Photo by Justin Fox Burks

Click here to listen to "Let's Boogie Woogie" from Ain’t Got No Troubles.

Eden Brent spends a lot of time behind the wheel. Each weekend the Greenville, Mississippi–based blues pianist gets into her white minivan to drive herself to various music festivals and clubs. It can be a lonely road, but it’s during those long hours that she often finds her best inspiration, listening to the radio and sometimes pulling over to record a melody or a lyric into her phone. In fact, much of her fantastic new album, Ain’t Got No Troubles, began that way. “I wrote the title cut driving down the highway to Jackson,” Brent says in her husky, gravelly voice. “It wasn’t a specific song I heard, just the sentiment. And I was thinking about all the things I ain’t got: money, religion, regrets. Since I ain’t got all that stuff, then I ain’t got no troubles!”

Though Brent, forty-four, has been playing the blues since she was a young child, Ain’t Got No Troubles is only her third solo album. But she’s already revered in blues circles, winning her third Blues Music Award (the blues world’s equivalent of the Oscar) this past spring for piano player of the year. Onstage, she’s a dynamo, pounding the keys while she sings and hollers like she’s straight out of a juke joint.

For much of her career, however, Brent willingly took a backseat to another Mississippi blues pianist, forging a unique relationship with the legendary Abie “Boogaloo” Ames. When she was eighteen, Brent asked Boogaloo to take her under his wing. They hit it off—Boogaloo eventually started calling her Little Boogaloo—and formed a musical partnership that lasted until his death in 2002. By then, Brent had become Boogaloo’s de facto manager and closest confidant; she was constantly pushing him to the fore, shunting her own career aside. “The relationship went beyond teacher and student,” Brent says. “We went out dancing together, celebrated birthdays together. We loved each other a lot, but it was a friendship built through music.”

Music has always been a part of life for Brent, who grew up in the rural county outside of Greenville. Both of her sisters and her mother were songwriters, and Brent started taking piano at age five, eventually getting a music degree from the University of North Texas, though no education could compare with playing alongside Boogaloo. “He taught me how to be an entertainer,” she says. “There’s a lot of power in charisma.”

While steeped in the Mississippi blues, Ain’t Got No Troubles was recorded down the river from Greenville in New Orleans, and there is a sense of exuberance and joy in her songs—especially on the searing romp “Let’s Boogie-Woogie” and the horn-saturated soul track “Leave Me Alone”—that is clearly influenced by the Big Easy. “I’m in love with the Mississippi River; I could never move away from it,” she says. “So New Orleans felt like home but offered me something fresh and its own flavor. The city colors the record.”