“I’ve been all over the world/I’ve seen almost everything/I’ve sung all kinds of places/People call me the queen.” That’s the start of the middle verse from the modern blues standard “Mississippi Woman,” a gritty song that’s been handed up and down the muddy banks of the mighty river that bears its name and passed along like a secret from the hills of Holly Springs to the juke joints of Memphis and into the hands of Elizabeth Wise, a young folk singer and guitarist who possesses what they used to call an old soul. With a slide in her left hand and conviction in her voice, Wise inhabits the lines that come next, delivering them as a mystical incantation and a purposeful statement of fact. “No matter where I go y’all/I give them something real/People all over the world/Need that Mississippi feel.’

Wise has indeed travelled the world and truly lived in it, from the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and on up the James River to the “Richmondtown” she reflects wistfully on in one of her many original compositions. From the aforementioned juke joints of Memphis and folk clubs in Manhattan to the wilds of New Zealand and the plains of Oklahoma, where she spent a year communing with her restless muse and spreading her respect for the blues. From her formative years playing piano and singing church music, to her coming of age as a fully formed folk artist steeped in traditions that trace their roots back to Appalachian hills, Kentucky bluegrass, and, of course, the blues of the Delta. As the Memphis Blues Society noted, Wise is “authentic yet refreshingly original,” and “a blueswoman at the dawn of a superb career.”