As a kid, Sue Foley never really pondered what she’d be when she grew up.
It’s not that she didn’t care; it’s just that she didn’t need to give it much thought — the answer to the question was all around her.
For as long as she can remember, a guitar was always in the picture. As her dad and older brothers played, Foley began to see the guitar as a way of life — an instrument that gave her purpose and brought her joy.
“Music has always been there for me,” the blues singer-songwriter recently told the Deseret News. “I knew from the time I was a little girl I’d be a musician. I knew all through school, high school — nothing really fazed me. I just knew I was going to be playing music. So I was lucky.”
But Foley didn’t always know what embracing that vision should look like.
Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Foley was fascinated with the way Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders slung her guitar. Hynde seemed to be more of an exception than a rule, though, and Foley struggled to find other women guitarists on the scene.
“I was kind of instinctively looking for role models, because I figured I would play, too,” she said. “As far as playing goes, I really wanted to see women playing leads. … Back then they were few and far between. … Now there’s a huge scene. Women are shredding and it’s not really a thing anymore. But I think back when I was doing this and starting, it really was.”
But by the time she released her latest album, the Grammy-nominated “One Guitar Woman” — which she’ll highlight in her show at Salt Lake City’s The State Room on Saturday — one thing had become clear to Foley: Just because she didn’t see many women playing the guitar doesn’t mean they weren’t there.
‘Sometimes all you need is a role model’
Foley has always been a researcher at heart. The whole reason she got into the blues is because she learned her favorite artist of all time, The Rolling Stones, started out as a blues band.
For roughly 25 years, the singer has been uncovering the stories and learning the musical stylings of trailblazing, guitar-playing women — some more known than others.
All of this research has culminated in her album “One Guitar Woman,” where she channels a number of pioneering players, including Elizabeth Cotten, a left-handed guitarist from the early 1900s who played a right-handed guitar; Maybelle Carter, the matriarch of the Carter family and mother-in-law to Johnny Cash; French classical guitarist Ida Presti; Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Sister Rosetta Tharpe; and Mexican American guitarist and Tejano singer Lydia Mendoza.
There’s also her greatest inspiration — and her own personal guitar-playing role model — Memphis Minnie, who recorded through the 1930s-50s, starting out as a country blues artist and gradually evolving to become one of the first electric lead guitar players to ever be recorded, Foley said.
Although Memphis Minnie died in obscurity, Foley said, her songs have been widely covered — Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” being one of the most notable examples.
“I think sometimes all you need is a role model to kind of go, ‘Oh, hey, you can do this,’” Foley said. “Memphis Minnie was that for me. She’s really an important person in the blues culture, but I wish she was more of a household name, and she should certainly be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”
For “One Guitar Woman,” Foley traded in her bright pink Fender Telecaster electric guitar for a nylon-stringed acoustic to perform defining songs from the women who helped blaze a path for her in the music industry.
“I didn’t just regurgitate people’s work,” she said. “It was more like I grabbed on to the material that resonated with me and my story, and it was like a mirror. It’s always been like a mirror to me. Their work, my work — how does this relate? How can I get inside their work, and make it personal?”
The final product was gratifying — both personally and for her career. It netted Foley, a four-time Blues Music Award winner for traditional blues female artist, her first Grammy nomination.
“I was over the moon about it,” she said. “A girl from Canada decided to go into blues music, which seems very, very much like a left of center kind of vocation. To be honored with a nomination for the biggest music award in the world, that’s really amazing. I’m really proud of my journey.”
‘Musical adventurers’
At one point during our interview, as Foley was sharing stories about the history-making women of guitar, I asked her what, if anything, she had learned about herself from the project.
She initially drew a blank.
But over the next several minutes, as our conversation unfolded, Foley started to piece an answer together.
In addition to “One Guitar Woman,” Foley has been working on a book highlighting interviews with her peers on the guitar scene: Rory Block, the late Deborah Coleman, Debbie Davies, the late Ellen McIlwaine, Joanna Carter and, perhaps most well known, Bonnie Raitt. She’s submitting the book to a publisher within a month.
But Foley also has her eye on the future of the scene.
She’s quick to mention up-and-coming blues artists like Samantha Fish, Ally Venable, Danielle Nicole and an 18-year-old sensation from Ireland named Muireann Bradley — “I think she’s gonna just light it up big time,” Foley said.
“I guess if I’ve learned anything about myself is I just really like the work, and I like to explore,” she added. “And I think a lot of these women ... they were all explorers too. They were all adventurers — musical adventurers. And that’s kind of where I’m at, too. I really love exploration and learning. They really lit my fire that way.”
Sue Foley brings ‘high energy’ show to Utah
Foley was 21 when she left her home in Canada and relocated to Austin, Texas, in search of her big break.
She got her education performing for years at the legendary blues club Antone’s, where Stevie Ray Vaughn broke out.
Over three decades, she’s released 15 albums — but it was only six years ago that she came to Utah for the first time to perform. Now, after headlining the Utah Blues Festival in 2019 and 2024, Foley is returning once again — this time for her own show at The State Room.
“It’s pretty high energy,” she said, noting that her show is a mix of acoustic and electric. “The show goes from a whisper to a scream, you might say. I’ve had experiences at blue shows that literally have transformed me as a person, and that experience was so powerful that I wanted to recreate that, or at least hold on to it and carry it forward.”
While Salt Lake City may be a newer addition to Foley’s map — she called Utah “a hidden gem” — there’s been a common thread that connects all of the cities on her tour.
“When women come to the shows and realize that they’ve had a place in the guitar culture the whole time, they get really excited,” Foley said. “There’s really important contributions that were made. When I see these women get excited, that really excites me, too.”