SUE FOLEY

Sue Foly was born in Ottawa, Canada, March 1968 from a typical Irish working class family and a neighborhood called Mechanicsville. The first thing she remembered and the main thing that had an impact on her was music. Music was everywhere in the 1970’s. It was blaring out of the speakers of my older sister’s car radio, it was in her brother’s electric guitars, it was coming out of my father’s mouth when he’d come home from a bender and teach her old Irish songs and poems. Music and sound, yelling, fighting, crying, laughing, rock and roll, country, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Clancy Brothers, Elton John and the silly insipid radio songs that she heard everywhere. ue never cared what she was hearing, what style it was or where it came from. She was just in love with words, expression and melody. Would recite twenty verse poems from the time she was 2 or 3 to whoever would be my audience and her especially loved when her dad would take her to the pubs he played on Saturday afternoon and she could get onstage and pretend to sing into the microphone. In 2001 Sue was being interviewed by journalist, Don Wilcock and he was telling about a biography he’d written about Buddy Guy. She mentioned off the cuff that he should write a book about all the great female guitarists like Bonnie Raitt, Nancy Wilson, Chrissie Hynde etc.... After thinking about this for several days and doing some research Sue decided to write a book for her self and call it Guitar Woman. That week I started to reach out to women players an interview them candidly. The idea was to find out all about their lives and music and uncover the “mystique” of the female guitar slinger. But even more than that Sue was trying to find out how my life related to theirs, kind of like a mirror but even more conceptual. She was trying to see how you could take yourself and relate it to a universal idea. Sue's partnership with Peter Karp came out of the blue; a rushed and forgotten meeting at the 2006 Ottawa Blues festival, a phone call from his manager, a haphazard recording session that she sang horribly on but that made us laugh our asses off and two years of email correspondence that turned into a CD, a tour, an entirely new concept and show, the reinvention of two careers and whole new approach to making music. Working with Peter brought back my love of writing and having fun with words and idea. Sue never have written better songs in her life and never made better music that connected so deeply with an audience. It’s partly due to the fact that she was trying to keep up with him but more so, it’s because we have such good chemistry and working together has broken out what she thought was and allowed Sue to grow into something new.