CONCERT CANCELED.

Blues music has come a long way since 1902, when W.C. Handy heard a man in a Mississippi train station pick up a guitar and sing a song with a repeated line about “goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” Each of the strands of its history, from country to city to the virtuoso guitar efforts that inspired British rock music in the 1960s, is still being extended, and the music still has a forward edge beyond these. The Ark, where electric blues was uncommon a decade ago, has lately specialized in this forward edge, with consistently intriguing results.

Oakland-based E.C. Scott, who comes to the Ark on April 20, is next up in the club’s roster of fresh blues voices. Scott is a belter with the attitude of a veteran, but she came to the blues only in middle age after raising two sons who urged her on, and her songs, most of which she composed herself, are full of contemporary twists. The Internet can figure in Scott’s blues (“I’ve Got Love on the Line” may be the first blues song to include the word “cyberspace”), and the cheating man who bedevils her might be heading for the arms of another man instead of a woman.

Scott certainly isn’t the first to bring humor to the blues, which has had its underappreciated wry side from the very start. But her humorous numbers, warning her girlfriends against a “Make a Man Kit” or bemoaning a guy who will start lying “Before Quick Can Get Ready,” have an originality that breaks through and makes you smile even when they’re not perfectly formed. Musically Scott draws on the blues-soul fusions of the 1970s and 1980s, and she spices her shows with covers of the Eurythmics’ “Missionary Man” and, more unexpectedly, Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.”

Robert Cray’s blistering set at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival several years back wasn’t universally welcomed by the acoustically inclined, but a lot of people were hanging on every note, and it’s specifically Cray’s songwriter-oriented brand of the blues that needs a home as the campus party blues scene once headquartered at Rick’s American Cafe recedes. The Ark seems to have situated itself on this new road the blues is taking, and Scott’s show and others to come should be worth checking out even if you don’t think of yourself as a blues lover.