In this episode, Alex visits Brooklyn Lutherie, the only woman-owned and operated guitar shop in New York City. While there to pick up his double SG, he chats with Mamie Minch, the shop’s co-founder, about the repair on his guitar and learns something new about it in the process. Alex, Mamie, and co-founder Chloe Swantner discuss what it was like to start a guitar repair business in what has traditionally been a very male-dominated field, and how Brooklyn Lutherie is changing the ratio. Mamie and Alex also discuss her musical career and her influences, which include two relatively unknown but fascinating female musicians, Connie Converse and Judee Sill. You’ll also hear a bit of Mamie’s music.

Mamie Minch is a longtime staple of New York City’s blues scene. She began playing guitar as a teenager in her bedroom listening to reissues of class country blues on repeat. She would try her hand at picking out the songs of legends like Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith. She loved the steady thumb and percussive right hand of these blues players, but she also devoured lots of different styles of music, from soul to psychobilly and old time to punk rock.

When she’s not making music, Mamie spends her days as a guitar repair luthier at Brooklyn Lutherie, the shop she and her business partner, Chloe Swantner, opened in 2014. It remains one of the few women-owned and -operated shops around. She also teaches, writes articles about luthiery and guitar playing for She Shreds and Acoustic Guitar magazines, and runs the annual Ukulele Building Camp for Girls in Brooklyn, NY.