Peyroux shared her thoughts about music and songwriting, along with some licks on her wonderful old Martin, before a performance at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California, last September. How did you get started playing guitar? PEYROUX I played ukulele when I was really little, and that’s probably what gave me an edge. We used to play together, in the family. We’d play folk songs out of songbooks and off records; things like Joan Baez and Johnny Cash.

We also had early jazz tunes lying around the house, and my father was into movies, so I always got to see Broadway musicals from the first half of the 20th century on TV. The music that was more complicated to play was fascinating to me right away. I finally got my first guitar when I was 11 or 12. Then, I got serious about guitar so I could sing, because I wanted to be able to accompany myself. My first joy was to realize that I could just play a blues, sing a blues, and hear everything.

Some of your tunes have fast-moving jazz changes. Does that come from the music you listened to early on? PEYROUX I did grow up hearing a lot of early swing, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Robert Johnson’s style of guitar playing. I was finding my way through the maze of intimidation in jazz on the guitar.

I didn’t study music in school, so it was very intimidating to look at a piece of sheet music, and say, ‘њAm I going to be able to play this song?’ќ It started to get easy when I started to play with other musicians who could show me some stuff that I didn’t already know’”[I learned that] if you can break down a chord so that you find out what the essence is, you don’t have to play everything you hear on records to enunciate what the music is trying to do.