Review: Sue Foley Honors Women of the Blues and Beyond on ‘One Guitar Woman’

Sue Foley is known as one of the finest blues guitarists around, though up until now she has mainly worked her magic as an electric player fronting bands, usually wielding a paisley Fender Telecaster (à la the great James Burton). For her latest release, One Guitar Woman, Foley has shifted gears and recorded a true solo album, with just her voice and a single, warm-sounding nylon-string acoustic Flamenco Blanca model made by Mexican luthier Salvador Castillo. Since her electric style is based on her intricate fingerpicking, the switchover to nylon-string feels seamless, and in this solo setting the brilliance and purity of her picking really come to the fore in ways that are perhaps even more apparent than in an electric context. 

Like her Stony Plain label mate Rory Block, whose “Power Women of the Blues” series has put out three releases since 2018, Foley’s offering showcases works associated with eight female guitarists and spanning four decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s. And though overall it feels like a blues album to me, it leans more to the genre’s folk/acoustic roots, and it also diverges in a few other directions: She performs a solid version of the Mexican instrumental staple “La Malagueña,” which she associates with the popular entertainer Charo (who studied with Segovia when she was young); gives a nod to straight classical guitar with Paganini’s “Romance in A Minor,” via the late-’30s recording by the great French guitarist Ida Presti; and includes a powerful reading of the Tejano classic “Mal Hombre,” a hit for Lydia Mendoza in the early ’30s, here including two verses in English.

Elsewhere on the album there are a pair of rather similar-sounding chestnuts by Elizabeth Cotten; two blues from 1930 by Geeshie Wiley; one from Memphis Minnie; Maybelle Carter and the Carter Family’s 1941 track “Lonesome Homesick Blues”; the mid-century gospel number “My Journey to the Sky” (Sister Rosetta Tharpe); and to close out the album, Foley’s own writing contribution, “Maybelle’s Guitar,” a tribute to Maybelle Carter.

All in all, One Guitar Woman is a fascinating and rewarding musical odyssey that shows a different side of an acknowledged master guitarist.