B.B. King’s annual Blues Festival Tour is a great sampler for an audience whose older members don’t get to clubs as often as they used to but — to judge by the irrepressible enthusiasm of last Saturday’s sold-out FleetBoston Pavilion crowd — still have an abiding love for the music. They cheered rabidly for King, though the 76-year-old’s surprisingly weak set was mostly stage patter and uncompleted songs, and for the Fabulous Thunderbirds, whose Kim Wilson brought them to their feet with a remarkable amp-less harmonica solo. They might have fawned over newcomer Shane Henry, too, had more than a few hundred people been in the tent when the 19-year-old Midwesterner took the stage at the un-bluesly hour of 6:30 p.m. After all, the singer/guitarist ably welded together blues and pop in his songs and played with a slow hand and a deep, resonant tone. He’s got the right cheekbones, too.

But the best performance of the night, and perhaps the warmest show of love, was Susan Tedeschi’s. Although she’s still coltish on stage, nervously fiddling with her microphone between numbers and occasionally darting her eyes from the crowd, she is at last ready to step back into the game. This November the former South Shore resident will release the eagerly awaited follow-up to Just Won’t Burn (Tone-Cool), the album that earned her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2000. Swept up in Grammy mania, Tedeschi toured relentlessly while everyone from her label to fans to industry pundits awaited a follow-up. She even made another album, in Lafayette, Louisiana, with her Just Won’t Burn collaborator, producer/songwriter Tom Hambridge, but decided to shelve it.

That disc would have come out in 2001 and adhered to the usual music-biz timetable for a follow-up. Instead, she let the hype settle. Between writing and recording new songs on her own, she fell in love. Tedeschi and the virtuoso slide-guitarist Derek Trucks courted, moved to Jacksonville, got married last December, and in March became the parents of Charles Khalil Trucks, who accompanied his mom to her Boston gig.

That’s all great for Tedeschi, but the best news for her fans is that she’s grown considerably since the Just Won’t Burn streak. My conclusion from Saturday’s performance and a quick listen to mixes from her next album is that she’s ripened as a singer; her tones are a bit richer, and her voice is equally commanding flying high or digging in the gravel. Live, all that gave even more emotional juice to her previously simmering versions of the Bonnie Raitt–associated "Angel from Montgomery" and "Just Won’t Burn." And the blues-rock stomps that made much of her big CD merely serviceable have been traded in for slower, soulful compositions that draw on her gospel-trained strengths.

On stage, new tunes like the ballad "Alone" and "I Fell in Love" found her plowing soul-blues grooves as if she were recording for Hi Records in the ’70s or Malaco today rather than the Wellesley Hills–based Tone-Cool. Further, she delivered a handful of terse, dark-toned, prickly solos. Unhurriedly snapping notes from her turquoise Telecaster over a space of about six frets, she sounded like a cross between Johnny Watson and Jimmy Vaughan — all tension, release, and big tone. Which made her set a welcome homecoming and a promise of good things to come.