Concert Preview
There might be some extra energy on stage when blues star Sue Foley performs at Bonnyville Strathcona Performing Arts Centre Saturday night.
Foley and her trio will be finishing a Canadian leg of their extensive touring schedule. They started in Vancouver September 26, and they’ve been playing in a different city every night since. After Bonnyville they get a few weeks off.
Does the last show of the run bring some extra magic to the stage?
“Totally,” Foley said.
She says the group delivers a great show every night. “They’re all the same and all different in a lot of ways,” she said. “But we have a great group and we just really enjoy playing music together. It’s always such a ton of fun.”
Foley was born and raised in Ottawa and has been playing professionally since she was 16. She’s now based in Texas, home of a distinct blues tradition.
“We’re known as a Texas-based blues band, and mostly on the traditional side. There’s a lot of guitar because I’m a lead guitar player, but I also do a lot of my own material,” she said.
Her musicianship has won Foley her share of awards. She’s won a Juno and been nominated for a Grammy. She has won the Blues Music Award for Traditional Blues Female Artist five years in a row starting in 2020.
And she is literally a lifelong student of the guitar: she holds a PhD in musicology from York University and is releasing a book next year, Guitar Women: Conversations with the Heroines of Guitar.
But don’t expect a scholarly lecture at a blues concert: the music, as it always has, will speak for itself.
“I always say blues is a celebration of the human experience,” Foley said. “They make you laugh, they’ll make you cry. It’s really about how it feels to be human. And blues isn’t afraid to touch on those really deep subjects, you know like loss and death.
“But it also celebrates,” she said. “It’s also about having fun, drinking and being with your friends and partying. It depends on where your blues lands.”
Foley’s show will deliver the full experience.
“We do a good scope,” she said. “A lot of party stuff, but also hopefully some deeper stuff.”
There’s an old saying: the blues had a baby, and they called it rock ‘n’ roll. Audiences who might not think of themselves as blues fans will find a blues performance contains the best of what they love about rock, country, even pop music.
But there are many blues traditions, and current artists like Foley have a lot to choose from. Saturday’s show will have a bit of something for everybody, she says, from some good rocking electric blues to intimate solo acoustic numbers.
Foley says her concerts draw her own fans and others who love blues, but she loves to win over the curious.
“There’s a lot of people that come who have never heard of me, they just come in cold. And we usually win them over,” she said. Saturday will be her first time playing in this region, so she’s not sure who will be in the audience, “but hopefully fans of good live music with a lot of energy and good stories.”
She loves how blues makes people feel good.
“I want them to be elevated. That was what brought me into blues,” she said. “I saw my first blues show and I swear my feet didn’t touch the ground for days.
“That’s the ideal,” she said, “to do that for somebody like it was done for me. That was always why I got into this.”
