From the Magazine
May 2022 Issue

How Brittney Spencer, Joy Oladokun, and Other Black Women Musicians Are Reframing Country Music

Nashville’s newest stars are not aw-shucks, down-on-their-luck cowboys but Black women carving a hallowed space in opry’s pantheon.
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Allison Russell’s earrings by Jennifer Fisher; hair products by Unite; makeup products by Ilia.PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES; SITTINGS EDITOR, NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

Ten years ago, you could not name more than three Black country music artists, if you could name any country artists at all. In 2022, there are so many Black artists making contemporary country music, you would have to book a festival to get even half of them on one show bill. And if you did book that festival, it would feature a lot of Black women. Respect to the brothers, like classic man Darius Rucker and youngblood Jimmie Allen, but the Black country women are serving.

What you want, they got it: love songs, girl-power anthems, grooves, protest music. And they do not just serve bops. They also serve looks. They are sexy, cool, and irreverent. Grounded in multiple musical traditions, each has a unique sound, but all of them pay homage to the Black music dynasty.


Jacket by Gucci; earrings by Lisa Eisner Jewelry; hair products by R+Co; makeup products by MAC.PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES; SITTINGS EDITOR, NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

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.


Earrings by Jennifer Fisher; hair products by Unite; makeup products by Ilia.PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES; SITTINGS EDITOR, NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

ALLISON RUSSELL

ALBUM: Outside Child
LINER NOTES: Ever the collaborator, Russell’s debut solo project delves into her long-held fascination with fables, historic myths, and lullabies, many of which she was exposed to by her Scottish Canadian grandmother.


If Russell’s fierceness is not evident, it is because people often underestimate beautiful women. Sitting across a screen from Russell, 42, I know a survivor when I see one. Hers is a story of slightly different flavor than those who usually make Black music. She is Canadian, for one. “I didn’t grow up in Black culture at all,” she says plainly. That her journey brought her to the same place as generations of soul women before her speaks volumes about the universality of Black creative genius.

Far from the clay dirt roads that made Black music, Russell was part of a white Canadian family that rejected her Blackness. Her mother married an adoptive father that Russell describes as a white supremacist. “You know, I was in the belly of this horrific colonial beast,” she told me. Scarred but unbowed, by the time she owned the 2021 Newport Folk Festival stage, it was clear that Russell had found her way home. To get there, she had to go south.

Russell’s journey to roots music through racial geography was, she says, part of what saved her life. “Coming to the South has been like, holy shit, I’m not alone. There’s mixed-heritage Black folks like me everywhere.” In roots music, Russell found a musical dynasty that matched the depth of the trauma that growing up in an abusive household visited upon her. It was the legacy of Black joy and pain—that melding of the sacred and the profane so integral to the Black diasporic experience—that helped her find her voice.

Joy Oladokun does not care what you call her music, just don’t come calling her all the time. She is busy up on her mountain, playing with chickens, blazing for a little relaxation, and making music in her home studio. Smooth as triple-distilled whiskey, everything about Oladokun is a vibe. Her 2020 album, In Defense of My Own Happiness (the Beginnings), has earned her a lot of love—in 2021, when she was nominated for the Americana Music Honors & Awards’ emerging act of the year, and this year, as she’s up for the GLAAD Media Awards’ outstanding breakthrough music artist. Her music has been featured on some of the biggest television series of the last few years, most recently the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That….

Oladokun, 30, is the youngest of this cohort. Her name is both prescient and redundant. She oozes energy that shifts a room’s center of gravity and makes you happy for it. It is charisma and she has it in spades. It’s the way she approaches her craft too. “The story and the emotion are first,” she tells me. “I want people to feel like they’re sitting across the table from me, talking about the past few months, or talking about that breakup. The emotion, the thought, the conclusion. Not a lot of fuss.” Last fall, as COVID was roaring back, I posted Oladokun’s “Look Up’’ on social media. People went nuts. There is something about her delivery, for sure. Her voice is honeyed, lilting like teacups at Disneyland. It is a New Age gospel song. No big riffs or exhaustive runs. No drum machines. But the heart of soul is there. Someone tweets at me that they have been in tears listening to it. “It could be a Negro spiritual for how I am crying,” they say.


Jacket by Bode; hair products by R+Co; makeup products by Face Atelier.PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES; SITTINGS EDITOR, NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

JOY OLADOKUN

ALBUM: In Defense of My Own Happiness
LINER NOTES: Inspired to first pick up a guitar after seeing a video of Tracy Chapman, the songwriter and self-proclaimed “sensitive stoner” writes music focused squarely on life as she learns to live it.


Like Russell, Oladokun came by her musical inheritance through a circuitous route. Her family is Nigerian American. She grew up in Casa Grande, Arizona, which is midway between Tucson and Phoenix. But like generations of Black American musicians, Oladokun’s musical training happened in church. The evangelical church, to be exact. She worked at the church and led music worship, until she could not sing the songs that did not recognize who she fully was. Today she is an out queer Black woman and can joke about that time in her life. “For a while, [my audience] was a lot of white Christian college girls. [My music] sounds like worship. I could play it at a coffee shop at Liberty [University].” I bend over laughing at the image of Oladokun laying down a deep soul-inflected groove for a bunch of conservative Christian, mostly white coeds at a university where they agree to a moral purity code. Still, it is not hard to imagine that it was difficult for her to leave.

“If I strip away all the political and the motivations that sometimes come with religion, especially in this country, and just go back to the basics of what attracted me to it, I love the idea of treating people well and being treated well,” says Oladokun. “I love the idea of taking care of the planet and taking my work just seriously enough that I can be proud of what I made at the end of the day, but not so seriously that I have no time to be with family or people that I care about.” Her love ethic also infuses her political critiques. On “I See America,” love supplants ego, making a concept song less preachy and imminently more enjoyable, and making hers unique. Even when she does a cover, like her ebullient take on the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” Oladokun never sounds like anyone but herself.

It takes a lot of courage and discernment to be one’s self. Amythyst Kiah’s path to breakout star is a case in point. Kiah, 35, grew up in Chattanooga as a Black girl who really liked rock music. The louder and harder, the better. There was a Scandinavian symphonic metal phase: “I’m very much melody first, even when I’m listening to metal—it has to be like melodic metal, like this band Nightwish…. The lead vocalist was an operatic soprano.” And there was a pop punk and alternative rock phase. She wonders out loud about the optics of her taste. “As a Black kid growing up in white suburbia, why is it weird that I like Blink-182 or Green Day? A huge majority of rock and roll is inspired by Black artists.” Inspired and created. That creation legacy is what ultimately brings Kiah to country music.

By 2018, Kiah had become a member of Our Native Daughters, a young group playing traditional music so antithetical to metal’s raging energy that it is colloquially called “old-time music.” Our Native Daughters should be remembered like the Trio albums by icons Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt. It is a Black supergroup that includes Giddens, Russell, and classically trained cellist Leyla McCalla. They put out their first album, Songs of Our Native Daughters, in 2019. “Up until working with Rhiannon and Leyla and Allison, I’d kind of adopted a ‘shut up and sing’ policy,” says Kiah. “I just kept [my opinions] to myself because I didn’t feel safe…. Having the opportunity to work with four other Black women who have all had very similar experiences, it was the first time I was able to discuss how I was feeling and somebody really understand what it feels to be there.”


Suit and tie by Elise Fife; tuxedo blouse by Giorgio Armani; hair products by Mizani; makeup products by Inglot.PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES; SITTINGS EDITOR, NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

AMYTHYST KIAH

ALBUM: Wary + Strange
LINER NOTES: An alum of East Tennessee State University’s Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Studies program, Kiah already has a Grammy nomination for penning “Black Myself” in 2020.


Kiah’s solo debut, Wary + Strange, features as full-throated an identity anthem as one can imagine: “Black Myself.” Making that song signified Kiah’s growth as a person as much as an artist. “Our Native Daughters really gave me the courage to write ‘Black Myself,’ the most confrontational song and specific song I’d ever written,” Kiah tells me. It was not just the song itself or even the very personal lyrics. It was merging her private self with her public image. As is often the case, it took a sisterhood for Kiah to own all the parts of herself.

Kiah is growing alongside her audience, owning her role leading her own band. “I’m going from doing mostly solo singer-songwriter stuff, maybe telling a few stories in between songs, to now, I’m playing with a really dynamic and exciting band that is absolutely rock and roll,” she says. It is a big deal for a young artist to take the helm creatively and onstage. Being in charge is part of the bigger story each of these artists is writing. Ultimately, only you can make your art. That requires radical authenticity.

Authentic storytelling is also at the heart of what Brittney Spencer creates. “I’m always telling a story, or I’m talking about something that I learned or observed or experienced down South,” Spencer says. “I think the art of storytelling is just beautiful.” A gifted writer and vocal powerhouse, Spencer, 33, is recording her first full album. But her singles “Sober & Skinny” and “Sorrys Don’t Work No More” already put her in enviable company—she joined Russell and Carlile on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2021. Like Russell, Spencer finds creative freedom in this genre. “That’s why I love country music,” she says. “You literally can write about anything. You can write about anything and you can make anything a story, because really everything has a story.”

Vulnerability weeps from all of Spencer’s performances. Even when the song is up-tempo, like “Damn Right You’re Wrong,” her vocal stylings do not rely more on emotion than acrobatics. It is like old-school soul in her careful attention to phrasing to evoke a feeling. Think about the way Lionel Richie enunciates “purpose” or Gladys Knight delivers the lyrics “I’d never no, no stop loving you.” But to be clear: Spencer isn’t a throwback artist. Her sound is modern and fresh. “Sober & Skinny” catapults a come-to-Jesus talk with a man into a delightful little earworm. “In a perfect world, you get sober, I get skinny / We live off of more than pennies,” she sings to an underwhelming boyfriend. Spencer’s willingness to puncture her own delusions as easily as she does those of a puffed-up partner is on full display. It is refreshing, especially amid all the empty bravado sucking up all the air in pop music. One hopes her bold honesty is contagious.


Dress by Eloquii; earrings by Jennifer Fisher; bracelet by Lisa Eisner Jewelry; hair products by Paul Mitchell; makeup products by Charlotte Tilbury.PHOTOGRAPH BY MIRANDA BARNES; SITTINGS EDITOR, NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

BRITTNEY SPENCER

EP: “Compassion”
LINER NOTES: The Baltimore native received the internet’s approval when her cover of The Highwomen’s “Crowded Table” led not only to viral notoriety but an invitation from the group to tour with them.


Adia Victoria does not have to hope for shit. Victoria, 35, who came out with her critically acclaimed third album, A Southern Gothic, last year, makes music on her own terms and asks for what she wants of the universe. Rolling Stone said the album “reclaims the Southern experience.” She also started her own podcast, Call & Response. (I have been a guest. Victoria is a nimble interviewer who might be gunning for more than Stephen Colbert’s musical guest slot.) And this year, she is touring North America and Europe.

In January 2022, Victoria tweeted Colbert, saying that as two South Carolinians (she from Spartanburg, outside Greenville, and he of James Island), they should get together on his late-night talk show: No more beating around the magnolia tree, “we are asking for what we want!” She comes by her boldness honestly. Raised in the Bible Belt, Victoria had her share of church hurt and good old-fashioned Southern racism. To survive, she learned to listen first to herself. Setting her own course has made her path rockier than it might have been, but she would not have had it any other way. “When I released my first record [Beyond the Bloodhounds] in 2016, I felt that the Americana Association was trying to co-opt me. So I wrote an open letter to the Americana Association. I mean, big old mouth from the South that I am. I basically told them, I’m not your Negro!”

Victoria had a sketchy path through school, choosing to instead enroll herself in a Black girl’s school of hard knocks. Some questionable relationships, routinely hotboxing the car with her friend Eric, traipsing up and down the interstate that connects Atlanta to Greenville. When Ronnie Spector died early this year, I realized who Victoria reminds me of. She is tough, yes. But it is scar tissue. As a teenager she nursed her pain with the blues after a friend left her a guitar. “Learning the blues was the first time that I did not feel stupid or crazy—because I knew I wasn’t dumb,” she said. “But I knew the intelligence that I had was not recognized by the Southern Christian world that I grew up in. So the blues allowed me, for the first time, autonomy.”

At its core, Victoria says her music is blues. “The blues for me, they were the original punk rock. They were able to stand outside of the system of mainstream mores and morals, and be comfortable there. That was my first, Oh, so I don’t have to change…. I don’t have to give up these parts of myself. I just got to figure out a way to be the orchestra leader of them.” She doesn’t mean the blues that caters to white audiences by offering them their singular approved version of a Black artist. She means music that troubles your spirit by reminding you that you have one.

All of them—Joy, Allison, Amythyst, Adia, Brittney—are asking for all of it. Their claim to contemporary country music reaches back before genres sliced culture into commodities, back to “the root of the thing,” as Angela Davis might say of country music’s glaring erasure of Black artistry. The root of the thing is the drum and the guitar that traveled with enslaved people across choppy waters, some to islands and others to colonized indigenous nations. It is a rhythm, yes. And a vocalization. It is a legacy of storytelling and survival. It is what soul music is at its very core. Whatever genre these artists choose, they are making music for the soul. It may have taken them some hard knocks to find it and a global crisis for me to find them. But theirs is clearly music for who we could be.

HAIR, MARZ COLLINS (OLADOKUN, VICTORIA), AUBREY HELLER (KIAH, RUSSELL), JADESTYLEZ (SPENCER); MAKEUP, AUBREY HELLER (KIAH, RUSSELL); MARZ COLLINS (ALL OTHERS). PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY VIRGINIA RIDGERS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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