IT’S EASY to forget, in its current whitewashed and sterilized state, that blues music used to be dark and dangerous. From Robert Johnson’s hellhounds to Geeshie Wiley’s buzzards, there was a time, many decades ago, when blues was the devil’s music. Adia Victoria knows about those blues.
On her debut single, 2014’s “Stuck in the South,” Victoria plays a swampy blues riff on her electric guitar and sings, “I don’t know much about Southern belles/But I can tell you something ’bout Southern hell.” Last year, she released her first full-length, Beyond the Bloodhounds. While she still finds herself embedded in the South, Victoria now speaks as someone who escaped, briefly, and returned as though she were drawn back by some unfinished business.
Victoria was born in South Carolina, then lived in New York City and Paris for a spell. She eventually headed back south—first to Atlanta, then to Nashville, where she’s lived for the last seven years. In the two years between her first EP and Beyond the Bloodhounds, Victoria toured extensively, developed a wider-ranging array of sounds, and grew more comfortable as a songwriter.