Ruthie Foster Just Say Yes Album Follows Her First Grammy at 60

Ruthie Foster Just Say Yes, due on 28 August, begins with a Post-it note written in 1993 and ends, more than three decades later, with a Grammy statuette glowing next to a television stand in a Houston home. Few careers in contemporary blues have taken quite so winding, or so deliberate, a route to this point.

The Grammy came first, in sequence if not in spirit. Foster was on a layover at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston in February 2025, mid-order at a bar called Bam Bam, when presenter Anoushka Shankar read out her name as the winner of Best Contemporary Blues Album for Mileage. She and tour manager Jennifer Salem had asked the bar staff to put the telecast on the TVs, just in case. After five previous nominations in the same category had gone unrewarded, Foster had decided it was safer to avoid revising her travel plans for the annual Los Angeles ceremony. ‘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,’ she recalls. ‘I’m just so grateful. It meant a lot to hear my name, and it’s beautiful to feel validated in that way.’

The win came at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards, as Sun Records confirmed, making Foster the label’s most decorated active artist in its contemporary catalogue. The category was competitive: the field included Joe Bonamassa, Shemekia Copeland, Steve Cropper and the Midnight Hour, and Antonio Vergara, all of whom Foster describes as ‘acquaintances and friends’.

The Post-it Note That Started It All

The biographical thread running beneath the Grammy and the new record stretches back to rural Gause, Texas, where Foster grew up in a family of ‘preachers and talkers’, singing in church choirs and community centres. She taught herself guitar as a young adult, began writing original material, and by the early nineties was performing with the Naval band Pride at recruitment events while stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. An Atlantic Records executive heard her at a local club and signed her to a development deal, and Foster uprooted to New York. The label, she has said, had a pop agenda she could not reconcile with her own instincts, and when her mother, Shirley Jean Johnson Jones, fell ill, she paused her career in 1993 and returned to Texas to be a carer.

On the day she moved back, she wrote three words on a Post-it note: Just Say Yes. She still carries it. ‘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,’ she says. The phrase, and the philosophy behind it, became the title of her new album. ‘That Post-it was a reminder about saying “yes” because I knew I needed music to still be in my life,’ she adds.

Ruthie Foster Just Say Yes: The Making of the Album

The record was made in Nashville with producer, engineer and mixer Tyler Bryant, whom Foster first encountered during the pandemic while searching YouTube for studio tutorials. Bryant mentioned in one video that he was originally from Texas, then started playing slide guitar, and Foster decided she needed to find him. A separate connection came through Nashville management company Red Light, which also worked with Larkin Poe: sisters Rebecca and Megan Lovell, whom Foster had already met on the festival circuit at the Chicago Blues Festival and Americanafest. Rebecca is Bryant’s wife, making the collaboration a tight, interconnected unit. Megan Lovell’s husband Mike Seal and Dominic Davis also contributed bass.

The album was written in ten days, with Bryant cooking chicken soup between sessions. All ten songs were tracked shortly after. ‘We just went down in the basement and recorded it. And it’s been full-tilt boogie since then,’ Foster says. She credits Sun Records itself with raising her standards: ‘Being on [Sun] has taken the importance of my music to another level. I want to make music that means something to that label.’

The songs reflect a life that has accumulated material. The opening track ‘Thank You’ addresses the doubt she felt 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,’ she says. ‘I’ve had imposter syndrome, but I don’t live in it.’ The piano ballad ‘Sitting Still’ argues for the equal importance of saying no, and the gospel-rooted ‘Come On Up’ carries the refrain: ‘Everybody stumbles, I can help you if you fall.’ Her model for this kind of testimony is Mavis Staples, now 87, whose concerts Foster has flown to attend on her own time. ‘She is living it. And this is my version of that.’

With Just Say Yes out on 28 August, Ruthie Foster will continue touring in support of Mileage and the new record, with upcoming dates across the United States and Europe confirmed by Sun Records. The Grammy statuette, meanwhile, sits lit up beside her TV stand every day: ‘I can go turn it on and just have my little lights glow on it and take it in.’