Amy Ray

In the late 1980s Amy Ray gained mainstream attention as a singer, songwriter, and activist through her partnership with Emily Saliers in the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls. Their second album, the self-titled release on Epic, earned a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Recording in 1990. Together Ray and Saliers addressed LGBTQ rights, environmental concerns, feminism, and other social and political topics, which helped establish them as one of the decade’s most lasting female acts and cultivated a loyal audience that persisted for years afterward. Ray, whose contributions often supplied the duo’s more somber material, began her solo work in 2001 with Stag, a raw set of Southern punk songs whose influences included the Replacements and Patti Smith. While continuing to issue Indigo Girls projects, running Daemon Records, and backing causes such as gun control, women’s rights, and Indigenous advocacy, she pursued additional directions on albums including the 2005 indie-rock release Prom. Later she merged the country traditions of her native Georgia with her progressive outlook on the Americana efforts Goodnight Tender in 2014 and Holler in 2018. Her tenth solo album, the 2022 collection If It All Goes South, reflected resilience amid difficulty.

Ray grew up in Decatur, Georgia, where she and Saliers first performed together in high school under the name B-Band. After one year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville she returned to Georgia and enrolled at Emory University in Atlanta, the same school Saliers attended. The pair resumed writing and performing in earnest in 1985, took the Indigo Girls name, and issued their debut EP that year. Epic signed them after the independent 1987 album Strange Fire, and the resulting 1989 self-titled major-label debut brought critical praise, a hit single in “Closer to Fine,” and the Grammy win. Over the following decade the duo released key recordings such as Swamp Ophelia in 1994 and Shaming of the Sun in 1997 while appearing at Lilith Fair and other prominent festivals.

Ray established Daemon Records as a nonprofit independent label in 1990 and used it for her first solo project, the lean, punk-driven Stag, which featured Joan Jett and North Carolina’s the Butchies; the latter group also backed her on later dates. Throughout the 2000s she balanced four additional Indigo Girls albums for Epic, Hollywood, and Vanguard with more abrasive solo sets on Daemon. Prom examined gender, sexuality, rebellion, and her life as a gay woman in the rural South, while 2008’s Didn’t It Feel Kinder incorporated outside production from Greg Griffith for the first time. After the 2010 live set MVP Live, Ray rejoined Saliers for the Indigo Girls’ thirteenth studio album, 2011’s Beauty Queen Sister. Reuniting with Griffith, she issued Lung of Love the next year, an expansive recording that added Brandi Carlile, Lindsay Fuller, and Jim James of My Morning Jacket. In 2014 she turned more fully toward country on Goodnight Tender, tracking the album in Asheville, North Carolina, and drawing from outlaw country, honky-tonk, Appalachian, bluegrass, and Southern rock traditions with guests including Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Susan Tedeschi. She continued in a similar vein with 2018’s Holler, another set of politically charged Americana whose brass arrangements partly referenced Jim Ford’s 1969 album Harlan County.

Early in 2021 Ray released the reflective single “Muscadine,” written after the death of her dog and featuring H.C. McEntire. If It All Goes South, issued in late 2022, addressed her ties to the South, the church, her own identity, and her circle of friends, with Brandi Carlile, Allison Brown, and I’m with Her among the guests; the record also revisited earlier material such as the 2006 Indigo Girls song “They Won’t Have Me.”