Joy Oladokun
WNXP’s Nashville Artist of the Month for January is Joy Oladokun, a singer-songwriter and producer of open-hearted, soul-inflected folk-pop. Her parents immigrated from Nigeria to small-town Arizona, where she was born and raised. After taking up guitar and taking in a globe-spanning array of musical approaches, from her parents’ older Nigerian favorites to popular sounds and contemporary church choruses, she arrived at her own style of self-expression: discerningly hand-crafted, honest in its introspection, often capturing the anguish of homophobic rejection and racist threats to well-being. Oladokun delivers her compositions with woolen warmth, and makes confronting injustice feel like an act of intimacy and an extension of her belief in human connection. Now based in Nashville and signed to a publishing deal, she’s been a prolific music-maker in her attic home studio throughout the pandemic and her profile is rising rapidly.