How does a teenage girl from Ottawa, Canada become one of the most decorated electric blues guitarists in Texas and then earn a PhD in musicology? This deep dive traces the extraordinary path of Sue Foley, born March 29, 1968, who picked up the guitar at 13 after falling for the Rolling Stones, played her first professional gig at 16 with Back Alley John, and moved to Vancouver after graduation to form the Sue Foley Band. A punishing 1989 tour with Mark Hummel logged around 300 dates in a single year, forging the stage authority that caught the ear of Clifford Antone in Memphis and led to her Austin relocation at 21 and her 1992 debut Young Girl Blues.

From there the awards piled up: a 2001 Juno for Love Comin Down, three Trophees de Blues de France, 17 Maple Blues Awards, and the Koko Taylor Award for Traditional Blues Female Artist five consecutive times by 2025. Her 2018 album The Ice Queen featured Billy Gibbons and Jimmie Vaughan, yet at the pinnacle of electric blues she pivoted to academia and acoustic roots, writing for Guitar Player magazine and the Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar, and channeling her research on forgotten female guitar pioneers into the Grammy-nominated 2024 solo acoustic album One Guitar Woman and her 2026 book Guitar Women.

• Why the blues scene is meritocratic and how a 16-year-old won over veteran musicians in Ottawa clubs
• What 300 shows in one year does to a musician physically and musically, and why her Antone discovery was no overnight success
• The significance of Billy Gibbons and Jimmie Vaughan guesting on The Ice Queen within the Texas electric blues hierarchy
• How a PhD in musicology led Foley to document the overlooked matriarchs of the guitar
• Her TrueFire instructional series and DVDs passing her techniques to the next generation of players