Dig by Amythyst Kiah

As host of this week's Album of the Week I offer an introduction to my featured album "Dig" by musician and songwriter Amythyst Kiah

In her book “South to America-A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation” author and professor Imani Perry writes “I can’t begin at the beginning because there isn’t one beginning to the United States . . . There are so many birth dates: 1492, 1520, 1619, 1776, 1804, 1865, 1954, 1964, 1965. The result now, after centuries, is a fractured American people: children of the colonized, colonizers, enslaved, marginal, poor, wealth, exploitive, White, Black, shades of brown citizens, fugitives running from the law. People with jobs but no papers, people with papers but no door or mattress. The American way is what has been bequeathed to us all in unequal measure.”

It is this America, in the South, that is the home of Amythyst Kiah. A graduate of East Tennessee State University, her home county in Tennessee is within a short drive to the county of my great-grandparents and my families ancestral home in the Smoky Mountains. My dad recalls, as a young boy, attending family reunions at the family farm and seeing Klan robes hanging in a barn. One can only speculate how my ancestors might have interacted with Kiah’s great-grandparents.

In her first album “Dig” Amethyst Kiah writes about growing up and existing in a country of “unequal measure.”