She was told to smile and hide the chaos. Now Leah Blevins is singing her truth

Those first few acoustic guitar chords on Leah Blevins’ “All Dressed Up,” a mid-tempo saunter, rise like the swelter off the black top of Bobbie Gentry’s Tallahatchie Bridge in 1967’s seminal Southern goth pearl-clutcher “Ode to Billie Joe.” But where the blazing redhead star turned recluse’s mystery came from something thrown into the water, the copper-tressed, genre-blurring songwriter’s own mysteries are contained within.

Blevins, whose Dan Auerbach-produced and co-written Easy Eye debut was released last month, has a throwback soprano that dissolves time with its innocence and crystalline tone, which suggests Gentry, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, as well as the more modern Kacey Musgraves, Sierra Hull or Alison Krauss. Her roots are pure Appalachia; growing up in Sandy Hook, Ky., as the daughter of a dentist turned local politician and a mother who played piano for gospel quartets.

Though both parents looked good on the outside, her father would go on to abandon the family and her mother sank into addiction. Counseled by a grandmother to look like a lady — “don’t go out without lipstick on” — Blevins ultimately moved in with an older sister, choosing cheerleading over the school band.

Not that music was abandoned. Instead, she played in local bars.

“My sister and her husband had a band, and I got to sing backup. It was the Judds, who’re from Kentucky, Bonnie Raitt, Patty Loveless always, Martina McBride, Miranda Lambert, Sheryl Crow some. Just getting up there and singing.”

Studying communications at Minnesota State Moorhead, Blevins left college for Nashville with Elliott Collette & the Articles. Limited success followed, including exposure on cable networks CMT: Country Music Television and Great American Country, though it was not enough to break through. Collette left the band and headed to California.

Blevins stayed in Nashville. A high school teacher who’d turned her onto C.S. Lewis inspired a sense that there might be more to the world than how she was raised. “Whether being the town beauty queen or whatever, there’s more going on under the surface. When I got out of the bubble, I knew I’d been told one thing, but there was no validity to it.”

Dressed in thrift-store finds, a flowy dress with a half-buttoned cardigan, Blevins packs a hipster style that’s chic without playing the fashion game. Her eyes, with minimal makeup, pull the listener into her soul without trying as she tells her origin story. In a Waffle House off I-65 in south Nashville, she reads both exotic and at home.

Blevins’ Dan Auerbach-produced and co-written Easy Eye debut “All Dressed Up” was released last month.

(Joseph Ross / For The Times)

That truck stop ease makes “All Dressed Up” beguiling. She writes from a place that’s a tangle of personal struggle, accountability and owning the pain. But instead of drowning in victimhood, she wants to understand her vulnerability and strength. That seemingly contradictory cocktail might make her a patron saint for a generation lost to the norms but seeking what feels like meaning.

Whether it’s the title track’s devastation of hopeful love dashed by abandonment, the hard-fighting warning “Below the Belt” or the vintage cocktail country “Lonely,” these songs deliver palpable details and emotions so raw they need salve. The plaintive “Tequila Mockingbird” drinks the pain away with a bluegrass purity, while the healing invitation “Leave It Up to Me” swings from quiet to big retro-pop with the assurance “I would never judge, so put away your pride/A kiss won’t stop a war, but maybe it’s a start…”

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame vice president of curatorial operations Shelby Morrison, who anchored the Hall’s Revolutionary Women in Music, cites Blevins’ willingness to own it all. “These are feelings every woman, maybe even human, has had, starting with Sammi Smith’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ or Merrilee Rush’s ‘Angel of the Morning.’ She’s been through some stuff, she feels like she’s earned these songs through actual living.”

Before Auerbach arrived with a plan, Blevins was earning that experience. Cleaning houses, working in a candle shop, babysitting, unloading trucks in a food terminal and finally the kitchen of local health food grocery the Turnip Truck, music was always in the background.

Rising from Nashville obscurity after years of day jobs, Blevins will open for rock legends the Black Crowes at Royal Albert Hall and join major festival bills across the U.S. and U.K.

(Joseph Ross / For The Times)

“My superpower is I wear my emotions on my sleeve,” Blevins explains. “My granny died, and I realized I’d been in Nashville as long as I’d been in Sandy Hook, always writing to give me a better understanding of who I let in my life, what I put up with.

“I just turned 36, processing my childhood, growing up in that town where everybody knows your business. Mom and Dad made everything look good when it was absolute chaos at the house. That ‘Smile, look presentable’ made me not want to get noticed.”

Auerbach recognized her potency immediately.

“That voice,” he said. “And she doesn’t have to do all the tricks to make you feel it.”

Creating writing situations where Blevins could hit a nerve, those feelings turned into the template for “All Dressed Up.” “She never knew who we’d be writing with, but her vulnerability and willingness [to put her emotions in the songs] let us create quickly,” Auerbach said.

Taking those songs into the studio, Auerbach assembled a team of iconic musicians. Beyond steel masters Paul Franklin and Russ Pahl, keyboardists Jim “Moose” Brown and Kris Kristofferson compatriot Billy Swan, he enlisted Gillian Welch’s creative partner David Rawlings on guitar. Tracking live with Blevins singing, the performances were tailored to her vocals.

“It was cohesive from us all being on the floor together,” Blevins begins. “But it was also a roller-coaster ride. I’d look over at David Rawlings, from all those Gillian Welch records, and I’d feel a little unhinged. It was the same with Paul Overstreet; I’d covered ‘When You Say Nothing at All’ since I was 16, because Keith Whitley’s from Sandy Hook. It was so fast-paced, and everyone was so welcoming, I didn’t have time to over-think or get in my own way.”

“Diamond in a Coal Mine” and “Hey God” distill her roots and arrival. Honoring her great-grandfather Cole Grove with the canary metaphor of the former, both songs celebrate personal salvation. As the Rock Hall’s Morrison notes, “Eventually you learn asking permission sucks and forgiveness isn’t necessary, so you learn to do what you want. Leah’s been through some stuff clearly, but she still has optimism. That’s what you need.”

Currently on tour in the South, she heads to the U.K. where she will open for the Black Crowes at Royal Albert Hall and the State Fayre in Chelmsford with the Lumineers and Counting Crows.

“I never in a million years thought I’d leave Kentucky,” she says. “I already have gone so far for the people where I grew up. Playing with the Black Crowes? They’re rock legends, to say the least, Georgia boys writing about taboo things … and me? It’s bizarre, but I’m ready for all of it.”