Lady Plays the Blues Project: Recovering the Hidden Legacies of Black Women Blues Guitarists through Digital Black Feminist Praxis

Lady Plays the Blues Project is a grant-funded digital annotated bibliography and multimedia archive that uses digital Black feminist praxis to recover and center the hidden legacies of Black women guitarists who played downhome blues. Dominant blues scholarship has long perpetuated a false binary: Black women sang the blues, while Black men played the guitar-driven blues of the rural South. This narrative, reinforced by the gendering of the guitar as male and the exclusionary practices of critics, scholars, producers, and archivists, has contributed to the erasure of Black women guitarists from the country blues canon. The result is a cultural memory in which blues guitar is imagined almost exclusively in male terms. Lady Plays the Blues counters this history by centering the lives and sound labor of nine Black women country blues guitarists: Elizabeth Cotten, Memphis Minnie, Geeshie Wiley, Flora Molton, Etta Baker, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Algia Mae Hinton, Beverly "Guitar" Watkins, and Precious Bryant. Their contribution -- often overlooked or dismissed -- are foregrounded through a digital space designed to be both educational and transformative. Built on Google Sites, the project includes: a digital annotated bibliography of 78 books; an annotated directory of archival collections and keyword maps; an interactive StoryMapJS visualizing the cultural geography of country blues; and comprehensive artist profiles with framing essays, interactive timelines, discographies and playlists, liner notes, sheet music, songbooks and lessons, interviews, photographs, and recorded performances -- totaling more than 1,400 sources. This presentation will briefly highlight the sociocultural and historical factors behind the erasure of blues guitar women from blues history, outline the project's origins and goals, and share the public site I created to showcase these extraordinary guitar women.