“You really can’t completely replicate what she does, which is a beautiful thing. She took it to her grave”: Sue Foley has spent 25 years researching the unsung female pioneers of guitar – these are the most important players she discovered

Sue Foley’s 2024 album One Guitar Woman has been heaped with praise, earning Grammy and Juno nominations for best blues album. It’s overdue recognition not just for Foley, but for the women she pays tribute to.

The record contains covers of largely overlooked musicians, and it’s the culmination of almost 25 years’ research – she began interviewing guitar-playing women in 2001 for a book, which is set for publication this year.

“Other people have done similar things,” Foley says. “We’re all adding to a big pile of information that wasn’t there when I started. These women were important; there may not have been that many, but their contributions need to be noted.”

Her guitar-and-voice solo performances feature her Salvador Castillo flamenco. The simple approach means the writers of those songs retain focus.

“When I go out live, nobody in the crowd has heard of most of these artists,” Foley says. “But when they hear their stories, they’re drawn in because they're all interesting people – and their music speaks for itself.”

Here’s Foley’s personal guide to the artists she has researched – many of whom shaped guitar playing as we know it.

Elizabeth Cotten

Elizabeth Cotten - Freight Train (Rare Live Performance) - YouTube

Watch On

The left-handed Cotten played a right-handed guitar upside-down, without restringing. “If you watch her videos, her voicings are all different,” Foley says. “It’s very counterintuitive. As a right-handed guitar player, I tried to work more from hearing rather than watching.

“If you watch the video it kind of turns your head upside down. You really can’t completely replicate what she does, which is a beautiful thing. She took it to her grave.

“Her style is just so fluid. I’ve been messing abut with that Piedmont style since I was a teenager; It’s one of the most fun and satisfying ways to play guitar. Even a simple song like Freight Train is such a perfectly constructed piece – if you learn it really well, you can play it everywhere, and everybody will really be impressed.

“The way she times things is unique. When you’re playing solo you can take all these liberties that you can’t in an ensemble. A lot of that is so personal that it’s hard to do perfectly.

“I got as close as I wanted to without pulling my hair out. You could be really persnickety, but executing something technically perfectly isn’t necessarily getting inside the music.”

Memphis Minnie

“As a female blues guitar player from Canada, I felt, ‘How is this going to work?’ I discovered Minnie and I thought, ‘She’s a women who did it, and she did it with way more up against her than I’ll ever have.’

“There are no interviews with her; no place you can go to get the story about her life, except the lyrics of In My Girlish Days. It talks about her leaving home and running away in the early 1900s.

“She was a great player. She was known to go head-to-head in guitar battles. What would that have been like: to be in some lowdown blues club with her and Big Bill Broonzy having a battle? She was boisterous, flamboyant and brave.

“She started as a country blues artist and migrated to Chicago, becoming one of the first recorded electric blues artists. She's such an important figure. The way she and her husband, Little Son Joe, play together is a perfect example of how two guitars are supposed to play together in Chicago blues.

“It’s this whole dance at the top and the bottom; they float back and forth, backing each other up. That’s really the stuff to study as far as how to play rhythm and how to embellish your rhythms and leads.”

Maybelle Carter

For Carter, Foley composed an original, Maybelle’s Guitar. “I got inspired and wanted to tell the story of her family. I was curious about that time in country music – the early recorded stuff – and how Maybelle backed up the group with her guitar, and how she figured out how to play so solidly. Her rhythm never drops a beat; people don’t understand how astoundingly hard that is to do.

“The song is about the Carter family’s influence and how vast it really was. It formed the foundation of modern country music. Her guitar was the backbone, and one of the first guitars people might have heard on record.

“She’s best known for the Carter scratch, which she played with metal finger picks and a thumb pick. You’re playing the melodies on the bass strings, which is a little counterintuitive. Then you have to keep a really solid rhythm in between, which becomes really quite challenging. They say the technique came out of clawhammer banjo.

“I also covered Maybelle’s song Lonesome Homesick Blues. For the longest time, I could not figure out that guitar. I thought it was the Carter scratch, just way harder than it needed to be. Finally, I saw this video of her daughter, talking about Maybelle’s guitar styles, plural. She played slide in open tunings, and a little Mexican style, and Helen Carter said she did flat picking, too.

“I was like, ‘What!’ Finally I tied it together with an open tuning and flat picking, and the song just came really naturally. That showed me what a curious musician she was. She’d written all these little solos that go between the rhythm. How well-structured all those songs are is no accident.”

Lydia Mendoza

“Keith Ferguson, the original bass player from the Fabulous Thunderbirds, gave me a Lydia Mendoza album when I first got to Austin. I really wanted to feature her in this collection. Mexican-American Norteña and Tejano music is such an important part of the cultural fabric of the music in this country. I wanted different stories, and I thought hers was really interesting.

“She also had an unusual guitar approach, especially in her early songs. She played a 12-string guitar, and some people have told me it was a restrung bajo sexto, the bass instrument used in Mariachi, or some kind of Mexican bass guitar.

“It was strung down to low B flat or something. In her her early recordings, the guitar is very low and her voice is really high. That contrast is very distinctive.”

Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Riley

Last Kind Words Blues - YouTube

Watch On

“These are two more obscure artists – they've only got six songs in existence between them. They’d travel together and back each other up on recordings, but there's not a lot known about them, although there was a famous article in The New York Times called ‘The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie.’

“About that time I found their songs were popping up on compilations I was buying. I was always fascinated – ‘These songs are so haunting. What is it about this?’

“Motherless Child Blues and Last Kind Words Blues are have really interesting guitar parts. They're not standard blues layouts either; the structure is different. I felt like those two belonged on this selection. Nobody writes songs with that kind of vibe anymore.

“And so many people have latched on to their work, which I think is also really of note. Last Kind Words Blues has been covered many, many times and still gets under people’s skin.”

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

“She's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and videos of her playing are circulating. Of all the artists, I think she was the most intimidating – she's such a force, between being a multi-octave vocalist, an astoundingly great performer and a wicked lead guitar player.

“I always loved My Journey to the Sky. I was really influenced by her work with Marie Knight when they were a duo. Marie played piano and they both sang. I found that side of her work the most touching, most emotional.

“I’m trying to interpret somebody’s music and find the place where you make it your own. This one is a personal, ‘Hey, I really like this song!’ It has nothing to do with her guitar style. There's no solo in it; I thought about doing a different song that maybe demonstrated her guitar style a little better, but I just like the vibe of this one.

“It’s one she wrote herself, which I think is important. It shows a more introverted, thoughtful side to her, even though she was so known for being a wild performer. She played in open D a lot – she mainly played in open tunings. I looked on YouTube for examples of her work and none of it was accurate. There was only one girl I found that played it right.

“Everybody else does the right notes, but they’re not in the open tuning, so it doesn’t have the right vibe. So I know what I would do if I started a project to honor her.”

Ida Presti

“What a story! Everybody I interviewed who studied with her or knew her spoke of her outstanding abilities on guitar – a technical ability like no other. Everybody who’d seen her said she was the best guitarist they’d ever seen.

“She died at 42. For the last decade of her life at least, she worked in a duo with her husband, so I’m not sure her full abilities were on display. I feel like her legacy got buried, and yet she was really important. There are some videos of her, but the one album that I found of her solo recordings is unbelievably beautiful. Her playing was so precise and her tone is so good.

“I picked a piece that I felt like I could get inside. I actually learned Romance in A Minor by tab. It was out of my wheelhouse but the thing I liked is it does sound bluesy to me. There’s parts that resonate with me as a blues artist. It’s free time, so you can stretch and expand or slow down when you need to. I still perform it.”

Charo

“Charo is the only person in this collection who’s still alive and she’s still playing.

“She studied at Segovia’s school in Madrid, so she has a lot of discipline. But then she had gypsies who camped on her property, and played flamenco, which is all improvised. Those worlds don't usually collide – but she collided them!

“I think people overlook her guitar playing because she’s such an entertainer. She's a comedian, a singer, a dancer; she kind of does it all, and then she’ll play some guitar. But when you pay attention to what she’s playing, she's a real artist. When I was a little girl I was mesmerized by her.”

• One Guitar Woman is out now.