I applied for and was awarded the American Library Association 2022 Carnegie-Whitney Grant in the amount of $4,960 for the purpose of completing my project titled Lady Plays the Blues Project: A Digital Bibliography and Multimedia Archive of Black Women Country Blues Guitarists.   

The Carnegie-Whitney Grant is a competitive grant from the American Library Association that supports "the preparation, either in print and/or electronically, of popular or scholarly reading lists, webliographies, indexes and other guides to library resources that will be useful to users of all types of libraries in the United States." 

Lady Plays the Blues Project is a digital annotated bibliography and multimedia archive that aims to raise awareness of and stimulate research, teaching, and use of collections around Black women country blues guitarists whose contributions to the development of blues music and culture have been ignored, overlooked, dismissed, or forgotten. The project is meant to serve as a corrective 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” of ten 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 consists of a digital annotated bibliography of books that capture the material conditions that shaped each artist; an annotated directory of archival collections, websites, and digital scholarship; an interactive story map that visualizes the cultural geography of country blues; and comprehensive profiles of ten Black women country blues guitarists. The profiles will include framing essays, interactive timelines, discographies, curated music playlists, liner notes, sheet music with tablature, songbooks and lessons, interviews, photographs, and recorded performances.

The nine featured artists are: Geeshie Wiley, Elizabeth Cotten, Memphis Minnie, Flora Molton, Etta Baker, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Algia Mae Hinton, Beverly "Guitar" Watkins, and Precious Bryant. The project is scheduled for completion in December 2024.