JOBIE Arthur: A Modern Troubadour

by Charles McGuigan 03.2023

Photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

The wedding band had just finished their set and were headed over to the bar for some refreshments. Their instruments stood like small sculptures on the makeshift stage, and a little girl stared at them for a moment, then climbed up on the stage. She clasped a microphone with her tiny fingers and without any musical accompaniment sang a song she had committed to memory thanks to her grandma who had sung it to her every night for as long as the girl could remember. She sang one verse and as soon as she finished it the people sitting at the tables in front of her applauded, and the girl smiled. She was just four years old and her name was Josie Arthur. She moved into her grandmother’s lap who sat at a table near the stage. Her grandmother hugged her.

That was the very first time Josie Arthur (JOBIE) ever performed in front of an audience. When she tells me this, I ask if she would mind singing it now. JOBIE nods and sings one verse in a perfect a cappella rendition, and by the time she finishes, with the words “Please don’t take my sunshine away," there are tears in her eyes.

When I ask if she’s okay, JOBIE nods. “It makes me sad to sing it still,” she says. “I just think about my grandma whenever I sing it, so I don’t sing it anymore. I was seven when she died very young of lung cancer. It was just a sad moment in my life. She really was a constant loving presence in my life, so when she was gone I felt that absence. She was like a third parent.”

For many weekend nights during her early years, it was JOBIE’S grandmother who would lay her down to sleep. “My parents would be having gigs on the weekends so she was like my babysitter,” JOBIE says. “And and she would sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and I would always cry because I thought the song was sad for some reason.” And now there are tears in my eyes, too.

Music has always had a profound effect on JOBIE. “It emotionally moved me,” she says. “I’ve been moved by music since I was really, really young. I would hear songs on the radio and things about heartbreak and stuff.”

At age five while in the car with her mother “Teardrops on My Guitar” by Taylor Swift came up on the radio. As JOBIE listened to the words and absorbed the melody, she began crying. Her mother looked in the rear view mirror at her daughter strapped in her car seat.

“Are you having heartbreak, Josie?” she asked.

JOBIE shook her head. “No, it just moved me,” she told her mother.

That ability to respond to music became a driving force in JOBIE’s decision to become a singer songwriter. “I think that that is probably one of my motivating factors for writing music,” she says. “I like to write things that are emotionally hard to feel,” she says. “I like to write things that are cathartic for me, and then they kind of turn out to be cathartic for other people, too.”

When the vessel that would become JOBIE was filled, what poured into it was an exceptional cocktail of genes. JOBIE’s parents, Sara and Charles, are immensely talented musicians. Sara has a voice like no other, and Charles could coax music out of cucumber. He is as versatile as any musician I have ever met, and the tunes he makes seem to drop out of the thin air.

Of her mother’s voice, JOBIE says, “She has a really soulful, very pretty, but strong voice. I don’t really know how to describe it in the best way. She usually sings kind of jazz stuff, but she’ll also sing Patsy Cline type of stuff.”

And her father’s musical gifts are matchless. “Except for horns,” she says,“he can play everything else.”

JOBIE realizes her unique good fortune in having the parents she has. “I mean I feel really lucky,” she says. “My parents didn’t make a ton of money. They worked in the local music industry in Richmond. I grew up rich in culture and an artistic drive, but I didn’t grow up with a ton of connections nationwide or anything like that.” She pauses for a moment and then says, “I don’t know if I would have been doing this if I didn’t have everything at my disposal like my dad’s instruments. He had so many instruments that I could just pick up and play anytime, as long as I asked him.”

And JOBIE is the mirror image of her mother. “Genetically I inherited a lot of her traits,” she says of her mom. “I don’t think our personalities are super similar, but physically we share a lot. We have shared a similar path due to our physical things. She was taller than everyone growing up, I was also taller than everyone in my class. Our faces are similar, our torsos are similar, and we can both sing.”

When she was young, JOBIE would often watch her parents perform together at venues throughout the Richmond area, places like Ashland Coffee and Tea.“I loved the idea of performing ever since I was very young because I think I saw my parents doing it,” says JOBIE. “And when they were doing it then suddenly I wasn’t the center of their attention and I wasn’t the center of their world anymore. So I think maybe as a response to that I have to be performing. I was never really afraid to be on stage, never really had stage fright.”

It was at Holton Elementary, then under the loving guidance of Principal David Hudson, that JOBIE really took to the stage. For one thing, she had excellent teachers there who saw her talent and nurtured it. “Miss Turnage was a great drama teacher and I had so much fun with her,” she remembers. “I was in choir with Mr. Clarke. He was so nice and I loved singing in that class. I have good memories of singing there and then being in choir.”

And over the years she would perform in the fall, winter and spring musicals produced at Holton. She recalls one musical with an environmental theme called Santa Goes Green. “That was the first time I had a solo and I remember a lot of people telling me I was a really good singer after that,” says JOBIE.

In the fifth grade, not long before graduation, JOBIE played the Wizard of Oz in the school’s interpretation of The Wiz. She had one song, and she nailed it. But for JOBIE it was never really about the theatrics. “I did it all so I could start singing,” she says. “That’s why I got into doing theater, because I liked to sing.”

Throughout elementary school JOBIE’s parents urged her to take classes at SPARC (School of the Performing Arts in the Richmond Community), but their daughter wasn’t interested. In middle school that changed. She attended the IB program at Lucille Brown Middle School where there was no theater program at all. “That’s when I decided I wanted to go to SPARC,” JOBIE says. “Till my junior year of high school I was with them. And after my sophomore year, during the summer, I started working there as an assistant to one of the marketing people in the office.”

“I loved learning the harmonies and singing them,” she says. “I learned a lot about music from just sort of doing choral type musical theater music.” While at SPARC, she performed in The Drowsy Chaperone, The Music Man and Tarzan, among other productions. “And I was really serious about musical theater,” she adds. “I wanted to be a dancer, singer, actor. I saw myself doing eight shows a week on Broadway or acting with a touring show. That was my goal.”

At Appomattox Regional Governor’s School, JOBIE honed her skills. She also attended summer programs at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, home of the Blackfriars Playhouse. “It was an awesome place,” she says. “That was probably the most fun I’ve ever had acting.”While there she had roles in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Roaring Girl by Dekker and Middleton.  She also played Regan in a scene from King Lear.

As college approached, JOBIE decided to study musical theater and began sending out early applications. “I had to send in pre-screens,” she says. “And most of them rejected me for musical theater.” So she changed course. “I was like, ‘Okay well I think I should just be an actor then. Maybe I’m really good at acting, maybe acting is what I want to do.’”

So she applied to Emerson College in Boston and was accepted into their acting school. That was about the time Covid struck. “I started at Emerson in fall of 2020,” says JOBIE. “Fifty percent of the classes were on zoom and fifty percent we would go into classrooms and be socially distanced. The acting classes there are great. The teachers that I had for voice and movement were really nice people, they were the best acting teachers that I had ever had.”

While attending classes at Emerson, JOBIE was also writing songs. She produced a load of them and during winter break she spent hours down in the basement where her father has a sort of recording studio. “My dad has all this equipment in his basement,” JOBIE says. “Sometimes he records stuff for himself. So I had all these songs and I was like. ‘We should record them.’ So we started recording, and I started producing these songs and I would get him to play on them.”

The first song she recorded was Scorpio which has now gotten more than 18,000 hits on Spotify. “I recorded four songs including Halfway and Simple Man,” says JOBIE. “This was with my dad in the basement and I sort of was like, ‘Oh can you play the cello on this?’ Or, ‘Can you play drums on this or bass?’ And then I would go and do harmonies and mix it that way and then my dad mastered it and then I put that out on streaming in April 2021.”

At this point in the interview, JOBIE grabs her guitar and begins playing and singing Scorpio. It is a wonder to behold this young woman who created this song from nothing, playing it now and singing the words she crafted. Her voice has a timeless quality and it haunts your soul long after the song is finished. And her voice seems to shift effortlessly from mezzo-soprano to contralto.

JOBIE made her very first song when she was just a preschooler. “My dad has a recording somewhere of me when I was like four or five singing in his basement this song about kissing somebody,” she says. “I was four and I had never kissed anybody, but I wrote songs and would sing them in my head.”

Her influences were many, from classic rock to folk. “I heard the melodies and the moments in the song that were big, and the moments that were small,” JOBIE says. “And I could hear a lot of the time what they were saying, what they were talking about.”

She listened to a lot of The Beatles' work. “I always resonated with Paul McCartney’s songwriting style,” she says. “I think Yesterday is a really great song.” And she remembers one Yusuf/Cat Stevens song from his Tea for the Tillerman album. “It’s called Don’t Be Shy, and that song makes me cry,” she says. There was also Tom Petty.

“My dad would play a lot of Tom Petty,” JOBIE says. “In second grade he was driving me to school one morning and we were listening to ‘I Won’t Back Down’, and it made me so sad for some reason.”

She got out of the car and went to class and later that day during recess she left her water bottle outside. She couldn’t find the water bottle and began thinking of this container as a living creature. “I couldn’t stop picturing my water bottle in the middle of a field somewhere being sad, and that song, ‘I Won’t Back Down’, wouldn’t stop playing in my head. I was sad about the water bottle and the song. And so I had to go home because I was so upset about the song and the water bottle.”

One morning as she showered a song popped into her head and she later strummed it out on a ukulele. It was called Puzzles, and it was about a friend and his girlfriend. She sings a verse of it now. “I don’t have a problem, You can never solve the puzzles in my head, the puzzles in my head, You can never change me, I do not need therapy for puzzles in my head, puzzles my head.”

When she sang it for her parents they were blown away. “My parents said, ‘This is really good,’” JOBIE remembers. “I was about fifteen at the time. So I kept writing songs about things going on in my life. I would do it for fun, on the side, all throughout high school.

In high school JOBIE was a member of an a cappella group. Even though she had a very good voice, she could not compete with some of the other vocalists. “I don’t have this powerhouse voice,” she says. “I knew that I couldn’t sing like Beyonce or Adele. I didn’t have a big voice that had a lot of control. I knew my voice by itself was good but it could never be show-stopping the way that I wanted it to be.”

JOBIE began listening to a singer who had a voice more like her own, a singer songwriter who was developing a strong fan base. “I heard Phoebe Bridger’s album Stranger in the Alps and I love that kind of music, that kind of folk and acoustic music that is also really sad and moody,” says JOBIE. “I thought people like her music and I can write songs like that and I can sing like that. I used to think when I was a little kid that I wanted to be a singer and I was always trying to write songs. So why not do it.”
On a biting cold January night in the secluded compound of house and outbuildings on a small rural tract near Reedy Creek on Southside, JOBIE held a release party for her album which contains eight tracks. It was a remarkable evening and the culmination of months of hard work.

The album’s title is Grendel, but it is not in reference to the monster as portrayed in Beowulf. It is more about the monster’s point of view as captured in John Gardener’s breakthrough novel Grendel.

“I like the perspective of an animal or a monster seeing the humans and how they are acting in a primitive way,” JOBIE tells me. “There’s this whole societal role that he can’t fit into and there’s nothing he can do about it. He sees inside and there’s nothing he could do to fit in and

he has to understand that.”

Which begs the question, who are the real monsters?

“I wouldn’t go so far to say that it’s human beings as I would say it’s industrialization and greed and white supremacy,” says JOBIE. “In the Americas the native people were living extremely sustainable lives, they were living in harmony with the earth. And I think that capitalism and industrialization is the real enemy, and that’s what killing the planet, and when the planet is suffering like this disenfranchised people, poor people are the people that get affected the most.”

“A lot of my songs come from a place of disillusionment and sometimes unhappiness or anger,” says Josie. “I think a lot of time somebody will be rude to me, or somebody will hurt me, or double cross me, and then I’ll write in reaction to that. I talk about my struggles socially with people, and how I’ve experienced that growing up, and that’s the main theme of the song I named the album after.”

That cut is now called To This Day (Grendel) on her album.

More often than not, great artists live in a realm that often seems isolated, for they see and feel things that many people are either incapable of experiencing or too frightened to acknowledge.

“I always as a kid felt like an outsider or I felt different from other kids when I was growing up,” says JOBIE. “Sometimes I still feel different from other people my age. And since nobody is like anybody else then we should use our own gifts to help everyone else.”

JOBIE’s gift is a singular way of expressing her deepest emotions through song. She is a bard; she is a troubadour.

“I’m putting into words feelings that everybody’s probably felt in their own particular way,” she says. “One of my songs on the album is about trying to stick with somebody who doesn’t like me, or isn’t putting in the same effort. And it’s sort of self-sabotaging staying in that relationship. A lot of people go through that where they are with people that are wrong for them, or with people that are not treating them right, but not everybody can put it into words how that makes them feel with poetry, So that’s what I do. And I think when people listen to that they’re like, I felt that way before and that’s really cathartic for me to hear that.”

The song she was speaking about is called All Is Well, and JOBIE recites her favorite lyrics from the piece. “I’m a sorry dancer with the moon in cancer, And you’ve gotten under my skin and all the ghosts are gone now, They’ve got up and walked out but I’m still dancing.”

She mentions her own depression and a recent conversation with her mother. “I realize the way the world is set up and it makes me real angry every day, and makes me sometimes not want to get out of bed in the morning,” JOBIE says. “I was talking to my mom about this and she was obviously sad that I was sad. She said throughout history there has been human suffering. But I said, ‘We have the technology where we could make everything sustainable, and we could redistribute wealth.’”

And then she speaks an indisputable truth. “Why is everyone so depressed? That’s the natural reaction to the way the world is right now. If you’re not depressed, you’re not getting what’s going on. Or you’re extremely privileged and dumb. I think it’s good to have that response. If we sweep that depression aside then we don’t help.”

JOBIE’S words and melodies are a sovereign remedy for what ails our collective psyche. She does what all great poets and songwriters have always done, she shines light on painful truths and collectively we listeners feel not so alone and are often inspired to the point of dramatic change.

She remembers the night of her album release celebration. After her performance, people from the audience approached her and told her how her songs resonated with them. “We are all kind of trapped and we’re all kind of isolated and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Josie Arthur tells me. “I realized that I was ultimately not alone when people were telling me how they felt about the songs. I could put that into words about feeling alone, about feeling different from other people. I have these issues and these feelings and they’re not unique feelings necessarily. But I see them in a unique way and I can articulate them in a unique way. And people can share that together and I think that is what art is all about.”

To listen to Grendel by JOBIE visit Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/album/2n0V2d6RCMJwPR32B5j0uv