“Want me to keep my cool,” Larysa Jaye sang over a dogged blues-rock guitar riff on the 2020 live recording of her song, “Nobody Wanna Hear It.” “And keep it calm for the people / Want me to keep it lowkey.” Then she made an indignant observation: “Funny how it falls on me.”
“Well,” she went on, her voice rising then, “if you’re scared of my skin, I’d hate for you to read my mind / I’m a mad Black woman on the mic and I ain’t gonna stop this time.”
Then she barreled right into the hook: “But nobody wanna hear it.”
She was boldly and skillfully distilling the expectation that she, a Black woman, must perform the emotional labor of making herself unobtrusive and compliant. What a potent, and rocking, country song that is.
For an artist with a couple decades of performing under her belt, Jaye — who died in a car crash over the weekend — left behind a relatively small catalog of independent releases, including that one. Altogether, that body of work tells a story — of a sense of conviction that remained undimmed despite her lack of access to music industry resources, and of her rejection of artificially imposed limits. The songs she did release showcased a strong voice and point-of-view, unfettered in what it could express, and how.
But even that is an incomplete excerpt of Jaye’s story. She grew up in Kansas City, Kansas in the lineage, she told me in an interview, of the county’s first free, documented Black residents. She finished high school in Nashville, and a few years later started seeking out stages where she could share the songs she was writing.
“I finally decided to take my guitar out of my bedroom and go let somebody else hear them for once,” was how she put it.
In the early 2000s, locally founded promotion company Lovenoise was putting on the one open mic she’d heard of that was a space for Black performers, even if its focus was neo-soul, conscious hip-hop and spoken word. So that’s where she went, singing five or six Sunday nights in a row, until Lovenoise organizers began offering her real shows.
“I don’t know if I ever felt like I found a home for what I do,” Jaye mused. “I feel like a popular loner. But I respect Lovenoise, because they did take a chance on something that was a little out of the box and not just the basic, you know, R&B singer. That helped gave me a sense of validation. Knowing that there was people that believed in what I did gave me another light to forge ahead a little further.”
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Her pursuit of a music career was interrupted by becoming a mom to four kid, but she wasn’t about to stop. She wanted them to see her persevere in realizing her dreams. Once she sent me an Instagram reel of her young daughter Sydney singing along with “Nobody Wanna Hear It.” Jaye had posted it not just because it was cute, but because it was proof of her progeny taking in the lessons.
Another of Jaye’s songs, “The Thoughts That Happen,” meaningfully expanded on the classic country theme of idealized mothers and motherly devotion. It’s the truthful disclosure of a single mother, a Black mother, carrying a whole world of expectations and responsibilities on her shoulders.
Jaye did her Nashville dues-paying several times over, going wherever the gigs were. She served as musical director for the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, played for travelers at the airport and earned a residency at Justin Timberlake’s Twelve Thirty Club, in the tourist district that hasn’t always been hospitable to performers of color. She excitedly told me, “I’m pretty sure I’m the only black woman with a residency down on Broadway. Down in the honky-tonk. That’s freaking dope.”
Much of that involved stocking hours-long sets with familiar material, but, Jaye emphasized, the musicians who accompanied her couldn’t just skate by, doing the hits the way they’d heard them before.
“I play the songs in my interpretation,” she said. “Whether it’s country, whether it’s R&B, whether it’s soul, whether it’s pop, it’s going to be a Larysa rendition.”
By which she meant wholesale reinvention.
In some ways, Jaye was spiritually akin to Tina Turner, ahead of her time in her understanding of country music’s storytelling potential, and how to heighten its emotional stakes with rock & roll muscularity and the testifying depth of soul. Jaye’s version of country was thrillingly unbounded and emotionally astute, not stuck in waxing nostalgic for the good old days and ways, but powerfully depicting the strain, risk and tension of life.
None of the recordings that Jaye put out in her lifetime fully captured what she could do. It’s a fortunate thing that there are numerous live clips floating around. I keep coming back to one that was filmed in a tiny club with a full band earlier this year. On one level, the lyrics she’s singing in it fixate on an object of desire in ways that we’ve heard before. But it’s also a song about how profound a grown-up appetite itself can be. Reaching the chorus, she attacks the repeating melodic figure in a rough, raspy timbre, then slips down the notes’ curvature with sensual control. Boy, had I been looking forward to what she might do with a studio version.
Just in the last several years, coalitions and initiatives aimed at diversifying country and roots music had partially caught up to Jaye. She took part in Black Opry shows and in the Academy of Country Music’s On Ramp program, and embraced being part of a scene, a magnetic presence in the midst of solidarity. That’s another way that she was making her mark on the city. And in Black Opry lineups, she was finally getting opportunities to tour beyond it.
Jaye had just celebrated her 40th birthday when she passed. Last year, I’d asked her what else she was working toward, what ambitions she still wanted to realize. “I do music full-time,” she reminded me. “I perform full-time. I love being in front of an audience. That’s what I do.”
“So, bigger and better.” Then the artist who often spoke at a darting and dizzying pace, keeping up with the quickness of her mind, found herself at a loss. “I’m going to start… I don’t even know.” All along, she’d been improvising her path, and hacking her way down it, far removed from how musical success is typically measured in Nashville. She’d already defined, for herself, what it meant to be a country performer of consequence.
A fundraiser has been set up for Larysa Jaye’s memorial costs.
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