It takes a minute to understand what’s really going on in “Elephants,” track one on Legacy, the fourth full-length album by Nashville’s Kyshona. Why is she opening a record about her family history and the erasure of African American roots with a song about famously smart and empathic pachyderms? “Our skin is thick,” she sings, “But greed still pricks.” And the allegory, bolstered by utterly rapturous music tinged with voices and beats of Mother Africa, comes at you like an emotional shove in the chest.
“This is my people's story,” Kyshona says in Episode 290 of The String. The song was first inspired by a documentary about elephants - their resilience, memory, and sociology. “This sounds like the experience of Black people on this land, you know? And it feels tribal. You know, elephants are so smart and so strong, and that they were hunted down for this one little piece of value that they had. So that song represents my ancestors whose names I may never know.”
“Elephants” makes a remarkable start to Legacy, but Kyshona’s creative and perceptive approach to her place in the world, as a Black woman, as a child of South Carolina, as an inheritor of gospel tradition, grips our attention all the way through the dulcet folk of its closing song “Covered.” Because the artist, as we learned in this 2021 Q&A, is a professional music therapist who’s been weaving that aspect of her background into her work and her touring. She told me on this visit that she thinks of her calling above all, as storyteller/healer. And that ethos pervades her natural musicality, her sonorous and affectionate voice, and a keen sense of lyric.
Legacy came into focus after Kyshona spent the Covid stasis doing more research into her family history than she’d ever done. She saw the responsibility being passed down to her. “I have two aunts on both sides of my family that have always been the family historians. They've kept the records for years, and the two of them are in their 80s,” she says. “I realized when the elders pass on, the houses sit empty and there's nowhere for us to gather anymore. It's extra work to get the family to gather together again. So I started just asking.” She found cassette tapes made by a grandfather that became found-sound moments and interludes on Legacy. And she took advantage of free genealogy support from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. “I wanted to find a way for my nieces and nephew to know their family history, since we don't gather like we used to. So I was like, maybe if I put them in song, they can learn something,” she says.
Kyshona comes from a small town in SC on the outskirts of Columbia, where she participated in a range of musical influences, including some striking and personal ties to southern gospel. Her college years took her to the University of Georgia in Athens, where she studied oboe and discovered the field of music therapy. In her decade in Nashville, she released the debut album Go in 2014, followed by The Ride two years later. But it was her album Listen, released in Feb. of 2020 that earned her breakthrough attention and acclaim. Though it was released before the pandemic shut us all down and before the murder of George Floyd and the uprising that followed, the album seemed made for the moment. It had a strong point of view that was both fierce and justice-minded but also constructive and open-hearted.
Even before Listen came out though, Kyshona was a valued member of the indie Nashville songwriting community. Her co-authors on the new album alone included Aaron Lee Tasjan, Caroline Spence, Brittney Spencer and Shannon LaBrie, who joined the effort on “Elephants.” In this hour, Kyshona talks about the value she places on her community and her professional network, including her producer on Legacy Rachel Moore, who was the subject of discussion recently on this show when I interviewed Dave and John from Chatham County Line. Rachel’s a veteran of T Bone Burnett’s world who’s more and more visible in Americana space.
So as you can tell, this is a wide ranging talk with a woman who approaches what she does with a desire and a plan to leave the world a bit wiser and kinder than she found it.