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- September 30, 2021
The blues is one of America’s most storied musical traditions. From the pioneering compositions of W.C. Handy and early hits of Ma Rainey to Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and on to the Rolling Stones (not Americans, but playing American music) and James Brown, the blues has run through much of the nation’s popular and vernacular music for over a century.
Nashville singer-songwriter Adia Victoria is but the most recent product of this storied tradition. Emerging from the ascendent Americana scene, which unites the Blues with other intertwined American musical traditions like Country, Folk, and Soul, Victoria has earned praises such as the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s Holly Prize in the lead up to her third album, A Southern Gothic.
Victoria wrote and recorded much of the record in Paris in late 2019 and the early part of 2020, and she surrounded herself in the recordings of Alan Lomax, who spent much of the 20th century traveling the south creating field recordings of local blues performers, discovering many of the genre’s greats (including Lead Belly and Muddy Waters) and forming the basis of blues scholarship.
Teaming up with co-producer Mason Hickman, Victoria created a set of songs that start with the blues and move outward, reckoning with the complicated and painful history of the south and bringing the style’s meaning from that era into the present day. She brings to light hidden corners of the blues tradition and American music as a whole, reintroducing old instruments and connecting to old tropes.
The record opens with “Magnolia Blues” an atmospheric number driven by banjo and guitar, with mandolin chops as well. Although banjo is traditionally associated with country music, and bluegrass, in particular, it was once a staple of the blues, appearing on records by figures like Ma Rainey and Charley Patton, (who had a song of the same name). “Magnolia Blues” references and implies the blues changes, but it doesn’t state them outright – the chords are always lurking just beneath the surface, much like many of the troubling themes that Victoria considers. Victoria’s chorus – I’m gonna plant myself under a magnolia,” seems to recall the tremendous violence done against Black Americans in such locales, but she flips it to find a new and redemptive meaning by pledging her continued allegiance to the Carolina region that she calls home.
This redeployment of old tropes is similarly present on “You Was Born To Die,” one of the strongest tracks on the record. A veritable Americana all-star meet-up featuring guest vocals from Kyshona Armstrong and acclaimed country singer Margo Price, as well as a guitar solo from genre leader Jason Isbell. One of the few songs to fully adhere to the traditional 12-bar-blues form, “You Was Born to Die” is a stomping number with overdriven slide guitar lines and rich vocal harmonies. It takes old tropes of delta and rural blues lyrics, such as the chorus refrain, and lines like “I know a black woman, she used to live around” (knowing/having women in town was a common phrase of singers like Lightnin’ Hopkins) to a new song. The song places itself firmly in the tradition of delta blues songs but sounds decidedly modern through its production and arrangement.
A Southern Gothic is far more atmospheric than any other significant blues record, at times almost calling to mind the rootsy but experimental aura that Daniel Lanois conjured for the likes of Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris in the 1990s. This sonic palette is notable on “Far From Dixie,” which pairs distinctly a minimalist arrangement and effects-laden production with a rolling backbeat indicative of its 21st-century origins. In contrast to the album’s central theme, this is one of a handful of “leaving home” songs that find Victoria struggling to come to terms with the more troubling aspects of southern life and choosing instead to get away. She envisions the south as a lover or partner from whom she has to get away but will always remain connected to; the largest clue comes in the second verse with mention of her neighbors, who keep an omnipresent suspicion hidden beneath the veneer of southern manners and sweetness. The fuzziness of the production compliments her emotional ambiguity and the uncertainty of her situation, only increasing as the song threatens to collapse in on itself in a ball of wordless feedback during its second half.
Despite this desire to leave, Victoria ultimately decides to come back to her familiar home on the closing numbers “Carolina Bound” and “South for the Winter,” a duet with Matt Berninger of the National. With these numbers, she laments her suffering in unfamiliar cities and the frigid north, deciding to choose the comfort of home and the world that she knows instead of one where she feels like an outsider.
