"You know the saying that you got to be in the right place at the right time?" singer Kim Massie asked in a recent phone interview. "It wasn't until I came to St. Louis where it was like, 'This is the place I'm supposed to be!' Everything started to happen. One thing led to another."
Kim Massie is not a household name, even in the context of the blues. She has become an institution in the great blues and jazz city of St. Louis over the past 10 years, twice winning the Riverfront Times' female-vocalist-of-the-year award, and she's the featured artist twice a week at the blues club Beale on Broadway. Yet she rarely performs outside of her hometown -- trips to Hungary, Seattle, San Francisco, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C., but no tours. St. Louis is a place like Chicago or New Orleans where blues musicians can find enough work that they don't have to leave.
Mike and Nanci Livermore of the Mississippi Valley Blues Society's Entertainment Committee "discovered" Massie in St. Louis and were so impressed with her show that they suggested the committee get her for the 2010 festival. The committee loved her powerful, soulful singing, which STLBlues.net described as "the voice of God with growling nuances of Etta James."
