If you enjoyed Susan Werner’s performance as the MC of the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in January, saddle up and get down to The Ark on Saturday, where Werner will be doing a full show of her own.

Werner has a new batch of songs to draw on for her current tour: Her new album, “Kicking the Beehive,” will be released on March 1, and her set will draw generously from that disc.

Werner is a real musical chameleon. She studied opera in college; possesses a multi-octave vocal range; is a terrific singer of jazz standards and Broadway tunes; and can also create a seamless alchemy of folk, gospel, country and the blues.

Indeed, “Kicking the Beehive” contains generous helpings of blues and country influences. The bluesy elements were inspired by a “blues pilgrimage” she took, by car — one that began in Memphis and carried her down to the Mississippi Delta, passed through the hallowed blues ground of Clarksdale, Mississippi and ended in New Orleans.

She says she wanted to make a more “down home” record this time around, after her ’09 “Classics” album, which was a collection of contemporary standards she recorded with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

“I was proud of that record, but when I began writing songs again, I was missing the guitar, and I began playing along to some of Bob Brozman’s slide-guitar videos, and then I did some dates with Keb’ Mo’ early last year,” says Werner from her home in Chicago. “And he was gracious enough to take time during sound check ‘schooling’ me in the acoustic-blues-guitar style.”

Keb’ Mo’ later ended up playing slide guitar on one track on “Beehive.”

All of that piqued her interest in the blues even further, and so began her journey to the source. “I just wanted to follow the river — there’s just something about it, the rhythm of it, that speaks to any musician who is interested in the blues, and who has spent some time down there.”

One of her side trips took her to the Delta blues museum and Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero Blues Club, both in Clarksdale. She soaked more of the blues tradition in those locales, and sat in for an improvisational jam session at the Ground Zero.

But, as noted, the disc also is infused with some country sounds - but not the formulaic Nashville major-label brand of country. Instead, several of the tunes crackle with Houston-style Texas country-rock — courtesy of producer Rodney Crowell, the great singer-songwriter-producer who has a long history of crafting that specific brand of rootsy country-rock.

And, where Crowell goes, the super-talented guitar slinger Steuart Smith often follows. Smith has often recorded and toured with Crowell over the years and has also lent his nimble guitar chops to the music of Shawn Colvin, the Eagles, Roseanne Cash, Trisha Yearwood and many others.

Smith led the core studio band for the “Beehive” recording sessions — a band that also included bassist Viktor Krauss and drummer Bryan Owings. Steel player Paul Franklin (a Detroit-area native), another ace musician — who's been a ubiquitous presence on many country-music recordings since the ‘70s, including some of Crowell’s — also guests on the album, as does Vince Gill.

The title song, “Kicking the Beehive,” done up in Texas-country fashion, is notable in that it takes the old saying, “If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive,” and turns it on its head — essentially encouraging people to stir up some trouble every now and then.

“My road manager has often asked me why I am ‘always kicking beehives’” — in that, from album to album, Werner has typically jumped from one genre to another — from jazz to folk to “agnostic gospel” to standards. That approach is musically satisfying to Werner, but makes it hard for a record company to market her albums.

“It’s sort of a national anthem for trouble-makers everywhere, whether they’re politically-minded, or jump out of airplanes, or just get a rise out of being disagreeable,” says Werner with a laugh. “I love debate. If you disagree with me, and you have a well-informed opinion, I’m fine with that — I want to hear it.”

Another standout track is “The Last Words of Bonnie Parker," an intimate and poignant song about loving someone no matter what. “When I began writing it, I knew what it was going to be about, but I knew it wasn’t me talking. I asked myself, ‘Whose voice is this?’ And then suddenly the part about the money came to me, and then the gun, and then it occurred to me, ‘Oh, this is a criminal,’ and then I thought of Bonnie Parker, and did some research on her, and found she wrote poetry. So, that inspired me to write something ‘for’ her.”

“On the Other Side,” the album’s final track, is another attention-getter. Written in a gospel-tinged style, it sketches images of a light and a voice that one might encounter in the afterlife — a change-up from the point of view Werner adopted on “The Gospel Truth,” her aforementioned ’07 “agnostic gospel” album. In the song, the singer is “much less certain” than on the songs she wrote on that album. “It’s really about not being really sure how it all turns out, spiritually,” she says.

“I think as you get older, you get more comfortable with the notion that you’re not sure how it’s all going to turn out. It’s actually sort of peaceful, encountering a question and saying, ‘I don’t know the answer,’ and not trying to force yourself to come up with one.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.