For Memphis-born, Mississippi-bred musician Kirby Lauryen Dockery, the last decade has seen her songs and determination bring her to an exalted place in the music business.
The 36 year-old KIRBY — as she’s known professionally — has been hailed by global icons like Elton John (who predicted she was destined for greatness) and had her songs cut by a who’s who of the world’s biggest hip-hop, pop and rock stars, with tracks like Rihanna, Kanye West and Paul McCartney’s “FourFiveSeconds,” Beyoncé’s “Die With You” and Ariana Grande’s “Break Your Heart Right Back.”
She has also released several solo projects in that time, but with her latest, “Miss Black America” (out Aug. 29), she’s digging deep into a personal and cultural experience. An ambitious concept album, KIRBY describes it as a record “about growing up in Mississippi and understanding how the fight of your ancestors, the love of your family, the blood on the land and the joy of the Sunday choir shaped how you see the world.”
A decade after breaking through as a successful songwriter, Mid-South native KIRBY is releasing a deeply personal solo LP titled “Miss Black America.”
Though she still maintains a residence in Brooklyn, for most of 2025 KIRBY has been back living and working in North Mississippi. “I didn’t want to do this project as an outsider,” KIRBY says. “I’ve been here since February, and it’s been quite rewarding to be here and create.”
“Mississippi has always been a place where I’m from, but I just never carried a flag of pride about it. It might be because for most of my life, somebody was flying the Confederate flag in our [faces].”
But sparked by the passing of her grandmother, KIRBY began to reconsider her relationship to the state. “It boils down to family,” she says. “And all of my family is here. So I had to reframe Mississippi from being a place that I left, to a land that’s good, a land that’s mine. It became a question of, ‘How do I cultivate and honor where I come from?’”
Songwriting success opens door to career as solo artist
After attending the Stax Music Academy in Memphis, KIRBY went to Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music. She eventually dropped out and moved to Atlanta in 2009, when a personal tragedy reshaped her life.
“My first love from college ended up getting killed in a car accident,” she says. “That shook my world completely. When that happened, I came back to Mississippi, quite depressed. I was still very much in grief.”
It was at this personal low point when she refocused on music. She became determined to write and record and upload a new song to the internet each day, and began reaching out to industry figures, looking for a break. “I would tweet at people,” she says, “I would write people. I would message people from ASCAP and BMI and Universal. I was hustling and I had no shame.”
Eventually that persistence paid off as she got her songs in front of an executive at Roc Nation, which signed her to a publishing deal.
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She admits her first year navigating the world of professional songwriting and cold collaborations was a challenge. “I had been a bedroom songwriter,” she says. “I wrote by myself. I wrote on my little piano. And suddenly they were throwing me into rooms with celebrities. And I was like, ‘What do you want me to do?’”
Quickly, though, KIRBY found her way working with artists like Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez, Brandy and Timbaland, and eventually got her work cut by the likes of Beyoncé and Ariana Grande. Her songwriting success also opened doors to a career as a solo artist, as she released a series of singles, a pair of EPs and her full-length debut, “Sis. He Wasn’t the One,” in 2021.
The spark for “Miss Black America” came soon after, when she was asked to contribute a song to the ABC limited series “Women of the Movement,” honoring Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of slain Civil Rights martyr Emmett Till. The resulting track, “Black Leaves,” became a viral and streaming hit, and pushed KIRBY to follow its thematic trail home.
“I think that song brought me back to my roots,” she says. “My life has always pointed me to the Southern Black experience. When I sing about things that are tender to my heart regarding the South and Black American culture, people resonate with that more. And so, I just leaned into what was working.”
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The making of ‘Miss Black America’
The cover of KIRBY’s second full-length album, “Miss Black America.”
KIRBY began work on “Miss Black America” in earnest in 2022 with producers Thomas Brenneck (Charles Bradley, Sharon Jones) and Homer Steinweiss (Amy Winehouse, Lee Fields). The songs would eventually come to include collaborations with fellow Mississippians, hip-hop-soul musician Akeem Ali and rapper Big K.R.I.T. KIRBY says she was especially inspired by the raw soul of artists like Mavis Staples and Bill Withers in shaping the project.
“I just wanted to find like the grittiest sound,” she notes. “I wanted a sound as close to what I grew up on at Pleasant Grove Community Church, where we would have something called the moaning bench, where people would moan and hum, that really powerful kind of a cappella singing.
“We just leaned in and allowed the record to be what it was. I didn’t try to make it perfect. I kind of hate this reference, but when you hear the intro of the album, it sounds like your ancestors singing in the field, really and truly. And so we took it all the way to that place.” (As part of the project, KIRBY has been releasing a series of videos that she describes as an “audiovisual experience of the Mississippi Delta, and a love letter to the rural South.”)
KIRBY describes her new album, “Miss Black America,” as a record about “how the fight of your ancestors, the love of your family, the blood on the land and the joy of the Sunday choir shaped how you see the world.”
With the release of the album, KIRBY is working toward finding a balance between being an up-and-coming solo artist and successful professional songwriter. “In a perfect world, I would love to say I can do both,” she said. “There’s no way I really could have been able to have a sustainable life financially had I not had the songwriting success I’ve had. There’s no streaming check for an artist that will compare to having a radio hit as a songwriter.”
Professionally, KIRBY has also branched out, voicing the pop star Ni’jah in Donald Glover and Janine Nabers’ Amazon Prime Video series “Swarm.” “I want a career that is sustainable and provides financially, but that also allows me to be 100% authentic to myself,” says KIRBY, who noted that will come by serving her audience.
“I’ve never liked the word fans, but as an artist your career is supported by the people who listen to your work. I have a loyal, intimate and very personal fan base that loves my music. I want to feel like I’ve given them something so timeless that they’ll always want to listen. That’s really the goal.”
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: KIRBY’s ‘Miss Black America’: The story behind the new album
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