Sample songstress Strehli's sound  Audio clip: "Boogie Like You Wanna" (105k WAV) (Sound courtesy Bay Area Music Awards)

Web posted on:
Thursday, January 14, 1999 4:23:54 PM EST

From Correspondent Gloria Hillard

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- She's one of the best-kept secrets in the blues community. Yet in her 25-year career, Angela Strehli has sung with some of the greats, including Muddy Waters and Stevie Ray Vaughn.

"It's not something I would imagine, wanting to be in show business," Strehli says now. "I'm not much of an extrovert. It's the music that gets me on stage."

Strehli says she first gained an interest in music when she was a young girl, living in Texas, staying up late listening to the radio.

"That's when I heard something a little different from mainstream pop music and I had to find out what it was," Strehli recalls.

She started singing during college in Austin, Texas, but didn't take herself seriously, believing that old adage that one has to live the blues to sing them.

"At a young age I couldn't pretend to, even though I had the feeling in my heart and wanted to pursue it," she says. "I did not have the life experience."

Strehli: Baptized by the blues

But there were those who encouraged her in those early years.

"The main one was Muddy Waters," she says. "When they saw that we were sincere, they were encouraging and very gracious to us."

The singer-songwriter likes to take her time with the music. Her new CD, "Deja Blue," is the first one in six years, and only the third in her 25-year career. ("Blonde and Blue" and "Soul Shake" are the other CDs.)

Now, with enough life experience under her belt, she feels more than baptized by the blues and is ready to take up the baton.

"We finally realized, as some of our heroes started disappearing from the scene, that we eventually would be the people other people would be learning from," she says.