Yola Carter is beginning to feel at home in Nashville. The country-soul singer from England’s west country hasn’t moved to Music City, Tennessee permanently – yet – but she has visited six or seven times and has friends who have given her the use of their spare room any time she needs it.

“That’s a real gift and incredibly generous of them,” says Carter, who plays the opening concert at the Fallen Angels Club’s annual Glasgow Americana festival next month. “People arrive here from all over America and from further away and they have to sleep on other people’s couches, other people’s floors even, and just managing to keep a roof over your head can be a distraction from the real reason everyone comes here – to get their music or talent heard. So I know how lucky I am.”

Luck and Carter haven’t always gone together. She grew up in a poor, single parent family in a small seaside town outside Bristol and was given short shrift when she told her mother she wanted to be a singer. Her mother had some Jackson Five albums and the barely school-aged Yola, whose voice was a thing of considerable power even then, she says, looked at and listened to the young Michael Jackson and thought it was quite natural to become a singer at the age of five.

The path that took her to having Rolling Stone magazine acknowledge her as one of the major breakthrough artists of the 2016 Americana Fest in Nashville and closer to home, being voted UK Artist of the Year at the AMA UK Awards in 2017, included keeping her ambitions to herself until she was earning a living as a singer for hire.

Lending her powerhouse voice – although she can sound quietly vulnerable too – behind electronic and pop acts including Bugz in the Attic, Massive Attack and Will Young wasn’t what Carter had in mind as she learned to play country style fiddle and listened to Dolly Parton’s downhome tales as a teenager.

“My mum didn’t think that singing was a proper job anyway so I couldn’t tell her that I wanted to blend country music with soul,” she says. “And most of the people I met seemed to think that country music was all about Achy Breaky Heart or Deliverance. I’d got really into the Stax Records sound and all the soul classics – I’m taking part in a celebration of 1968 here in Nashville and the number of great soul songs that came out that year was amazing – but I also liked Dolly and that whole storytelling tradition of country music. If you’d told people where I lived that the two styles of music went together naturally, they’d have laughed at you. So I kept my observations that there was this thing called country-soul quiet.”

Having proved that she could indeed earn a living as a singer and learned her craft by appearing in front of audiences of up to 60,000 at Glastonbury, Carter began to put her plan into action, although not without difficulty. The musicians she approached at first told her they’d spent fortunes on electric guitars and weren’t about to revert to playing acoustic music.

Eventually, with more sympathetic sorts, although she had to cajole them into trying different things too, she formed the band Phantom Limb. They released their first, self-titled album themselves and then caught the attention of Marc Ford of the Black Crowes who produced their second album, the more country leaning The Pines. Tours with Dr John, Solomon Burke and Candi Staton followed but keeping the band together proved impossible and after taking time out, partly through disillusionment with the music scene, partly to write songs to get her solo career on track, in 2016 Carter struck out on her own.

The response, she says, was “amazing.” She’d planned to release an EP, for which she’d written fifty songs and whittled them down to six, in 2017 but reaction to her live performances forced her hand and she released Orphan Offering towards the end of 2016 instead.

“I wasn’t prepared for the EP to do so well in terms of press reaction and how it was perceived on both sides of the Atlantic,” she says. “But in a way, because I’d known what I didn’t want to do musically for so long, I’d learned quite clearly what I did want to do. So I became a pretty good self-editor. I had all these songs I’d written and I knew I had to choose the ones that hung together best, made the strongest statement collectively, and in making those choices I developed into a producer too.”

This wasn’t quite the way she’d planned things. She wasn’t expecting to be the boss in the studio and at first she was uncomfortable with this role.

“I had to get used to the fact that it was my job to have all of the ideas,” she says. “The engineer would find what I was looking for, the players would play what I suggested they play or go in the direction that I guided them in to improvise. But no one wants to do a bad job or the wrong job, so they would be waiting for me to express an opinion. Fortunately I’m naturally opinionated so I learned to produce on the job and I sat and mixed the recording with the engineer too. It was quite a fast learning experience.”

With the songs for her first full-length album written and recorded and awaiting imminent release, Carter is already looking ahead to her next album. The songwriting splurge that ended up with her pouring the equivalent of several gallons into a pint pot with Orphan Offering has continued, which would make Nashville, with its constant demand for new material for any number of singers looking for a hit, seem like her natural habitat.

“I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a song factory,” she says. “I love writing. I love the process, finding the exact words that fit the message you want to get across and working out chord sequences that will carry, or just suggest the melody. But I also love singing for people. The response I get here in the U.S. is on another level from what happens in the UK, and I’ve been pleased with the way I’ve been received as a solo artist back home. I’ve been in Nashville over the years, for example, and I’ve done showcases and things but the reaction I’m getting now is the best I’ve had and it’s just me, not a band. That’s great because I’m just doing what I want to do and bringing who I want to be onto the stage.”

Yola Carter’s Glasgow Americana concert goes ahead at Cottiers on Wednesday, October 3. However, due to the CCA in Sauchiehall Street remaining closed following the fire at Glasgow Art School, the concerts by award-winning Tennessee-based troubadour Nathan Bell and Austin, Texas-based singer-songwriter, author and playwright Kimmie Rhodes on Sunday, October 7 have been moved to St Andrews in the Square at 4:00pm and 8:00pm respectively. Glasgow Americana runs from October 3 to 7. For full details log onto www.glasgowamericana.com