Ask Amythyst Kiah to label her amalgam of blues, old time music, country, singer-songwriter pop, folk and indie rock and she comes up with a word that somehow both covers the breadth of the music but, at the same time, doesn’t really pinpoint what she’s doing.
“I still use the term Americana and it is frustrating because of how vague it is,” Kiah said. “But it also is a perfect description because of how they get it from a marketing perspective, I feel like Americana is kind of where everybody falls in where they don't fit anywhere else. It's where all the misfits that didn't fit in with pop, country or they didn't quite fit in with blues or they didn't quite fit in with like, rock.
“Anytime I say Americana, I follow it up with blues rock country folk. It's never just as simple as, I'm a country singer. There is a small paragraph that comes with describing my music,” she said. “I used to come up with all these little different names like all country blues, and Southern Gothic folk. Now I read back and I cringe. That’s so pretentious.”
Kiah had to start making up those names as she broke through to widespread attention with her 2021 album “Wary + Strange” and its Grammy nominated song “Black Myself.”
That song, live and on record, and the traditional “Trouble So Hard,” her show ender, showcase Kiah’s unforgettable, deep and powerful soul vocals that sound like they had to have come from church. Or did they?
“I've had people ask me if I grew up singing in the church and I didn't,” she said. “But we wouldn't have popular vocals the way we have today if it wasn't for the Pentecostal gospel church.
“All the people I listened to when I was really young, like Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, all of those huge voices, like Patti LaBelle, they all sang in church...Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe sang in the church. That essentially became part of it, became part of rock and roll and throughout American music. So it came from church, from the influences.”
That’s the kind of observation that comes from a musicologist, who’s been absorbing American musical styles for two decades.
Kiah, who grew up in Chattanooga, Tenn. and got a guitar from her dad at 13, studied classical guitar and developed her fingerstyle playing as a teenager. She later enrolled at East Tennessee State University in the Johnson City school to study guitar in the music department.
But the academic study of classical guitar didn’t take with Kiah, who then saw a listing for a bluegrass guitar class.
“The only image I could conjure in my mind about bluegrass was the Beverly Hillbillies. That was literally all of my knowledge,” Kiah said from her Johnson City home. She took the class anyway, expanding her fingerstyle range and, eventually, adding a layer to her musical orientation.
“It led me to playing old-time music, which is the bedrock of, really, all American music,” she said. “It was before bluegrass. It was before electric blues. So it was really the precursor because it's a mix of European and African traditions and cultures.”
Old time music, and the banjo she picked up as she learned it, brought Kiah together with Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell on the 2019 album “Songs of Our Native Daughters,” which contained the first, Grammy-nominated version of “Black Myself.”
But Kiah, who was a punk-rocking skateboarder in high school, couldn’t confine herself to old-time music, bluegrass or country. As she demonstrates in all her shows, she’s an indie-rocker as well, doing an uptempo, guitar-rocking version of Tori Amos’ “Sugar.”
As for the singer/songwriter elements, those can be heard in “Black Myself,” her anthem of enslaved people, both literal and figurative, as well as her often dark songs, grappling with the personal, such as her mother’s suicide, and the societal, such as the struggle of Black and queer Americans.
Kiah’s now making a new album. Having written a bunch of songs over the last couple of years, Kiah and her band have since been in the studio and she hopes to have the album out by year’s end.
Those songs, which she’s starting to play in her shows, continue her distinctive musical mixture. But they’re far from predictable.
“When I write music, all of those different influences kind of come together in a way that I never really know exactly what to expect, which is the most fun about it,’ she said. “It’s cool…I play American music, and it's got a little bit of a twist to it because I'm from east Tennessee and I have an accent and sometimes it shows up in more places than others.
“That’s what happens when you hear a bunch of different music and you are a nerd and whatever, it's kind of challenging,” Kiah said. “It’s been a challenge for me to really forge a solid identity sometimes when it comes to music.”
Which is why Kiah, for better or worse, calls her music Americana.
Amythyst Kiah is set to perform on Thursday, May 9, at 8p.m. and doors open at 7p.m. General admission tickets are $25. Tp purchase tickets, visit:
