When prairie blues artist Romi Mayes was scouting around for someone to produce her 2006 album Sweet Something Steady, a dobro-playing friend of hers suggested famed Texas songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Gurf Morlix. Mayes held Morlix in high regard for his work with Lucinda Williams and Mary Gauthier, but she didn't think it likely that he'd be interested in the job.

“To me, at the time, it just seemed like, ”˜Well, yeah, why don't we ask Neil Young, too?' ” recalls Mayes on the line from her Winnipeg home. “It just seemed totally intangible, because he [Morlix] was one of my all-time favourite producers.”

Mayes sent some tapes off anyway, which caught Morlix's ear and got him on the phone. After a long talk the two realized they shared the same ideas about making records, so they did Sweet Something Steady together and have remained close friends and collaborators ever since, through the production of Mayes's latest release, Achin in Yer Bones. One of the most captivating CDs of 2008, it shows Mayes to be a soulful purveyor of stripped-down, rootsy blues. Or as Morlix himself eloquently states in her bio: “She's got the flint and she's got the steel—everything she needs to take her where she wants to go.” The fact that she plays a mean guitar doesn't hurt.

“I grew up on a lot of Brownie McGhee and Mississippi John Hurt and that kinda guitar style,” Mayes explains, “and any dirty blues like Johnny Winter along the way. I always thought I'd be this bad-ass slide player by the time I was 25, but that didn't happen.”

No worries, as Morlix handles the bottleneck beautifully on the new disc's haunting title track. He also cowrote one tune with Mayes—the J. J. Cale–influenced “Mercy on Me”—and contributed organ, piano, bass, and percussion to the album, which was dedicated to the memory of Willie P. Bennett.

“He was a really good friend of mine,” notes Mayes of the late Canadian songwriting hero, “and a super-great musician, as you probably know. When I listen to music, skill's great, but heart is everything, and to watch Willie P. perform, he just glowed when he played. It was really messed up when we lost him, so I try and cover some of his songs in my shows and keep his memory alive as much as possible.”

Buoyed by the everlasting spirit of Bennett, Mayes regularly sets off on the road. Her fourth European tour kicks off in mid April, with stops in Holland, Germany, Italy, and England; before then, her Western Canadian itinerary has her booked at such out-of-the-way venues as the Geomatic Attic in Lethbridge and the General Store in Twin Butte, Alberta. But she's totally cool with playing tiny venues.

“As the years have passed I have been able to acquire some bigger shows, which is nice, but those hideaway venues with the small-town hospitality, there's so much character, and you really get to just dig into a little local community. If I were ever to attain the arena stage, I would still try and play these small venues spontaneously whenever I could. They're the shows that made me who I am, so I would hate to lose that.”

Romi Mayes plays St. James Hall on Friday (March 20).