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    Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre

    TRAY WELLINGTON KNOWS that many will take the title of his 2022 album, “Black Banjo,” as an oxymoron. The banjo, and with it an entire body of folk-based music, is now so thoroughly associated with whiteness as to obscure its origins in Black musical tradition. “One of the first things I heard when I started playing banjo was, ‘You’re not supposed to be doing this,’” says Wellington, 24, whose father is Black and mother is white. But for him, playing the banjo has become an act of reclamation.Contemporary audiences still tend to associate the banjo with white Southern traditions of bluegrass, old-time and what record labels used to market as hillbilly music, but its roots are in Africa, in stringed instruments like the akonting, the buchundu and the ngoni. During the 19th century, the banjo became inextricably linked to minstrelsy: variety shows in which white performers (and, increasingly after the Civil War, Black performers) “blacked up,” grotesquely caricaturing Black facial features. The minstrel show, which persisted onstage and onscreen well into the 20th century, accounts for the banjo’s conflicted legacy — both part of the visual vocabulary of white supremacy and a point of creative contact between Black and white musicians.Wellington’s interest in the banjo was stoked by his maternal grandfather’s love of classic country, which he’d play for Wellington on fishing trips or while working in the backyard garden of the family home in Ashe County, N.C. After some cajoling, Wellington’s mother (a hip-hop fan) took her 13-year-old son to a pawnshop, where they purchased one on layaway. Playing banjo eventually led Wellington to East Tennessee State University’s renowned Bluegrass, Old‑Time and Roots Music program, where he learned the history and practice of folk music and joined a community of mostly white teachers and students. Many of his classmates welcomed him (he plays with fellow E.T.S.U. grads in his current band); a few subjected him to scorn. “People would often ask me, ‘How does it feel to be Black in this music?’ I would put if off because I didn’t want to talk about it,” Wellington says. Recording “Black Banjo” during the pandemic lockdown and amid protests for racial justice, however, occasioned an awakening. Being a Black banjo player is “kind of a rare thing,” he says. “It’s who I am.”The folk musicians Dom Flemons, Kara Jackson, Amythyst Kiah and Tray Wellington discuss the complications of being a Black performer working in a genre now commonly associated with whiteness.Justin FrenchToday Black folk performers have reached a critical mass and level of exposure not seen since the early decades of the 20th century, when Black bands like Cannon’s Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band were among the most commercially popular in the country, touring in medicine shows and playing vaudeville stages. In a 2013 essay about Gus Cannon, the banjo-playing frontman of the Jug Stompers, the multi-instrumentalist and cultural historian Dom Flemons writes that it was only out of an “absurd racial insensitivity” that a “legitimate Black art form developed.” Flemons, 41, who goes by the name the American Songster in tribute to the players of the past, believes we’ve now entered “a postmodern contemporary folk period” in which new and more expansive definitions of traditional music are taking root. He’s among a new generation of Black folk musicians that includes Rhiannon Giddens, Valerie June, Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell and many others who are returning to songs that are decades (even centuries) old. They play fiddles and jugs, bones and guitar — and most of all the banjo.Some of these performers veer into activism. For Hannah Mayree, 34, a Northern California-based musician, “playing banjo as a Black person is not enough.” That’s why she founded the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, which supplies instruments to Black musicians and holds workshops where participants learn to make banjos for themselves. “The knowledge of how to build a banjo lives inside my body,” she says. Other musicians are folklorists, introducing listeners to source recordings that testify to an unbroken tradition of Black folk music in America. Still others see reclaiming the past as a means of creating a future. “As opposed to someone who is the caretaker of an archive, I think of my role as a living musician as a member of a future archive,” says Jake Blount, 28, a banjo and fiddle player from Washington, D.C. His most recent album, “The New Faith” (2022), presents an Afrofuturist refiguring of traditional songs. Black Americans, Blount says, have “had to be a forward-facing people because the past has been denied to us.” Part of that history is recoverable through sheet music and source recordings, but much is lost to memory.IN THE BROADEST sense, folk music is a multiracial, working-class tradition, stretching across time and continents. In the United States alone, it comprises a repertoire of ballads and work songs, blues and breakdowns, songs of love and songs of protest. Folk is a body of simple tunes played by beginners — “Tom Dooley,” “Oh! Susanna,” “Down in the Valley” — and a platform for the greatest virtuosity. For some the term conjures a cinematic shorthand: the dueling banjos of “Deliverance” (1972) and George Clooney mugging his way through “O Brother, Where Art Thou” (2000). Folk’s history over the past century or more is best told through revivals, periods of intensified interest and participation in the music. In moments when the notion of a shared cultural heritage is most desirable — during the Great Depression, or the Red Scare paranoia of the ’40s and ’50s — people have often returned to what the 20th-century folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan once described as “the big song bag which the folk have held in common for centuries.” During a 1956 live performance of the spiritual “This Train (Bound for Glory)” — a song that’s now been recorded by scores of artists, including Louis Armstrong, Alice Coltrane, Bob Marley and Sister Rosetta Tharpe — the guitar legend Big Bill Broonzy teased an audience of earnest college students swept up in the latest revival. “Some people call these ‘folk songs,’” he said while noodling on his guitar, with the singer-songwriter Pete Seeger playing banjo onstage beside him. “Well, all the songs that I’ve heard in my life was folk songs. I’ve never heard horses sing none of them yet!”Rhiannon Giddens at Cecil Sharp House, an arts center in London named for the English folklorist.Justin FrenchFolk is indeed the people’s music, yet early efforts to market it ended up, to borrow the historian Karl Hagstrom Miller’s phrase, segregating sound. In the 1920s, with the advent of the modern recording industry and broadcast radio, music executives, most notably Ralph Peer of Okeh Records, leveraged emergent technology to define marketable genre categories along racial lines. Out of this came so-called race records (which first appeared at the beginning of the 1920s, aimed at Black Americans) and hillbilly records (which arrived a few years later, geared toward Southern whites). Even as folk crossed racial boundaries — as in the Lomaxes’ recordings of Lead Belly for the Library of Congress — white song hunters often constrained Black performers inside narrow presumptions: attributing virtuosity to natural gifts rather than to musical skill; soliciting songs of protest and lament rather than those of love and happiness; and conjuring a mythic authenticity instead of making space for the real thing (as happened when the Lomaxes, after helping to secure Lead Belly’s release from Angola prison in 1934 in Louisiana, made him perform thereafter in a prison jumpsuit).Over the decades, race records gave way to more coded genre designations, like R&B and soul. Hillbilly morphed into country and western and finally simply into country. By midcentury, folk was widely considered a genre, too, a narrow term to define acoustic, string-based music, mostly by white musicians and often with a political bent. Folk songs inspired generations of singer-songwriters like Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, whose global fame the term “folk” was too small to contain. Folk, at least for some, became a backward glance to a distant past, nostalgic and reverential. It became Southern and working class and, in the minds of many, it became white.Amythyst Kiah in front of her father’s home in Johnson City, Tenn.Justin FrenchTHE RENAISSANCE OF Black folk music can be traced back to a single event nearly 20 years ago. In April 2005 in Boone, N.C., some 30 Black string-band musicians and dozens of other attendees came together for fellowship. Black Banjo Then and Now, as the gathering was called, began as an online community of over 200 members (only a small percentage of whom were Black), formed the year before by Tony Thomas, a Black banjo player from Miami. Among the group’s most junior members were Flemons, an Arizona native, then 23, and the then-27-year-old Rhiannon Giddens, a classically trained soprano from Greensboro, N.C. After graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in music performance, Giddens found her way back home, working two jobs — one as a singing hostess at Romano’s Macaroni Grill — until she earned enough money to buy her instruments, and calling contra dances, a form of line-based group folk dancing with roots in the British Isles.Giddens sought a way to embrace her love of folk music and her Blackness, too. It’s a central paradox of folk today: How can a music so thoroughly identified with whiteness that, for the better part of 50 years, found definition in contradistinction to Black music and even Black people be so Black? She found her answer at the in-person gathering of Black Banjo Then and Now. At the time, she told the Greensboro News & Record that old-time was “something that really spoke to me, and it was OK that the people who were playing it were white. But when I discovered my people had so much to do with the music, and the string bands at the turn of the century were Black, well, this is a part of history.” The four-day event, held on the campus of Appalachian State University, drew musicians from afar, including the New York-based old-time string band the Ebony Hillbillies, and living legends from close to home, like the then-86-year-old North Carolina old-time fiddle virtuoso Joe Thompson. The experience was unforgettable, with epic jam sessions and intergenerational camaraderie. “It changed my life,” Giddens says. Out of this gathering, she, along with Flemons and, eventually, a third member, Justin Robinson, formed a modern Black string band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops.The Chocolate Drops were both interested in history and utterly contemporary. All members sang and played multiple instruments, with the banjo at the center of their sound. Their style of performance owes a debt to Thompson (who died in 2012). “We had a pure mission to expose this music to as many people as possible and to tell Joe’s story,” Giddens says. On their 2010 album, “Genuine Negro Jig,” which won a Grammy Award for best traditional folk album, they covered the 2001 R&B song “Hit ’Em Up Style (Oops!)” by Blu Cantrell, taking a time-bound pop hit and making it feel nearly as timeless as “This Train.” The group disbanded in 2014, at which point, as Giddens says, the project had done “exactly what it was meant to do: inspire a whole generation of young people of color to say, ‘Hey, I see myself.’”Tray Wellington with his banjo at the Pour House, a music venue and record store in Raleigh, N.C.Justin FrenchTHE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE Drops and many others have now ensured that future generations can see themselves onstage but, once up there, such Black performers rarely see themselves in the crowd. Do Black artists need a Black audience? It’s a longstanding debate that sometimes pits the artistic against the sociopolitical functions of song. The writer Amiri Baraka once defined Black music as “American music expanded past the experience of the average American.” “It gets down,” he wrote. “It is about the life of the downed, yet its dignity is in the fantastic sophistication even at the moment of would-be, should-be humiliation and actual despair.” Giddens, who once described her music as “Black non-Black music” and now prefers to call it simply “American music,” understands this implicitly. “All the good things that come from American music [come from] mixture,” she says. “Hiding in plain sight in all the different types of American music is cross-cultural working-class collaboration. It’s people making music because that’s what they’ve got.”The most powerful folk music has always addressed points of tension: between Black and white, rich and poor, sophistication and humiliation. Cannon’s 1927 song “Can You Blame the Colored Man?” tells the story of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, dining with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1901, the year Washington’s best-selling autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” was published. “Could you blame the colored man for makin’ them goo-goo eyes?” Cannon sings, after describing in detail the lavish dinner at the president’s table. Likewise, today’s best folk music still confronts issues of race and class. In 2019 Amythyst Kiah, now 36, a guitarist and banjo player from Tennessee, joined Giddens, along with Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, in a string-band collective called Our Native Daughters. They decided to excavate American history, going back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to find inspiration for new songs. One of the songs that came of that process was the startling and soulful “Black Myself.”I don’t pass the test of the paper bag’Cause I’m Black myselfI pick the banjo up and they sneer at me’Cause I’m Black myselfYou better lock your doors when I walk by’Cause I’m Black myselfYou look me in my eyes but you don’t see me’Cause I’m Black myselfThe brown paper bag test, as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, was born out of colorism within the Black community, in nightclubs and house parties in New Orleans where anyone darker than the bag taped to the door would be denied entrance. In a song that confronts the experience of being shut out of traditionally white spaces — such as contemporary folk and country music — Kiah’s lyrics build toward resistance and joy: “I’ll stand my ground and smile in your face / ’Cause I’m Black myself.”Addressing her race so explicitly in her music was a departure for Kiah. “I’ve always written songs in a way where anybody can put themselves in that position,” she says. Throughout her years of playing, she’s subscribed to the theory that the more specific and personal a song’s perspective, the more a listener — any listener — will relate to it. Just as Kiah, no poor white Southern girl from rural Kentucky, could relate to Loretta Lynn’s 1970 single “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” she says, so she hopes that listeners, whomever they may be, will relate to “Black Myself.”Bluegrass and country, the music first marketed a century ago as hillbilly, might seem inhospitable to Black listeners and musicians. But there’s a longstanding tradition that binds Black people, both personally and aesthetically, to these sounds. “The way I talk is with an accent, so the way I sing is with an accent. And that has always needed to be explained because I’m in the skin I’m in,” says Valerie June, 41, whose voice carries the cadences of her native Jackson, Tenn. “There are [Black] people from where I’m from that talk like me. And if they started singing, they would probably sound like me.”Flemons at FitzGerald’s.Justin FrenchThis rootedness in place, particularly a rural Southern place where many Black Americans no longer live but that they never left behind, is central to Black folk music’s endurance. When Kara Jackson was a child, during the first decades of the 2000s, in Oak Park, Ill., just outside of Chicago, characters from her father’s hometown of Dawson, Ga., populated her imagination. “I grew up knowing these nicknames, hearing these stories from this small Southern town of 4,000 people,” she says. “It almost felt like hearing superhero tales.” She reveled in the stories she heard in songs as well, be they Wu-Tang Clan tracks that her older brother played or ballads from Dolly Parton LPs in the family collection. It wasn’t long before she began to write songs herself, composing by voice, then on guitar, then using the banjo that her father gave her when she was in high school. She wrote poetry, too, so well that she was named the national youth poet laureate in 2019-20.Earlier this year, Jackson, 24, released her debut album, “Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?,” with songs that partake of folk and jazz, blues and rap. Her lyrics layer sound and simile: “I wanna be as dangerous as a dancing dragon / Or a steam engine, a loaded gun,” she sings on “No Fun/Party.” Her music is sometimes playful, sometimes searing; above all, it’s story driven, like the nearly eight-minute ballad “Rat,” in which Jackson assumes the role of troubadour from the opening couplet: “Take the story of Rat who’s headed west / His buddy once told him he likes the girls there best.” Memorializing the lives of people both real and real enough for Jackson to imagine is what her music does best. “I love songs that tell stories,” she says. “That’s what folk music is for me.”After composing many of her songs in the isolation of her bedroom during the pandemic, she’s now growing accustomed to playing them for an audience. She recalls a recent performance where the energy was great, but the crowd was mostly white, which left her conflicted. “I am so grateful for anyone who listens to my music,” Jackson says. “But I secretly and very selfishly do want my music to reach my own people. And to prove that this is our music also. It’s not even like I’m doing something subversive. I’m just making the music that we came up with in the first place.” More

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    Arcade Fire Ignites a Fresh Era, and 11 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Normani, Brad Mehldau, Valerie June and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Arcade Fire, ‘The Lightning I, II’Rarely does critical consensus pivot as quickly and sharply as it did for Arcade Fire, a band that began the 2010s snagging a surprise album of the year Grammy for its beloved, towering double album “The Suburbs,” and ended the decade caricatured as out-of-touch scolds when its 2017 technology critique “Everything Now” left just about everybody cold. The overwhelming return-to-form narrative that has greeted its first new music in five years, from an album due May 6, though, suggests that many were simply waiting for the group to once again make songs that sound like “The Lightning I” and “II.” “I won’t quit on you, don’t quit on me,” Win Butler sings through gritted teeth on the first part of the song, which moves at the tempo of someone running against the wind. Then, all at once, the track kicks into a rapturous gallop and becomes the kind of urgent, clenched-fist anthem the band was once known for: “Waiting on the lightning, waiting on the lightning, what will the light bring?” Butler sings, burning once again with an earnest, fiery hope. Somebody kept the car running after all. LINDSAY ZOLADZOumou Sangaré, ‘Wassulu Don’Oumou Sangaré has carried a women’s song tradition from Mali’s Wassoulou region to a worldwide audience. Her first new song since 2017, from an album due in April, is the Malian fusion of “Wassulu Don”: the quavering vocal lines and call-and-response of Wassoulou songs propelled by the modal, six-beat electric guitar picking — echoing Ali Farka Toure — that has been called “desert blues,” topped by an openly bluesy slide guitar. The song, it turns out in translation, praises regional economic development “thanks to colossal investments”: a prosaic text for a euphoric piece of music. JON PARELESNormani, ‘Fair’Her debut full-length is so long awaited, to some people the phrase “new Normani album” has come to mean roughly what “Chinese Democracy” used to, or — heaven help us —“#R9” still does. But the arrival of Normani’s new single “Fair” is promising on two counts: It indicates that 2022 really could be the year she puts out that mythical album; and it’s much better than “Wild Side,” the sultry but ultimately snoozy Cardi B duet from 2021. Mining the liquefied sounds of Y2K-era TLC or Aaliyah, “Fair” is an anguished ballad with a deep, menacing undertow. “Is it fair that you moved on?” Normani asks, “’cause I swear that I haven’t.” All the while, the moody track throbs with a sputtering but persistent heartbeat. ZOLADZInside the World of RosalíaIn just a few years, the Spanish singer from Catalonia has grown into one of the most worshiped, scrutinized and counted on young artists in the world.Reinventing Flamenco: Rosalía first burst onto the scene with her take on tradition, earning worldwide acclaim and introducing new generations to the genre.New Album: With “Motomami,” the singer adds irony and humor to her thematic arsenal, while turning up the sex and swagger.The Making of a Star: Before racking up magazine covers and millions of views with her YouTube videos, Rosalía spent years training in one of the world’s oldest musical art forms.Diary of a Song: For her hit “Con Altura,” the singer and her collaborators entered the studio with the express mission of paying tribute to old-school reggaeton.Residente featuring Ibeyi, ‘This Is Not America’Setting aside his intramural reggaeton beef with J Balvin, the Puerto Rican rapper Residente returns to major sociopolitical statements with the furious “This Is Not America,” which is rapped in Spanish but purposefully titled in English. It’s a darker sequel to the hemisphere-spanning “Latinoamérica” by Residente’s former group, Calle 13: a far-reaching indictment of repression, corruption and abuse across North, Central and South America. Driven by deep Afro-Caribbean drumming and choir harmonies, it insists, “America is not just the U.S.A.,” with a video that recapitulates brutal human-rights abuses in nation after nation. PARELESBrad Mehldau, ‘Cogs in Cogs, Pt. I: Dance’A three-part suite, “Cogs in Cogs” sits at the center of Brad Mehldau’s new album, “Jacob’s Ladder,” which collects 12 complex, hard-toggling tracks: an attempt to use the tools of prog-rock — his first musical love — to explore how a worldly life might have both shaken and strengthened his Christian faith. Mehldau, who continues to build out from his fixed identity as one of the country’s top jazz pianists, plays almost every instrument on Part 1 of “Cogs in Cogs”: piano, Rhodes, harmonium, mixed percussion and more. He sings some, too. Underpinned by the syncopated rhythm and woven harmonic progression that he outlines at the start, the track works as a patient immersion, providing some balance to the heady overload of so much of this album. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODonae’o featuring Terri Walker, ‘Good Mood’Everyone in this dystopian moment wants something better. Here’s a song for whenever, eventually, the situation might feel right: a stripped-down bit of electronic funk topped by gritty human voices, placed in a digital grid but hoping there’s a warm, real, physical space beyond it. PARELESSyd and Lucky Daye, ‘Cybah’On the brink of a new romance, Syd — Sydney Loren Bennett, the songwriter and producer who emerged from Odd Future — airs her misgivings in “Cybah,” whispering a question to a prospective partner: “Could you break a heart?” Lucky Daye responds with conditions of his own: “Promise me you’ll always keep my heart in a safe place.” The hesitancy is built directly into the track, three slowly descending chords atop a bass line that sometimes falls away into complete silence, keeping the next step uncertain. PARELESValerie June, ‘Use Me’Valerie June’s “Use Me” isn’t the 1972 Bill Withers song. It offers a more kindly, less exploited version of the same generously loving sentiment: “I’ll let you use me when the world is doing you wrong,” she promises. It’s a soul waltz that gathers a circusy momentum from an oom-pah-pah beat, slightly delayed snare-drum rolls and jovial horns that sound like they wandered into a bar and decided to stick around. PARELESRosalía, ‘Hentai’A delicate, demure piano arrangement serves as a sonic red herring for the raunchiest song Rosalía has released to date. On the surface, “Hentai” is achingly gorgeous, as sparse and intimate as anything the pop-flamenco queen has ever done. “So, so, so good,” she croons ecstatically on the chorus, starry-eyed and accompanied by nothing more than a few plinking notes — the sound of a multifaceted artist revealing yet another side of herself. ZOLADZEthan Gruska and Bon Iver, ‘So Unimportant’Two meticulously disorienting songwriters and producers — Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Ethan Gruska (Phoebe Bridgers’s producer) — collaborated remotely on “So Unimportant.” It’s a waltz that mingles an argument and an apology, with Gruska eventually deciding, “It’s so unimportant what started the fight.” What could have been a folksy, homey waltz is layered with hazy sonic phantoms — echoes, altered voices, electronic tones, a hovering string arrangement — that hint at the emotional complexities of everyday frictions. PARELESDanilo Pérez, ‘Fronteras (Borders) Suite: Al-Musafir Blues’As the founder of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston, the celebrated Panamanian pianist Danilo Pérez has a utopian goal, framed by his own experience of jazz: He sees the music as a tool for international solidarity, and a pathway toward some kind of global sonic language. Pérez’s Global Messengers are a transnational band that has grown out of his work at Berklee, and that seeks to put some evidence behind the ideas. “Al-Musafir Blues” comes as part of the “Fronteras (Borders) Suite,” which contemplates the pain of forced migration. “Al-Musafir Blues” is an 11-minute epic unto itself, starting with a plodding, lovely pattern from the Palestinian cellist Naseem Alatrash that melds slowly into a full-band arrangement; by the end, Pérez’s scampering piano is guiding the conversation. RUSSONELLO More

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    The Time-Warped Charm of Valerie June

    Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations.Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Time-Warped Charm of Valerie June“The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” the introspective, quietly hopeful album she made more than a year ago, sounds just right in 2021.Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations.Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 4, 2021A fire crackled in a cast-iron stove behind Valerie June. She had a bright carnation in her abundant dreadlocks, a mug of tea, a banjo by her side and an Etta James album propped against an amplifier as she chatted via video about her new album, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers.” She had all but finished the music last January, after two years of on-and-off recording, and was expecting at first to release it in 2020. But her label, Fantasy, convinced her that would be a “bad idea,” she said with a laugh.Now, the 39-year-old musician was ensconced at an Airbnb rental house in upstate New York, where she could make music at any time without disturbing the neighbors at her Brooklyn apartment. She had set up instruments, microphones and lights for home recordings and for the livestreamed performances that she’s substituting, for now, for her years of perpetual touring.“It feels so strange,” she said. “It just feels so different to not travel. I value just being alone, but this is way too much.”Although “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” due March 12, arrives in a different era than the one it was made in, it sounds unexpectedly timely. Even before the isolation of the past year, Valerie June’s artistic intuition had led her toward thoughts of stillness, meditation and inwardness. She also completed a book that is due in April under her full name, Valerie June Hockett: “Maps for the Modern World” (Andrews McMeel), a collection of poems, drawings and homilies about consciousness and mindfulness, like “Visualization”: “When you don’t see a path/Before you,/Maybe it’s time to fly.”Valerie June has built a devoted following by ignoring expectations. She is simultaneously rural and cosmopolitan, historically minded and contemporary, idiosyncratic and fashionable, mystical and down-to-earth. She calls her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Her voice has a wayward twang and a sly finesse, while her music wanders amid soul, country, folk, jazz and blues — along with nods, on the new album, to hip-hop and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat.“Not every song that I write fits a certain genre,” she said. “Songs are teachers — they’re like bosses, basically. They’re like, this is what we want. They have lives and feelings and potentials and desires and dreams. And I have to be the one who’s listening to them and telling whoever it is, what I hear that they want.”She added, “A whole lot of magic has to happen to make music. A whole lot of minds have to see something invisible. The act of making music — that could be spiritual. You’re taking something that’s not physically seen and you’re bringing it from nowhere, pulling it from thin air, so people can experience it.”Valerie June was born in Jackson, Tenn. and grew up in nearby Humboldt. She learned to sing from all the voices around her at church services — young, old, pure, cracked — while she was exposed to the secular music business through her father, a part-time concert promoter. She also dug into the musical history of Tennessee, the Appalachians and the Deep South, from early blues singers like Memphis Minnie to Dolly Parton to the Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia. Valerie June moved to Memphis as a teenager and began singing with bands and then as a solo act. In 2010 she landed a spot on an online MTV series about Memphis musicians, “$5 Cover.”“Not every song that I write fits a certain genre,” Valerie June said. “They have lives and feelings and potentials and desires and dreams.”Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesHer reputation spread fast among musicians. She sang featured backup vocals with the country singer Eric Church, the rapper John Forté and the songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello; she released her own recordings, including a bluegrassy EP, “Valerie June and the Tennessee Express,” co-produced by the fiddler Ketch Secor from Old Crow Medicine Show. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys was a co-producer for her 2013 debut album with a label, “Pushin’ Against a Stone.”By then, she had moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, though she rarely stayed in New York City for long. “For basically a decade,” she said, “what I was doing was flying to New York, washing my clothes and going back on the road.” “Pushin’ Against a Stone” and “The Order of Time” from 2017, her first albums released nationally, had the naturalistic sound of musicians playing together in real time. They drew comparisons to expansive stylistic hybrids like Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.” But for “The Moon and Stars,” Valerie June decided to incorporate some studio time-warping. She wrote new material and dug into a backlog she estimates at 150 songs; one, the fragile “Fallin’,” dates back to the early 2000s. And with her co-producer Jack Splash — a Grammy-winning Los Angeles producer whose extensive credits include tracks with Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, Jennifer Hudson and Anthony Hamilton — she layered live band recordings with low-fi demos and multitrack experiments.“When I was working with Jack,” she said, “I told him certain words and feelings that I want the record to be able to have for people. Spirituality was one, iridescence was one, illuminance was one. Ethereal was one. And magical, fairylike, dreamy, colorful.”From his studio in Los Angeles, Splash said, “Valerie writes like a poet writes. That’s something that very much gets overlooked in contemporary music in the constant quest for hits and success. It’s not often when I get a chance to work with an artist who actually cares enough about the world to want to write those types of things.”They worked on the songs at home and saved up material until they were ready to gather musicians at professional studio sessions. Those tended to be scheduled on nights with a full moon, by “absolute cosmic coincidence,” said Splash. “It was very beautiful though. We felt like the sky was smiling down on us.”Splash connected Valerie June to vintage Memphis soul by bringing in the string arranger Lester Snell, who was a mainstay of the Stax Records studio band and a frequent collaborator of Isaac Hayes in the 1970s; they recorded his ensembles at the renowned Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis. Valerie June also garnered a cameo appearance from the soul singer Carla Thomas, who had mid-1960s hits like “B-A-B-Y” and made duet albums with Otis Redding. On “The Moon and Stars,” Thomas recites an African proverb — “Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet” — and then sings along with Valerie June on “Call Me a Fool,” a Southern soul ballad testifying to impulsive love.But the album also includes hypnotic songs like “Within You,” which stays on one chord throughout its five minutes as Valerie June sings thoughts like, “The only truth to know/Is in the letting go.” It’s a sonic assemblage built from a mantra-like acoustic guitar line, tendrils of electric-guitar improvisation, an off-kilter drum-machine loop, wisps of Valerie June’s voice and Snell’s hovering string-section chords.The final track for “The Moon and Stars” was going to be “Home Inside,” a song about a search for peace, which reflects, “I know there is a home inside/Window to soul, where every dream abides.”“You know, the negativity is always going to be there. It’s just, how do you work with it?” Valerie June said. “We all have these seeds of darkness within us and we all have these seeds of light. We get the choice.”Credit…Lelanie Foster for The New York TimesBut during the first months of quarantine in 2020, Valerie June returned to her family home in Humboldt, where her mother still lives. “It was starting to be summer,” she recalled. “I was still out in the country, away from everybody in the world. And all I heard was bird song, day and night. I would wake up and just go out there and record bird song.”Eventually, she decided to give the album a new ending. With her bird recordings, she and Splash layered on keyboards, flutes and the bell tones of a Tibetan singing bowl to make “Starlight Ethereal Silence,” the album’s postscript. “You go into this nature world,” she said, “And you can sit there and let them be the singers — because they’re the best singers — and just be immersed in all of what is around us all the time.”Although the album was finished in 2020, the context of that turbulent year changed the way Valerie June saw her songs. “Smile,” a song that arrives midway through the album, is about a determination to make it through rough times. In 2020, she was listening to the track and watching Black Lives Matter protests and, with the death of the Georgia congressman and civil-rights activist John Lewis, footage from the marches and rallies of the 1960s.“I saw everything that we’re fighting for now, with systemic racism and injustice,” she said. “And I saw this older Black woman sitting on the steps of, like, a sharecropping house or something. Maybe she had been a slave and maybe she had truly known the hard times. And she just started smiling. Because she had done everything. She had fought for freedom. She had tried, you know, and all she could do was smile. And in that smile, there was some joy and some happiness that just couldn’t be taken from her no matter what anyone ever did. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, is that what the song is connecting me to?’”Above all, a willed and unblinking optimism courses through Valerie June’s songs. “One of my lessons for this life is, how can I keep my energy?” she said. “I know darkness. I know the blues. And so how can I use the blues as a fuel for what I wish to say? You know, the negativity is always going to be there. It’s just, how do you work with it? We all have these seeds of darkness within us and we all have these seeds of light. We get the choice.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More