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.