Shemekia Copeland is a blues marvel at the height of her powers, playing contemporary blues, roots, and soul music with nuance and shading, strength and authority. “Shemekia’s a ball-of-fire vocalist with a voice that’s part Memphis, part Chicago, and all woman,” says the Chicago Sun-Times. “She’s a great singer, period.” According to USA Today, “Shemekia captures the timelessness of the blues while spinning it forward with remarkable maturity.” NPR’s Weekend Edition declares that she “embodies the blues with her powerful vocal chops and fearless look at social issues.” Tonight she comes to the Freight with a brilliant band and an incandescent new album, her eighth, Outskirts of Love, which Blurt Magazine calls “as great a blues album as you will find in 2015. The fact that it comes from Shemekia Copeland, one of the greatest female blues artists in the world, or is released by Alligator Records, the best blues music label in the world, should come as no surprise.”

Born in Harlem in 1979, the daughter of blues great Johnny Copeland, Shemekia came to her singing career naturally. “It was like a switch went off in my head,” she says, “and I wanted to sing. It became a want and a need. I had to do it.” At 16, when her father was suffering from a degenerative heart disease, she joined him on tour. “Dad wanted me to think I was helping him out by opening his shows when he was sick, but really he was doing it all for me. He would go out and do gigs so I would get known. He went out of his way to get me that exposure,” she says. Since those early days, she’s earned a pair of Grammy nominations, won eight Blues Music Awards, and received the Living Blues Award for Blues Artist Of The Year. She has sung with such artists as Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana, and James Cotton, and performed at the White House. Her band features Arthur Neilsen and Willie Scandlyn on guitars, Kevin Jenkins on bass, and Robin Gould on drums – and together they deliver a glorious blast of the blues!

visit the Shemekia Copeland website