Most emerging artists dream about quitting their day jobs. But as Kyshona has taken her vivid songwriting and soulful singing on tour nationally, she’s brought her old day job as a music therapist on the road. Through her Your Song organization, she holds music therapy sessions for vulnerable communities — including those who are incarcerated, experiencing homelessness or living in nursing homes — in places where she’s performing.
“Anybody can write a song,” she insists. “It’s not about whether you can sing. It’s about whether you have a story. When I would write with women who were incarcerated, they would say they don’t know how to write a song. And I’d say, ‘Where are you right now? Do you have a story to tell?’ By the end of the last session they’d be fighting over what the lyrics should be.”
At one point Kyshona (who at the beginning of her recording career went by her full name, Kyshona Armstrong) admits she was burned out by her mental health work. “But around 2000, I realized that this is actually something I could be using in tandem with my mission, which is to be a voice and a vessel for those who feel lost, forgotten, silenced, or hurting,” she says over Zoom from her Nashville home. With her busy touring schedule, sometimes those sessions now happen remotely or get organized once she’s arrived in a community. In the future she’s planning on working with the Boston Public Library on a songwriting project for elders.
Kyshona’s sixth and most recent album, “Legacy,” looks at what she calls her “family’s journey.” While writing the music, Kyshona drew on the knowledge of a great aunt and a cousin who preserved her family’s histories. She also did research into her family tree at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The concept album’s story arc opens with “Elephants,” which Kyshona calls a tribute to her African ancestors “whose names I will never know.” “The Echo” honors her great grandparents and their legacy of landowning.
“As a Black woman from the South that comes from a family of formerly enslaved people, not a lot of great records were kept, and our family was listed in paperwork and wills as property, or on slave schedules,” she says. “This whole record centers around the pain of now knowing about my family’s legacy and lineage, but what I do know about them is that I come from a long line of strong people that knew how important it was to own land.”
This family influence flows through the recording. The track “Heaven Is a Beautiful Place” sounds like a traditional gospel standard, but it was written by Kyshona’s grandfather Hawthorne “H.T.” Armstrong. An interlude includes some audio of him singing it that Kyshona found on an old VHS cassette. “Where I Started From” pays homage to the family that raised Kyshona and its love of music, whether it be R&B played on the radio at picnics, the formal piano lessons her mother arranged for her, or the family lore — confirmed by Kyshona’s research — that Motown songwriting greats Ashford & Simpson were distant relatives.
Kyshona also grapples with her own life story. She co-wrote “Where My Mind Goes” weeks after receiving a life-saving emergency hysterectomy. Throughout the song, Kyshona contemplates what her life would mean if she could no longer write the songs that she thinks of as her children. “If I ain’t moving, I ain’t living,” she sings. “If I ain’t living then who am I.”
Kyshona says that songwriting is therapeutic for her and her songwriting partners (who on “Legacy” range from fellow Carolinian and Club Passim regular Crys Matthews to Kyshona’s brother, Kelvin). A near-death medical crisis wasn’t easy to turn into a song, but Kyshona thought about the advice she had long given her music therapy clients. “With therapeutic songwriting, when you share the hardest parts of your life, you will find that there’s someone out there that gets and completely understands it,” she says, “and you realize that you’re not alone.”
Kyshona also isn’t alone when she steps out on stage. Instead of hiring a second guitarist or a rhythm section like many singer-songwriters do as their careers gain traction, she’s added two other female vocalists who create a rich and distinctive gospel-rooted tapestry of harmonies. At Passim her vocal trio will be rounded out by Nickie Conley and Jannelle Means.
“I used to travel with a drummer, but what I was hearing in my head were always these other voices,” she recalls. “I’m a singer-songwriter at heart, a storyteller, and what I find is that I can keep people really focused on the lyrics and the stories when it’s just voices. And I always want people to realize and be reminded that your voice is important, and the voice is enough.”
KYSHONA
With Grace Givertz
At Club Passim, 47 Palmer St., Cambridge. June 15 at 8 p.m. Tickets $24. 617-492-7679, ClubPassim.org
Noah Schaffer can be reached at noahschaffer@yahoo.com.