Adia Victoria plays with DoNormaal and Reverend Dollars at Sunset Tavern this Tues Feb 28.
It’s easy to forget, in its current whitewashed and sterilized state, that blues music used to be dark and dangerous. From Robert Johnson’s hellhounds to Geeshie Wiley’s buzzards, there was a time, many decades ago, when blues was the devil’s music. Adia Victoria knows about those blues.
On her debut single, 2014’s “Stuck in the South,” Victoria plays a swampy blues riff on her electric guitar and sings, “I don’t know much about Southern belles/But I can tell you something ’bout Southern hell.” Last year, she released her first full-length, Beyond the Bloodhounds. While she still finds herself embedded in the South, Victoria now speaks as someone who escaped, briefly, and returned as though she were drawn back by some unfinished business.