At the age of 25, Ally Venable has done more than many artists manage in an entire career. She’s released six albums. She duetted with Buddy Guy, at his request, after he watched her opening for him (the result, Texas Louisiana, featured on Venable’s Real Gone! LP).
Last year she played the national anthem at the Houston Astros game, becoming the first woman to do so. Oh, and she’s just bought a house. Not bad for a small-town girl who was bullied in school and never expected music to be more than a hobby.
“It’s really cool to be like: ‘I bought this with the money I made from being a musician,’” she says, fresh off the Experience Hendrix tour with Zakk Wylde, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, her old friend Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram and others. “I really have beat the odds here. It’s very surreal. I’m very grateful. I’m gonna keep going and see where my guitar takes me.”
Long inspired by the wah-savvy stylings of Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Venable pours her tastes into new album Money And Power. There’s full-blooded blues rock in Brown Liquor; latter-day Joe Bonamassa vibes in the pensive Do You Cry; modern alt.rock and country edges in Heal Me; a syncopated swing in Stopper Back Papa. “I’ve been feeling all the feelings about this album; excitement, self-doubt, nerves, thrilled…”
Born and raised in Kilgore, Texas, Venable learned to sing from her grandmother, a “crafty, artistic” sort who played Beach Boys and country CDs on road trips to Houston. Back home Venable, an outgoing kid, sang at a family wedding and learned church songs. But it was Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Texas Flood – which her father played on the way to school – that turned her on to the guitar when she was 12.
“I knew it was something that was fun, that I was kind of good at, but I never thought: ‘Oh, I’m gonna be this guitar player’. Things just started to build.”
By age 13 she was playing grocery stores, crawfish stands and backyard parties with her own band. She started writing songs, and released her first album while in her teens. It separated her from most of her peers, and she struggled in school. “But finding music helped me become outgoing again. It saved me in that way. It was nice to be like: ‘Okay, this is who I am.’”
Now, with Money And Power, she hopes to inspire women and young people, in a field where fewer artists look like her (although she agrees that that’s changing), continuing to shift the boundaries of the blues, and “create spaces” for the mixed audiences seen more often at country gigs.
So what else does she still aspire to? “I’d like to create a nonprofit of some sort to help my community, and maybe open a cool blues joint. Janie Hendrix gave me a good name for it…”
Money And Power is out now via Ruf Records. Ally has US shows lined up over the next three months and arrives in Europe in October. For dates and ticket details, check her website.
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