For the New York Guitar Festival’s 20th Anniversary, the Festival and WNYC’s New Sounds combine forces once again, this time for a celebration of the music ofMemphis Minnie.

The 2019 edition of the New York Guitar Festival celebrates 20 years of live concerts, panels, and workshops that span the huge range of the guitar.  And it celebrates one of the instrument’s pivotal but overlooked figures:Memphis Minnie.  “Memphis Minnie was an incredible force during one of the most trying times for a black woman to be a performer in popular music in America,” says Amythyst Kiah, the singer/songwriter/guitarist who will be part of the tribute concert.  Minnie began her career in 1929, recording the song “When The Levee Breaks” with her husband Joe McCoy, known as Kansas Joe.  That song would go on to great fame when Led Zeppelin recorded it in 1971.  She was an early exponent of the Delta blues style – an urgent, passionate guitarist.  But she was also a formative influence on the electric blues sound associated with Chicago, and her career in the 1930s and 1940s – both solo and with her later husband, Lil Son Joe – produced hit songs like“Bumble Bee”and“Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” which have also gone on to long and productive musical lives.