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Amythyst Kia Inspired by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she
explains her ‘Southern Gothic’ tag to Colin Irwin
styles and I got into those bands. We’d prac- tise twice a week and start going to gigs – we even went to the Czech Republic to play a couple of bluegrass festivals over there. So that was my starting point really and I got asked to play solo shows here and there and it gradually built up.”
She’s been going out singing for the last ten years now and has plenty of anecdotes to prove it, listening and learning every inch of the way, embracing music, whatever its provenance, with an open mind.
much but delivered little, foundering and faltering amid an irritating avalanche of plaintive voices delivering tepid pseudo- Americana.
T And then up stepped Amythyst Kiah…
Instantly everything changed. She stood upright and proud, banging out a formidable rhythm on her guitar and, filling the stage with… well, presence… began to sing with a hidden strength, suppressed power and a rare command that enraptured the audience. Such was her commitment to the song, it was a while before the astonish- ing range of the material began to hit you. There was blues, country, bluegrass, Appalachian ballads, jazz and all states beyond. A “Southern Gothic, alt-country blues singer/songwriter” is how she likes to describe herself though – with a repertoire that shifts from Vera Hall’s blues classic Trouble So Hard (so familiar to Moby fans) through Dolly Parton covers and her own gritty compositions to Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees.
On stage she’s almost understated, her simmering strength communicating more through suggestion than the barrel-voiced delivery of which you know she’s capable; but offstage she’s different again, a wildfire of rapid chat, opinions, information and anecdotes. She talks of her adventures
he enterprising initiative to devote the first day of last summer’s Cam- bridge Folk Festival almost entirely to women performers promised
around Britain and her previous year’s Cam- bridge appearance at The Den; she tells you of performing at a Dolly Parton tribute show; she breaks into smiles recalling the journey to gigs in the Shetlands; she tells you all about her involvement with East Tennessee’s Old Time Pride Band and her own occasional Chest Of Glass band; she makes regular references to her admiration for Rhiannon Giddens (to whom she is sometimes compared) and she goes into overdrive discussing her musical back- ground and inspirations.
“When I was thirteen my parents bought me a guitar and it just kinda went from there. I listened to everything I could find. A lot of singer-songwriters and that whole anti-folk thing, people like Regina Spektor. I always liked fusion music and I even got into Scandinavian symphonic metal – I listened to everything I possibly could.”
She was still at High School when her mother died and one of her first serious attempts at writing was the song she wrote to sing at the funeral, a cathartic experi- ence that gave her the confidence to do more. Moving to Johnson City at nineteen, she went on to study at East Tennessee State University, got into traditional music, studied bluegrass, played rhythm guitar in a Celtic rock band and – intrigued by old- time music – fell in love with the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
“With old-time music you might be talking about an a capella ballad or a fiddle or banjo tune, it’s just so open to different
“I find the history and evolution of black people in American music fascinating. I had classes in American folk music with Ted Olson and one of the things he talked about was the way the story of Appalachian music is typically told by outsiders and assumed to be all about Anglo-Saxon descendants living in the mountains and the music is ascribed to them only. But that’s a very short-sighted, one-dimensional view. Look at people in Appalachia and you find people of German descent, African-American descent, Hispanic descent… there’s a whole range of things left out. And then I heard what the Carolina Chocolate Drops were doing…”
“What I really liked about them was the fact that it didn’t matter about genre or who’d done a song originally – if they liked it, they’d take it and make it their own. I found that really inspiring. And of course I love Rhiannon’s voice. She’s classically trained and sometimes when you have that background and try to do stuff from the oral tradition you end up missing the mark – there’s a fine line you have to walk as an interpreter of traditional music. But she exe- cutes it in a believable way. That’s some- thing I try to do as well. Not that I’m classi- cally trained or anything, apart from a little classical guitar in high school. I listen to peo- ple like early Nina Simone and the tech- nique and technical prowess they had and try to channel that energy into what I do.”
nd where does this ‘Southern Gothic’ description you ascribe to yourself come from? “It was actu- ally inspired by a Spotify playlist I was listening to. It was called Southern Gothic and it was all sorts of music with a lot of minor key stuff and songs that dealt with death, unrequited love and isolation and great stories and I really relate to those kinds of songs and the description just seemed to represent what I do.”
A And what do you ultimately want to do Amythyst?
“Inspire people…”
amythystkiah.com
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