"I've always been a fan of older musicians," says Sue Foley.

Exactly. In her new album (following her debut for Edmonton's well-regarded Stony Plain label, the modestly more eclectic Ice Queen, reviewed in this space on 7 April 2018) Foley's blues are both old-school and old-soul. For her they were first absorbed far from the Southern climes where the music was born and nurtured. As a young woman and performer, sensing that she needed closer exposure to the sources, she moved from her native Canada to Austin to join that city's lively neo-roots scene.

Wherever Foley chose to live in her desire to get closer to the blues, Austin (though generally better known for its rock bands and singer-songwriters) has been good for her. Most living blues, or blues-adjacent, artists are white men and women who owe as much to guitar rock as to blues, a deeper, older, more traditional music requiring a different spirit. This is not an issue for Foley. Her blues are compellingly felt and naturally delivered. Her gifts are sufficient that (as happened recently) the mere announcement of a new album immediately lifted my spirits and set me to watching for the package in the mail. After a lifetime of listening to more albums than I can possibly count or recall, I am here to attest that hardly anything in any genre does that to me any more.

Recorded live in the studio during the lockdowniest days of the COVID pandemic, Pinky's Blues is happily devoted in notable part to a deep-blues, fat-chords approach associated with some old masters -- Howlin' Wolf and his celebrated guitarist Hubert Sumlin for two -- but which is yet fresh and idiosyncratic. It never feels like anything but Foley's vision even if you've heard an earlier iteration of some element or other. Few practitioners are able to pull off something like this. Foley manages to encompass a good chunk of what attracted us blues geeks to the genre at the onset and has held us there ever since.

"Pinky" is what she calls her pink-colored Fender Telecaster. On the current project three local musicians accompany it and her; a fourth, the well-known guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, joins them on "Hurricane Girl." Blueswoman Angela Strehli's spooky, anthemic "Two-Bit Texas Town" tells the story of how the blues found her at an impressionable age, via the radio, at her unlikely, out-of-the-way address. In my experience that's the way it works: if the blues is meant for you, one day it will claim you, whoever you are and wherever you occupy space. If there's a moral to Sue Foley's odyssey, I guess that's it. As we can hear here, it worked out well for everybody.

[ visit Sue Foley's website ]