Julia Ward Howe, author of "The Battel Hymn," was active in the suffrage movement.

"In the 1800s in America, not very many women were writing songs," said Catalani, who proofread legal briefs for 10 years at a law firm before re-embarking on a creative path.

With large families and no modern conveniences, 19th century women were busy tending to home needs, Catalani said. Those who wrote tended to write patriotic or religious songs.

"Being close to home and church and country, those were the things they wrote about," she said.

A prolific example is Fanny Crosby, who wrote "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a popular hymn. Crosby wrote under more than 200 pseudonyms.

"Basically she wrote all the songs in the hymnal," Catalani said. "They didn't want it to be obvious that she wrote all of them, so she had pseudonyms."

Blind from birth, Crosby may have written more than 9,000 hymns, for which she was paid $1 each. Her composers made as much as $3,000 each, a king's ransom at that time.

By the 20th century, songwriters were earning royalties equal to composers.

In her show, Catalani jumps to the 1930s and to an area in New York City called Tin Pan Alley. Musicians such as Cole Porter and the Gershwins were making music there. Working among them were few women, and one of them was Dorothy Fields.

Fields wrote an anti-Depression song called "On the Sunny Side of the Street."

Along with composer Jerome Kern, she won an Academy Award for "The Way You Look Tonight," which was featured in the film "Swing Time."

It was wealthy women with leisure and time who had gained any fame writing songs, Catalani said, but that changed in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

Loretta Lynn, the coal miner's daughter, was married at 13 and had several children by age 20.

"She wrote songs that expressed her life, what she felt and what she thought directly," Catalani said.

With titles such as "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)," "Your Squaw is on the Warpath" and "You Ain't Woman Enough (to Take My Man)," Lynn provides a nice contrast to previous songwriting, Catalani said.

Malvina Reynolds, a small woman with white hair, shook the boat and gained attention for anti-war songs in the '60s and '70s, Catalani said. A professor of English from the University of California at Berkeley, Reynolds couldn't get a job because of her liberal politics, Catalani said.

At age 50, Reynolds started writing songs that turned into hits for Pete Seger and the Kingston Trio.

She sang her own songs, including the non-conformity rally "Little Boxes" at anti-war rallies.

"I would like to be charitable, but she did not have a pleasing voice. Nobody cared," said Catalani, who finds Reynolds particularly inspiring because of her late start.

Before sharing her own music, Catalani spends a few minutes of the show on another Midwestern songwriter, Felice Bryant.

With husband, Boudleaux, Bryant write "Bye, Bye Love," "Wake Up, Little Suzie" and "All I Have to Do is Dream."

Catalani's own writings include a song about her late grandmother, a Depression-era farm mom who used to recycle greeting cards.

"I grew up in suburban Chicago, and I used to be embarrassed of her when she came to visit," Catalani said. "I wrote a song about remembering her and coming to realize what she gave me."

Catalani, a timid person in her younger days, learned some of her creativity from her Polish grandmother. She learned the appeal of performing at informal song circles held Friday nights at Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. Though she played guitar, it took her more than three years before she led her own song in the circle. The experience led her to continue taking lessons in music, singing and songwriting.

"Songs brought me so much joy that I thought, 'I'm going to follow this,'" she said.

She never looked back. Always a fan of stories about people ditching their buttoned-up careers to do something different, she is happy to be one of them.

"When you hit 40, it's 'If I don't do it now, when am I going to do it?' So I thought 'I'll do it now,'" she said.

She easily adapted her training in poetry to include rhythm, and therefore music, she said. Tunes come to her when she takes long walks.

The artist gave her first concert at age 42. When she was 45, she gave 250 concerts and toured full time. Getting over stage fright took time.

"It's like a pilot logging a certain number of hours in flight," she said.

Besides here tribute to women, Catalani does a show of songs from the 1930s and 1940s and another set of her own "Harry Potter" theme songs.

The Illinois Humanities Council pays for Catalani's concerts, so they are nearly free for non-profit groups. The council may be reached at (312) 672-8017.

Catalani's Web Site is www.CatCatalani.com.

Mariana Farrell may be reached at mfarrell&64;dailysouthtown.com or (708) 633-5983.