Adia Victoria’s Blues

Adia Victoria is a southern gothic blues poet, musician, and story teller from South Carolina.

Victoria’s music was quick to resonate with the world. In 2015 Rolling Stone featured her as one of “10 New Artists You Need to Know.” The Village Voice called her an “eerie, intriguing songwriter,” with “bone chilling guitar riffs and lyrics topped with candid scorn.”

In 2016 Vogue highlighted Victoria as one of “5 Beauties Who Answer to Afropunk’s Rebellious Call,” although Victoria was quick to point out that she doesn’t like to be “fetishized” for her looks.

In 2020 Victoria released the song “South Gotta Change.” About the song, Victoria writes, “‘South Gotta Change’ is a prayer, an affirmation, and a battle cry all at once. It is a promise to engage in the kind of ‘good trouble’ John Lewis understood necessary to form a more perfect union. No other place embodies the American experiment with the precision of the South. It is home to both unspeakable horror and unshakable faith. It is up to us, those who are blessed enough to be Southern, to take up the mantle Brother Lewis left us. As the old saying goes, ‘As the South goes, so goes the nation.’”

“South Gotta Change” was produced by T Bone Burnett and inspired by the late Congressman John Lewis.

An essay written by Victoria in 2020 explores the ties between memory, nostalgia, and the way white supremacy is branded and whitewashed.

When one of her white friends said he was going to miss Aunt Jemima’s smiling face on his breakfast table, singer-songwriter Adia Victoria wrote a response to the sticky-sweet problem of nostalgia. Read Victoria’s essay, “The Creature Comfort of Aunt Jemima” at The Bitter Southerner, bittersoutherner.com/southern-perspective/2020/the-creature-comfort-of-aunt-jemima-adia-victoria.

With her release of “A Southern Gothic” in 2021, Victoria continues to find ways to center the narratives of Black Southern people through a lens of dark and light, love and loathing.

Just last month, a film crew for a new PBS series hosted by Rhiannon Giddens spent time in Tryon, NC, filming Giddens and Victoria for an episode centered around their shared love of Nina Simone, and other aspects of Adia’s upbringing in nearby Spartanburg, SC.

The new series, “My Music with Rhiannon Giddens” premieres May of 2023 on PBS. Follow Adia Victoria at www.facebook.com/adiavictoria.