{"id":291795,"date":"2026-05-13T21:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T21:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/291795\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T21:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T21:08:11","slug":"dallas-guitar-nonprofit-aims-to-diversify-music-spaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/291795\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas Guitar Nonprofit Aims to Diversify Music Spaces"},"content":{"rendered":"

April marked both International Guitar Month and International Black Women\u2019s History Month<\/a>. For Jess Garland, a Dallas-based singer-songwriter,<\/a> neither occasion required a calendar reminder. She has been living at that intersection for two decades.<\/p>\n

Garland is the founder and director of Swan Strings<\/a>, a Dallas-based nonprofit providing free music education, community concerts and sound therapy programming built on a foundation of racial and gender equity. But before the nonprofit classification, before the grants, before art installations and symposiums, there was just a Black woman with a guitar going wherever the need was \u2014 schools, recreational centers, living rooms \u2014 and noticing something that wouldn\u2019t leave her alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve taught all over Dallas,\u201d she tells the Observer. \u201cBut even when I started doing nonprofit work, I still wasn\u2019t seeing a lot of Black people. We were there, but it wasn\u2019t the large majority of the demographic I was teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n

She noticed something else, too. As a musician working in Dallas\u2019 broader arts ecosystem, she kept running up against the same wall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou don\u2019t see a lot of Black women who play instruments,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not that we don\u2019t exist. It\u2019s not pushed and presented in the media as much. Historically, that\u2019s been by design. If you look at the pipeline, from minstrel shows to the entertainment industry, it\u2019s typically a white man in the forefront.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black Artists Shape Black Artists<\/p>\n

Garland traces her own formation as a guitarist to a handful of women who carved the path for their successors, including Sheila E., India.Arie and fellow Dallas musician Erykah Badu. But the pivotal moment for Garland was watching Lauryn Hill\u2019s 2001 solo taping for MTV\u2019s Unplugged<\/a> series. In the session, Hill sat onstage in Times Square alone, with just an acoustic guitar, and performed an entire set of unreleased material. An official album version the recording, MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, was released in May 2002.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been playing guitar as long as that [album] was released,\u201d Garland says. \u201cBecause that was the very specific moment of, \u2018I\u2019m doing this.’\u201d<\/p>\n

When Beyonc\u00e9 held open auditions in 2006 for what became the Suga Mamas, a ten-piece all-women band, with lead guitarist Bibi McGill in the center of it, Garland understood the significance immediately, not as entertainment, but as an intervention.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI became, instantly, a fan of Bibi McGill,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Swan Strings aims to expand accessibility to not only Black artists, but Black audiences as well. <\/p>\n

But she was also clear-eyed about the limits of visibility without infrastructure. Even now, she says, her students will reach for a male artist\u2019s name before a woman\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of my students will say Leon Bridges before they say H.E.R. And I\u2019m like, \u2018Wait a second,’\u201d the musician says.<\/p>\n

That pattern of the cultural gravitational pull toward men, and specifically toward white men, even in art forms that Black people built, is what Swan Strings was designed to interrupt. The organization came into sharper focus when Garland participated in the Dallas Truth and Racial Healing and Transformation<\/a> equity cohort and was asked to develop a formal theory of change. What she landed on was precise: increase the number of young Black girls participating in Swan Strings programming from 40 to 60 annually. By September 2026, she will be a handful of students away from that number.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a Black woman leading a music institution, and I wasn\u2019t seeing young Black girls,\u201d she says. \u201cHow do I change that? I had to be more intentional about reaching the demographic I wanted in our nonprofit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Creating More Visibility in Music <\/p>\n

Intentionality extends to every dimension of Swan Strings\u2019 work, including where and how it chooses to show up publicly. In March, the organization presented the inaugural Behind the Strings: Music Symposium<\/a> at St. Paul United Methodist Church in the Arts District. It was a free, six-hour event honoring Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the lineage of Black musicians she represents. The choice of venue was deliberate. The church sits on land tied to one of Dallas\u2019 earliest Freedmen\u2019s Towns, in a corridor Garland has long been vocal about.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not afraid to talk about how it could be a lot more diverse on that street,\u201d Garland says. \u201cIt\u2019s frustrating, because it is a Freedmen\u2019s Town, but you don\u2019t really see a lot of Black institutions or Black art there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The symposium\u2019s lineup was crafted with the same intention. Garland and Kierra Gray Thomas, a Swan Strings collaborator since the organization\u2019s founding, performed together on electric guitars, weaving rhythm guitar and fingerpicking through Elizabeth Cotten\u2019s \u201cFreight Train\u201d and \u201cBlackbird.\u201d Grammy-winning soul artist Kam Franklin performed solo, moving between electric guitar and lap steel with a soul and skill that doesn\u2019t translate to description. Dallas\u2019 Cookie McGee brought a full band, her signature Gibson SG anchored a blues set alongside Brianne Sargent and Lunar Rae.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to show how this sound gets shaped right here in Dallas,\u201d Garland says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the crowd was composed of the diversity she envisioned. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t just about racial diversity or gender diversity. It was diverse through age\u2026 I saw the most Black people I have seen in one space for the work that I present,\u201d she says. \u201cMy audience is typically white. That really meant a lot to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

One moment stood out above the rest: Community activists, civil rights organizers, and veterans from Dallas\u2019 broader movement community showed up, not to perform, not to play, just to witness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t even pick up a guitar,\u201d she said. \u201cThey just wanted to see us in action\u2026 They\u2019re here to be in community and to uplift this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another recent performance presented by Swan Strings featured rising Dallas singer-songwriter, Zyah<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"\"Garland performs at Swan Strings\u2019 inaugural Behind the Scene: Music Symposium with Kierra Gray Thomas.<\/p>\n

But the ecosystem Swan Strings is building is bigger than any single event and more durable than any single grant cycle. The organization now partners with the Black Banjo Reclamation Project<\/a>, a Bay Area-based initiative working to return the banjo, an instrument with African origins that was stripped from its cultural roots, back to Black communities. Garland\u2019s nonprofit also hosts free monthly banjo lessons at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center<\/a>. Through it all, Garland is still self-funding when she has to, moving with the direction she brought to the first guitar lessons years before anyone called it a nonprofit.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not getting the funding people think we are,\u201d she says. \u201cWe are getting funded, and we have grown tremendously. But I have to be creative. I\u2019m an artist, and I\u2019ve always had to self-fund a lot of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teaching classrooms full of young Black students who see themselves at the center of musical history remains the driving force for Garland.<\/p>\n

\u201cRepresentation matters to all groups of people,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s important to see Black people doing things outside of the narratives that have been created for us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April marked both International Guitar Month and International Black Women\u2019s History Month. For Jess Garland, a Dallas-based singer-songwriter,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291796,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2172,102,104,103,8386,2596],"class_list":["post-291795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-country-music","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-history-nostalgia","tag-local-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291795\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}