After ‘near-death experiences’ on the road, Canadian blues guitarist Sue Foley writes a song about ‘cruel old 81’

Most of us complain about Interstate 81.

Sue Foley wrote a song about it.

The award-winning Canadian blues guitarist has her street cred on the subject — or, in this case, her highway cred. She used to travel the road a lot between her home in Ottawa, Ontario, and many of the places in the United States where she was doing shows. “I found myself going back and forth on 81 to work in the States,” she said in a recent interview. “I was always on 81. I’ve had so many wild near-death experiences on 81.”

So, naturally, all that worked its way into a song — “81,” the second track on her 2018 album “The Ice Queen,” which featured guest appearances by Billy F. Gibbons of ZZ Top, Jimmie Vaughan and Charlie Sexton.

Cardinal recently published a story about country music star Charley Crockett, whose latest album includes a song that mentions his 2014 drug arrest in Wythe County for hauling marijuana. That prompted Paul Glover of Draper to suggest we do a story on Foley’s “81” song. Here it is.

For those of you not familiar with Foley, here’s the quick version: She grew up in Ottawa, not the usual place to find a blues guitarist, although she told Modern Guitars in an interview several years ago that it has an active blues scene. She grew up listening to the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, whose primary influences were American blues. When she discovered the actual blues as a teenager, she was hooked.

Here’s what she told Modern Guitars in 2007: “At the time, I would go and save my pennies and my dollars that I earned through my little job, and I would go buy blues records. It was always guys. It was always Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Every week, I’d get a new blues record when I had a couple of bucks. And T-Bone Walker, I’d go through all these guys. Then one day I was just going through the blues bins, and I came across this woman. It was Memphis Minnie. I’ll never forget, I just picked it up, I was like 16 years old at the time, and said, ‘Wow. Who’s that?’ She had a guitar, too. I played guitar at the time, and I wanted to be a blues guitar player. So, I brought it home, and her music just hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Before long, she had her own blues band, covering Memphis Minnie and Robert Johnson. “I didn’t really tell my family much of what I was doing,” she told Modern Guitars. “I used to sneak out to the clubs and stuff, and my dad didn’t know where I’d go. He worked midnight shifts, so I could go out after he went to work. I was every father’s nightmare, I think. His 16-year-old daughter’s running around.”

By the time she was 20, she was touring the United States and recording the first of her now 17 albums. Her most recent one just came out: “One Guitar Woman.”

Foley now lives in Austin, Texas, and says it’s been five years or so since she was on Interstate 81. She has very clear memories of it, though. “That is one of the most treacherous roads,” she said. “I always thought I was going to lose my life on 81.”

She says the worst part of the road — and her scariest time on 81 — is in New York, where, north of Syracuse, the road runs alongside Lake Ontario (sometimes just 4 miles away) on its way to the Thousand Islands International Bridge. The weather coming off the lake makes Buffalo a notorious spot for snowstorms, but that same meteorological effect plays out all along that stretch of I-81.

“One of the most treacherous snow belts in the world is across 81 up north,” Foley said. “Anyone who travels there knows it’s almost a permanent snowstorm” in winter. “It’s a complete white-out,” she said.

Meteorologists call that lake effect snow. Foley has a more colorful name for the weather in that part of the country. She calls it “the gates of Hell.” That’s where she had her worst experience on 81, sometime about 2002 or 2003.

“One time I got close to what I call ‘the gates of Hell’ and it’s snowing like that — so much snow you can barely see the tracks in front of you from the last car. There’s nothing up there. The trucks don’t slow down. They’re fearless, but I’m not fearless.” On this one particular trip, “a truck stormed past me and that made me even more snowblind.” She couldn’t see the tracks, she couldn’t even see the road. “I did a whole spin-out. I did a 360. I saw my life flash before my eyes. I was up by Watertown — that one truck passed me and I spun right off the road.”

She tried to get her car out of the snowbank but couldn’t. “My little car was stuck,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in the middle of winter. I’m by myself. And up there, my cellphone doesn’t work.”

Her only thought: “It’s snowing like crazy. I’m done for.” She also worried that if someone did see her and stop, who might it be?

“As luck would have it, another car came by, and it was a young couple and they stayed with me,” Foley said. “I was shaking, not from the cold, just from, when you spin off the road like that, you don’t know if you’re going to die or not.” The couple had a phone that did work; they called the police and “they came to get me.”

Her car wasn’t as lucky as she was. It had gone over the guard rail and snapped a brake line. “That was probably the worst,” she said. “Watertown is called Watertown for a reason.” Except that time of year, it’s more like Snowtown. “It’s wild.”

Foley’s memories of I-81 through Virginia are less vivid. Most of the time she said, “We’d just beeline, just drive it straight” to Nashville or wherever she was going. Often she was traveling alone, sometimes with her band, sometimes with her son when he was younger (he’s now 27). “Getting to Roanoke was one of those stops where you could drive into town and stop for a minute,” Foley said. She’s never played Roanoke but did play the Get Tight Lounge in Richmond in August (and during the interview, asked what venues were around Roanoke, if any of them want to take the hint). She also has a tip for anyone driving on I-81: “It’s a rough road. You can’t take your eyes off the road or hands off the wheel.”

Foley has spent some time in Bristol, though, to pay homage to the birthplace of country music — “I was just fascinated by the whole atmosphere of what that would have been like” — and once made a trek out to the Carter Family Fold and Memorial Music Center in Scott County. Some of Foley’s recent work has been a tribute to country music pioneer Maybelle Carter (her current album includes a song called “Maybelle’s Guitar”).

The final product, which runs a bluesy 5 minutes and 33 seconds with some searing guitar breaks, connects the two. “I worked hard on it to form it into a conceptual piece,” she said. “That road is etched into my psyche.”