Sue Foley moved to Austin at the end of the 1980s to immerse herself in the city’s blues scene, where artists like the Vaughan brothers, Albert Collins, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Billy Gibbons became her beacons.
For Austin, Texas’ favorite Canadian expat, guitarist, and singer Sue Foley, staying faithful to the blues tradition is more than just a concern of style. It’s a calling. Foley explains: “I never questioned really dedicating myself to the blues, and that commitment and desire to always be true to it has never changed. I can see where the lines have been blurred between blues, Americana, and country, and there’s a million ways you can skin a cat at this point, but for me and my perception of what the blues really is, you have to step into a history and a deep tradition.”
With her latest release, Pinky’s Blues, Foley doubles down on that assertion while adding a fresh document to Austin’s fabled blues catalog. The album’s obscure song selections flex Foley’s muscles as a historian and student of the form, but also provide a fabulous platform for her tremendous personality and chops as a guitarist and vocalist. The album, which was named after her beloved late-’80s pink paisley Fender Telecaster, “Pinky,” is Foley’s 16th release as a leader and a love letter to the forgotten but influential deep cuts that helped shape the Austin blues sound as we know it.
“We really handpicked these tracks of favorites between me and our producer Mike Flanigin. These are all songs that, when we were coming up, you kind of had to know to get in the club, so to speak. Something like Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown’s ‘Okie Dokie Stomp’ was a rite of passage for any guitar player in Austin back then. Now, you never hear anyone doing it, but it was a regular song that everyone had to know.”
Pinky's Blues
Foley earned her stripes in the blues world the old-fashioned way. After starting to find her voice on guitar in her native Canada, she grew enamored of the blues and specifically the sounds coming out of Austin. Foley relocated to the hip Texas city in the early ’90s to immerse herself in the local blues culture. In an era before the internet gave us infinite access to all things, Foley’s Texas pilgrimage wasn’t just a drastic way to soak up the music. It was the most authentic way. Foley ruminates on that magical, pre-internet era.
“It’s completely different now! I have a 24-year-old son that’s a musician, and the way he is able to view and experience music is totally different from what we did. It’s still really valid, but it’s just a different vibe. What I saw and experienced was all direct transmission, and that honestly had to be experienced directly. I had to stand in front of Albert Collins’ amp to get the full effect! I had to have part of my hearing destroyed and I had to move molecules. I think direct transmission like that is important and you just can’t get that from the internet.”
“Let’s face it, Howlin’ Wolf wasn’t in there splicing together his vocal takes.”
Foley continues: “I can talk about Albert Collins, but unless you stood in front of his amp and watched him, you can’t really get it. You can watch all the clips of him you like and say, ‘Well, yeah, he had a wicked tone,’ but when that tone hit your ears in person, I’m telling you it split your hairs! That shit was real and that shit changed my life. I’m not sure if I was just starting out today if I’d even be a blues musician, because I wouldn’t have seen all of these people live. It was experiencing that face-to-face and walking away with my jaw dropped that changed my life and expanded my spirit and my soul, and I’m not sure I could do that watching a YouTube video.”
The years Foley spent worshiping in front of the amplifiers of (and eventually sitting in with) greats like Collins, Brown, Billy Gibbons, and Jimmie Vaughan helped her shape a style that’s undeniably authentic and traditional, but defined by an impressively vocal phrasing approach that gives her playing its own special personality. From the soulful, improvised instrumental title track and album opener to the brasher rave-ups (“Dallas Man” and “Okie Dokie Stomp”), Foley’s singing and guitar playing is timeless and familiar, yet entirely her own. From her tones to her note choices, she tends to favor understatement fueled by palpable conviction.
Sue Foley’s Gear
Meet Sue Foley’s pal Pinky, the reissue Telecaster that’s been her onstage companion for 30 years. She strings the instrument with D’Addario .010 sets and uses a thumbpick for her ringing single-note leads.
Photo by Michele Gare
Guitar
- 1988 Fender MIJ ’70s Paisley Telecaster Reissue named Pinky
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario strings (.010–.046)
- Golden Gate small thumbpicks
In the spirit of capturing as live and visceral an experience as possible, Pinky’s Blues was cut in just three days by Foley and her band (which included drummer Chris “Whipper” Layton of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble/Arc Angels fame, and a guest appearance from Jimmie Vaughan himself) playing in the same room—including all the amps. There was no pre-production involved and the musicians went in with only a cursory knowledge of the songs—something Foley believes added a lot to the album’s undeniable spark and energy.
“Everything was done live, everything was played together in the studio, including the vocals,” Foley relates. “No overdubs. I was just getting comfortable with a few of the songs. Chris Layton is obviously a wizard and can just play anything, and Jon Penner was my very first bass player and he’s back in my band now. So, it was a bunch of really skilled musicians and what we do is live music, so none of us were intimidated by the process. We just went for it! That’s how all our favorite albums were cut! Let’s face it, Howlin’ Wolf wasn’t in there splicing together his vocal takes.”
From Foley’s perspective, deliberately shirking any rehearsal of the tunes on Pinky’s Blues forced her and her band to really listen to one another as they tracked. “Everyone was really in the moment, and that spontaneity and energy is what you’re hearing on the album. And the reason this album sounds so good is the bleed, because we had so many room mics and we were all in one big room. It was set up like a live show and we just hit record, so we were getting the drums in the vocal mics, the vocals in the guitar mics, and that bleed created this big, cohesive sound. Our engineer, Chris Bell, worked hard to get those sounds right, and I know he had challenges mixing the album because everything is going into everything. You want a blues record to be a little on the edge, you know?”
Recorded in the studio in just three days, Foley’s new album sparkles with live energy—and bleed. Producer Mike Flanigin is also an Austin scene stalwart, who has toured and recorded with Jimmie Vaughan and Billy Gibbons.
When asked what legendary drummer and longtime friend Layton brought to the fold beyond his signature deep pocket and greasy backbeat, Foley is quick to call out his fantastic playing on “Southern Men,” and tells PG the tune was a deep cut that was dug up from an obscure ’70s compilation album called Blues in D Natural. “I’ve had it in my vinyl collection from way back, and Chris Layton had that same compilation and showed it to Stevie [Ray Vaughan] and they cut [Sly Williams’] ‘Boot Hill’ off that album. The original version [by Georgia-based bluesman Tommy Brown] was called ‘Southern Women,’ but we did it as ‘Southern Men.’”
All players hit a rut occasionally, and when Foley found herself in the 6-string doldrums, she turned to flamenco guitar to shake things up. Foley believes the picking hand is where the magic of a player’s personality really comes through, and as a player with a fixation on picking techniques, flamenco offered her a buffet of new techniques and a completely alien playing experience. Foley, who favors a thumbpick and acrylic nails on her right hand, says, “I used to watch Gatemouth, and his picking hand had this magic thing to it. He had unique things he was able to do. I took flamenco lessons because there happened to be a teacher in town, and it really turned me on my ear. It was literally like I had never played the instrument before, and I had been playing for almost 20 years at that point. It was very humbling. I took a year or two of those lessons and I applied those techniques to some kind of hybrid-blues form. I love playing my nylon-string guitar, and flamenco and blues are very sympatico art forms in my opinion. I think a lot of your tone comes out of the picking hand and I think you get more special elements out of your playing if you focus on that side of your playing a bit more.”
“These days, the whole loud guitar and amplifier thing isn’t the most popular thing, but it still is for me, and I love it. It’s a feeling of power!”
Much like her heroes, Foley favors a lone guitar and a spartan rig. The entire album was tracked with Foley’s paisley Telecaster named Pinky, which is a stock MIJ reissue that she fell in love with and got new in 1988. “I saw it and thought, ‘I have to have that!’ and my boyfriend at the time brought it home for Christmas and had made the first payment, but I paid it off in installments,” Foley says of Pinky’s origins. “I’ve played that guitar at every show, recorded every album, and done every tour with it for 30-something years now. It’s got a lot of miles and it still sounds great. I’ve never changed the pickups, but I’ve had it refretted a few times. I’ve always loved the neck and it’s always sounded so good that I’ve just never wanted to mess with it!”
Pinky sang through an early ’90s 1959 Fender Bassman reissue on the album, which Foley bought new. The guitarist says that she’s never felt the need to be particularly adventurous about gear, because “you can dress everything up, but at the end of the day, you’re still you and you’re going to sound like you. When I saw Albert Collins, he only ever had one guitar. When I saw Gatemouth, he almost always played the same one.” However, Foley does make an exception for reverb, which she loves, and called upon a Boss Digital Reverb and a Strymon Flint to add some atmosphere to her cranked Bassman.
Foley digs into one of her solos, which are marked by a thick midrange-and-reverb heavy tone and in-the-pocket playing.
Photo by Joseph A. Rosen
Beyond her killer new album, Foley’s many years in the game—coupled with a dedication to studying the blues tradition with an academic approach—has afforded her a unique perspective. While she’s a staunch proponent of preservation, Foley makes no bones about the fact that to keep the blues alive “you have to breathe new life into it, you’ve got to be yourself, and you’ve got to tell your story. There’s a whole bunch of things you can add into it that bring this tradition forward and into the current times, but it’s about your personal story and nobody can take that away from you. That’s where your blues begins and ends, really!”
Foley’s lengthy career has brought her shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the greatest guitarists the genre has ever produced—experiences she says were not just wildly validating but provided the perfect opportunity to steal from the best. “You can learn some of their tricks because you’re seeing them up close and getting a feel for the little special things that everybody incorporates in their stuff that might not be immediately apparent,” she notes. “I’ve played with Jimmie [Vaughan] a lot, and he’s got a lot of little special things that he does to make up his secret sauce, so there’s that. That osmosis and direct transfer and those magical things that shoot right into your spirit when you’re getting them from an amp and a guitar … that’s what it’s all about for me. These days, the whole loud guitar and amplifier thing isn’t the most popular thing, but it still is for me, and I love it. It’s a feeling of power!”
And while many of the great blues players that shaped her love of the genre have now passed on, Foley still appreciates the style’s capacity for reverence and respect for its elders more than anything: “When I was coming up, we toured with every blues artist that was on the scene, from Buddy Guy to Koko Taylor. Most of them were a lot older, but there was a real reverence for that age and a real respect, and I just love that about the blues. You can grow up in it, grow old in it, and get better! To me, that was always the beauty of blues music: When you get older, you kind of get better. It’s such an age-obsessed, youth-obsessed world these days and when you see an art form like this that not only really appreciates age, but you kind of have to have some years in the game to be the real deal … it’s rare.”
Sue Foley - Live in Europe DVD
Chock full of perfect-blues-tone guitar solos, this live concert from Köln Germany captures Sue Foley relatively early in her relationship with Pinky, her paisley Telecaster. It also reveals how deeply her playing is rooted in Austin’s blues legacy.
Making a quiet, contemplative album allows Isbell to reflect on the material in a new way and to really explore the relationship between his guitar and voice, which he’d recently lost and reclaimed.
Would you be excited? Would you be petrified?
This is the challenge that Jason Isbell voluntarily took on for his 10th and latest album, Foxes in the Snow. There were some extenuating circumstances. He was sorting through the aftermath of a very public breakup with his longtime partner in life and music, singer/violinist Amanda Shires, and the new songs reflected that situation, sometimes uncomfortably. Music this personal needed a personal approach. And so, when Isbell entered Electric Lady Studios in New York City for five days of recording last October, none of the members of his regular band the 400 Unit were there. He was accompanied only by co-producer/engineer Gena Johnson, who’s worked with him regularly for the past eight years.
Soundstream
“It was difficult to pull off,” Isbell acknowledges via Zoom from his Nashville homebase, “but it didn’t require me to look for ways to make the record sound weird. And that’s important to me, because what I don’t want to do is write a bunch of songs and then go in the studio and intentionally try to make them sound strange, just so they don’t sound like things I’ve done in the past. It made sense to me to just walk into a studio with a guitar and a notebook and make a record that way. First of all, because I can, and I’m grateful for the fact that I can. And I also thought that it would be really hard. And it was.”
Although Foxes in the Snow is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, acoustic guitars have long been a part of his onstage 6-string regimen.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Making it especially hard was Isbell’s insistence on not overdubbing his vocals. “I didn’t want [the album] to sound like anything that could have been replicated or fabricated,” he explains. “I wanted it to sound like somebody playing a guitar and singing. To me, the only way to do that was just to go in there, sit down, and play it. And it’s hardto play the guitar and sing at the same time in the studio. Normally, that’s something you wouldn’t do; you’d be in a really controlled environment with mics on the guitar, everything would be isolated, and you’d have to play very carefully, not the way you play live. The idea of doing that while singing master vocal takes … well, it was tough, because if you screw up, well, you just screwed up. But the good news is you don’t have to make everybody else start over, and I liked that. I liked the fact that if I messed up, I could just stop and immediately try another take.”
“I brought an old D-18 into the studio, like a ’36 or ’37, and it sounded beautiful, but it didn’t sit in the right spot. It ate up so much space, and it was so big.”
Being aware of the difficulties and doing it anyway—that can’t help but be a vote of confidence in one’s own ability as a musician. And it should come as no great surprise that Isbell’s confidence was well-founded. Foxes in the Snow shines a bright spotlight on his guitar playing, and the playing proves eminently worthy of such a showcase. From the bluegrass-tinged solo on “Bury Me” to the Richard Thompson-esque fingerpicking at the end of “Ride to Robert’s” and the bouncy, almost Irish-reel-like hook of “Open and Close,” Isbell always gets the job done, coming up with tasty parts and executing them with panache. It’s been easy to forget in recent years amid all the critical accolades and Grammy wins that when Drive-By Truckers brought Isbell into their fold in 2001—his first major-league gig—they didn’t do it because of his singing or songwriting, which were still unknown quantities at the time; they did it because of his considerable skills as a guitarist. By putting those skills on display, Foxes in the Snow helps rebalance the Isbell equation.
Isbell says his new album was “difficult to pull off, but it didn’t require me to look for ways to make the record sound weird.”
Jason Isbell’s Gear
Acoustic Guitars
- 1940 Martin 0-17
- Martin Custom Shop 000-18 1937
- Two Martin OM-28 Modern Deluxes
- Martin D-35
- 1940s Gibson J-45
- Fishman Aura pickup systems
Electric Guitars
Amps
- 1964 Fender Vibroverb
- Dumble Overdrive Special
- Tweed Fender Twin
Strings, Picks, & Capos
- Martin Marquis phosphor bronze acoustic lights (.012–.054)
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010–.046)
- Dunlop Tortex 1.14 mm picks
- McKinney-Elliott capos
And it does so while employing one guitar and one guitar only: an all-mahogany 1940 Martin 0-17, purchased within the past couple of years at Retrofret Vintage Guitars in Brooklyn. “My girlfriend [artist Anna Weyant] lives in New York,” Isbell notes, “and I didn’t want to keep bringing acoustics back and forth. I’ve got a lot of old Martins and Gibsons, and I don’t love to travel with them and subject them to air pressure and humidity changes. So I needed a guitar that could just stay in New York. As far as pre-war Martins go, it’s about the least special model that you could possibly find. But it sat perfectly in the mix. I brought an old D-18 into the studio, like a ’36 or ’37, and it sounded beautiful, but it didn’t sit in the right spot. It ate up so much space, and it was so big. The sonic range of that guitar was overpowering for what I was trying to do, and with the little single-0 I could control where it was in relation to my vocal.”
“There’s Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney all staring at me, and I knew that I had to sing in front of them with a busted voice.”
That control was important, because Isbell’s voice is spotlighted even more brightly on the new album than his guitar work. If you hear more strength in his singing these days, it’s not your imagination; he hired himself a vocal coach last year—out of necessity. “My voice failed,” he says simply. “I didn’t have any nodules or anything, but for some reason, anything above the middle of my range was gone. It was painful and embarrassing. I was doing the MusiCares tribute to Bon Jovi [in February 2024] and my voice was gone and I knew it. I was singing ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ on stage, and I looked down and there’s Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney all staring at me, and I knew that I had to sing in front of them with a busted voice.” He pauses and sighs. The sense of humiliation is palpable.
“You know, I did it,” he continues after a few seconds. “I did my best, and it was not good. And then after that I started working with this coach, and it made a huge difference. I figured out that I hadn’t been singing in a way that was anatomically correct. I’d been squeezing and pushing all these notes out, and [the coach] was good enough to manage to keep my vocal quality the same; I didn’t have to change the way I sounded, I just gained a wider range and a lot more stability. Now I’m able to sing more shows in a row without having vocal trouble. It’s been really, really nice.” He pauses again, this time to laugh. “And I made fun of people for so many years for blowing bubbles and, you know, doing all the lip trills and everything backstage … but here I am doing it myself.”
While recording sans band, Isbell said, “I liked the fact that if I messed up, I could just stop and immediately try another take.”
Isbell’s voice has made gains in both upper and lower range, as the Foxes in the Snow ballad “Eileen” demonstrates. In a clever touch, he pairs an unusually deep vocal part with a high, chimey guitar line, produced by placing a capo on the 0-17’s 5th fret. “Now that I’ve learned how to sing after just hollering for my whole career, I’ve got the ability to support a vocal in that low a key,” he says. “Having a vocal coach made it possible for me to sing a song like that. And the 5th-fret capo is a little tricky sonically, too. People usually go between two and four [the 2nd and 4th frets]. At least I do. Matter of fact, when I was a kid, my grandfather didn’t like for me to capo up over the third fret. I remember he’d tell me that would damage the guitar. I’ve never found a way that it would damage the guitar,” he adds with a grin. “I think it just irritated him.”
“My grandfather didn’t like for me to capo up over the third fret. I remember he’d tell me that would damage the guitar.”
Growing up in northern Alabama in the 1980s, Isbell took to music in large part because of his multi-instrumentalist grandfather. “He was a Pentecostal preacher, and he played every day. When I’d stay over with him, he’d play mandolin or banjo, fiddle sometimes, and I would have to play rhythm guitar. And then my dad’s brother, who’s a lot closer to my age, had a rock band. He taught me to play the electric guitar and rock ’n’ roll songs. I feel like I just got lucky that I loved it so much. That’s really at the heart of it—the fact that I’ve never had to sit down and practice because I just think about it all the time.”
Isbell is typically found onstage with his fleet of electric guitars, including vintage Telecasters, Les Pauls, Stratocasters, and his ’59 Gretsch Jet Firebird with a Bigsby.
Photo by Matt Condon
This is not to say that Isbell doesn’t practice; quite the contrary. Indeed, one of the most moving segments of Sam Jones’ excellent 2023 documentary on Isbell for HBO, Running With Our Eyes Closed, is when he recalls just how crucial practicing became to him as a child. The guitar was a refuge, a way to literally drown out his parents’ vicious arguments in the next room. (Another poignant aspect of Jones’ film, shot mostly in 2019 and 2020, is the delicacy with which it captures the often tenuous state of the Isbell/Shires relationship, prefiguring their breakup.)
When asked what exactly it is about the guitar that makes it so special to him, Isbell doesn’t hesitate. “The guitar is the best instrument,” he says. “It’s the smallest, most portable instrument that you can make full chords on. You can’t take a piano to a dinner party, you can’t accompany yourself on a clarinet, and you need something that’s big enough to where the volume of it can fill a room. In the days when everyone had acoustic instruments, like in the 1920s, there was nothing else like the guitar that you could carry on your back and travel from place to place and entertain people with."
“I realized pretty early on in the solo experiment that when you’re playing with the band, you don’t have a chance to work with tempo or volume in the same way.”
With that question answered, all that remains is to inquire, now that Isbell’s done the solo acoustic thing once—both in the studio for Foxes in the Snow and live for his tour to promote the album—whether he’d ever consider doing it again. “I don’t see why not,” he responds. “It’s not in any kind of plan right now, but I enjoyed the challenge of it. And I think anything that makes me turn off the ‘Don’t fuck this up’ switch is good for me, because if you sit there and spend the whole time thinking, ‘Don’t fuck this up,’ you’re not ever gonna get into that zone where you’re communicating with the work, and you’re not ever gonna get to a point where you can deliver it comfortably. This has been a really good opportunity for me to just practice letting all of that go.
“Obviously I miss the horsepower of the band,” he adds. “I miss the people individually, being on stage and communicating musically with them. But I realized pretty early on in the solo experiment that when you’re playing with the band, you don’t have a chance to work with tempo or volume in the same way. Usually you’re just trying to count a song off at the same tempo you recorded it in or the way you’ve been playing it lately, but when it’s just me, I can intentionally speed up and slow down within a song. And with respect to the volume, I can drop the bottom out soquickly, whereas it’s more like steering a ship when I’ve got the whole band up there—it happens more slowly, no matter how good they are. I would not enjoy this as much if I had to do it all the time,” he concludes. “But it’s nice to have both sides.”YouTube It
In this version of “Ride to Robert’s,” Jason Isbell demonstrates the flexibility of playing solo by picking up the tempo of this song from Foxes in the Snow.
