Jackie Venson's bluesy sound adds to a growing Black female guitar 'revolution'

While speaking with the Tennessean at the Analog at downtown Nashville's Hutton Hotel, Austin-based guitarist Jackie Venson laughs loudly, her mouth wide open and her eyes flashing in giddy hilarity.

Venson is at a point of unusual calm and focus in her career, but she's also squarely focused on mastering her iconoclastic style.

Venson is laughing because she's been presented with a laundry list of organizations and genre names that industry insiders and journalists have come up with in an attempt to describe her imaginative, guitar-driven music. She is following a long list of gifted Black women in trying to reach varying levels of acclaim in the past half-century.

"Black Country Music Association. Black Rock Coalition. Black Lily Collective. Neo-soul. Afro-Americana."

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Once the list stops, Venson's smile turns into a stern yet fun-loving and knowing grin.

"You forgot 'Afrofuturism' and a bunch of other ones, but I know what you're getting at," she states.

In the century that has passed since Sister Rosetta Tharpe's gospel-laced guitar licks birthed rock 'n' roll, the genre has been less than willing to significantly acknowledge generations of Black brilliance with the instrument.

In a February 2022 Tennessean feature, Yola — another Black woman for whom industry attempts to define her art forced her to list her style as "genre-fluid" — noted that "women of color in music don't have to be in service to someone else's art or vision of yourself to be worthy of appreciation."

Moreover, as Joy Clark — Venson's opener at the Analog — highlighted in an April 2022 Tennessean conversation: "Black women are without the aid of the [music] industry in healing ourselves from the psychological trauma of being told that we can't [play guitar]."

Venson's journey is similar.

She has gone from being a child of a veteran musician to a viral December 2022 social media post about her 2020 single "Make Me Feel" in which fellow Texan Erykah Badu noted that "the future is bright." Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid more deeply stated: "Badass! [Love] the Taste. Tone. Feel!" and added that her playing "leaves that addictive bugaboo 'speed' off the table upfront, without dismissing it a priori."

The journey has been fraught with her attempting to authentically define herself as a hyper-intellectual creative. When she's failed to do so, she's pursued the introspective discovery of virtuoso musicality.

The 32-year-old Venson has felt socially maladjusted for some time. First, it was as a high school teenager, then as a classical pianist at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Navigating her way through a decade of being a well-respected guitarist has proved difficult, too.

She describes Reid's fondness for her work as "affirming and relieving" because they play the same instrument and share the same passions as musicians who are also producers and songwriters.

After graduating from Berklee, she describes feeling frustrated with the "hard" schooling and the acculturation process of an institution so steeped in "rigid" processes and traditions. She compares it to "a box of things I thought I'd never need again, so I put them away."

When reminded that her father, the distinguished bass guitarist Andrew Venson, told her that pursuing a career in the music industry would, in fact, be"hard," she smiles then offers a rapid-fire reply.

"In retrospect, that was such a vague response," she says. "This industry isn't just hard; it's a stressful walkabout through a desert of emotions where untrustworthy strangers [surround you]."

In the live realm, Venson's sets have never been better. Her decade of freewheeling meanderings through the blues, electronic music and improvisational jazz have yielded material that is growing in renown alongside Yola's self-aware folk-soul, Allison Russell's genre-redefining Americana and Brittney Spencer's powerfully heartwarming takes on timeless country stylings.

Venson compares achieving this level of renown to being a hard-working college student who has been accepted into a college classroom of academically talented and extraordinary students.

She has benefitted from being a veteran of Austin's vaunted live music scene who has released nine albums and six EPs in a decade. Plus, she's been co-signed by the likes of Melissa Etheridge (she's played the rock superstar's cruise to Cancun for the past two years) and featured on "Austin City Limits."

This means she's disarmingly frank, uncompromised in her creative expression, and able to drop into a mind-bending guitar solo at the drop of a hat.

Moreover, isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic pushed her deeper into her core musical self and greatly benefitted her stylings.

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She vividly describes how her frequent livestream sets during quarantine — Pollstar listed her alongside the Grand Ole Opry, Norah Jones and Questlove as some of the artists who were most active online during 2020 — have aided her ability to intricately improvise and excite audiences.

"I've learned how to zero my ear in on, say, my drummer's 16th-note triplet, which will give me a theme for an extended guitar solo," she says. "it makes my material as familiar to the crowd as it is adventurous. I'm in a zone where I still feel as excited as I was to be alone and exploring during COVID, but people and inspiration also surround me. I've come nowhere near exploring my musical possibilities during a show."

Asked about the more significant potential of the moment Black female guitarists are having, she offers telling thoughts.

"I'm never going to act a specific way based on who you think I am," she says. "I couldn't even pretend to do that. [Related], how I play the guitar showcases my best, most unfiltered self. If I play something, it's genuine. Otherwise, I wouldn't. I'm done playing into a void. It's time to become the revolution. All of us, we are a revolution."