by Eden Turner, Nashville Banner
September 10, 2025
A lively group lined up to head upstairs to the second floor of Layman Drug Company in Wedgewood Houston. Attendees spread out in a quiet blue-lit room lined with tables and chairs, sofas and rugs dotted with pillows. The first Touched by Sun festival was about to begin — an event organized by musician Crystal Rose to celebrate Black women in music. The local artists performed folk, R&B, country, indie and soul. Rose wanted to show that Black women artists are “boundless” — something that felt especially important in a city like Nashville.
This is top of mind for many musicians of color as Americana Fest kicks off this week.
Here are three Black women musicians in Nashville working to make a statement with their work, heal their communities, and forge their own rightful place within Americana.
‘It’s really about standing in community’
Luisa Lopez, then an aspiring musician, moved to Murfreesboro in 1997. The transition from Houston, a city she felt was more integrated, was a tough. She found Murfreesboro to be heavily policed, and not as diverse as she hoped — especially in the music scene, where she noticed very few Black musicians, which made it hard for her to find community.
She remembers a moment when she and her friend, who are both lighter skinned, were stopped by another Black woman after performing a set in the city square.
The woman stepped back and said to them, “‘Y’all some yellow n*****, ain’t ya?’”
“It was the first time I noticed what it really meant to live in Tennessee,” Lopez said. “I knew being there I was forcing an acceptance without even being aware.”
As the Tennessee legislature repeatedly loosened gun laws over the years, even amid mass shootings, Lopez stepped into activism. The destruction guns can cause when they’re in the wrong hands reminds her of when Emmett Till’s mother had to advocate in remembrance of her son’s life and abuse at the hands of white supremacy. She worries how much it will take for people to truly care about what’s happening.
“It does seem like the same kinds of bad people that regulate and legislate now are the exact same kinds of bad people that were allowing that kind of abuse of Black people during the Civil Rights Movement,” she said. “That’s why I’m in activism now.”
In 2023, she performed at an event at the American Baptist College for Tennessee for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP) in support of a friend of hers who was wrongfully convicted and formerly incarcerated.
Lopez’s activism has sharpened her musical perspective. While she performed pop and rock music when she was younger, she’s returning to her folk roots and writing songs that reflect her community, creating a unique blend of the music she loved as a child.
Her 2019 album “45” commented on the state of the world as she reached her 45th year, and marked the beginning of a shift blending her music and activism together.
Lopez took a four-year hiatus from the industry, which felt exclusionary for her as a Black artist. She hosted a get-together to announce she was retiring from music, but a friend pulled her aside to tell her that wouldn’t happen. It took her a while to heal, but eventually Lopez returned. She felt she needed to say yes to something she loved. Now she said she’s ready to start healing the people around her, too.
Lopez hosts potlucks for her queer friends and neighbors in hopes of creating protected space for the Black queer community.
This week marks Lopez’s return to live performance after two years. Tuesday night, she played in a queer showcase at drkmttr. And Thursday night, she’ll perform at Lipstick Lounge, a landmark of queer history and community in the city. When the Banner asked Lopez if she was nervous, she said yes. But she knows there’s power in resistance and sticking together.
“I think it’s really about standing in community,” she said. “We’re not alone here. … It’s about us being healed. Then we can take it out into the world.”
‘[We] were all badasses’
In 2021, Crystal Rose felt a call to leave Kansas City, her hometown, where she worked with grassroots organizations to improve access to stable housing. She moved to Nashville in search of a new place to build community.
“I just packed up my car and came on down,” she said. “I knew that I would find what I was looking for, even though I didn’t really have any proof of a place for me existing here beforehand. But I felt like I would find it, and I did.”
Rose got started by connecting with her neighbors and performing with new friends. She was quickly frustrated by the way people in Nashville would pigeonhole her, assuming she was an R&B or jazz musician just because she is Black. That led her to launch the Touched by Sun festival in February 2023. The event sold out. The next year, she received a Metro Arts Thrive Grant and a sponsorship, which helped Rose and her peers book artists from outside of Tennessee for the second festival.
Rose told the Banner that people still tell her how much the festival meant to them.
“It was really special,” she said. “I feel like on paper, it could just look like a festival, but really it was cultivating such an intimate, safe space for expression and celebration. Whereas people get nervous when they see too many Black people on the lineup, sometimes you see one, [but] the entire lineup was just Black female artists. And they were all badasses.”
“They did their own genres, and they stood in it, and everyone just got to see the range that artists could have.”
Showcasing Black artists performing so many genres, including country, was a powerful statement in a town that often is under the impression that country music is white. Rose said that the artists who have something to say about the issues around them aren’t always offered a platform to shine.
“Sometimes it feels like country music is allergic to substance,” Rose said. “As long as you check off a couple of things on the list, it’s a banger. I think there are a lot of country artists that aren’t really saying anything. At least, that’s what we’ve accepted.”
Her event challenged that.
“I feel deep down that when you feel like you’re not getting the mic or you’re not getting stage time, then you have to build your own stage or build your own table and create the world that you want to see and want to live in.”
In the future, Rose hopes to see her community come together to create solutions for the challenges they face. Already, she and her friends have had brainstorming sessions about hurdles in their personal lives and how they can improve their neighborhood. She wants to see more shared resources, networks and connections in her neighborhood without transaction.
To that end, Rose leads free yoga classes for her neighbors — she knows that somatic healing practices can be unaffordable.
Although she isn’t performing during Americana Fest this year, Rose is returning to her reflective and soulful music on her own terms. She’ll be recording her next album, “Long Live,” for live audiences on Sept. 18 at True Romance Sound.
Rose, who grew up singing in church, prefers the energy of a live audience over a sterile studio set-up. The album features a collection of songs she has written over the past few years and will serve as another example of what Rose said is “doubling down on what feels good” to her.
‘The arts have always played a role in the movement for freedom’
Activism and music have always gone hand in hand for Lizzie No, who moved to North Nashville from New York City in 2023. No came to town to perform at the Blue Room in support of Abortion Care Tennessee in September 2022, three months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and she was hooked. Soon after, she moved to Tennessee to be closer to the fight for reproductive justice.
“I’ve always been intentional about weaving the personal and the political together in my music, and that’s what brought me to Nashville,” she said.
No has seen the power music can hold when it comes to advocating for what she believes is right.
“I’m not an organizer,” No said. “I am a communist songwriter, [and] the arts have always played a role in the movement for freedom. People need an image, a picture, a sound, a feeling, to animate them towards action. That’s where the arts come in.”
With her harp at her hip and her raw vocals, No performs original protest songs that reflect on the world around her. One of her earliest, “The Killing Season,” is about the cyclical nature of gender and racial violence. Released in 2017, it was inspired by Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” No said she has been called to perform it more often as she and her community see the federal and state governments enact drastic changes to civil rights policies.
“It’s kind of a humbling thing to feel like there’s actually even more reason today to sing a song about Black people being killed by police than there was even back then,” she said. “Any song is a souvenir of a moment in time when you wrote it. … You sort of hope that it’ll remain relevant for years to come.”
When Black artists make space to talk about their experiences in the genre, they don’t receive the same attention as their peers, No said. Last year, she sat on a panel with Rissi Palmer, Kyshona Armstrong and Brandi Waller Pace that discussed ways to sustainably support Black women in roots music. Despite the star-studded lineup, she felt it wasn’t advertised the way it should have been.
“I think there are events focused on black people, queer people, people of color, people outside the mainstream, but they are not prioritized by any means,” she said. “People are less interested in treating Black women artists as central to this scene.”
Even so, No said the silver lining is that folk music is making a comeback in mainstream culture. Now, audiences are more interested in protest songs. Although when people think of a white man as the standard folk singer, female, BIPOC and queer musicians have to work harder to make sure their voices are heard.
“I’ve found that the most compelling protest songs tend to come from Black people, queer people, pretty much anyone that’s not a cis white man,” No said. “We tend to have a more intersectional and nuanced view of … the history we’re viewing right now. That’s who I look to for leadership, for what it’s worth.”
No and Nathan Evans Fox, another singer-songwriter, are launching a new podcast — “Y’allidarity Social Club” — where they’ll talk about how leftist politics and roots music overlap and where the gaps for opportunity lie in the mainstream genre. During Americana Fest, on Friday, the two will host a launch party at the Edgehill United Methodist Church.
No joined Lopez at drkmttr Tuesday night, and will perform again Thursday night at Lipstick Lounge.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the location and affiliation of one of Lopez’s performances.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.