Ruthie Foster at the Crossroads

Phenomenal 2007 LP pulled singer-songwriter out of the funk and into the soul

Ruthie Foster photo by John Carrico

When Ruthie Foster was a young girl in Gause, about an hour northeast of Austin on U.S. 79, she thought her mother was Aretha Franklin. "She would be singing in the kitchen and then she'd put on an Aretha album, and I thought it was my mother's record," Foster said before a June 2002 show at the Cactus Cafe. A few hours later, it was apparent where the College Station resident got her vocal genes.

In introducing "Runaway Soul," the title track of a new album she sells at her shows, Foster said it started off as a gospel song, but eventually evolved into a blues number. "I do believe my soul's found a happy home," she delivers with a righteous wail. "It left me waiting here to suffer on my own."

Indeed, the musical symmetry between gospel and the blues is the basis for Foster's sound, which gets down and dirty to lift you up. Because of her skin color, dreadlocks and feminist following, Foster is often compared to Tracy Chapman. Perhaps looking for their own Chapman after "Fast Car" hit in 1988, Atlantic Records signed Foster in 1990, fresh out of the Navy, after hearing a one-song cassette she recorded in her kitchen.

Although she plays the same folk circuit where Chapman got her start, Foster is really closer in style to Mavis Staples or Etta James. Which is why she's a natural-born stealer of shows. It's like Mahalia Jackson walking out onstage when you're expecting Joan Baez. Even as she's strumming an acoustic guitar while her partner Cyd Cassone fiddles with various percussion instruments, Foster defies the "folk music" description. If she's a folkie, then so was Sam Cooke and Janis Joplin and Ike and Tina Turner. It's her voice that sets her apart, making overdone covers like "No Woman No Cry" and "People Get Ready" sound al dente.

The buzz shot through the Austin music scene in 2002: you’ve gotta hear this girl Ruthie sing. It was happening so fast for Foster that most thought she was just starting out. "We need to tell our friends at Antone's about you," a KLBJ announcer gushed after Foster played one morning. "Oh, we've played Antone's before," Foster said. In fact, Ruthie went back to the Guadalupe Street location (‘82-’97), where she was known as the Waco blues belter "Little Ruthie Foster." That was when she was attending McClennan Community College’s commercial music program circa 1983.

At Hearne High School she was "the chick with a guitar," playing Beatles songs on the bleachers during lunch break. When she realized that her voice was better suited for rhythm and blues, Foster sang in a succession of bar bands.

Then one day she up and joined the Navy. "I was looking for a little buffer, a little time away from the music career," she said. Foster married a sailor, and after they got out of the service, they moved to New York City, where she got her record deal with ridiculous ease.

Creating original material was the hard part. "I couldn't write in that city," she said. "Plus, my husband and I were living in this little crackerbox apartment with nothing to do but get on each other's nerves." In 1993, Ruthie left a shaky marriage and shakier record deal and moved back to Texas to care for her ailing mother (who passed away in January '96). She also started writing again for a self-released album Full Circle, named after her journey from Texas and back.

She wanted to become a Bryan police officer, but couldn't get over the wall on the obstacle course, so instead Foster went to work as a production assistant for a local TV station. On the side, she and Cassone produced another album, Crossover, which had socially conscious lyrics inspired by a civil-rights documentary Ruthie worked on. Her reputation was spreading through the coffeehouse-and-campfire circuit, where she came to the attention of Terri Hendrix guitarist Lloyd Maines, who would go on to produce Runaway Soul.

Foster and Cassone credited Maines with creating a studio atmosphere that brought out the duo’s essence, then fleshed it out with some of Austin's top studio players. "I hate being cooped up in a studio," said Foster. "I get bored with all the little details, the little tinkering. But Lloyd recorded us live, just me and Cyd, doing what we do. We'd play and go home, and the next day we'd come back and all the overdubs would be on the track, and we'd go right into the next song."

Ruthie and Cyd 2002

Foster found herself in a rut, both musically and personally, in 2005, when a 10-year relationship with Cassone ended, and sessions at Ray Benson's Bismeaux Studios eventually were scrapped without yielding the intended studio album.

With no new tunes to play live, the old songs just got older. "I kept telling myself what Terri Hendrix says, that every night there's someone out there hearing those songs for the first time," Foster said from her condo in North Austin. "But there were times when I just wasn't feeling it."

Memories of her mother, and Malcolm Welbourne's record collection, pulled her through and with 2007’s The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster," the singer released her most soulfully satisfying album to date.

Named like such vintage albums as The Genius of Ray Charles and The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, Phenomenal was an homage to '60s soul records, filtered through Foster's organic sentiments. The album, on Houston-based Blue Corn Music, asked Foster to bring everything she had on every song. "It felt like I was being reintroduced to my voice," she said.

Producer Welbourne, who performs under the name Papa Mali, said he'd always heard more Muscle Shoals than Kerrville, more funk than folk, in Foster's voice.

Once a week, the pair met at Welbourne's Lake Travis home and listened to his records and pieces of songs Foster had kicking around in her head. Donny Hathaway, Dusty Springfield, Otis Redding and, of course, Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin were in heavy rotation. But after six weeks, not a single note had been recorded.

Then one day Foster sat at the Wurlitzer electric piano in Welbourne's home studio and unlocked the vibe. "It was on," said Welbourne, who didn't even know Foster played the piano. "I get chills thinking about it."

The first song she played was "Phenomenal Woman," a self-empowering Maya Angelou poem set to music by a pair of Canadian folk singers. Foster has been a fan of the poet since her childhood in Gause. Someone in her neighborhood on the "other" side of the tracks had a black history encyclopedia that was passed from household to household and Foster followed up on all the black poets it included.

Angelou's lyrics spoke to Foster like no one else. "When I starting singing those words - 'It's the fire in my eyes and the flash of my teeth, the swing in my waist and the joy in my feet, cause I'm a woman, phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that's me' - it was like let the healing process begin!"

Although her previous four albums were billed solely to Ruthie Foster, she called Phenomenal her solo debut. It was her first record without Cassone, her partner in every way since they met in 1993 at a club in College Station, where Cassone ran the sound board.

While Foster supplied the mountain of musical talent, Cassone did everything else. She was not only Foster's percussionist/ harmony singer/girlfriend, but tour manager, chauffeur, personal assistant and merchandise manager. "I didn't realize how much stuff she deflected until she wasn't there anymore," said Foster. The two were off and on again for the last few years of their relationship, which added a lot of stress to a touring schedule that put them on the road for 250 days out of the year. "There were a lot of silent miles," Foster said.

After a few rough patches, the two were great friends again, going off, romantically, in different directions.

During the recording of Phenomenal, Cassone popped in one day at the Congress House studio. It was at the start of a take, so Cassone slid into the control room without Foster noticing. The song was "I Don't Know What To Do With My Heart," which Foster had written after her final split with Cassone. As Foster sang "I don't how I'll get by/ I wish you knew how hard I tried," producer Welbourne heard sniffling behind him that exploded into sobbing at the part that goes "there's only one true love and you were my miracle."

Welbourne says that by the end of the song everyone was wiping away tears. "This was the most emotional recording I've been a part of," he said. "This is an album of loss and redemption and at times, I felt, we were getting just a little too close to the bone."

Phenomenal was the turning point in establishing Ruthie Foster as a soul/blues belter, who just happened to play the folk circuit. Her next LP- The Truth According to Ruthie Foster- was nominated for a Grammy in a blues album category, as was its followup 2012’s Let It Burn, featuring the Blind Boys of Alabama (also managed by Charles Driebe).

The most recent album was 2020’s Live at the Paramount, featuring the Ruthie Foster Big Band. She was introduced by her 8-year-old daughter Maya. Here’s a clip from that phenomenal concert: