This weekend, as the lights dim for Halloween, the Carbondale night air will be full of the soft emotion that blues music always seems to bring.

No matter how many people you ask, everyone is going to have a different definition of what a blues singer should be. Joanna Connor has basically made her own definition through her actions and accomplishments. Not only does she play a slide guitar from the heart, but she is also one of the leading women’s blues guitarist around.

I think of myself as one of the pioneers of women guitarists, Connor said. When my band first started playing, there weren’t a lot of women playing lead guitar; now there are a lot of us out there wherever we play, and that is good.

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Connor began performing at the age of 17, moving to Chicago from Massachusetts at 19 to give professional music a chance. As she grew older, the definition of what blues music should be was constantly changing, and Connor threw herself into an entirely new category that she herself was creating.

I hate the term classification’ because I find it limiting, she said. Music is music, and I am a musician. I grew up on rock and roll and funk, and I have always tried to be experimental. I call my music root music because it has roots in the blues.

And experimental she is. Her music sounds like the blues, but before you know it a rock or soulful jazz song could evolve from her instrument. There could be funk one night and rock on another, but all of that comes from the blues music that the Joanna Connor Band puts out with the term she calls soul fullness.

Soul fullness is when a person plays their music, and that music reaches into your soul and touches you, and that is my main goal, she said. I want people to feel something in my music, and just go out there to have fun. I really love when I can feel the energy of the room and when people lose themselves in the moment of the evening.

Her band has been playing together for six years, which according to her is unusual for a blues singer.

A lot of blues singers have different bands wherever they go, but that is what makes this one different, she said. We have been playing together for six years, and the audience can see that when we play. The way we react to one another is almost telepathic.

She said that one of her mental pictures of the blues is of an old guitar, which she claims is synonymous with blues music, claiming that to be yourself is the key to every good blues musician.

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Anyone can become a good musician as long as they have the drive and dedication, but above all you have to be yourself through your music, she said. Modern life has become so commercialized and mechanized, and I want to move the audience in some way with my music. I just want people to go out there and have fun, and I think blues music lets them do that.

Joanna Connor plays at 8 p.m., Saturday, at A.C. Reed’s.