About

The newsletter

Photo from issue 11: Murphy Hicks Henry, Veronica "Roni" Stoneman — Murphy Hicks Henry, Veronica "Roni" Stoneman Photographer unknown. Issue 11, page 4

Murphy Henry started Women in Bluegrass in 1994, while she was building a database of every woman she could find who played bluegrass. She edited and published it until 2003 while raising two kids and earning a Master’s Degree in Women’s Studies from George Mason University. The 33 issues of the newsletter carried interviews, letters from readers, columns, reviews and news, much of it written by the women it covered. Murphy’s daughter, Casey Henry, edited the last issue as Murphy began to focus on writing her first book. Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass was published by University of Illinois Press in 2013.

This site

The archival copy of the newsletter is on Omeka, with full catalog records for researchers. This site is the reader’s edition: every issue as page scans and as text, and a page for each person, band, place and record the issues mention.

The text of each issue is a transcription made for the archive, so it can be read on a phone, searched, and read aloud by a screen reader. Some names in the newsletter don’t match the names in the index. A few were misprinted, and others changed later through marriage or divorce. In bylines the site uses the name from the index and notes the printed form with [sic], so a search for either name finds the person.

Photo from issue 21: Gloria Belle, Jimmy Martin — Gloria Belle, Jimmy Martin Photographer unknown. Issue 21, page 11

A note on language

Some issues mention bands whose names included a word now widely considered an offensive racial slur and a pejorative label by many Romani people. The site shows it as “G____.” The original wording remains in the page scans and in the archival copy.

The one exception is “gypsy jazz,” the name of the style of jazz that grew from Django Reinhardt’s music. In that name the word is less often considered offensive, and it is still the only common name for the style, so the site leaves it as printed.

Using this material

The newsletter is © 1994–2003 Murphy Hicks Henry and used with permission. The transcriptions are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Photos belong to their photographers, who are named wherever their work appears. To use a photo, ask us first.

How to credit the archive

To cite an issue, name the issue and the archive, and link to the page you used. For example:

Henry, Murphy, ed. Women in Bluegrass, no. 1 (September 1994). Women in Bluegrass Newsletter Archive, Reader’s Edition. https://womeninbluegrassarchive.org/issues/1/

For research, cite the archival copy on Omeka instead. Each issue page here links to it.

If you reuse a transcription, the CC BY-SA license asks you to credit the Women in Bluegrass Newsletter Archive, link to the license, and share your version under the same terms.

Support the archive

Gifts support both the archive and the podcast. Larger gifts go through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, and are tax-deductible. Monthly support goes through Patreon. Ways to support the archive.

Write to us at info@womeninbluegrassarchive.org.