We are delighted to announce our featured musician, singer Joy F Brown.
Born and raised in Newark NJ, Joy’s introduction to music came through her parents. “My whole family is musical – my father was a big advocate of music growing up, there were always instruments around; a piano, fender Rhodes, guitars. Music was life to my father, a Pentecostal preacher. He was very strict in that secular music was not allowed at home though I heard it at friends or cousins’ houses. I grew up with lots of gospel. My parents grew up during the depression and I listened to a lot of music from that era. The Dixie hummingbirds, Sam Cooke and the Soul stirrers, 5 blind boys of Mississippi, Roberta martin singers. The gospel sound of Chicago particularly. The elders of the upper Midwest came from the south”