You can hear her idols in her music, from Joni Mitchell’s finely crafted songs and from Tracy Chapman, a sharp rhythmic and melodic sense, but Narissa is her own woman. Her mother urged her to tell family stories. Narissa took that to heart — “When I write, those voices come to me.” And it’s a clear voice, like the one in “Road to Berea,” about her great-grandfather James, born into slavery, who walked 75 miles to Berea, Kentucky, where he attended college as a free man; his mother gave him a cow to pay for the tuition. “Wishbone,” is an uplifting song about the power of dreams told through the story of her mother’s father — a beekeeper, carpenter, and farmer: “You can put your dreams upon the shelf, Hold them close to your heart and tell nobody else, Or break the wishbones you’ve been saving, And let your dreams fly free…”
