On her latest album, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” Valerie June shines in full force. The Tennessee native stays rooted in the quiet power of mindfulness as activism. If you’re looking for an antidote to negativity, Valerie June holds the remedy — and she believes you can hold it, too.
Story by Josina Guess | Photographs by Kendall Bessent
Let’s get something clear from the start. As gorgeous and multitalented as she is, Valerie June is not a goddess (though she talks to the moon and adorns her hair in flowers), or a superhero (though she slays in those shimmering metallics in her new album photos), or a saint (though I will tell you about a small miracle).
“I can be really mean sometimes,” she told me over Zoom from her apartment in Brooklyn, “and I wake up with heaviness and darkness and I’m like ‘Well, how do I work myself out of that?’ First of all, I’m going to forgive myself for being mean when I’m mean, and second of all, I think about what can I do tomorrow to shift that and not wake up in that same dark spot.”
June sees herself as an alchemist and an artist who uses the pieces that life provides to sculpt something beautiful. The magic she talks about is as real as the breath in your lungs, as real as the belief that we, as a human species, belong to one another.
Some might call her a foolish dreamer — dancing around with a smile on her face, lighting candles while the world is on fire. In her outrageously good new song “Call Me a Fool,” featuring guest vocals by Memphis Stax legend Carla Thomas, June beats you to the punch. Her voice moves into deep waters and belts out the power of love. As a woman who has walked through fires and storms in her own life, she calls us all to shine.
Born in Jackson, Tennessee, June moved with her family to a piece of land between Jackson and Humboldt when she was around 8. The family of seven lived in a cinder-block garage that her parents built while they worked on saving up to build their “dream country home.” Her father ran a construction company and also was a music promoter. Her world was tools, hard work, and music.
But when she thinks about “home,” her mind goes to the land. “When I was little, we were so isolated that we took showers outside; nobody’s gonna see us in the middle of all of these trees and stuff. I could go outside and look up at the moon. And I would just clear space on the ground and get down on the ground and just talk to the moon and just spend time with the stars.”
Valerie June sees herself as an alchemist and an artist who uses the pieces that life provides to sculpt something beautiful. The magic she talks about is as real as the breath in your lungs, as real as the belief that we, as a human species, belong to one another.
As she moved into adolescence, she became more self-conscious about their living conditions. “I would be 14 and scared to tell my friends to come over to my house because they would see that we were poor and living in this garage.”
The garage and the house, which they never finished, burned down when she was 14. They lost everything. She wishes she could have that garage back; it would have made an amazing recording studio.
After the fire, her father went to an auction and bought a house to put on the land; her mother still lives there. June returns as often as she can to put her hands in the dirt. Her dad passed away in 2016, but she says she feels his spirit there. She knows he worked through so many challenges to become both a Black business owner and landowner in the South.
Though her parents’ dreams didn’t materialize exactly as they thought they might, they instilled in June and her four younger siblings a combination of dreaming and hard work. “Dreamers have to dream for the ones who can come after them who can enjoy the dream.”
June moved to Memphis, Tennessee, as a teenager to follow her dream of becoming a musician. Her musical style has been categorized as country, blues, folk, Americana, jazz, Afrofuturist, funk, rock, R&B, bluegrass, and gospel. Her 2013 breakthrough album, “Pushin’ Against a Stone,” perked people’s ears when she refused to adhere to racially divided music categories and proclaimed her own genre as “organic moonshine roots music.”
Her 2017 album, “The Order of Time,” put her on the map after Bob Dylan gave her a shout-out. Her 2021 album, “The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers,” which she co-produced with Jack Splash (who has worked with Alicia Keys, John Legend, Tank and the Bangas, among many others) is shooting her into the stratosphere. As her star rises, this new record — with bits of birdsong recorded from the land her family still owns — reveals her intention to stay grounded.
She has performed at the White House, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, on “Austin City Limits” and around the world, but June recalls just how special it felt to be inducted into the Humboldt Hall of Fame in 2018. “It was my highest honor I’ve ever received in music,” she declares.
“I got to get on a float and go down Main Street during the Strawberry Festival!” She laughs as she describes feeling like a giant piece of cake. “I just love that my town did that for me. And I think about growing up there, and how I wanted to see the world and I wanted to travel, but I would say to myself, ‘Nobody from Humboldt does that.’ Now, I have gone! So, I hope that I can inspire some of the younger African American girls who are there who might want to see the world.” Her first chance to travel abroad came when a friend invited her to visit Nigeria. She only needed to pay for the ticket, and the rest would be covered.
“With all my coffee shop barista money, I was able to do it in one year. I saved up $2,000. And I was so proud of myself. I was 19 years old. I got on the plane and I flew to Nigeria and I was singing ‘Zombie, o zombie’ [lyrics to a Fela Kuti song] over and over again while I got off the plane.”
Fela, the activist and Afrobeat legend, had died a few years earlier in 1997, but his band Egypt 80 was still performing. June had hoped to see the band perform in Lagos, but she was told it would be too dangerous. “I wasn’t able to go, but I was able to feel the vibes of it.”
I ask her about those “vibes” and whether it was that trip to Nigeria that opened her music to such a clearly identifiable West African influence.
“It came later,” she says. “It came as naturally as it could for a Southern American. It came through the sounds of hill country and how the traditions of African music translated through our Southern sounds [that you can hear] in Junior Kimbrough or Jessie Mae Hemphill. … I like to study or fall in love with a genre or an artist, I want to watch everything about them. I want to know as much as I can about them, read about them, and learn everything I can.”
For Valerie June, meditation has become its own form of activism. “That’s my only way that I knew how to go out and protest. I’m high risk. And so, I was just like, I’m just going to start doing these meditations and sharing them and try to help shift consciousness.”
Although the self-taught musician has studied up on everyone from Tina Turner to Ali Farka Touré, from Nina Simone to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, she says songs have come straight to her since childhood.
“I started hearing songs when I was little. I started hearing voices singing to me quiet; and I would be playing and I would just hear this pretty voice singing. It would be similar to like, if you turn it on the radio, but it would just be playing in my head. I would hear this pretty voice,” she explains.
“That’s pretty much the same way that songs come now. I’ll be washing dishes or going to the store or doing something like boarding a plane and I’ll just hear a pretty voice and I’ll be like, ‘Ooh, what’s that?’ And I’ll catch on to it and keep it on repeat, and then I’ll catch it in my phone or write it in my journal. And when I get … time to help sculpt it and play it with an instrument, then I’ll [do so], but it all starts with the voices.”
Valerie June knows that what looks like magic — whether it takes the form of a beautiful lyric or a consistent meditation practice — requires work. As she wrote in her manifesto “Workin’ Woman Blues”:
There ain’t no dinner on the table
Ain’t no food in the ‘fridgerator
I’ll go to work and I’ll be back later
I go to work said I’d be back later
“Positivity is a practice,” June says. “It is work and it’s a job and dreams are work. … They’re not like cotton balls and fluffy and soft. They’re more like grit and dust and work.”
June has been practicing mindfulness and meditation for about 15 years, but, she tells me, getting involved with Grounded, a Memphis-based collective of artists, allows her to work directly toward that dream of a more loving world.
“Our goal is to help reduce gun violence because Memphis is a seriously dangerous town,” June notes. According to FBI data, Memphis is ranked among the top three cities in the nation for violent crime. June talked about the multiple stresses that children carry, living in a city with also one of the highest poverty rates while trying to heal from collective and individual trauma.
“We’re trying to figure out ways that mindfulness could be used in the school to help the students use creativity and art to help try to transcend some of the heaviness that comes with living there,” June explains.
Valerie June has been working with Grounded a collective of artists using mindfulness and the arts to help inspire healing in Memphis. “If we look within, we can begin to see the oneness of each other, but we can also see ways that each person has the power to help heal and transform the planet. Each person is responsible in their own circle.”
She credits Sister Peace, a Buddhist nun, disciple of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and co-founder of Grounded, for giving her the courage to share what has been a very personal practice with Memphis youth as well as with her friends and fans through social media. Sister Peace lives in Memphis, where she practices Engaged Buddhism.
“Mindfulness is very simply a capacity to be aware and be conscious,” Sister Peace said in a 2019 interview with a Memphis TV station. “Easier said than done, but doable,” she added. So doable that she and June began working with the collective of artists and a group of Memphis students last school year. They were able to meet a few times in person before they moved their weekly gatherings online.
“I felt like I needed to do it, like yesterday,” June says. “As soon as the pandemic hit, and all of the heaviness of change that we needed to see last year regarding systemic racism and injustice. If we look within, we can begin to see the oneness of each other, but we can also see ways that each person has the power to help heal and transform the planet. Each person is responsible in their own circle.”
For June, meditation became its own form of activism. “That’s my only way that I knew how to go out and protest. I’m high risk. And so, I was just like, I’m just going to start doing these meditations and sharing them and try to help shift consciousness.”
Toward the end of their program last school year, June says, the students started to lead the meditations. “So, Sister Peace got not only me to be courageous and share my practice with my followers, but each of the teenagers — who are the future — to do it.”
Using her full name, Valerie June Hockett, she created Maps for the Modern World, a book of short poems and illustrations that she read as another way to share what she’s been learning along the way. In one poem, “Ways of Being,” she writes: “It is not meditate or pray / It’s meditate and pray … Work and play.”
June sees her new book and her social media platforms as a collective playground for spreading everyday magic. “I mean, can [social media] be used to help uplift people? I’m experimenting with it. It’s all just a test.”
June says that we can all live magical lives.
I lit a candle and took some deep breaths before I called her for our interview. I placed a red camellia and blooming sprig of peach blossoms on my table since we couldn’t sit out on the porch and talk in person.
Earlier that week, my 12-year-old daughter, Seraphina, snuggled up beside me in bed while I studied up on Valerie June in preparation for our conversation. Seraphina and I decided to watch June’s Valentine’s Day Instagram meditation video together. June sat cross-legged in a heart-patterned jumper with red flowers spilling from her glorious crown of locks. She talked about love, lit a candle, and scattered flower petals on a mat while declaring, “I am whole.”
My eyes got heavy, and I drifted off to sleep as June’s voice lilted with the power of positivity and following your dreams. My child was transfixed. The next morning I saw Seraphina’s blue yoga mat and a candle on her bedroom floor. I made a mental note to ask her more about that as we rushed to get out the door.
Seraphina’s transition back to in-person school this January has been a struggle. After almost a year of Saturdays, it was hard to adjust to basic routines such as settling in to sleep early and getting out of bed before 10 a.m. It was hard to get back to thinking about different clothes each day, and wearing shoes. Harder still was the return to the crucible of hormones, pressures, and middle-school angst that can lead to a precipitous decline in confidence, especially for girls.
A week after my conversation with Valerie June, I asked Seraphina to tell me what she thought about that guided meditation. She said that after everyone was asleep (she shares a room with her two sisters) she watched the video again and wrote down her own list of truths to remember.
She held her blue journal to her chest as she entrusted those words to me and read them aloud:
“I am strong.
I am worthy.
I am independent.
I am radiant.
I am beautiful.”
That morning, Seraphina says, she repeated those words as she braced herself for another day of middle school. Instead of worrying about what people thought of her, she told someone, “I like your shirt.”
In gym class (6 feet apart and contactless), she did her first real set of pushups — before that she’d gotten by with faking it. She said even though her arms were trembling at the top of each push she would repeat to herself, “I am strong.”
The second to last song on Valerie June’s new album is “Home Inside,” a meditative anthem that starts with, “I know there is a place for me. … ” As she continues to chisel out a niche for herself, she knows she’s making a way for all of us to be more at home in our own bodies. The song closes with the line, “Earth is a school / To shine is why you came.”
Let this serve as a testimony that June’s experiment — something as ancient and wise as a deep breath and a smile — is working.
“I’m excited to see what we sculpt as our new world when we come back” from the pandemic, Valerie June told me as we wrapped up our call. She’s eager to get back to Tennessee and plant tomatoes in the land where her mother lives. “I think we can really come back with a whole lot more love.”
This story was published in Issue No. 1 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
Josina Guess is the managing editor of The Bitter Southerner and resides outside Athens, Georgia. Her Bitter Southerner essay about the lynching of Willie Earle, “The Wind Delivered the Story,” was picked by Longreads as one of the best crime stories of 2020. She has written for Fourth Genre and Sojourners, among others, and is a contributor to the anthology Fight Evil With Poetry.
Kendall Bessent is an Atlanta native and fine art photographer and creative director based in Brooklyn, New York. He uses his work to communicate his perception of the world around him and explore the complexities of Blackness while also highlighting the beauty, strength, love, and happiness that are all a part of the Black experience.