With blues as her birthright, musician Adia Victoria, a proud Spartanburg, South Carolina, native (who has been living in Nashville since 2010), has infused the atmosphere of Blue Ridge magic into her must-hear third album, A Southern Gothic.
Recorded in Paris, France, and Nashville, the songs take you on a sonic travelogue—one replete with both the longing and lauding of the place that shaped her, as well as an exploration of how she had to leave it (for Europe and New York City), all through her stellar songwriting and haunting vocals. She’s a critic’s darling, was the opening act to Jason Isbell’s tour in January, and made former president Barack Obama’s Favorite Music of 2021.
Of all the many interviews you’ve done, do you think I might be one of the only people who has actually ever been to Campobello, where you used to live?
I’d reckon. I moved from Greenville at the beginning of 2008 to Atlanta, right when the recession started. That was the last time I lived in South Carolina, unfortunately. I’m actually trying to get my way back there.
It’s changed a lot, too, in all those years. A lot of people leave their hometowns and they either forget it, or pretend like it didn’t exist or disparage it, and you have written a love letter to it with this album it seems.
I feel like my relationship with the South, and especially South Carolina, has been a hard-won one, and as my relationship with myself grows, I’m able to grow in my appreciation for the land that I grew up on, that fed me. It’s where I first looked around at the world and knew that I wanted to distill it into art. The more honest I’ve become with myself of who am I and where I’m from, it makes me want to turn my gaze back and look more honestly and unflinchingly where I grew up and where I was born.
Nashville can be a bit like Russian roulette for a musician, but it’s clear that the town has embraced you. The artists you’re playing with, people like Jason Isbell and Margo Price, are on your record, and Mickey Guyton and Brandi Carlile are on your Instagram liking stuff. How did that all roll out?
One of my saving graces was that I didn’t come here to be a star. I was living in Atlanta before I got here. I was working as a telemarketer, a high school drop out . . . I dropped out of Mauldin High School. I was fortunate enough that I attended the Fine Arts Center in Greenville. I studied contemporary ballet there under Jan Woodward and the director at the time, Dr. Fluher, was one of the few adults who told me, ‘There is something to you—you are an artist.’ He validated me in a way that I carried with me throughout my twenties. When I got to Nashville, I got there on a Greyhound bus with a cat and a guitar. I met people through my music. I’m terrible at networking—I’d rather just my art be my calling card, and I think I carry that Carolina spirit with me of just like, I’m not here to be a star, I have stories to tell. I grew up in the South and that’s what I’m going to do. The fact that I’ve met so many amazing people over the course of my decade here has been really gratifying, but I’m glad I got to meet them on my terms in a way that was honest, and it was through us recognizing art in one another.
The cover of A Southern Gothic is a photo of you when you were five-years-old. Looking at where you are and what you’ve done so far, what would you tell that little five-year-old Adia?
I put that picture that my Grandma Betty Ann took of me at my aunt’s house, and that girl knew she had a story to tell. She was confident in it—you can see that in my face. I feel like I lost that along the way, but the only thing that I would tell that little girl would be ‘You were right. You were right, thank you.’
Walk me through your ongoing connection with Paris. It’s been a big part of your life.
Paris is a city that I’ve been visiting since I was 18. The last tour that we wrapped before Covid, we were opening up for Calexico and Iron and Wine in Europe, and the final show was in Paris in November of 2019. I have a few collaborators there, and we just went to the studio. I had a book of Eudora Welty short stories, and I just found this song come out of me, which would be the song “My Oh My” on A Southern Gothic. Mason Hickman, who is a fellow South Carolinian and my creative partner and fiancé, and I flew back to the States, and then I decided to go back to Paris on a writing trip from January to February 2020. The plan was to go back in spring and finish it up and then the pandemic hit, so Mason and I finished the record here in Nashville while sending tracks to our partners in Paris. So this record is as much a love letter to South Carolina as it is to Paris, which been an artistically fruitful place for me.
What’s harder to learn: French or the guitar?
They’re challenging in different ways, but I feel like learning one has helped me with the other, because it forces my brain to think past its limitations, to move in new directions. So I would say that learning French helped me be a better guitar player, and learning guitar helped me be a better French speaker.
When you think about the idea of strong Southern women, like your mom and your Grandma Betty Ann, what have you learned from them?
I’ve watched these women grow older and graduate out of the roles that our society had for women—Black women in the South, especially—and how they found a sense of purpose outside of what they were told they were. They grew to be larger later in life than what they even believed that they could be. So watching them grow old, it’s been an honor to get to know them in a more honest, vulnerable way. As they grow older, they start navigating all these parts of themselves that they did not have access to as younger women. My Grandma Betty Ann, she began painting when my grandfather, whom she was married to for 50 years, passed away, and my mother found a new chapter of her life here in Nashville as a community activist and organizer. It allows me to look forward with hope to challenge myself and to remain curious about myself, and to retain a sense of wonder and awe about what I am capable of.
Your song “Magnolia Blues” captures the poignancy of the way you see a magnolia tree. It means something different to you than when most people see it.
During the pandemic at my mother’s house in Nashville, I was housebound. Outside of my window there was a magnolia tree that obscures everything else from view, and I was forced to interact with it. I thought for me, growing up in Spartanburg, the magnolia was the place where all the young girls in my neighborhood would gather underneath its shade in the summer and allow ourselves to create worlds and be visionaries and artists and creators. I knew I had a relationship with that tree that had empowered me to become what I was today, and so I wanted to reclaim what the magnolia stood for and also disrupt a lot of Southern iconography and emblems that have stood as a way to whitewash the difficult truths about the dirt of this place. A lot of the times during the pandemic when I would find myself anxious, I would go walk underneath the magnolia tree barefoot in the backyard, and I would feel that dirt and recenter myself and my Southern identity.
What do you want people to know about the blues?
The blues keeps moving. The blues is alive in Southern Black culture today. The blues is not just a lick that Eric Clapton can play on the guitar. That the blues is Southern Black folks’ greatest contribution to American culture. That the blues can save lives.
Learn more about Adia Victoria and check out upcoming tour dates at adiavictoria.com.
Photograph by Derek Batt
