2026 - Wendy has accepted an invitation to be the slide guitar player in BLUE VELVET a new Oxford Mississippi band, headed up by vocalist Effie Burt. https://www.thelocalvoice.net/oxford/category/local-music/
To close out 2025, Wendy's new release Under the Radar is available on most streaming platforms! https://open.spotify.com/track/2RYCB4rQsApaWZMctTEANZ
Thanks to bluesman Jimmy Duck Holmes of Bentonia, Wendy and slide guitar apprentice Sophia Doyle entertained opening night, Thursday evening June 19, 2025 at the Bentonia Blues Festival. Many thanks to Maria Zerangue at Mississippi Arts Commission for arranging the details. Thanks for sponsorship of the apprenticeship to the Mississippi Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts.
Highlights of 2024/2025
1.May 2025. Thanks to his good friend Bob Linn, Robert Keeley of Keeley electronics saw the Invitation Oxford article about Wendy and Sophia's MAC apprenticeship. Unbelievably he then offered to design a custom effects pedal for Wendy! Within a matter of weeks the pedal was in Wendy's hands, plugged in to her guitar with reverb and tremelo guilding the lily of slide guitar. Be looking for a new tab on the website to feature the pedal! The pedal is inspired by the Mississippi Mudslide guitar fashioned by Ken Pfalzgraf of Paul Mero Junkpile Guitars.
2. Also in May 2025 Wendy was invited to kick off the Annual Acoustics Society jam. It took place this year in New Orleans at the Toulouse Theater.
3. Article on the apprenticeship in the April 2025 issue Invitation Oxford and Invitation North Mississippi. It is the music issue! Sophia and I had a great conversation with Executive Editor Leslie Chriss. https://www.invitationmag.com/
4. Wendy's instrumental slide guitar CD “Partaking” is now part of the collection of the University of Mississippi's Blues Archive.
5. The Mississippi Art's Commission's Folk Artist Apprentice grant awarded to Wendy and student Sophia Doyle is the subject of an Oxford Eagle article. https://www.oxfordeagle.com/2024/11/01/mac-grant-give-ohs-student-a-chance-to-learn-slide-guitar-from-an-expert/
6. Wendy is featured in the June 2024 Issue of Oxford Magazine. Article by Davis Coen in “Returning the Gift of Music”
7. Wendy has been awarded a prestigious Mississippi Folklife Apprenticeship/Mentorship grant for 2024/2025. Over the next year she will be sharing slide guitar techniques, performance wisdom, and the culture of slideguitar with her apprentice 14 year old Sophia Doyle from Oxford. This project is supported in part by funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
8. In addition to several Oxford performances, Wendy played at Mississippi events from Foxfire Ranch in Waterford to the Water Valley Arts Crawl sponsored in part by the Mississippi Humanities Council and Magnolia Coffee. She returned for a third year as featured musician at “The Enchanted Forest” event at Chakchiuma Swamp in Grenada Along with actress Rebecca Moore Jernigan, she performed “The Legend of Robert Johnson at the Crossroads” at TIN in Water Valley funded in part by the Mississippi Humanities Council.
Other highlights:
Wendy is featured in the Fall 2021 Issue of Mississippi Folklife: Performances and the Pandemic. http://www.mississippifolklife.org/
In May 2021 Dysphonia International, formerly the National Spasmodic Dysphonia Association https://dysphonia.org/ contacted Wendy about writing a song for the organization. Wendy and her songwriting coach Grace Askew cowrote the song "I have a Voice" which Grace live streamed. A few months later, the song was professionally recorded, with Grace's vocals and Wendy on slide guitar. The song is now featured on NSDA social media https://dysphonia.org/i-have-a-voice/
Photo credit: Lindsay Pace