ADIA VICTORIA
ALBUM: A Southern Gothic
LINER NOTES: As the title of her latest album suggests, the South Carolina native’s sonic creations are imbued with the deep hues of gothic indie blues—tales of life that both unsettle and intrigue listeners.
In the 1940s, Sister Rosetta Tharpe strutted onto stages with a guitar strapped around her neck and helped invent rock and roll. Starting in the late 1960s, soul-funk-psychedelic pioneer Betty Davis (may she rest in funk) survived Miles Davis and made anthems for weird Black girls who didn’t want to marry a genre. Rock, gospel, blues, roots, folk. A little Stax, a little Motown, a little Philly, and a little Mississippi Delta. Joy Oladokun, Allison Russell, Adia Victoria, Amythyst Kiah, and Brittney Spencer have bits of it all in their songwriting and stagecraft. Their secret sauce is as old as human migration. These women have soul.
Black female artists reimagining country music is a revival of sorts, and it is not happening in a vacuum. R&B music is also finding its footing in pop music again after being reduced to hip-hop hooks and adult contemporary radio. The R&B revival also owes a lot to women artists—H.E.R., Ella Mai, Summer Walker, and Ari Lennox have successfully cut through the hip-hop/dance music domination. Social media platforms like TikTok play a significant role in getting the jams out to the people. But that only works because the music has, as H.E.R. described it in a 2018 interview with Gerrick D. Kennedy, “real, genuine emotions” that people want. And need, especially now.
Critically for a writer, Joy, Allison, Adia, Amythyst, and Brittney are in the part of the celebrity cycle where they are still interesting, still talk like humans. When I sat down with them over the course of a week in Nashville—which I essayed about elsewhere at the time—they were open, real, and above all, ready. Now, they are gracing the pages of Vanity Fair as emerging icons of country soul’s musical dynasty. It is 2022, and mainstream country music has not yet figured out how to fit these singer-songwriters into traditional platforms. Like independent and minority artists before them, they have much better success with live shows, satellite radio, and streaming platforms. And their ride is far from over. They are touring, releasing new music, getting corporate sponsorships, and being name-checked by musical heroes like Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell, Maren Morris, and Rhiannon Giddens. Individually and collectively, these artists are poised to write a new chapter in Black music’s enduring legacy.
Well-meaning people have asked them a million times about race and equity and diversity in country music. I don’t want to be well-meaning. I want to mean them well. These are artists, with perspectives on the world. As artists who have the entire legacy of Black music at their disposal, I want to talk about how they choose to make their art and what it means to be making it in surprising ways. Their answers varied, but all spoke of a musical tapestry that saved them in some way. As good keepers of the legacy they inherited, they are simply paying it forward.
The sense of coming into one’s own is especially true for Allison Russell, who made one of the best albums of 2021. Fight with somebody else about this. Outside Child is otherworldly. Variety called it “beautiful, harrowing.” It was nominated for best Americana album at the 2022 Grammys. The album’s standout track is “Nightflyer,” which lives inside of you, moving between traditional roots instrumentation—at one point in the live version, she plays the clarinet—and the kind of jazz vocalization that scandalized audiences in the early 20th century. Her delivery reminds you that jazz was not always easy listening—it used to be dangerous. Jazz was once considered a sexual vice, bound to lead to race-mixing and civil rot. Henry Ford was so incensed by jazz’s popularity that he spent money to train America’s youth to square-dance instead. Biracial, sexy, and jazzy, I like to imagine Russell’s music playing as Ford drove himself over a metaphorical cliff.