Ten years later, singer-songwriter Emily Elbert returns to Oklahoma for Blue Door show

Ten years ago, teenage troubadour Emily Elbert earned a standing ovation in her Woody Guthrie Folk Festival debut at Brick Street Cafe, where she strummed an acoustic guitar almost as big as she and held the last note of her jazzy number "I Feel Fine” a breathtakingly long time, to the delight of the about 250 music fans assembled in the Okemah venue.

“I still get that feedback about the guitar,” Elbert, now 29, said with a laugh. “I'm playing electric guitar now predominantly, and I think that fires things up in a different way from me. … But I still play acoustic — a lot of the new album has acoustic guitar, too — and I usually travel with acoustic because it gives me some extra mojo when I'm playing alone. It lets me kind of work in the soul, R&B and funky stuff and the mellower side.”

Since making her WoodyFest debut in 2008, the native Texan has performed in Oklahoma only one time, at Oklahoma City's Blue Door, where she will play a long-awaited return engagement Thursday.

“I don't even know how it's possible since my family's from Texas. It just hasn't happened recently. … Oftentimes when I come through Texas, there's so many spots to stop in Texas that it ends up being pretty quick. But this time it just worked out, and I'm sharing this new music. It's been important to me for a while to get back up there,” Elbert said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles.

“The summer after my freshman year of college, I took some boys from New York and Maryland and California down there for their first Oklahoma and Texas experience. They all came out with cowboy hats and pretty hilarious imitated accents. That was my first experience with the Blue Door, and it's just such a special listening room and there's so much history there.”

World traveler

Although it's been a decade since she's made it back to Oklahoma, that's not because the folk-soul singer-songwriter hasn't been playing and traveling hard. A 2011 graduate of Boston's Berklee College of Music, Elbert said she has performed more than 1,200 shows in the past decade, including solo gigs in 37 countries, from Italy to Indonesia and from Peru to Palestine.

“My hope is that if I'm putting the work in and my intentions and my values remain strong, then things can unfold that way and it feels really authentic," Elbert said. "That's what happened with Esperanza, too: We just met at dinner through a friend and had a good connection.”

Yes, she is referring to four-time Grammy Award-winning jazz musician Esperanza Spalding, with whom she spent a year touring. As part of Spalding's band, she worked on the critically acclaimed album “Emily's D+Evolution,” performed on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and played the famed Sydney Opera House.

“Esperanza has really been a hero and great influence of mine for a decade, so to get the call from her and be able to support her vision and just witness her creativity at work was incredibly inspiring. It was really cool to be able to use different artistic muscles and just be a cog in the machinery of her mind, it was a really powerful experience,” Elbert said.

Frequent collaborator

As part of her musical travels, she met fellow L.A. denizen Dweezil Zappa at the Crown Guitar Workshop and Festival in Montana and ended up contributing to his latest album, “Via Zammata.”

“He just kind of rang me up one day and asked if I'd come sing and write some vocal arrangements for his record,” she said.

A mutual friend connected her with British songwriter, producer, recording artist and Sam Smith tourmate Bruno Major, and they ended writing his viral hit “Easily” together when he came through Los Angeles, where she has been based for about four years.

“We just kind of sat down on the porch and wrote a tune together … so it just happened to unfold pretty organically,” Elbert said.

“For a long time, my perception of L.A. was Hollywood, which is not really my scene. But there's a such a rich tapestry of creative work going on and so much to our city. There's a really thriving songwriter scene out here right now, so I feel really inspired by and supported by the community of musicians out here. And it charges me up, too, to be near the desert and the mountains and ocean and everything.”

New music

In a small downstairs room in the Los Angeles house she shares with four other women, Elbert has been recording her upcoming album “We Who Believe in Freedom.” The title is taken from “Ella's Song” by the vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock; it's one of the covers on the LP, which she plans to release in mid-October.

“It's a record centered around, conceptually, social justice, equality and progress. ... It's several songs of mine that I've stripped down that are relevant to the concept. And then, I've taken songs by others — like Marvin Gaye, a Chilean protest singer named Victor Jara, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, artists like that that I love — and reworked those,” she said.

“In talking about social change, it so often can be a fairly political thing — which I have sung some about that, as well — but I think this particular project that I'm working on now, my hope is that it can be unifying, because we all want what's best for each other, and there is enough room for all of us. That's my hope with this.”

Although she hasn't played WoodyFest since 2008, Elbert said she enjoyed her time in Okemah and remains a Guthrie devotee.

“I still play some Woody tunes live. Really, his values and his fearlessness, to me he represents a lot of what I strive for and what moves me musically. His wanting to be a voice of the people and his commitment to enacting positive change with his music and speak what was authentically on his mind, that's a lot of the message of this record," she said.

She said she is eager to share selections from her upcoming project as well as songs she has written over the past decade at Thursday's Blue Door show. She also is looking forward to sharing the bill with Oklahoma City-based singer-songwriter and her longtime pal Clayton Graham Fike. She said she and Fike went to middle and high school in Coppell, Texas, near Dallas, and he was her “first guitar player friend.”

Fortunately, he wasn't her last. Elbert said a network of fellow musicians, venues and fans have helped her build her music career.

“That's what motivates me every day, and that's like the lens through which I view the world and kind of my own purpose. It's an honor to get to share it,” she said.