SHE'S A BLUES 'BABY,' AND GROWING STRONG

September 22, 2000
The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Nick Cristiano

Here's the thing about the blues, Sue Foley was saying. People think the music is simple to play, but it's not, and it has nothing to do with technical skill.

"You can be a real accomplished musician and not be able to play the blue," Foley said last week from her native Ottawa. "Like Clifford Antone said, 'This is stuff you can't teach people.'" But if you can play the blues, "you can go anywhere" musically.

Foley should know. She can definitely play the blues, and in a field where performers can be hopelessly derivative, the 32-year-old has already transcended her influences to develop an absolutely riveting voice of her own.

When she hit the music mecca of Austin, Texas, in 1992 to record for the Antone's label - she moved back to Canada a few years ago, just before the birth of her son - Foley had a reputation build mostly on her fiery fretwork. Clifford Antone, owner of the record label and the fabled Austin blues club of the same name, said that as a guitarist Foley was "as good as it gets" - this in a town that boasted Stevie Ray Vaughan and too many other six-string aces to name.

Foley's guitar prowess will be on ample display tonight when she fronts her bass-drums-keyboards band at the North Star. Just as striking as her playing, though, is her singing. She has a voice that, to borrow a phrase of Little Richard's, can make your liver quiver - an impossibly alluring blend of sultry swagger and naked vulnerability.

Though she says that "the absolute essence of what I do" remains the blues, Foley has come a long way from the days when she mainly played songs by her electric-blues heroes. As she has come to write most of her own material, her music has expanded to include acoustic blues, rhythm-and-blues, roots-rock, and even touches of Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan.

Her latest and best Cd, Love Comin' Down (Shanachie), recalls the work of another singer-songwriter who started out in the blues - Lucinda Williams, who duets with Foley on the desolate "Empty Cup".

The Canadian dynamo may have that indefinable it, but don't call her a blues master. "When you say 'Blues Master' it's almost like you're talking about a spiritual master," she said, preferring to reserve the term for such titans as B.B. King and Muddy Waters.

Suffice it to say Foley has her own voice, and one that still has plenty of time to grown even more.

"I'm a baby, I'm 32. That's the good thing about the blues. You're still young at 32."