Music is the travel of sound through time, place, race, and institution. Music has always been important to me, from ballet class to road trips to eventually picking up a guitar myself and learning to play my favorite songs, to finding a passion in writing my own songs as a way of expressing myself. I now regularly play shows and am embarking on my first tour up the east coast in a couple of weeks.

Being a woman in music is complicated at times. There are complex hindrances I feel walking into band practice, soundchecking at a gig, or even playing in my room by myself. Hindrances that at times feel like a lack of belonging, like an invisible wall separating me from my male counterparts. Sometimes these barriers are created by environment, like sexist comments from a sound guy, but sometimes these barriers come from within myself when I’m alone with my creativity. This summer, I wanted to explore the idea that women in music of all genres across all walks of life feel like this at times too.

This project started out as a paper that would combine my research on gender theory, interviews with women in the music industry, and personal experiences. I also knew I wanted to create a way to advertise women’s music by getting them streams and clicks, which I believed would somehow involve a playlist or website.

However, that all changed when I read Chris Herrington and Jared Boyd’s Memphis music road map in the Daily Memphian. In this road map, the two chart out a history of Memphis music from 1914 with W.C. Handy all the way to Star and Micey, taking care to acknowledge the biggest, most well-known moments, but also bringing to light lesser known records that are still integral to our city’s musical history. A quote from this article that stuck out to me was,

“This is meant to be a road map - not the road map. One path among infinite potential routes, and hopefully a starting point for further exploration.”

On their particular road map, 110 tracks are featured. Of the 110, 16 are projects that include women in some way. I was instantly struck with the idea to trace the journey of Memphis music using only women. So, the Loud Women Project was born and I knew its final phase would be a website where I would timeline the story of Memphis music through the individual stories of the women who authored it.

So I dove in. I began gathering names of women in music who were born in Memphis, lived in Memphis, or worked in Memphis. Upon looking over my list of over a hundred women that was growing every time I read about Memphis music, I realized the Loud Women Project was going to be much bigger than I’d imagined. My hope is that this project will be able to grow within the Mike Curb Institute at Rhodes, and eventually throughout the Memphis community once the website goes live. This first draft is really just the beginning.

The work that I’ve done this summer has shown me how much more work there is to do. Looking back on eight weeks ago, I wish I had known that one of the biggest barriers of this project would simply be access to the exploration of women in music itself. So many of these women’s achievements have gone completely unrecorded, which makes being able to honor their careers that much harder. To think that national stars from this city, like Alberta Hunter and Memphis Minnie, have only minimal information about their impactful lives breaks my heart not only for them but especially for the women who remained in Memphis to pursue their careers and felt the pushback from this city everyday because of who they were.

One of the most disheartening aspects of my research was the language used to describe women in music. Memphis Minnie, known to many as the Queen of the Blues, was described as so talented that she “transcended her gender.” It is more apparent to me now than ever that when a woman possesses talent, it is so “in spite” of her womanhood instead of “because.” She cannot hold the title of one of the greats, but we will allow her to be one of the female greats.

In the context of Memphis, women are allowed into our history, but only when it benefits the story. Estelle Axton mortgaged her house twice to begin Stax Records with her brother, and without that financial backing the world would sound completely different. Yet, she is left out of many of the Stax narratives, and when she is mentioned, it’s to highlight her motherly and tender nature within Stax. In 2002, her brother was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for founding Stax. She has yet to be honored.

Beale Street itself, one of the most musically and historically rich streets in the entire world, has a tumultuous history: in the early 1900s, it was the only entertainment area in the nation that allowed female performers, not because of any early feminist idealogy, but because it was thought it would encourage women to perform and prostitute themselves. In many cases, it is recorded that men would physically charge the women performing on stage. This is all to say that I believe it’s very important to contextualize these women’s musical achievements within the confinement of a male dominated world. Girls were not encouraged to play instruments, and if they were given lessons, it was usually piano and usually for the purpose of serving a religious community. So because of this lack of education in instruments, only 9 of the 27 women on my timeline are musicians in a discipline other than vocals, and that’s with me trying to include as many as possible, especially those before 1970.

Also, the majority of musicians on my timeline are African American. Black women were creating the blues and jazz when it was scorned by society, and then when it was appropriated and socially accepted, they were creating soul and groove music when it was scorned by society, and then when it was appropriated and socially accepted, they were creating rap and hip hop. I hope that this shows that all of the music we listen to and celebrate today was innovated and continues to be innovated by black women.

Finally, I want this project to eventually transcend musical genre, but this first installment does not. For example, Memphis has a rich gospel history, one that deserves much more research and attention than I have given it in this first round.