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Deborah Coleman

October 3, 1956 – April 12, 2023

Deborah Coleman was an American blues
musician. Coleman won the Orville Gibson Award
for "Best Blues Guitarist, Female" in 2001, and
was nominated for a W.C. Handy Blues Music
Award nine times.

Coleman was born in Portsmouth, Virginia
and raised in a music-loving military family
that lived in San Diego, San Francisco,
Bremerton, Washington, and the Chicago area. With
her father playing piano, two brothers on guitar, and a sister
who played guitar and keyboards, Deborah picked up guitar at
age eight. She graduated in 1974 from Deep Creek High
School in Chesapeake, Virginia. She worked in various
professions, including as a master electrician, before
pursuing a career in the music business.

She played at top music venues: North
Atlantic Blues Festival (2007),
Waterfront Blues Festival (2002), the
Monterey Jazz Festival (2001), Ann Arbor
Blues and Jazz Festival (2000), Sarasota
Blues Festival (1999), the San Francisco
Blues Festival (1999), and the Fountain
Blues Festival (1998).

In 2008, Deborah joined Joanne Shaw
Taylor and Dani Wilde on the Blues
Caravan - Girls with Guitars tour of the
UK, filling in for Candey Kane.

Coleman died unexpectedly on April 12,
2018, in a hospital in Norfolk, Virginia,
from complications brought on by
bronchitis and pneumonia.