Combined with the music is a message of lesbian strength, struggle and pride". The album earned Tillery a Bammie (Bay Area Music Award). In fall 1978, Olivia Records produced the "Varied Voices of Black Women" national tour in response to an all-white lineup of an earlier "Women on Wheels" tour, as well as to promote Olivia artists. The Varied Voices tour played in eight cities and featured Tillery, Mary Watkins, Gwen Avery, Vicki Randle, and poet Pat Parker and brought poetry as well as jazz and blues to women's music audiences. It also exposed audience members to an empowering lesbian culture that was emerging across the USA and it "demonstrated that white lesbians were not the only ones creating a new women's culture: Though the concert [tour] was first and foremost a celebration of Black lesbian feminist identity and culture, it was also an attempt to broaden the white feminist community's understanding of feminist and lesbian identity…. Varied Voices was a watershed event in the history of black women and women-identified music". The film "Radical Harmonies" documents the history of women's music, and includes a segment on the Varied Voices tour. In the film, musician June Millington describes seeing the performances at the time: "You've never seen anything like it. They really did present this hot, hot, HOT show. And either you really fell into … the well or some people were repelled … because it was almost too much. But that's the good news, because they were groundbreaking". "Linda Tillery" was the only album she released on Olivia Records, and Tillery left the collective in 1979. In an interview years later, Tillery described her Olivia experience: "I was quite happy to be in an environment where I could observe other women in the creative process and also in the administrative process because all of my experience up to that point had been working with men. The Loading Zone was nine: me and eight white men; every other band I was in was me and six men, me and five men, me and four men. I had never worked with any women musicians". Tillery has referred to herself as the "queen mother" to women's music, to both deflect the tendency of some to look upon her as a sex object, as well as to recall the term's honorific association in some African cultures. Although she ended her formal relationship with Olivia in 1979, Tillery remained an important figure in the women's music scene throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.