Although she claimed to be still a bit jet lagged after her journey from Johnston City, Tennessee, via Glasgow (where she played at Celtic Connections a few nights ago) Amythyst Kiah still had an arresting stage presence tonight. The small audience in the Oh Yeah Centre in Belfast’s buzzing Cathedral Quarter seemed to be familiar with her work, and she had fond remembrances of her first gig here in 2022. She probably first came to prominence to wider audiences as part of the Our Native Daughters project, with Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, but prior to this she had graduated from East Tennessee State University's prestigious Bluegrass, Old Time & Country Music Studies degree.
She launched straight into songs from her current album, 2024’s STILL + BRIGHT, accompanying herself initially on her open back banjo, played frailing style. I Will Not Go Down features Billy Strings on the album version, but Kiah’s solo version was no less powerful tonight, a song of defiance with some Gothic horror thrown in. ‘If I’m to be left all alone/I’ll kill the beast all on my own’. S P A C E is a plea to be allowed to explore one’s psychological issues as a normal part of existing, and Kiah explained how she felt the need to suppress these things when she was young, but no longer. Comfortable on stage, her between song banter was illuminating, her explanations of the background to her songs made them all the more powerful. Switching to her acoustic Vintage Gibson guitar, she told us of her deep interest in the cosmic horror genre and it infuses many of the songs she performs tonight, including Gods Under The Mountain, Die Slowly Without Complaint and Silk and Petals.
Before performing Empire of Love, Kiah gave us some background about her upbringing in Johnson City Tennessee, where she felt out of place, for obvious reasons, but she decided to stay, and has since ‘found her tribe’ and is happy there even though she has rejected the faith that has given rise to the Bible Belt moniker of the American South. She still appreciates the folk music that she turned to while she was in denial after a personal tragedy at 17, hence the rendition of Darlin’ Corey, concerning that ‘moonshining, banjo playing, gun toting’ legendary female. Her next cover version was of Lady Gaga song, Game of Love, which demonstrated how Kiah is as influenced by popular culture as she is by the Appalachian traditions which she is also immersed in. A muscular version of the folk standard In The Pines is followed by Play God and Destroy the World.
Explaining that she had used alcohol for years to avoid facing the aforementioned trauma that occurred during her teens, she performed three songs all on this theme - Hangover Blues, Firewater and Greendays’ Hitchin’ A Ride. She is open about the fact that through therapy she has faced those demons and is now in a good place, which is very obvious to all tonight. Her final cover song is her version of Vera Hall’s well known 1937 song, Trouble So Hard, which was recently used in the Netflix series, The Abandoned. She bid us goodbye with perhaps her best known song, the Grammy nominated Black Myself, which she points out is essentially about freedom for all, not just her black demographic.
The opening act was local Belfast man, Carl Devlin, who not only is a proficient blues guitarist influenced by Robert Johnston, Blind Willie McTell etc, but he is also researching the link between Irish music and the blues, and the Alan Lomax collection. He performed a fascinating version of Goodnight Irene as gaeilge (in Irish)! We’ll be watching that project with interest.
Review and photo by Eilís Boland