YouTube assist for Bluhm

Six years ago, Nicki Bluhm was headed down a more traditional career path to become either an elementary school teacher or maybe a horse trainer.

Then along came New Year’s Eve 2006. At an after-party for the band The Mother Hips, she mustered the courage to sing an Allman Brothers song while someone else played guitar.

Mother Hips singer and founder Tim Bluhm was blown away by her voice and quickly helped her form a band — Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers. By the time they got married less than a year later, she had already started perfecting a 1970s throwback acoustic sound that conjured timeless Americana with a dash of early Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt.

Playing countless club shows and even an occasional cake walk in Chico, the band, which is playing Saturday at the Petaluma Music Festival at the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds, built up a loyal Bay Area following. Growing up in Lafayette, Bluhm was rooted in an eclectic musical background as her dad listened to country and jazz, her mom, who ran an aerobics studio, was more into Motown and 1980s leg-warmer pop, and her older brothers listened to the Grateful Dead and Bob Marley.

One of the first songs she wrote, “I’m Your Woman,” is a female anthem and reminder to all those coddled mama’s boys out there — “I ain’t your mama, I’m your woman.” On her second album, the song “Jetplane” — backed by a sweet country slide guitar at home on any Allman Brothers album — came out of “a summer spent in Yosemite on the verge of turning 30,” she says.

But it wasn’t until the 17th episode of their YouTube “Van Sessions” that Bluhm and the Gramblers started to take off. The premise of the low-budget series was simple: Roll camera as the band rolls down the road in a Ford cargo van — usually with Nicki at the wheel in mirrored shades — singing covers of Beatles or Allman Brothers tunes.

“Mostly we just thought it was a good way to entertain ourselves since we didn’t have a radio in the van and we had really long rides without cell-phone reception,” says Bluhm, while riding in the van on tour somewhere between Colorado and Utah.

For the 17th session, they recorded “I Can’t Go For That” by Hall and Oates. After John Oates re-posted it on his website, the video soared to over a million views on YouTube. ESPN came calling, asking Nicki and the band to record a cover of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” for the ESPY Awards last month.