New for 2024:
- Wendy is featured in the June 2024 Issue of Oxford Magazine. Article by Davis Coen in “Returning the Gift of Music”
2. 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.
In Spring 2024 MS Slideguitar was a sponsor of the May 2024 Velvet Ditch Gran Fondo bike ride held in Oxford Mississippi. Last year MS Slideguitar was a proud sponsor of Dysphonia International's "Walk For Talk" 2023, a fundraising and awareness project. https://www.givesignup.org/Race/IL/AnyCityAnyState/VirtualWalkforTalk.
A seasoned performing artist, Wendy is adding songwriting and original custom instrumental slide guitar soundtracks to her repertoire.
Wendy is fortunate and lucky to have benefitted from some extraordinary mentors during her career including award winning songwriter Grace Askew and legendary late bluesman Bill Howl-N-Madd Perry.
Wendy was honored to have been selected for Andrea Stolpe's year-long intenstive songwriting Platinum Masterclass Mentorship program 2023- 2024.
In 2023 and 2024 Wendy has taken slide guitar to the Boys and Girls Club of Oxford, the Coldwater Public Library in Coldwater Mississippi, and This Is Noteworthy “TIN” in Water Valley supported in part by the Mississippi Humanities Council.
Wendy was delighted to have been invited back to the RL Boyce picnic in Como Labor Day Weekend 2023 as a performer on Sunday, AND an instructor at the guitar workshop on Saturday. Mr. Boyce was designated as a prestigious National Heritage Fellow through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 2023. Sadly R.L. passed away later that year, a terrible loss to the blues and local community, as well as to his family and close friends. It is fortunate for blues fans that an NEA film crew documented the event.
In October 2023, Wendy along with blueswoman Andrea Staten were featured performers at the Oxford Blues Festival.
Chakchiuma Swamp album was released in Spring 2023. Wendy contributed slide guitar to Kansas musician Sally Vee's original songs on the album. Read about the project here.
Other highlights:
Wendy is featured in the Fall 2021 Issue of Mississippi Folklife: Performances and the Pandemic. http://www.mississippifolklife.org/
Wendy released "Partaking" a CD of her original instrumental slide guitar soundtracks. Plus one track with guest appearance by Memphis' Grace Askew.
In May 2021 Dysphonia International, formeraly 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