Metro Pulse/Music/Susan Tedeschi

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What:
The B.B. King Blues Festival with B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Susan Tedeschi

When:
Thursday, Sept. 21 at 7 p.m.

Where:
Chilhowee Park Amphitheater

How Much:
$25/$35 at Tickets Unlimited outlets or 656-4444

Susan Tedeschi can play and sing with the best of them. And she does.

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

On what Susan Tedeschi calls her "colorforms" guitar, in between the decals of Eeyore and Piglet and Minnie Mouse, there's a signature scrawled in black marker. It says, "To Susan. Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown. 1997."

There's a story there. Tedeschi's band was on tour with the legendary bayou bluesman. They were all slated to play one night at the Hot Tin Roof, a club Carly Simon owns in Martha's Vineyard. "But the President of the United States decided he wanted to have a party there that night," Tedeschi says. "So Carly Simon canceled our band. Gatemouth Brown still got to play, though. The President of the United States left before he played."

Tedeschi didn't. She spent the evening there. "I hung out with Gatemouth Brown," she says fondly, reminiscing on the phone from a tour stop in St. Louis. No chance to meet the president, then? "Oh, I met him, and the first lady, and everybody," she says mildly. "It was all right."

It's no anomaly that it's Brown's autograph she carries onstage with her every night, rather than Bill Clinton's or Bob Dylan's or Sarah MacLachlan's or any of the other big names she's played with or for in the past few years. Like Brown—and like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, who are coming to Knoxville this week with her—Tedeschi's first loyalties are to the blues. Although her gritty, soulful singing and playing have made her a crossover threat (witness the 1999 Grammy nomination for Best New Artist), she's a product of the blues world, with its sprawling networks of clubs and bands and dedicated fans.

"It's a nice genre to be involved in, because it seems like it's an extended family," she says. "A lot of the bands all know each other and grew up together and played with each other."

Tedeschi grew up outside Boston at a time when the city was one of the mini-capitals of indie rock (Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders, Blake Babies, Lemonheads). But while Kristin Hersh and Kim Deal were going post-punk, Tedeschi was listening to her father's Lightning Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt LPs. She started singing early on and joined her first band at 13. By the age of 18, she was playing and writing her own stuff, on both guitar and piano. Staying close to home, she honed her chops (and her music business acumen) at the Berklee College of Music, graduating in 1991. And she played and played and played.

The eventual result was her 1998 debut CD, Just Won't Burn, on the Massachusetts indie label Tone Cool. It grabbed critics and blues hounds early on, for good reason. Tedeschi has a big, rugged voice, and she's a real singer. She slurs and bends her words with casual confidence, almost never veering into the bombast so many would-be blues wailers substitute for technique. She kicks off the album with alarm bell urgency, hollering, "You say you haven't been rocked in a long, long time" and tearing into an eight-bar riff worthy of Chuck Berry. Elsewhere, she covers the spectrum of what currently counts as "blues," from the Clapton-ish groove of "You Need to Be With Me" to the stormy balladry of the title track.

Most of the songs are worthy originals written by Tedeschi and her bandmates (notably drummer Tom Hambridge). But she's not shy about her cover choices, taking on the Ruth Brown signature tune "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean" and John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery." The latter is a particularly bold move, considering that its best-known version was recorded by Bonnie Raitt—with whom Tedeschi can't help but be compared. As she notes, they're both white women who sing and play blues guitar, which puts them on a relatively short list.

Tedeschi admits she was nervous about recording "Angel," a crowd favorite at her live shows. "My producer and a few people just convinced me to record it," she says. "They said, 'Oh, it probably won't even go on the record.' And then after we did it, they said, 'It's so great, it has to go on.' I was like, 'No!' But everybody loved it.

"Bonnie heard it, and she likes it, so I got her blessing," she adds. "That makes it a lot easier."

Other seals of real-deal blues approval have come from the guys on her current tour. Both Guy and King have invited her to sit in with them onstage. And that's at least partly due to her playing. Tedeschi is one of few commercially successful female blues guitarists.

"For a long time, I just played a few chords like a lot of women players do, to sing along with, the folky thing," she says. "It wasn't until I started hearing a lot of Chicago guys like Magic Sam and Freddie King and...[and here she reels off a list of players too fast and long and detailed for an interviewer to keep up with]...that genre, that style of electric guitar, it made me want to play.

"I just got addicted once I started to figure it out a little bit. It was just so much fun. It also helped me communicate better with my band."

She's found plenty of other guitar-slinging women of her generation. "There's a lot of them [now]," she says. "It could also be that they're just finally getting a chance. I'm sure there have been people who played before. It is pretty much a man's world, the music industry."

Her second album will be out on Tone Cool sometime next spring. After that, she'll consider her options, which include interest from major labels. She expects her Berklee classes to come in handy. "They taught me not to sign anything, basically," she says with a laugh. Except, maybe, a guitar or two.