North Florida Music Hall of Fame

Last year was a good one for Susan Tedeschi. In addition to having her first child, the Jacksonville-based blues belter was nominated for a Grammy award, her second nomination in two years.

Tedeschi, a Berklee College of Music (Boston) grad who hails from Boston suburbs, received a Grammy nomination in 2000 for Best New Artist. This year, she is up for the 2002 award for Best Female Rock Performance.

Tedeschi moved to Jacksonville with her husband, Derek Trucks, in 1999. Trucks, a Jacksonville native, is a guitarist with the Allman Brothers Band. The pair met while her band was opening for the Allmans on a West Coast tour during summer 1999. The couple later settled in Julington Creek.

She recently took a few months off from her busy touring schedule to spend time with their new son, Charles Kahlil Trucks, born in March 2002, but she’ll be hitting the road again in February.

Besides playing with the Allmans, Trucks has his own band, the Derek Trucks Band, which records forColumbia, and a busy touring schedule of his own.

Tedeschi recorded basic tracks for five of the 11 songs on her latest Tone-Cool album, “Wait for Me,” at Jacksonville Beach’s Made In the Shade Recording in October 2001. Two studios and a year later, it debuted at No.90 in Billboard’s Top 200. It was produced by the late Tom Dowd (Allman Bros., Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart).

Jacksonville engineer Pete Thornton, now an Orlando producer and record exec, manned the board on Tedeschi’s Jacksonville recording sessions. Those sessions were hectic because Tedeschi was six months pregnant and getting ready for her wedding, Thornton said. “But she was super sweet, nothing but nice.”

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Science’s 2002 Grammy Awards will be held in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Feb. 23 and will be televised on CBS.