Who is singer Kara Jackson?

That’s Kara Jackson in a nutshell, but there’s much more to this remarkable young artist, who joined us at the Southbank Centre in June 2025 as part of Little Simz’ Meltdown.

A folk musician whose sound blends elements of country, jazz and soul, her writing is inspired by both the history of the American South and her post-millennium upbringing in the suburbs of Chicago, here’s a little bit more about how Jackson’s distinctive sound came to be.

She comes from a music-minded family

Jackson was born and raised in Oak Park on the fringes of Chicago in a home where music was prevalent. ‘My parents always played music,’ she told The Red Bulletin interviewer Dayvdd Chong in 2023. ‘My dad grew up playing the trumpet, and my mum insisted on me and my brother having formal music training’. That music training came with a deadline too, as Jackson told The Guardian’s Kadish Morris; ‘my mom had a rule that we had to play piano before we left the house at 18.’

But it was on the street that her vocal talent was discovered

While she was learning the piano at home, Jackson’s voice was getting noted by her friends. Aware of her vocal talent, one of Jackson’s friends encouraged her to sing at a block party open mic. Two of her neighbours – who happened to be members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – were so impressed that they emailed Jackson’s mum to let her know of her talent. It also led to her first gig, singing covers of Beatles songs in a local art gallery aged 12 and 13.

She developed a love of folk music from her mother

Albeit not directly from her mum’s own musical tastes. Jackson’s mother was a soul fan, but she was also a labour union worker, and it was through accompanying her mum at protest marches and joining in the singing that the young Jackson forged a love of artists such as Pete Seeger, Jim Croce, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez.

Her musical influences are much varied

As well as her early fondness for The Beatles and her love for folk musicians, Jackson’s musical inspiration has come from a breadth of fields. At home she was introduced to soul via her mother, jazz via her father, Charley Pride via both of them, and contemporary hip-hop – artists like Wu-Tang Clan and Three 6 Mafia – through her older brother. She is particularly drawn to women who ‘took up space with their performance’, artists such as Joanna Newsom, Laura Marling, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and Megan Thee Stallion. And in an interview with Country Music News she explained that ‘watching the greats like Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Beyonce taught me the importance of studying music, of being a student and to see the work you do as being much larger than yourself’.

She’s a poet, and definitely knows it

Perhaps partly influenced by her father, an English teacher, as a teenager Jackson began performing spoken word poetry. ‘In high school I was known as ‘the poetry girl’’, she told Chong, and with good reason, as in 2018 she became the Youth Poet Laureate of Chicago and then a year later, after submitting an essay on poetry and democracy, she was named the United States National Youth Poet Laureate. Her poetry has appeared in the pages of publications such as Poetry, Frontier Poetry, Rookie Mag, and Nimrod, and she also published her own chapbook, Bloodstone Cowboy.

However, it’s through folk music that she’s chosen to channel her talents

‘I feel like something is happening. People are hungry for something real. We’re on the verge – if not in the thick of – a folk resurgence,’ Jackson told Sophie Leigh Walker in a 2023 interview for The Line of Best Fit. Pushed as to why she’s chosen folk music over poetry, Jackson went on to add, ‘folk music is the music of the regular person, the everyday person. It amplifies the people who don’t get anthems, or put on pedestals every day….  I think that’s really important to me’.

Her debut album came from a place of grief

Though released in 2023, Jackson wrote the title track of Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? when she was 18, just a year after her best friend Maya-Gabrielle Gary died from a rare muscular cancer. When she began writing the album several years later she came back to that same song with a different perspective. As she explained to Chong, ‘I was coming back to a question I’d asked in a more naïve place – a place of agony and frustration as a teenager – and trying to make more sense of it. I think that’s why I wanted it to be the title of the album, too. It’s born out of grief, of course, but also there are so many types of grief.’

…and earned her much acclaim

‘She’s not far wrong when she has the revelation that, ‘I am pretty top-notch’, wrote Loud and Quiet’s Susan Darlington, wrapping up her review of Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? with a line from Jackson’s ‘dickhead blues’. The album – on which Jackson provided guitar, banjo, and piano as well as vocals –. saw similarly glowing reviews from The Line of Best Fit, NPR, Pitchfork – who cited it among the year’s best new music, and Rolling Stone – who named it the eighth best indie-rock album of 2023.

If you want to know where she’s toured, just check out her tattoos

As her music takes her further and further around the world, Jackson has adopted quite a permanent approach to souvenir-gathering, telling Country Music News that when she’s on the road, she’s added getting a tattoo to her ways of filling downtime, ‘[it’s] one of my favorite things to do in another country because it feels like the most enduring souvenir’.