How guitarist-singer Rachelle Coba got the Miami blues

at just such a concert in New Orleans: “In the photo, you could see this gentleman in the audience watching me, and he had this delighted look on his face.” She’s seen that look before. “That was the first time he met the blues,” she says, with a laugh.

The first time she met the blues was on her 15th birthday, when her mother took her to a blues-rock show in Wichita, Kansas, that featured legends Lonnie Mack and Stevie Ray Vaughan. It just so happened it was the same day she got her first guitar. “Karmic,” she says. Coba was born in Fond du Lac, Wisc., to an American mother of Irish and Swedish heritage from Wichita, and a Cuban father who was originally from Havana. “He was one of the Pedro Pan kids,” she recalls. “It was the largest exodus of children out of Cuba at the time. My dad was 13.” Between 1960 and 1962, the program airlifted more than 14,000 Cuban children from Havana to the United States, made possible by a deal a Miami priest worked out with the U.S. State Department.

It gave the family a kinship to Miami. When Coba was 7, her family relocated from Chicago to Miami. When her mom moved back to Wichita, she took Rachelle with her.

“Funny,” Coba says, “I ended up living in all the places I was as a kid. I guess I had to revisit them as an adult.” Her stop just prior to returning to South Florida four years ago was Wichita. “I went to visit my mom and got a gig on the road and stayed for 10 years.” It’s also where she started a blues-in-theschools program. “It’s still going strong there,” she says.

But it’s Miami that she says is her “musical hometown.” And it was a twist of fate when she applied to study music at the University of Miami that ended up solidifying her relationship to the guitar.

Set on studying violin in college, Coba sent her audition tape to UM. “The tape got lost, so they wrote to me and told me [to] send another one and get it back quickly,” Coba remembers. “My boyfriend, at the time, was a guitar player, so I told him to give me his guitar so I could put that on the end of the tape.”

When they called her to