There is a lifetime of memories swirling around blues master Angela Strehli. For over fifty years, she has been singing with a feeling so deep inside her that Strehli often sounds like someone whose place on the planet is to share the most profound side of the human spirit, the one that overcomes pain and shows listeners to the other side of life. Blues has been recorded for over a hundred years, and as time progressed from those earliest days the music grew with it. But above all else, the blues has remained a form of solace to fans who believe its power to heal. That's what the music does, and no one knows this better than Strehli. The woman from Texas, born in Lubbock, a longtime resident of Austin and for the past thirty-plus years living in Northern California, was captured early by both blues and gospel music. Those life-altering decades of listening opened the door on Angela Strehli's journey as surely as if she was on a rocket ship traveling to an outer zone. There was something so strong and vivid in the sound and spirit of what the young girl heard then, it was as if a hand had reached pointing her in a new direction and a voice spoke and said, "This is the way forward." Before that, in high school, she says, "I didn't make the school choir, and they were begging for people. For some reason I was told I didn’t have a voice." After that, there would never be any question on where Angela Strehli was going. It was straight for the blues.

Strehli, now 76 years old, decided it was time once again to bear down on the blues, and recorded an album of many of her favorite songs hoping to capture what the music has meant for her all these years. ACE OF BLUES will be released this fall, and sounds like a love letter that has been waiting a long time to get sent. Her lifetime story sometimes seems like a fictional tale of a woman on a mission, but in reality is really all that and more.

A lot can happen to someone while growing up in Texas. Within the massive state are the kind of possibilities that can get inside the soul and turn life inside out. It's like there are no limitations where someone's young dreams can go. "I knew there was a different world than Lubbock," Strehli says. It was as if the wind could push someone straight up to the sky and take them anywhere. Maybe that's why the Lone Star state can be home to such seemingly endless styles of music and the characters who play them. There is a sonic beauty there that cannot be contained. 

Strehli's album ACE OF BLUES is like a culmination of a lifetime of singing. After many years of record-making usually concentrating on her own original songs, this 12-song collection is a showcase of all the many styles of blues and soul music that helped inspire the singer as she became who she is today. That's the way influences work. They can get inside how someone hears music, and hold out a light to follow as that person shapes themself and their own music. It is such a joyous endeavor and sometimes isn't even a conscious path. Music is often like an invisible learning process, one which begins in a hidden part of the human psyche where feelings exist beyond knowing. They're just there. And by the time the end result appears, whether on a bandstand or in a recording studio, the magic of accomplishment bursts through in a blaze of invention.

Still, before those breakthroughs happen, it is always about the getting there which first calls the tune. After high school, Angela Strehli set out for about as far away as she could go in the United States: Minnesota. Specifically, Carleton University in Northfield south of Minneapolis. She took with her an exploding world of music she'd heard on the radio while growing up in Lubbock on far-flung blues stations, like the XERF in Via Acuna, Mexico and WLAC in Nashville. "When I first heard that music I had to figure it out. They called it blues, and it got my full attention." In Minnesota, she mixed it with the jazz and country-blues she saw at Carlton, like Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers and Doc Watson. All of a sudden the young college student had a swirling radio station of her own going on in her head, and figured out it was time to return to Texas and see where the next steps would take her. Austin was the place to be. Her older brother lived there, it was home to the largest state school, the University of Texas and even had the rumblings of a bohemian edge around the perimeters of the campus. In other words, once again, being in the right place at the right time can mean everything. When Strehli hit there in 1966, she quickly figured out the musical action for her was on the city's East Side, with blues clubs like Good Daddy's, Charlie's Playhouse, Sam's Showcase, the I.L. and others. It wasn't long before Strehli herself was singing on the city's bandstands, and maybe without even knowing it, had walked into the career of a lifetime. But it would take a while.

As the 1960s turned into the '70s, though, Austin was slowing down on the blues front. The East Side clubs were becoming less vibrant, and even soul music was turning to a slightly sweeter vibration. Strehli's earliest bands naturally gravitated to playing blues, but ran into a solid wall. "Nobody in Austin was really looking for our kind of music. If you wanted to do something in blues, you had to go somewhere else," she says. The group went out to San Pedro near Los Angeles. From there she went to San Francisco, and worked at Clark Records on Divisadero Street putting together custom 8-track tapes. Soon back in Austin, Strehli graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in Sociology. Once she returned to Austin, she began singing with James Polk & the Brothers, a high-octane aggregation of the city's best Black musicians. "Nobody had done that before," she says. "Some people were wondering what I was doing with a Black band. I didn't have an answer for that. But if you put yourself out there, I figured some people are going to know about your services. I just really wanted to be in great music."

It was just a few years after performing with James Polk's group that a hardy group of souls brought together by Clifford Antone and Angela Strehli opened up the groundbreaking club on East Sixth Street in downtown Austin called Antone's. It would be a history-making outpost for blues in several different locations now for almost 50 years, one that continues to this day. For 30 years Angela Strehli was smack dab in the middle of it all. She had moved from singing with early groups like the Fabulous Rockets into Southern Feeling, then starting the Angela Strehli Band with many of Austin's finest blues musicians, always looking for a way to share the music of her soul with as many people as she could. It is a higher calling the singer doesn't take lightly. When Strehli moved to San Francisco and married Bob Bown, who by then had opened a groundbreaking club with Boz Scaggs in San Francisco called Slim's, the woman was right at home. She kept singing, recording, touring, sometimes with the group The Blues Broads featuring Tracy Nelson, Annie Sampson, Dorothy Morrison and Strehli. But it was always about the music.

That long road of blues devotion still continues. It is not anything that could ever end. Which brings the idea of ACE OF BLUES to the front. "Bob said to me, 'It's been 15 years since you made a record. Don't you think you should now? Time is ticking'," she says. "Then he came up with the idea: do songs first done by those artists who inspired you, the ones who made you who you are. I started thinking about those whose music has been there for me all these years, who came from where I come from deep inside. Doing songs where I can really be myself, and don't need to be anyone else. That's what these songs are. They're very, very special and influential for me, many for almost my entire life."

Strehli has once again found the key that opens up all the doors for her music. She returned to the true contours of her heart, which have always let her exist with that special power of the soul. In so many ways, the woman's whole life has come together to bring her to ACE OF BLUES. There was an immediate happiness that overcame her when she started recording, one that the singer has been living with a whole lifetime. For her, this is the music of the spheres. And she is all the way inside it again, the place Angela Strehli calls home. Where the heart is.

Bill Bentley