Doesn’t it seem like all famous people hail from some state on either coast? And the music industry, of all businesses, employs a lot of people who have never even been to the Midwest, or seen it except from an airplane. So it’s refreshing when a person from the nation’s breadbasket is making waves in the record business, and it’s even better when she gets a chance to come home.

Susan Werner, a folky, jazzy singer and songwriter from Manchester, will open for Joan Armatrading at the Civic Center of Greater Des Moines this weekend. She will be supporting her latest release on Private Music, Last of the Good Straight Girls, her third CD.

She has found, now that she traipses all over the country, that the values we hold dear in the Midwest do not necessarily carry through to the rest of the country.

“I always wanna be nice, gracious, because in Iowa it’s very important to be friendly,” Werner said. “This is not so important in other parts of the country. You know, I have the darkened limousine windows and I smoke with a cigarette holder. No, I don’t, but you do realize that the way you grow up has an effect on you. You have to be who you are and explore that.”

As Werner stays true to her roots, it’s interesting to note that this upcoming show is not the first time she’s performed in our capital city. Several months ago (before a lot of the excitement around her had built yet), she was doing a lot of touring, even in small clubs. After a lifetime of loving and making music, the first drops of popularity and success started splashing this year, and soon it’ll be a torrential downpour.

“I did a little show in Des Moines in March and a bigger show in Des Moines in the summer,” Werner explained. “At that point we had shows full. My whole career is going kaboom! These are good problems. I have good people around me, agents and publicists, and good radio support in Des Moines. All of these things make for leaps and bounds.”

This progressing success has lead to bigger venues and more extensive touring, and Werner is still trying to adjust to these bigger shoes.

“You get stage legs, so to speak. It gets more difficult in front of a large audience. They’re in the dark, and you’re in the light. It’s a black void, and you’re trying to chum up with the darkness. It’s a change. … There’s growing pains at the start.”

And these pangs, along with some of the inconveniences of being on the road, constitute a slight downside to being a musician. But live performances make up for any little discomforts.

“It’s the less glamorous side of this life, luggage racks and hotel rooms,” Werner said. “But then there’s that moment when you go out on stage and get intimate with 1,000 people in the dark.”

With her subject matter, getting intimate is exactly what happens when Werner takes the stage. The songs off of Last of the Good Straight Girls definitely takes after Nanci Griffith, who Werner said had a “melancholy streak.”

“It’s comfort music, quilt-bummer music,” Werner explained. “When you tell your friends you’re not going out and you say, ‘I’m gonna deal with it.'”

Not that Werner is some kind of death-and-doom soothsayer; she merely writes how she feels, and the period of time leading up to the album was not exactly happy-happy-joy-joy.

“It was a sad period when I was writing them,” she said. “They came out that shade of blue. … I write happy songs; I write about all kinds of things. Albums are like photographs of a time period.

“Out of all the songs to put on a record, you cull the ones with the sharpest angle and the sharpest edge,” she continued. “For the next record, they’re much happier songs, and I’ll pick the best of these. This is this year’s harvest. This year, if beans are good, you have beans. Maybe you get hail, maybe you get a bumper crop.”

And this year’s yield is mellow and folksy, with a definite jazz twist. “That’s one of my strong suits,” Werner said. “I’m not really sure [where the jazz came from] — I can swing. I could ever since I was a little kid. I got the swing gene. I used to listen to Count Basie records when I was 14, 15, 16 years old, and I was in jazz band in high school. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

Another one of Werner’s influences stems from her study of opera as a graduate student at Temple University. Those roots meander through, in a grassroots sort of way, her present work.

“I’m a good singer, I can defend myself,” Werner said. “One of my dreams is to sing with Tony Bennett. I always thought I’d be an opera singer, but it’s not working out that way. There’s something else emerging as a natural talent, and it doesn’t require dressing up in weird clothes and speaking German. It’s a little more down-to-earth, a little more pot-luck.”

Catch this jane-of-all-trades opening for Joan Armatrading at the Civic Center of Greater Des Moines Saturday night at 8 p.m. Tickets are $22.75 and are available at the box office and all Ticketmaster outlets.