Sue Foley

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Sue Foley developed an early guitar style rooted in the blues, before cutting her teeth on the Ottawa scene with Back Alley John and then settling in Vancouver, where she formed the Sue Foley Band. By the late 1980s, she toured with harmonica player Mark Hummel across North America and Europe, before moving to Austin, Texas — a significant step in Foley’s trajectory, whose writing and playing then leaned toward Texas blues, with a direct sound, a pronounced sense of the riff, and an approach that alternates between electric and acoustic. Her discography begins with Young Girl Blues in 1992 on Antone’s, including Without a Warning (1993), Big City Blues (1995), Walk in the Sun (1996), Ten Days in November (1998) and Love Comin’ Down (2000). Subsequently, Foley continued along a path between traditional blues, sober blues rock and more stripped-down formats, while occasionally collaborating with musicians such as Peter Karp on He Said She Said (2010) and Beyond the Crossroads (2012). After The Ice Queen (2018) and Pinky’s Blues (2021), Sue Foley released One Guitar Woman: A Tribute to The Female Pioneers of Guitar in 2024, an acoustic album centered on the legacy of women guitarists, which also sheds light on another dimension of her career.