Amythyst Kiah returned to her roots to perform at Tipton Gallery on Oct. 2 via Zoom and with a limited live audience.
Kiah graduated from ETSU in 2012 with a degree in bluegrass, old time, and country music studies. This was her first time performing at the university post-graduation, and it was the final part of the “Black Diaspora: From Africa to Appalachia to Affrilachia, Reclaiming History, Memory and Place” series.
Karlota Contreras-Koterbay, director of the Slocumb Galleries, described her performance as an important part of representation for students and viewers as a female, bluegrass musician of color and member of the LGBT community.
“She has this really strong presence in the industry because she represents a lot of minority communities that are either stereotyped or discriminated against or just not given enough opportunities for their potential,” said Contreras-Koterbay. “She was one of those who was given an opportunity to shine. She is like a pride for our region, a pride for our country, really.”
Both Contreras-Koterbay and exhibit curator Lyn Govette spent years trying to bring Kiah to Slocumb Galleries, but it was not until a few months ago when Govette reached out that plans began to fall into place.
“Over the past three years, we have done a particular exhibit focusing on Black artists and connected it with up with the Umoja festival that normally happens in downtown Johnson City to celebrate Black artists,” Govette said. “She rounds out the whole exhibit; it makes it about the whole community. It is about visual artists, the spoken word artists. The poets that we have in it and the music is just yet another piece of art to take out to the community.”
During her set, she performed several songs on banjo and acoustic guitar, including some off of “Songs of Our Native Daughters”, which was a group collaboration with Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Rhiannon Giddens. She gave songwriting background before every song, including one anecdote about how her studies at ETSU influenced her career.
“One of the very first bands I heard was a band called The Carter Family,” said Kiah. “The Carter was and did end up being a pretty big influence, and I thought that would be an important piece of history to know. … I ended up writing one that was definitely inspired by the Carter Family. It is called ‘The Ballad of Lost’.”
Kiah closed with her Grammy-nominated song “Black Myself”, in which she captures 400 years of history in three minutes, including the Transatlantic slave trade and its repercussions.
“Writing such a specific and confrontational song is not something I would have done before, because I did not want to do the same thing to people that they had done to me,” Kiah said. “This is something that needs to be able to be talked about and recognized and all heal from it.”
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