Amy LaVere

Amy LaVere possesses a delicate, airy vocal quality that suggests youthful innocence, yet her songs convey the full spectrum of adult emotional turbulence drawn from a life marked by constant movement and upheaval. Born Amy Fant near the Texas-Louisiana line to parents who occasionally performed music themselves, she experienced frequent relocations that took her through thirteen different towns before completing high school. Once her family established roots in Detroit, she turned away from the country artists they favored—Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson—and embraced punk rock instead. She performed drums and vocals in the Motor City punk outfit Last Minute, but restlessness after graduation prompted a short return to Louisiana before she secured a position at a music management firm in Nashville. There she encountered Gabe Kudela of the high-energy country-punk group the Legendary Shack Shakers; following a short courtship they married, and once LaVere mastered the upright bass the pair launched the Gabe & Amy Show, playing Lower Broadway clubs where they built a devoted local audience before shifting operations to Memphis in 1999.

Although their marriage dissolved in 2003, LaVere’s commitment to singing intensified alongside a newfound regard for traditional country, blues, and jazz elements that reshaped her approach. Assisted by Paul Buchignani and Jason Freeman, she began appearing as a solo performer, and after repeated Southern club dates she attracted the interest of Memphis indie label Archer Records, which issued her debut album This World Is Not My Home in April 2006. Roughly a year later came her second release, Anchors & Anvils, helmed by veteran Memphis musician and producer Jim Dickinson. Outside music she took on acting roles, portraying rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson in Walk the Line and later appearing in Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan.

She issued the five-song Died Of Love EP in 2009. Shortly afterward her mentor and producer Jim Dickinson died, and the simultaneous conclusion of her long-term relationship with drummer Paul Taylor precipitated a period of personal disarray that she chronicled on 2011’s Stranger Me, which still featured Taylor’s drumming. In 2012 LaVere supplied vocals to Lucero’s Women & Work and joined Luther Dickinson’s the Wandering alongside Sharde Thomas, Shannon McNally, and Valerie June; the ensemble recorded the full-length Go On Now, You Can't Stay Here: Mississippi Folk Music, Vol. 3. Her partnership with Dickinson proved especially productive: she contributed to his solo effort Rock 'n' Roll Blues and enlisted him to produce and play guitar on her next album, Runaway's Diary, which also included Thomas, Will Sexton, and Tim Regan and appeared in May 2014.