Wary and StrangeCast-Iron Pansexual

Abstract

When I was invited to write an album review for this issue, I perused several volumes of JAS media reviews. Many thoughtful and well-written reviews highlighted albums readily legible as “Appalachian” through repertoire, style, and genre. Reflecting on this issue's focus on queerness, I decided to cover the work of two artists whose work invites audiences to listen carefully to the subtleties and nuances of queerness in and from the region. Yet both, in their own ways, also elide, bend, and “queer” canonic styles, genres, and aesthetics commonly associated with Appalachia and Appalachian studies.Over the past decade, Amythyst Kiah's work has implicitly centered the sounds and voices of African American musicians elided in canonic “Appalachian” music, while subtly opening space for queer performance and listening. Born in Chattanooga and an alumnus of East Tennessee State University's Bluegrass program and Old-Time Pride Band, Kiah's debut acoustic album Dig (self-released 2012) curated a “southern gothic” aesthetic that spanned traditional Appalachian ballads to songs by Dink Roberts and Son House. Here, Kiah's covers of these songs and her original tunes frequently invite queer readings through ambiguous representations of gender and narratives that subtly avoid heteronormative tropes. Her second album, Amythyst Kiah & Her Chest of Glass (Soul Step Records 2017), pushes these avenues further, using an electric blues and rock and roll sound (inspired by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) to re-invigorate tunes by Veera Hall (for example, “Troubles So Hard”), and less opaquely queer lyrics in Kiah's original songs like “Wildebeest.”An album comprised of original material, Wary and Strange (2021) more stridently articulates these intersectional priorities through new facets of Kiah's genre-bending sound. Kiah's Grammy nominated “Black Myself” signals the album's bolder songwriting through an anthem of black feminist resilience, liberation, and solidarity. Originally written and recorded for the acoustic roots Songs of Our Native Daughters project (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings 2019), Kiah's electrified and pop-produced version on Wary and Strange infuses the anthem with new energy and urgency. These political overtones resonate with more subtle songs that critique empty political rhetoric (“Soapbox”) as well as complacency in contemporary Western culture (“Fancy Drones [Fracture Me]”). However, Kiah continues to open space for queerness in narratives about relationships through including a country-influenced song about unrequited love (“Ballad of the Lost”) and rock ballads that address the difficulties of ending a fraught relationship (“Sleeping Queen” and “Opaque”). In these songs and others (“Firewater” and “Wild Turkey”), Kiah squarely addresses the importance of attending to mental health, particularly unresolved trauma.A self-proclaimed non-binary country singer based in northeast Tennessee, Adeem the Artist's 2021 album Cast-Iron Pansexual presents a similar queer ethic and politics. As an experienced singer-songwriter whose recorded output spans a decade and nearly as many styles, Cast-Iron Pansexual represents a more recent turn toward queerness in their work. Adeem explains in the album's visually and poetically beautiful lyric ’zine that they wrote the songs while reading gender theory, reflecting on their sexuality, and exploring their “divine femininity” in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, 1). This led to their coming out as non-binary and “drifting with the waters pace towards wholeness” (Adeem 2021, 1).In this spirit, most songs on Cast-Iron Pansexual work through unacknowledged and unarticulated queer experiences and desires. The album's lead track “I Never Came Out” describes not having words to say you're “not straight or gay” in order to reflect on recognizing and overcoming internalized misogyny. While personal, inward-facing reflections on gender and sexuality permeate the album (“Apartment,” “Honeysuckle Hipbilly Homoerotica”), Adeem's songs leverage commentaries on social, cultural, and political norms in contemporary Appalachia and the South. Sentiments about religion and spirituality range from ambivalence and gender-bending re-imagination (“Fervent for the Hunger”) to slapstick queer humor (“Going to Heaven”). “I Wish You Would've Been a Cowboy” moves beyond the parody the title implies, to launch a critique of masculinity and nationalism in both Toby Keith's music and the politics of early 2000s commercial country music. The album's titular track delivers the most direct political statement within an already queer Appalachian world replete with interdimensional pansexuals, Marxists, a restaurant where you don't pay anything, tarot readings, and plenty of barbeque and cornbread. However, accompanied by pithy banjo picking, the song's final verse calls for a “radical movement towards equity (and justice) to dismantle white supremacy entirely, brick by brick, by hand, together.”The works of Amythyst Kiah and Adeem the Artist stand out for constructing musically compelling spaces that call listeners to imagine and build intersectional queer solidarities, healing, community, and activism. Their albums also implicitly ask us to listen to the numerous queer musicians and performers in the region who work within and against narrow definitions of Appalachia and, in so doing, re-imagine queerness more expansively.