Ask any up-and-coming singer-songwriter: A booking at The Ark is a coveted gig, a validation that an emerging musician has reached a certain level of achievement in the folk/roots community.

For Misty Lyn Bergeron, it’s even more than that. For Bergeron,playing The Ark is a sentimental journey back to the very beginnings of her life as a musician.

But that’s getting ahead of our story.

“I’m a late bloomer,” said Bergeron, who shares a bill at The Ark with Timothy Monger on Oct. 15. “I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 22 … and it was a couple of years after that before I started writing songs.”

But once the songs started to arrive, she made up for lost time, quickly rising to the top of the evergreen Ann Arbor singer-songwriter community, while achieving a good measure of outstate and regional success.

Much of that momentum came with the release in 2009 of her debut record, “For the Dead,” a gorgeous, evocative, profoundly sad, record that, although it features all songs composed and sung by Bergeron, is credited to Misty Lyn & the Big Beautiful.

Featuring first-call local players and solo artists like Jim Roll on bass, drummer Matt Jones, guitarist Ryan Gimpert and fiddler Carol Grey, the Big Beautiful is the perfect accompaniment to Bergeron’s dusky singing and spare acoustic guitar playing. And the record was beautifully produced by Roll at his Backseat Studios, lending the perfect atmospheric touches to the band’s arrangements. It’s a lovely record—one of the prettiest local releases in some time.

That Bergeron has emerged as a leading light in a rejuvenated Michigan roots-music scene isn’t a surprise. In fact, it was a chance encounter with Michigan roots stalwarts Steppin’ In It at a gig in Lansing that set her on a path toward making her own music.

“That was my musical awakening,” she said. I heard them playing zydeco and all this other roots music I didn’t know and everything changed.”

Which brings us back to The Ark.

A few weeks later, Bergeron, feeling an existential shift, had quit her day job and begun volunteering at the folk club, when she caught a gig by singer-songwriter Kelly Joe Phelps.

“It just blew my mind,” she said of the show. “And I just knew that this is what I needed to be doing.

“It took me a year to have the guts to do it, but I finally got up on stage at an Ark open mic night to sing.”

Since then, Bergeron has performed at The Ark a handful of times and even represented the local music scene at the club’s annual Ann Arbor Folk Festival at Hil Auditorium.

Still, playing there is a thrill, she said. Bergeron returns to the club Saturday as part of a double bill with another leading local performer, Timothy Monger.

“We play so many loud bars and stuff that it’s nice to play in a place where the focus is on the music,” she said. “I sang my first song onstage there, so it’s been a huge part of my life.”

The Ark show also represents a departure of sorts for Bergeron. It will be her first with a new band, featuring Alex Anest (Delta 88, Ryan Racine and Gas for Less); Serge van der Voo, of Orpheum Bell, on bass; as well as her usual drummer, Jones.

But fans of The Big Beautiful, needn’t fret. Bergeron and the band have a new record, “False Honey,” which she’s readying for a winter release. The band will also continue to perform. It’s just that, with each of its members busy with their own projects, Bergeron felt she needed a backup to her backing band.

Bergeron said the new record is more upbeat than the last one. But not too upbeat.

“I’m a much happier person now than I was when I was writing the songs that are on the first album,” she said. “But, you know, bad things still happen.”

Listen to Misty Lyn & the Big Beautiful perform "Flower Song":