Women of Preservation Hall

Kelly C. Porter is head of the Preservation Hall Archives, a public historian, scholar and community organizer. She is also currently a PhD candidate in American History at Tulane University. As the first professional archivist to begin to preserve and digitize the vast records of music-making at Preservation Hall, her focus is on connecting current Preservation Hall musicians with long-hidden memories and artifacts of their family members and mentors.

Dodie Smith-Simmons was a staple of the Civil Rights Movement in New Orleans as a former chairperson of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and has been personally responsible for protests that desegregated the city. She was was also one of Preservation Hall's earliest employees and tour managers, one of the founders of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and worked on Bill Russell's oral histories with musicians who played at the Hall as well as on his published research.

Sherrie Tucker is a musicologist and professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas. She has written and published extensively on the intersection of jazz and gender.  She is co-editor-in-chief of the American Studies peer-reviewed academic journal and has previously served as the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University.