February 23rd, 2021

Brittany Howard is an American Rock Star. Her work as a solo artist has earned her 7 Grammy Award nominations, as well as 4 wins from 9 nominations as part of Alabama Shakes. She has sold millions of albums in the US.

Howard was born on October 2, 1988, in Athens, Alabama, a city of some twenty-six thousand people, about halfway between Nashville and Birmingham. During the Civil War, Athens was briefly occupied by Union forces, and Colonel John Basil Turchin gave his troops tacit permission to ransack the area, telling them, “I shut my eyes for two hours, I see nothing.” Less than a century later, Athens was the birthplace of Don Black, the founder of the neo-Nazi Web site Stormfront and a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Originally a cotton town, it became a railroad town. In 1974, the Tennessee Valley Authority opened the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, at the time one of the largest nuclear-power plants in the world, nearby. “I grew up swimming right behind a power plant, man,” Howard said. “We all did.”

Howard started singing when she was three years old. Her great-uncle played bluegrass, and he often invited musicians over to jam in his woodshop. “I came in there one night, and they handed me a microphone,” Howard said. “I remember all these grown country men, laughing and being entertained and giving me so much attention. I loved it.” Her great-uncle started leaving a guitar in her bedroom. When she was eleven, a rock band performed at the high-school gym, and she immediately knew how she wanted to spend the rest of her life. She began teaching herself how to play. “I had no options, and I didn’t care about anything else,” she said.

Howard has attracted some very famous fans, including Paul McCartney and Barack and Michelle Obama. “Hold On,” the album’s first single, was nominated for three Grammy Awards and named the best song of the year by Rolling Stone. In the pre-chorus, Howard addresses herself: “Come on, Brittany / You got to get back up!” she bellows. It’s a small choice, using her name like that, but it disarms me every time I hear it. When Howard finally delivers the full chorus—“Yeah, you got to hold on!”—she’s singing with so much vigor and boldness that the lyric feels less like a plea than like a nonnegotiable demand.

Many of the most beloved performers try to put as little distance as possible between themselves and their audience. With Howard, this kind of intimacy seems instinctive, in part because she is inherently unpretentious, and in part because she has spent so much time figuring out how to live without shame. “A lot of people do shit because they don’t know themselves,” she had told me earlier. “If you can just kind of be you, you’re gonna be all right.”

Excerpts from: Brittany Howard’s Transformation https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/brittany-howards-transformation

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