The blues have swirled around Erica Brown for as long as she can remember. Over the years, Brown has carved her own niche within the blues, drawing inspiration from legends like Big Mama Thornton and Koko Taylor while building a career rooted in her authentic voice and storytelling, the Denver music community, and emotional connection with audiences large and small. With a new project on the horizon, she’s continuing to honor the blues tradition while crafting a sound that’s undeniably her own.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. -Ed.
Support for this arts and cultural coverage comes from the Wyoming Arts Council.
Evan Ballew: Do you remember when you first discovered the blues and fell in love with it?
Erica Brown: Well, I don’t know if that ever happened to me because it was always all around me, like literally always all around me. One of my next door neighbors in the duplex that we lived in growing up as kids was a man named Mr. Jimmy De Berry. He was the quintessential older black man on a porch with a guitar playing the blues. Well, what I didn’t know until I was an older adult was that he actually was in a band called the Memphis Playboys and they recorded for Sun Records. So that’s what I got to grow up with. Plus I sang in my Baptist church and played flute from third grade through high school. I’ve always been musical.
Ballew: Who are some of your biggest influences and what is it about them that you admire?
Brown: Big Mama Thornton for all the obvious reasons. She was an incredibly strong woman in a time that needed strong women. She forged her path her own way. I wrote a song that we do in the live show called “Do It Your Own Way.” And it’s a tribute to her. She’s absolutely one of my idols. Koko Taylor is one of my idols. Irma Thomas. Diamond Teeth Mary, who was the woman who set Big Mama on her path to the blues. She was called so because she literally had diamonds embedded in her teeth.
Ballew: Is it their storytelling or is it their voice that draws you in?
Brown: There’s certain vocalists that have a tonal quality that distinguishes them from their peers and when they open their mouths you know who it is. You can be half asleep you know that’s Aretha Franklin you know that’s Gladys Knight.
Ballew: I’m curious to know a little bit more about your songwriting process and what that looks like?
Brown: I don’t know if I should say this out loud, but I’m going to say it anyway. My songwriting process does not necessarily spring from some incredibly deep well. It does come from emotion, absolutely, because why write a song about something that is important enough in your life to memorialize and not be invested in it? But I don’t have any one way that I write songs, things come to me from all over the place.
Ballew: When you’re telling the story, is it more from personal, direct experience or is it channeling something bigger than that?
Brown: I like to think it’s always channeling some sort of emotional response to something that has affected me one way or the other. I wrote a song that was on one of my first band’s CDs and the song’s called “Hard Faith” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s hard to have faith. Sometimes it’s hard having faith in that man, but if you’re committed to the relationship, you have the faith, and you keep the faith. But then I also wrote a song called “Bodywork,” and I use automotive metaphors, shall we say?
Ballew: Would you be able to walk me through a little bit of your musical career with all the bands that you’ve been in?
Brown: I’ve done a little bit of everything. I’ve done everything from (you’re gonna love this) a band called Foreskin 500. I don’t know if you can even say that on radio, but they were an electronica / punk / hardcore band. They were an incredible band and I was honored to be a part of it. One of our songs, the songs that they wrote that I had input on, was in a movie called “The Fan” with Wesley Snipes and Robert De Niro. That’s the level of music we were putting out. I had my own band for 10 years and it was called the Erica Brown Band and it was blues rock. It was not straight up hardcore blues but once again, the musicianship was absolutely incredible. Those sorts of efforts have been the kinds of things that have landed us at the Telluride Blues Festival. And I have the opportunity every year to do a thing called The Last Waltz Revisited, which is the redoing of the band’s movie, “The Last Waltz.” It’s also a benefit for the Denver Rescue Mission. Because I try as much, whenever the opportunity presents itself, to weave some of my activism and some of the things that I hold dear into my music. I volunteer with Girls Rock Denver and all of these things are inspiration for what I do.
Ballew: Could you describe how the city of Denver has shaped your sound and your playing through the years?
Brown: Musically, Denver was the Wild West for a minute. There were amazing bands in all genres coming out of Denver and the landscape of musical performance in Denver, as far as bands were concerned, the ‘80s, the ‘90s, the aughts, just insanely incredible musicians. Lord of Word and the Disciples of Bass, the Freddie-Henchi Band, Hot Lunch, Chris Daniels, Hazel Miller, Peaches Embry, Sammy Mayfield, so many amazing, amazing musicians. It was almost like I just got to stand and turn in a circle and every time that turned in a piece of that circle, there was another one of those icons staring back at me. I was very lucky in that Denver had a blues club called Brendan’s. Brendan’s was the place. If you were serious about your blues and you didn’t mind somebody knowing it, that’s where you went. Kevin Garrity, I owe him a debt I can never repay. He would book these musicians. And because he believed in my talent, he would call me up and go, ‘Erika, I’m having A.C. Reed down here tonight. I have E.C. Scott, you need to come down and meet them and they need to meet you.’ But that’s the water I got to swim in and oh my god, it was amazing. There isn’t a venue in Denver, whether large or small, if it’s a venue of any consequence, 99 chances out 100 I’ve probably played it. It’s been an incredibly fruitful experience living here, which is not something I expected. Denver’s landlocked, so everybody had to come to us and they did.
Ballew: What would you say has been the main reason for staying in Colorado all these years?
Brown: This is home. I’m from southeast Missouri and it’s beautiful down there but they also have a season called ‘tornado.’ I grew up a nervous child but when I got out here there was just something different about it and I’ve never I never felt the desire to go back. So I stayed here and started carving a life for myself here raising my daughter and then when I really got up to my elbows in the music scene, I went in head first.
Ballew: As an artist, how do you go about balancing the traditional side of blues, you know, it’s rooted in such deep tradition, while still making something that sounds new and fresh?
Brown: My personal feeling is it’s the authenticity you bring to it. If you are serious about your craft at all, you spend countless hours figuring out who you are within that genre you’ve chosen. I try to find that kernel of commonality. Is it the melody? Is it the harmonies? Is it words? Is it the timbre in the singer’s voice? Is it the lyrics? What is it? And then I try to bring who I am to that. I like to hope that one day I will forge a type of vocal signature where when a recording comes on, people go, ‘Oh, that’s Erica Brown.’ That’s what I want.
Ballew: Is there anything in particular that you hope folks can take away from you, your performances, when they come to see you?
Brown: I want them to leave better than they were when they walked in. But one of the big things in my mind is I want to take you someplace that’s going to take you out of the everydayness of your life. Or strike some kind of chord that will ultimately make you better. I’ve had countless women and men come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t know I felt like that till I heard that come out of your mouth.’ Women have come up to me crying saying ‘I haven’t been out in a year and fortunately the first person I get to see is you.’ That’s what you do it for. You can satisfy your own musical muse when you do, but you want your audience to go on the journey with you and you want to take them on one.
Ballew: What exciting things are going on in 2026 and beyond that you could share with us?
Brown: I am currently recording the last pieces of my Big Mama Thornton project. It is called Willie Mae Sings Willie Mae because Big Mama’s legal name was Willie Mae Thorntons. My legal name on paper is Willie Mae Brown. So the project is called, Willie Mae sings Willie Mae. There is a GoFundMe. It is situated on my website at EricaBrownEntertainment.com on my record label, WolfdenRecords.co and on my Instagram, which is @ericabrownentertainment, and my two Facebook pages. Look in there, everything Erica goes on those pages.
