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Riding The Blues Highway
03/02/1999 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Ted Drozdowski
Punch up singer/ guitarist Susan Tedeschi's home number and you're likely to hear the hum of hot tires and the roar of tractor-trailers when she answers. That's because these days Tedeschi's home is quite literally the interstate and the concert stages that it connects.
"I've been on the road so much since the summer that I couldn't keep a place, so I put my stuff in storage. Now I don't live anywhere," explains the 28-year-old rising star via cell phone, as she heads to Los Angeles International Airport the night after selling out that city's House Of Blues.
Tedeschi's refuge is the same she's had since childhood: her parents' home south of Boston, Massachusetts. But she's spent little time there since her 1998 Tone-Cool label debut Just Won't Burn was released. That album plunged her into a modern variation on the have-guitar-will-travel lifestyle of the blues and R&B innovators she names as heroes: Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Son House, Memphis Minnie, Ruth Brown, Janis Joplin.
"I listened to a lot of music like that when I was growing up," she recalls. "Dad was a big fan of country blues and singer-songwriters. Mom was into Sam Cooke."
Tedeschi's album subverts her Yankee roots with a vocal performance that rings like a Southern belle's. Part of its allure is her good old-fashioned belting. There's a sassy vinegar tang to the way she rips into raveups like her own stomping "Rock Me Right." And she spits out gravel on the Delta-style git-down "Friar's Point." But the CD is best when Tedeschi lights a torch to find her way through soulful ballads like "Just Won't Burn" and "Looking For Answers." Those songs deal with lost love, mortality and faith in ways that gently tug the heartstrings. They become spirituals, in a sense, as she reworks her phrases like a gospel diva--passionately testifying, repeating lines as the fire builds to the heated pitch that makes concertgoers burst into screams...or churchgoers raise their hands and shout.
"I got into singing blues through gospel," Tedeschi explains. "I was in a gospel group, but I wanted to perform more, so I started hitting blues jams around Boston on my days off. Club owners started offering me my own gigs. But at the time, I didn't know you could make a career of singing blues."
Now--after nonstop touring with B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Jonny Lang, taping television appearances, plus headlining clubs and theaters on her own--Tedeschi certainly does.
"I know I've grown a lot as a performer in the past year," she considers. "I think I'm aware of the audience in a different way." Also, with the departure of six-string whiz kid Sean Costello from her band in the fall, she's emerged as a raw 'n' stinging lead guitarist.
"I've been performing so much I haven't been able to reflect a huge amount on what's happening. I know I even look different than I did a few years ago," Tedeschi continues. "I don't know how people perceive me, but I do know this is pretty exciting."
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