Bam Bam restaurant and bar at Gate C5 inside George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston will always be a special place for Ruthie Foster. It’s where the blues/soul/folk star was in February 2025 when finding out she won her first Grammy at the age of 60.
“Everybody around us exploded, and I was like, did she just say my name? She just said my name!” Foster shares, her mouth agape all over again as she remembers in full detail how presenter Anoushka Shankar announced the 2024 album Mileage as the victor in a crowded Best Contemporary Blues Album category. It’s one that included “acquaintances and friends” Joe Bonamassa, Shemekia Copeland, Steve Cropper & the Midnight Hour, and Antonio Vergara.
Foster happened to be in the airport on a layover, coming back from one of the many blues cruises where she regularly performs. Realizing the telecast was starting, she and tour manager Jennifer Salem had asked the bar staff to turn on the TVs—just in case.
After five previous nominations in the same category had gone unrewarded, Foster figured she was safe to sit out the annual gathering in L.A. and avoid the headache of revising her travel schedule. “I was thinking, oh, there’s no way, there’s no way. I was actually in the middle of ordering a shot at the bar,” Foster jokes. “I’m just so grateful. It meant a lot to hear my name, and it’s beautiful to feel validated in that way.”
Being in Texas for the defining moment was also special in its own right. It’s where Foster grew up in a family of “preachers and talkers,” in the rural town of Gause, and where she got her start singing in local church choirs and community centers, often soloing spirituals by Andraé Crouch, the Staples Singers, and Mahalia Jackson. Soon after, as a young adult, she taught herself guitar and started writing original material. And by the early ’90s, while serving in the U.S. Navy, Foster found opportunities to perform with the Naval band Pride at recruitment events and with taking gigs at local clubs around Charleston, South Carolina, where she was stationed.
It was during one of these nights that an executive from Atlantic Records heard Ruthie’s soulful croon and wide-eyed songwriting—often described as a mix of Aretha Franklin and Bonnie Raitt—and signed her to a development deal. She soon uprooted to New York, but, after butting heads with the label over their pop agenda and upon learning her mother, Shirley Jean Johnson Jones, was ill, Foster pressed pause on her career in 1993 and went back home to Texas to focus on being a caretaker.
Even though her life changed course for three years, Foster was devoted to never giving up on music completely.. The day she moved back home, she wrote three important words on a Post-it note: Just Say Yes. She still carries it with her today. “It’s raggedy, and it doesn’t stick anymore. I have to use a piece of tape to hold it in place, right under my monitor in my studio,” Foster shares. In fact, the words have meant so much to her, she borrowed them for her latest album (out August 28), her second for the legendary Memphis label Sun Records.
“When I moved back to Texas, I set up my home studio in my small apartment, because I wanted to not miss any opportunity when it came to music, whether it was back in the church or just doing something for the community, or even going and singing in a coffeeshop once in a while,” says Foster, adjusting her swimsuit straps and pulling at the corners of a towel around her waist. Right after we are done with our video chat, the singer-songwriter is headed out to the pool at her friend’s house in Houston where she’s been staying for a few days. Her 15-year-old daughter Maya is already lounging on a float.
“That Post-it was a reminder about saying ‘yes’ because I knew I needed music to still be in my life,” Foster adds, quickly turning her gaze back out to the yard to make sure Maya is doing okay. “Being a caregiver is really, really hard and you use a different part of your brain. It’s about taking care of somebody and having to be on call. With music, it’s a different side for me. I can give and actually get something back immediately. It’s an automatic reciprocal love fest. So, I kept thinking ‘just say yes’ to any and everything and keep yourself open. And in doing so, it really opened up my life. When I opened myself to whatever the universe may have for me, it brought so many opportunities my way.”
One of them came several years ago when she met Tyler Bryant, the Grammy-winning frontman of the Shakedown. The two started working together on Mileage, and Bryant returned to the fold to produce, engineer, and mix Just Say Yes. He also contributed instrumental and songwriting credits on many of the songs, along with his wife Rebecca Lovell and her sister Megan, who make up the Americana duo Larkin Poe. Megan Lovell’s husband Mike Seal (of the Jerry Douglas Band) and Dominic Davis (of Jack White’s band) also contributed bass.
“It’s one of those things where the universe kind of brought us together,” Foster admits. During the pandemic, as she was buttering up her studio in order to make more music during the down time, she looked to YouTube for helpful tutorials from other gearheads. “And one of [Tyler’s] videos popped up,” remembers Foster. “When he mentioned that he was originally from Texas and he started playing this slide guitar, I was thinking, I need to know this guy.” Around the same time, Foster had signed on with Nashville management company Red Light, which also worked with Larkin Poe, leading to another fruitful connection.
“I had already met them on the festival circuit,” says Foster of the Lovell sisters, referencing the Chicago Blues Festival and Americanafest where both acts shared billing. “All of that brought us together in a big way. I flew out there [to Nashville] and I got a chance to hang out with Rebecca and Tyler and drink a lot of coffee and see if we meshed. And we managed to write our first song on day one. We just went down in the basement and recorded it. And it’s been full-tilt boogie since then. They’re really sweet people and incredible writers and we write really quick together.”
In fact, they wrote all of Just Say Yes in just 10 days, aided by lots of chicken soup for the soul. “Tyler would make a mean chicken soup, and we’d sit and write a song while eating it, and then we go back to the studio and record an hour later,” says Foster, pulling her long dreads back into a ponytail as pool time inches closer.
Though the team was efficient, they made every minute count, as Foster says being on the historic Sun Records made her want to take a huge amount of pride in her work. “Being on [Sun] has taken the importance of my music to another level. I want to make music that means something to that label.”
Notably, she did her own backup vocals during sessions, solo and with the Lovells. “I called us the Cheap Inspirations because we come cheap, but we deliver,” she jokes. That practice took her back to her days in New York when she hustled as a background singer as part of her contract with Atlantic. “I was on call, so I did commercials or parts for rock bands, I never even knew their names. … You never knew what you were being called into do so you just had to be prepared. I was called in to just whistle one time,” she says, looking like she might purse her lips and emulate it.
Still, that former experience soured her. “I spent a lot of time on the other side of the glass and feeling very shut off from the world. I wasn’t really fond of recording for that reason. It felt very cold to me,” she adds. “But over the years, I’ve learned to loosen up and let these young people teach me how this works and convince me that there’s a way to have fun with it, too.”
You can feel the enjoyment and purpose all over Just Say Yes. The album opens with the brawny blues number “Thank You,” a song applauding all the people, places, and things that were “lighting [her] fuse” when Foster had nagging disbeliefs about her place in the music world after so many stops and starts.
“When all of the positive things start happening and they start happening really, really quick, you start doubting yourself … like many women do,” says Foster. “So yeah, I’ve had imposter syndrome, but I don’t live in it. Now I know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
One of her friends, Leslie Summey, who’s running for Arapahoe County Commission District 4 in Colorado, loves “Thank You” so much she’s been using it as her daily mantra to keep her spirits high in the race. “She just texted me the other night to say, ‘That’s my new theme song,’” Foster says, with a wide smile. All her life she just wanted her music to help people.
“I want to be a teacher of life as I go through all of this,” Foster attests. That message is clear on the album’s stirring anthem “Come On Up” with a gospel refrain that declares, “Everybody stumbles, I can help you if you fall.”
Reading between the lines of another song, “Tangled,” the fierce blues rock number seems to be about a recent separation from a long-time partner. As Foster shares, “I’m a normal person. I’ve gone through ups and downs, heartaches, heartbreaks, trials, and triumphs. I just happen to write about it, and I happen to have incredible musicians and co-writers who help me phrase it all in a way that can give you a little something to move to and make you feel like, when you put our record on, you have a witness to what you’re going through.”
In essence, she wants to be like her friend and fellow performer, 87-year-old Mavis Staples. “A lot of what she puts out there, she’s lived it. She is living it. And this is my version of that. I’m just out here trying to make the best of what I’m given,” says Foster, who gets inspired all over again when she sees the gospel legend in concert. “We’ve shared some bills together, but I’ve also gone out of my way to buy tickets and fly to catch her in concert whenever I can. … I just hope I can move around like that when I’m hanging out in the Gold Age, as I call it. It ain’t old, it’s gold.”
Even if “the body kind of reminds me that I’ve been out here for a little bit,” Foster jokingly clarifies. She got the memo a year ago after enduring knee surgery and a long recuperation from injuring her meniscus while running in the airport to catch yet another flight to another stop on her active touring circuit.
As much as her album is about saying “yes” to opportunity, it’s also about knowing when to say “no,” or “respectfully decline,” as Foster puts it. Listening to the soft piano ballad, “Sitting Still” drives this lesson home. “Because you also have to remember to take time for yourself and know when something is maybe not part of your journey,” she advises.
Knowing the difference is something she learned from her mother. “She’d always say, ‘Make sure that you keep you first.’ She prepared me for this. She prepared me for her not being here physically but being right here for the rest of my life,” says Foster, pointing to her heart. “She’s still here, and she’s still in my ear. Still in my dreams, telling me to say yes to what matters.”
Foster will take that wisdom with her until the end, too. As she would be the first to say, “It’s never too late … I truly believe that. … Even as I was doing other things, like joining the Navy, working at TV stations in broadcasting, and taking care of my relatives, I knew that music wasn’t going anywhere. It never left my life, but it wasn’t the center of my life until I decided that it was time. And when I did, I never looked back.”
She pauses, coming up with a double entendre for her album title. “I guess, now, 30 years plus later, it’s more about just saying yes to me and what really matters to me. While I’m out here, I just want to make it count. I want to change minds. I want to change lives. And the music has so much more meaning to me now that I’m out here doing it for what, the third, fourth, fifth time.”
Her Grammy statue is a tangible reminder of that—and she keeps the honor in a place where she can see it for all its worth every day. “It’s next to my TV stand. It has its own little box it sits on, and it’s all lit up,” Foster shares. “So, I can go turn it on and just have my little lights glow on it and take it in.”