At the Living Room, a small venue in New York City, Ruthie Foster told a crowd: “I had the audacity to call (my new CD) ‘The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster.’ Because I believe you’ve got to own up to it, you know?”

A tribute to the rare use of superlatives in album titles, mostly in the ’60s and ’70s, (think “The Electrifying Aretha Franklin”), Foster’s fifth album also pays homage to poet Maya Angelou.

Angelou’s iconic poem, “Phenomenal Woman,” was set to music by Canadian singer/songwriter Amy Sky. Once Foster heard Sky sing the song, she knew she wanted a turn.

“It’s empowering to sing a song that had come from one of my favorite poems,” she said. “A lot of us who love Maya Angelou just want to see a lot more people exposed to what she has to say.”

Foster, who plays Nightfall this evening, grew up with a love of both music and poetry.

“Poetry was my first love, and then I started writing songs around 11 or 12 years old, just putting music to poems,” she said.

She started putting music to other people’s poems just to see how to put words and music together but moved on to her own works later on.

Musically, she said, she is largely influenced by gospel.

“I come from a gospel singing family, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Andrae Crouch to the Gospel Keynotes,” said Foster, who grew up singing in the choir at Teals Prairie New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Texas.

Foster’s album features a cover of Tharpe’s “Up Above My Head,” a gospel song usually played in an uptempo major key, but she and her producer decided to slow the song down and put it in a minor key.

Her mother was a big fan of gospel music, and her father educated her in blues, from Muddy Waters to Howlin’ Wolf. “We had just as much blues in the house as gospel, but usually my mom won over,” she said.

Based in Austin, which she calls a great town for music, Foster is a great admirer of Mahalia Jackson — “Anything she does, you know it’s coming from her spirit” — and has a proclivity toward the great female jazz vocalists such as Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, mostly because of their phrasing.

“It’s something I’ve worked on all my life as a singer,” she said.

Playing folk and blues festivals gives her the opportunity to play alongside artists whose work she has admired. On a recent car ride through Lancaster County, Pa., she was listening to Keb ’Mo, with whom she got to play a few years ago at a Canadian music festival.

“I had a chance to do a duet with Bonnie Raitt onstage in Austin when she came through,” she added.

Songwriting offers Foster a chance for self-expression.

“My music is definitely a reflection of what’s been going on in my life,” she said. “I think every writer tries to come from a place where they’ve been because that’s what’s going to show the true you, and that’s what’s going to make a song connect to people.”

Her songs, she said, are about “breakups, breakthroughs and finding your way back again.”

It’s a continual learning process, honing the songwriting craft. “I do the songs for a while, when I’m in that place, then I give them a rest because there’s always room for growth, even in a set list,” she said.

“The Phenomenal Ruthie Foster” incorporates vintage instruments, including a slide guitar and a Wurlitzer keyboard. One song, she said, is just vocals and handclaps.The album was recorded on a 2-inch reel. “There’s a true warmth to that way of recording,” Foster said.

“This CD,” said Foster in her biography, “is what happens when all the elements come together and you just get out of the way and let the groove go, you know? I learned a lot about just getting out of my own way.”