As Jackie Venson told us, “Blues is the roots and everything else is the fruits.” Venson, Texas-born and unafraid to shred, creates soulful blues-pop that strips rock music to its ancestral commonplace. But in doing so, she incorporates aspects of modernity found sometimes too inaccessibly throughout instrumented genres today.
In Venson’s case, however, such modernity is an afterthought, her intelligence in blues storming the foreground of her musical battlefield.
This can be seen in her newest single, “Cover My Eyes,” premiered exclusively at Flaunt. The song stands as a follow-up to her 2017 EP _Transcends_ and showcases one simple fact: Blues isn’t dead, no matter how much we try to attribute it to the past.
But Venson doesn’t seem to feel she’s recording amid a dead genre. “Blues has always been an evolving genre,” she said. “So in order to play blues in the 21st century, one must further evolve the genre.”
_Venson was featured in a mural in East Austin, Texas, honoring Black History Month_
She continues, “It’s always necessary to go back to ones roots in the real pursuit of mastery.” And her music is atonement of just that. She pushes blues into a new realm, one impossible for the greats before her. “I’m using technology, electronic instruments, and looping, but at the core of it I’m still playing instruments.”
Venson began her quest to perpetuate blues at age 16, learning to play piano and immediately writing songs. “When I switched to guitar at 21, I began to write on it as soon as I was able to play a few chords.”
And so, her blues were born. “The rest is history,” she said.
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Photographs by: Ismael Quintanilla III
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