When Ruthie Foster opens her mouth, it’s hard to believe the little girl who started out playing guitar in church in Texas was more than content, as she said in a late June interview “to be the person who backed up incredible singers because I was really, really shy.”

But 10 studio albums in, Foster has developed a rich voice that lives at the crossroads of gospel, blues, soul and country and has garnered her six Grammy nominations, with the most recent being a win for Best Contemporary Blues Album by way of 2024’s “Mileage.”

Foster will be the headliner Saturday at the fifth annual Blues On The Mesa event in the Gold Hill Mesa development in western Colorado Springs.

For the Lone Star native, who grew up taping sermons and regularly attending services in the small town of Gause, she’s surprised to see where she’s wound up.

“I thought I wanted to be part of a group that could really move people,” she recalled. “I wanted to be support, because I didn’t want to be up front. Little did I know that I had a knack for being up front because I had studied so many incredible players and singers in the church.”

While sacred sounds lit the fuse, Foster soon embraced secular music as well and eventually found that blues and soul were among the styles that spoke to her. So she embarked on a music career that has seen her accrue a stellar string of albums, including 2007’s “The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster,” 2008’s “The Truth According to Ruthie Foster” and 2017’s “Joy Comes Back.”

For the current album, “Mileage,” Foster worked with producer Tyler Bryant, who also enlisted wife Rebecca Lovell (one half of duo Larkin Poe) to help with the creative, heavy lifting. That collaboration came out of pure happenstance that eventually found Foster shuttling between the duo’s Tennessee home and Texas to make the album.

“‘Mileage’ came about one song at a time,” Foster said. “I was introduced to Tyler Bryant during the lockdown. Everyone is on YouTube, and that’s where I saw him and loved his segment on Andrews Masters, his YouTube channel. He mentioned Paris, Texas, so now I know this guy is from Texas. That stuck in my mind — and the fact this 20-something little White boy from east Texas was playing slide guitar like an old Black man and I needed to know where he learned that.

“Fast forward and it’s time to do another project. My management mentioned Rebecca, from Larkin Poe, who is also part of my management. Her husband was this guy named Tyler. I asked if he wouldn’t happen to be Tyler Bryant, and that’s what brought us together.”