By: Will Ellis
Miss Freddye can command a room with a blues song. Ananda Xenia Shakti can invite one into stillness with a mantra. Their performances may sound worlds apart, but both women have built lives around a belief that music can help people carry what words alone cannot.
For Miss Freddye, known as Pittsburgh’s Lady of the Blues, that belief grew from home and church. Her mother’s love of blues music and the influence of gospel gave her a foundation long before she joined her first blues band in 1996. In the years since, she has become a fixture of Pittsburgh’s music community, singing with the force of someone who knows that a song can hold sorrow and joy at once.
Ananda’s route began in a very different room. As Xenia Holliday, she helped found the B-Girls, an all-female band that emerged from the late-1970s punk scene. She toured with The Clash and sang background vocals on Blondie’s AutoAmerican. Punk gave her a way to challenge expectations in public. Years of yoga, meditation and travel in India later gave her another way to explore freedom, one that now shapes her work with Love Power the Band.
Neither artist’s story fits neatly into a tale of leaving one life behind. Miss Freddye’s blues draws on the church music that first moved her; the two traditions continue to meet in her voice. Ananda’s spiritual music carries a trace of punk’s insistence that a person can question the role the world has assigned her. The sounds have changed, but that determination remains.
Their lives outside music make the connection more striking. Miss Freddye has worked as a surgical oncology nurse while building her career as a singer. A two-time breast cancer survivor, she has also supported cancer awareness and community causes. Those experiences lend weight to her stage presence, though they do not define the whole of it. She brings humor, authority, and the pleasure of performing to the same stage where she brings hard-earned feeling.
Ananda has spent decades teaching and practicing yoga alongside her music. Her recent single “Devotion,” released with Love Power the Band in July 2026, grew out of a silent meditation retreat in Andhra Pradesh, India. Its origins are personal, but its invitation is open: listeners can join in, sit with the sound, or simply make a little room for quiet. In live performances, Ananda has described giving the audience a part in the music, allowing the boundary between performer and listeners to soften.
That shared impulse toward participation matters. A blues singer depends on the response in the room: the attention before a line, the recognition after it, the energy that returns to the band. Ananda’s devotional songs ask for a more deliberate kind of joining in. Each understands a performance as something people make together.
Miss Freddye’s work remains rooted in a particular place. Pittsburgh has watched her grow from a newcomer on its blues stages into an artist closely identified with the city. She has, in turn, used that standing to show up for others, including young people and those facing serious illness. Her career offers a picture of what a local music scene can give back when an artist stays engaged with it.
Ananda’s path crosses cities, countries, and musical traditions. The B-Girls’ clubs, her years as a yoga teacher and the retreat where “Devotion” took shape belong to distinct chapters. She brings them together through song without requiring listeners to share every belief behind it. The human experience of searching, changing, and beginning again is enough of a point of entry.
Blues and devotional music offer different languages for that experience. One may give a hurt its clearest voice; the other may make space to release it. Miss Freddye and Ananda Xenia Shakti each know that a powerful performance starts with conviction, but reaches further when it leaves room for someone else.
Their careers are still unfolding. What connects them is the choice to keep making music through change, and to keep welcoming people into it. Whether a listener arrives carrying grief, curiosity, or a need to feel less alone, both artists offer a place to begin.
