About the Project

Introduction

I play country blues on guitar, banjo, and ukulele. Over the years, I’ve taught myself how to play the fingerpicking styles of major artists in the country blues canon, including Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Lonnie Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Reverend Gary Davis, and Robert Johnson. One day while listening to Spotify, I accidentally stumbled upon the country blues guitar music of Etta Baker and that left me to wonder if there were other Black women country blues guitarists out there that I somehow missed. So, I set out to search for my forebearers; for my fellow guitar-wielding Black women country blues musicians. I was shocked to discover a long list of Black women country blues artists who accompanied themselves on guitar (and sometimes banjo and other stringed instruments), including the “renegade Black cowgirl” Jessie Mae Hemphill and the multi-talented Algia Mae Hinton who often buck danced (a form of clogging) while singing and playing her guitar behind her head! Why had I never heard of these women? 

Blues guitar is overwhelmingly a male enterprise, or so we're told (Lomax, 1993, p. 358), and any reference to “blues women” brings to mind vaudeville-style blues singers like Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox, all of whom rose to popularity in the 1920s following the recording of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” which was the first recording of the blues by a Black artist (Davis, 1999). Black blues women who accompanied themselves on guitar were, and continue to be, largely ignored, dismissed, or forgotten (Turner, 2021; Johnson, n.d.; Levine, 1993; Garon & Garon, 2021). They are, with few exceptions, the "disremembered and unccounted for" (Morrison, 1987, epilogue).

The erasure of Black women country blues guitarists can be explained by a number of factors, including the Great Depression, which ended both the classic blues era and the careers of many (mostly male) interwar country blues artists who rose to prominence in 1926 following the release of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Long Lonesome Blues” (Garon & Garon, 2021); and the gradual shift from country to urban blues in the late 1940s.

It is also explained by the mostly male music critics, cultural scholars, tastemakers, record producers, and promoters, as well as music archives that failed to grant these women the same level of attention as their male counterparts or out right dismissed their contributions to the genre (Brooks, 2021). In the liner notes for Memphis Minnie's album I Ain't No Bad Gal, for example, Peter Welding (1988) begins by noting, "In the world of country blues few women have made much of an impact, let alone exerted any appreciable influence on the music or performers -- the criteria by which one's contributions to the idiom generally have been measured." He goes on to explain why this isn't "a sexist remark," before describing Memphis Minnie as "an uncommonly gifted singer, guitarist, and songwriter" (Welding, 1988).

Perhaps the single most important factor in explaining the hyper-invisibility of Black women country blues guitarists is the gendering of the guitar as an instrument for men. Guitars have long served as signifiers of hegemonic masculinity and the boundaries around who can and cannot play are often carefully policed (Halstead & Rolvsjord, 2017). Black women country blues artists who accompanied themselves on guitar were seen as disrupting power relations built up around gender by daring to “play like a man” (Garon & Garon, 2021; Levine, 1993). The “stratification of the instrument as male” not only renders Black blues guitar women invisible but also has the potential to leave women and young girls with the impression that women “should not play that instrument” (Halstead & Rolvsjord, 2017, p. 10). Indeed, Jessie Mae Hemphill, who learned to play blues guitar at age eight, explained that she opted not to play guitar on stage when she first started playing professionally because, in her words, "I hadn't seen no woman up on the stage with no guitar . . . so I thought I wasn't supposed to be" (Johnson, n.d., p. 219). 

Lady Plays the Blues Project is meant to serve as a corrective (or counter historiography) to a dominant blues history that creates the impression that there was an absence of women who played rural blues guitar by centering the lives, legacies, and “sound labor” (Brooks, 2021) of nine Black women country blues guitarists. Raising public awareness about the existence of these women also brings attention to and greater use of library and archival collections about these women, blues history more generally, and materials that provide theoretical and contextual frameworks for understanding the material conditions of their lives and the music they produced.

This project also provides the first-ever centralized place for locating information about Black women country blues guitarists. The information and resources that currently exist are scattered across different sources and, as a result, are hard to find. Presently, there is a dearth of scholarly research around Black women blues guitarists. By increasing the discoverability of resources around Black women blues players, this project may also stimulate greater research and scholarship around this topic in ethnomusicology, Black studies, American studies, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, geography, and other relevant disciplines.

Project Purpose

In her article “She Plays the Blues Like a Man”: Gender Bending the Country Blueswomen, Nancy Levine writes, “Now that classic blues women are finally getting the attention they deserve, it is time to uncover the more profoundly hidden women of the rural blues” (Levine, 1993, p. 38). Lady Plays the Blues Project answers this call by offering a digital annotated bibliography and multimedia archive aimed at raising awareness of and stimulating research, teaching, and use of collections around Black women country blues guitarists whose contributions to the development of blues music and culture, the Black experience, and Black consciousness have been largely ignored or minimized. This project aims to make those contributions visible.

In doing so, Lady Plays the Blues Project will also:

1. Actively resist the erasure of “Black women’s sound labor” by naming these women, telling their stories, and demonstrating that “Black women’s music [. . .] profoundly matters” (Brooks, 2021).

2. Disrupt the place of the guitar as a signifier of hegemonic masculinity and conduit of gendered power relations by placing women who played the blues at the center of both blues and guitar histories.

3. Provide role models for Black women and girls interested in learning to play guitar or expanding their musical repertoires beyond the male canon.

4. Inspire the public to listen to and perhaps even learn the music of Black women country blues guitarists.

5. For Black women like me who play country blues, pay homage to our forebearers; “absorbing the pedagogy of the figures who have created the conditions for [our] sonic being" (Brooks, 2021).

The digital annotated bibliography includes Black feminist and womanist texts that provide a theoretical framework for understanding how Black women country blues guitarists negotiated the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality and the ways in which this was reflected in their music. It also includes books that provide historical context and capture the material conditions of their lives, theorize about gender and male hegemony in music, provide histories of the blues and the guitar, provide histories and analyses of Black blues women (particularly those who played country blues guitar), examines the role of the recording industry and “race market” in blues history, and explores the geography of blues culture and the ways in which music is shaped by place and space.

In addition to the digital annotated bibliography of books, the project includes:  

Profiles for Nine Women. The profiles include framing essays that provide a short biography, (forthcoming) interactive visual timelines of each woman’s life, bibliographies that are specific to each artist, annotated directories to relevant archives and special collections, photo collections, selected discographies with digitized liner notes, sheet music with tablature, songbooks and lessons, interviews and oral histories, recorded performances, and curated playlists.  

An Interactive Storymap. The forthcoming Knightlab Storymap will provide a new cultural geography of country blues with the featured Black women country blues artists at its center.

A List of Other Black Women Guitarists & Instrumentalists. Not limited to blues, this hyperlinked list includes Black women multi-instrumentalists who are both little known and well known. Their music often defies genrefication, often blending blues, jazz, Black Americana and roots music, R&B, country, southern Gothic, pop, and more. This list includes historical figures like Mattie Delaney, Rosa Lee Hill (aunt of Jessie Mae Hemphill), Barbara Lynn, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Odetta; and contemporary artists like Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Valerie June, Deborah Coleman, Ruthie Foster, Kaia Kater, and Sunny War.   

Featured Artists

The nine Black women country blues guitarists featured in this project are:

1. Elizabeth Cotten

2. Memphis Minnie

3. Geeshie Wiley

4. Flora Molton

5. Etta Baker

6. Jessie Mae Hemphill

7. Algia Mae Hinton

8. Beverly "Guitar" Watkins

9. Precious Bryant 

These nine Black women blues artists were initially selected based on the following criteria:

Country blues guitar was the primary type of music they played. Country blues is mainly performed by a solo artist typically, though not always, on an acoustic guitar using fingerstyle-style and/or slide playing techniques. It is sometimes called rural, folk, or downhome blues and includes a variety of regional styles, including Delta, Piedmont, ragtime, and songster (allmusic.com).

I selected Black country blues women because we know the least about them and their cultural legacies relative to Black women blues singers and Black men country blues guitarists. This is due, at least in part, to the dichotomization 

of the blues into vaudeville-style women blues singers and country blues guitar playing men (Garon & Garon, 2021). 

Within this dichotomy Black women rural blues guitarists occupied a kind of third space that helped to render them invisible. Arguably, one of the few exceptions would be Memphis Minnie who is well known among blues enthusiasts, but we know far less about her compared to her male country blues counterparts despite her having recorded over 200 sides. There is exactly one book about the life and legacy of Memphis Minnie. 

Their careers were confined mostly to the twentieth century. Country blues guitar originated in the early part of the 20th century, waned in the 1950s, before experiencing a revival in the 1960s. All the women featured in this project recorded in either the early or later part of the century. A few of the artists began recording in the late 80s and 90s while two released their first solo albums in 2001. Confining the project to the 20th century also keeps it to a manageable scope.

Their music was recorded. In my research, I discovered a long list of women who played rural blues on the guitar but only a small number were recorded either by record companies, folklorists, or by fans who captured their live performances on video. Having their performances somewhere on the record is important for documenting and analyzing their music, particularly if the women themselves are viewed and treated as “archives of cultural memory" (Brooks, 2021, p. 35).

who is this project for?

Lady Plays the Blues Project is aimed at a wide variety of audiences:

It is intended as a research tool for scholars interested in blues and guitar histories, particularly at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. It is also intended as an educational resource for faculty and students in social science, humanities, and music disciplines like American studies, Black studies, sociology, women and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, cultural anthropology, musicology, history, and geography. 

Lady Plays the Blues Project can also serve as a collection development tool for librarians looking to diversify their collections and archives or to engage in inclusive pedagogical practices by incorporating the blues into information literacy instruction (see The Blueprint for Hip Hop Information Literacy as an example). 

Finally, this project is also aimed at musicians looking to expand their listening and playing repertoires, and to members of the public who have an appreciation for music, history, guitars, and/or the blues. And, of course, it is for my fellow Black women guitarists who see themselves reflected in all the Black women, past and present, that are centered in this project.

Enjoy!

Yoli Bergstrom-Lynch

Lady Plays the Blues Project © 2024 by Yoli Bergstrom-Lynch is licensed under CC BY 4.0  

Supported by a Carnegie Whitney Grant from the American Library Association