At 25, Grammy-winning vocalist Samara Joy is breathing new life into the rich legacy of jazz. In this ELLE Women in Music feature, she sits down with ELLE Features Editor Adrienne Gaffney to reflect on her viral rise on TikTok, the bold, self-assured sound of her new album Portrait, and how she’s stepping fully into her creative power.
Recorded in just three days, Portrait marks a breakthrough moment for Joy, capturing a time when she says she had to “grow up and stand up for [her] ideas.” The album follows a whirlwind few years: national tours, a holiday concert series with her musical family—including her 94-year-old grandfather—and a deepening connection to the jazz community that first embraced her online.
In this candid profile, Joy reflects on the invisible support she first felt through her online community, the early memories that shaped her love of music, and her hopes of inspiring a new generation of jazz listeners.
On joining TikTok while recording her debut album: Joy joined TikTok around the same time as she was recording her 2021 eponymously debut album. She’d been somewhat resistant to social media, but that quickly changed when she saw the reach it gave her. “I was scared that my content would look the same as everybody else’s—I thought, ‘I’m just singing to camera, everybody does this,’” she says. “But once a bunch of strangers started gravitating toward it, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is crazy.’ And I still feel this invisible but tangible embrace from the community.”
On how recording her album Portrait became a breakthrough moment for her confidence and artistry: Last October, Samara Joy released Portrait, her third album. Recorded over just three days, it gave her a new sense of power and creativity. “This album was different from my last two, because there was a period of time when I felt like I had to make a lot of decisions for myself and I had to grow up and stand up for myself and my ideas,” she says.
On being recognized by Regina King and being asked by her to record an original song for King’s film “Shirley”: “That was my first time being acknowledged by a celebrity in that way. I was like, “She knows who I am. Oh my God.” At that time, I had no social media presence. I had zero. It was none. I was not posting singing videos or anything. So that’s why I was like, ‘How did she find me?’”
On performing with her family on tour: She is on tour with Portrait through the summer, and late last year performed 13 shows with her family to promote a holiday album. She was joined by her 94-year-old grandfather, Elder Goldwire McLendon (who came out of retirement to join), as well as her father and her uncle and cousins, who are all vocalists. “Audiences come out to see my family perform together. It’s a beautiful thing because they get to share that memory with their own families,” Joy says. “My grandfather is getting the chance to see this legacy play out—to see all of us still enjoying music from when he and my grandmother first introduced it to us in church to now us being able to do it all together once again after a lot of detours.”
On what it was like growing up in a musical family: “It was constantly inspiring. My ears were trained early to listen to music in a different way. I enjoy thinking about why I loved my dad’s voice so much, and the riffs and runs he did and how he did them and where he placed them in the song. When he played bass, how melodic everything was. I feel like I learned from a place of singing with feeling and playing with feeling.”
On her first musical memory: “The first memory was fed to me by my dad, who has a cassette of me when I was three years old singing an Usher song. I think the song was “U Don’t Have to Call.” It’s one [memory] that I hold dear now—it’s like, “Whoa, I was three years old singing!” And my earliest memory was singing in church at 10 years old. My first solo was “Oh Happy Day.” I remember being nervous, but I had on my Easter dress.”
On her introduction to jazz: “I was introduced to jazz in high school, but I wasn’t really interested in doing it or listening to it. I just didn’t connect with it at that time. But I learned one or two jazz songs, and when it came time to choose a college, I was auditioning for different programs with those songs. I was hoping that even though I had very limited knowledge of this music, maybe they could see the potential with this one song.”
On how studying music expanded her approach to collaboration: “It broadened my perspective on collaboration, because we had all of these students with the same goal in one place. Up until that point, my relationship with music obviously stemmed from my family. It was nice to reframe my role and be able to listen and take in the music that was happening around me and [think about] how I could contribute to it and interact with it.”
Photographer: Adrienne Raquel
Stylist: Jan-Michael Quammie
Writer: Adrienne Gaffney
Hair: Lacy Redway
Makeup: Alexandra French
Manicure: Natalie Minerva
[Photo Credit: Adrienne Raquel for ELLE Magazine]
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