WILLA HART

Willa Hart learned harmony on a church pew and rhythm on a juke-joint floor. Raised in Greenville, Mississippi, behind the counter of the family joint — the kind of room where the blues played for beer money and everybody’s grandmother could sang — she grew up believing every story worth telling fits inside three chords and a slow dance.

After a scholarship voice program at Delta State and a hard decade of writing songs for other people’s records, Willa came home to claim her own. Her sound sits where country storytelling, Memphis soul, and sanctified gospel overlap — a place she calls “choir-house music.”

Her single “Neon Psalm” — a last-dance anthem cut live to tape at Sam Phillips Recording — cracked the Americana chart’s top 20 and earned her a Mississippi Arts Commission fellowship. She still closes every set with the hymn her grandfather hummed while sweeping the joint at 2 a.m.

“To hear Willa Hart is to remember where you were when the song ended.”