Wed 1/14 @ 8PM
Tennessee musician Amythyst Kiah calls herself a “professed Southern Gothic songster.” The vocalist/guitarist/banjo player is steeped in the traditional music of her native south, influenced by artists including Big Mama Thornton, Jimmie Rodgers, Mahalia Jackson, Dolly Parton, Son House, Patsy Cline and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as well as having tewo musician parents. She then earned a degree in Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies from East State Tennessee University where she was the only African American student in the program.
She took all those influences and education and tossed them together on her 2013 debut solo album Dig and her 2016 full-band album, Amythyst Kiah & Her Chest of Glass. She toured with Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who invited her to be part of her 2019 Songs of Our Native Daughters release on Smithsonian Folkways, telling the stories African-American women in the 17th-19th centuries through original tunes.
She’s since released two more solo albums, 2021’s Wary + Strange, and 2024’s Still + Bright, the latter of which draws on her influences from Eastern spiritual beliefs, connections to nature and more. She’s enhanced her “hard to pin down” credentials with a 2022 cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” one of the seminal tracks of the gloomy goth strain of 1980s post punk.
Kiah is returning to northeast Ohio for a show at Peninsula’s historic G.A.R. Hall. Go here for tickets.