Blues lady Eden Brent is a modern-day piano-pounding, juke-joint hollering powerhouse of American roots music. A legendary performer and southern songwriter, she spent the first two decades of her career under the tutelage of Abie “Boogaloo” Ames, before winning The Blues Foundation’s Challenge and bouncing onto the international scene. Since then she lands steady honors, three Blues Music Awards among them. Her new album Getaway Blues presents nine original songs recorded in London with a four-piece band. Laid down in London. Mixed up in Memphis. Made in Mississippi.
Eden was born into a family of riverboat captains and guitar pickers in the river port of Greenville, the largest town in the Mississippi Delta, renowned for its literary history.
Eden’s hometown hosts The Mississippi Delta Blues & Heritage Festival, the oldest blues festival in the world, which she attended annually as a youngster. Through the years the festival hosted the greats, from Albert King to Denise LaSalle and from Koko Taylor to Memphis Slim. Locals, who were noted internationally, played the festival annually, people like Sam Chatmon of the Mississippi Sheiks, T-Model Ford, James “Son” Thomas, and Eugene “Sonny Boy Nelson” Powell. The local VFW presented acts like Bobby Blue Bland while Little Milton Campbell played Nelson Street, and of course there were the annual homecoming visits by B. B. King. Eden was in the right place at the right time, immersed in the Blues at its Mississippi Delta birthplace during this revival.
Eden studied jazz and was classically trained in piano and voice at the University of North Texas, earning her degree in music theory. She started learning piano at age three and was given her first guitar at age nine. Piano lessons were part of her formal education from elementary school through music college and finally her apprenticeship with Boogaloo Ames, who according to Eden, “taught me how to really play.” The pair worked together for nearly twenty years until Boogaloo’s death in 2002. Thereafter, Eden began her solo career and along the way worked with folks like Lil’ Bill Wallace (an early contemporary of B.B. King’s), and Eddie Cusic (a member of the Rhythm Aces and Little Milton’s guitar teacher). Eden also worked with guitar sensation Lil’ Dave Thompson and harmonica legend Willie Foster and was a member of the Mississippi Delta Blues Revue, a local favorite featuring John Horton, Mississippi Slim, and Mickey Rogers. She eventually established her solo act and became an annual performer at the Mississippi Delta Blues & Heritage Festival, a festival that inspired her career.
Eden is a Yellow Dog Records recording artist and there are six solo albums in her catalogue: Something Cool (2003); Mississippi Number One (2008); Ain’t Got No Troubles (2010); Jigsaw Heart (2014); An Eden Brent Christmas with Bob Dowell (2018), and Getaway Blues (2024). She sings the duet “Southern Honey” with bluesman Johnny Rawls on his 2016 Tiger in a Cage album and boogies on Kern Pratt’s 2015 release Broken Chains. In 2012 she recorded Party Dress, an album of songs written by their late mother, Carole Brent, with her sisters, Jessica and Bronwynne, both songwriters.