Ruthie Foster brings blues and more to World Café Live

Ruthie Foster has just finished driving from San Antonio to Austin, Texas - home to partner Katie and their 3-year-old daughter, Maya. She's a little tired, considering she's had three record-release parties for her new Promise of a Brand New Day. Tuesday, she'll do the same at World Café Live.

Such is the life of the modern blueswoman. New Day is layered in gospel, R&B, Tex-Mex, folk, and conjunto. It's full of departures, chief among them the producer: singer/composer Meshell Ndegeocello. A diverse group of players and songwriters contribute - Toshi Reagon, Doyle and Bonnie Bramlett, William Bell - with a sound brighter and bolder than Foster's usual.

New Day, then, is hardly blues alone. "It's an honor to be compared to the great Billie Holiday," Foster says (and she often is), "but I do sing much more than the blues, so it is a bit misrepresentative. At least there are stories about me. There are worse analogies than that one in my book."

Foster's book starts in Gause, Texas, and the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. She started as the organ player, but by her teens, her mother and grandmother ("my big mama") made Ruthie start singing. "My favorite songs were 'He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs,' " she says. "It's a beautiful message and sung in the melody of the Irish tune 'Danny Boy.' Also 'Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,' because I always heard my big mama singing that one while she canned in the kitchen."

Foster got into secular song abetted by her father and his interesting way with a mixtape: He recorded each with spoken commentary. ("When I listened to them," Foster says, "I would hear, 'This is a good one, baby!' ") While Foster's mother played Sam Cooke and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, her "Paw-Paw" was sending her tapes of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and country artists. "He loved Hee Haw, since it was the only radio station we would get on his farm."

But the church remained a nurturing place, a necessity before going off to the world - or at least Waco, where she went to music school. "Being a terribly shy kid with a stutter when I started singing, I needed that kind of place to learn," Foster says. "By the time I got to Texas bars famous for their 'snake pit' environment, I knew how to handle myself." Seeing the world included joining the Navy, first as a helicopter repair person, then as a singer in Pride, the Navy big band. "Let's be honest, who doesn't love a little John Philip Sousa now and again?"

Tour of duty over, Foster was signed for a minute to Atlantic in the early '90s ("People used to come into the Bitter End and say they saw Tracy Chapman, but it was me") but moved to the independent Blue Corn label for her 1999 debut, Crossover, and stayed. The label gave her artistic freedom. She broadened her blues with players like the late Jim Dickinson, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and Robben Ford. And she worked with writer/producers like Bell. She did his tune "You Don't Miss Your Water" on her 2012 album Let it Burn, and on New Day they cowrote "It Might Not Be Right."

The blues lets her roam, Foster says, both musically and lyrically. And she has moved from performing all originals to a healthy dose of covers. "Lyrically, I look for songs that have some relevance to what I know," she says. "But I've borrowed someone else's life experience as well and then realize later that I'm living right in the middle of it, as on, say, 'When It Don't Come Easy' " - from her 2011 album The Truth According to Ruthie Foster.

On New Day, Foster included a handful of her own songs, as well as covering Reagon and Eugene McDaniels tunes. And she brought in Ndegeocello as producer, and gave her carte blanche. "I wanted to take my songs and sound and then see what someone cutting-edge could do with it," she says. "I left a lot up to her regarding the tracks." Ndegeocello brought in "her guys that she's comfortable with." Foster tracked vocals separately from the band, which was "different from what I'm used to." Plus "she brought in Toshi, who's a good friend of hers and one of my she-roes."

Foster hopes the departures on New Day bespeak her life as an artist: "It will always change. My work seems to be a true representation of my life, and that's not a bad thing."

Ruthie Foster

8 p.m. Tuesday. World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St.

Tickets: $18 and $22

Information: 215-222-1400, www.worldcafelive.comEndText