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in my home. He was also a sessions musician at all the Memphis and Muscle Shoals studios, so at a
young age, my parents would regularly bring home wonderful Memphis soul music. Then, of
course, there was the blues – and I was lucky to have had Furry Lewis come to my school for what
we would now call a Blues in the Schools program. I guess you could say the music that came out
of Memphis was in my DNA.

LL: Would you tell us how you came to your position at The Blues Foundation?

BN: My background is in not-for-profit management with early experience in money and banking.
In addition, my husband is an entertainment attorney, and the two of us had been producing benefit
concerts for various not-for-profit
causes for 25 years, so I also
understood the music industry and
promotion. When the CEO position
came available, he suggested that I put
my hat in the ring, since it appeared I
had the wide span of experiences
needed to run this specific
organization. While I had a good
familiarity with blues, I did not come
into this from being an insider in the
blues world, so I leaned in hard for the
quick learning curve. The blues
community embraced me from day
one and I feel so fortunate it all
worked out, because I have loved my
work and will remain passionate about
the blues forever.

LL: So, I’m sure it’s been a
whirlwind experience and we’d love
to hear all about it! Let’s start with
your accomplishments while serving The Blues Foundation with which you are most satisfied.

BN: I’ve been fortunate to have a Board of Directors who supported my vision and was willing to
collaborate from day 1. This has allowed me to do so many things to grow the reach of the blues.
From the beginning, I wanted to better use technology for the benefit of our organization and of our
members. One of my first decisions was to bring a social media consultant on board. Within less
than a year we had grown our social media reach from 15,000 followers to over 200,000. Now we
have over 500,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We regularly engage over
75,000 people on each post and our monthly reach is more than 2,000,000 people. This has
exponentially expanded awareness of The Blues Foundation and of the genre.

I also decided we needed to use technology to give artists better access to the Blues Music Awards
submission process, so in 2018, we switched the submission process to an online platform. This has
allowed more blues musicians, including those from outside the United States, to participate. In the
past, musicians had to send about 100 CDs to our offices to be distributed to the industry experts
who were part of the nomination process. Now the music can be directly uploaded to the cloud and