Saaneah
Inspiration is often found in unexpected places. For Saaneah, it was as a child, watching the sitcom Martin while hanging out at her great-grandmother’s house. She heard the character Pam sing “Silent Night” on a Christmas episode.
“I was so touched by her performance of ‘Silent Night’ that I tried to sing it myself,” Saaneah recalls. “And when I sung it myself, it came out sounding nice. I wanted to mimic her because it just touched me so much at [age] 6 with that particular episode, and I wanted to have that effect on people.”
Word around Nashville traveled fast, and pretty soon people were talking about how Saaneah could sing. Her great-grandmother helped her join the church choir, and eventually, the first standing ovation she ever received — although certainly not the last — was singing “O Holy Night” at Gordon Memorial United Methodist Church in North Nashville. To get those vocals right, she practiced, listening to classics, including Mahalia Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.
“I’ve been performing seemingly since birth, since breath entered me,” she says, recounting how she would stand on the lip of the fireplace in her grandmother’s house, using a toilet paper roll as a microphone. “But I’ve been singing and developing my craft ever since ‘Silent Night’ and Martin.”
Since then, Saaneah has had a lot of big years. She studied at Nashville School of the Arts. “It was the modern-day Fame,” she says, breaking into the TV show’s theme song mid-interview. “It really changed my life, going to that school. I felt like I had people that got me as an artist, as a free spirit, who believed in me.”
She studied voice at Tennessee State University and was classically trained in jazz, show choir and theater. In 2014, she released an EP, The Spirit of Joy. She’s acted and modeled curvy jeans. She worked as the executive director of the Jefferson Street Sound Museum, focused on fundraising for the essential Nashville organization. She performed at the Belcourt and at Miss Zeke’s Juke Joint at Papa Turney’s BBQ.
But perhaps 2024 was the biggest year of them all. In 2023, she was tapped to record “Get the Hell Out of Dodge” on My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall, a combination book and album project that featured commercial country songs written by Randall and recorded by Black women artists. The project garnered award after award, from a writer’s choice in the Scene’s Best of Nashville issue to Rhiannon Giddens’ Grammy nomination for her performance on the album. The record was produced by Ebonie Smith, who brought Saaneah in for “Get the Hell Out of Dodge.”
“It was my first time working with Black women like this,” Saaneah says. “Miss Alice Randall, the way that she is with My Black Country is really inspirational to me. To have someone take me on and just see my star, my superstar — to see all these things and put me in position to find an audience that I didn’t know would love me so much was really inspirational.”
Then, in September, Saaneah made her Grand Ole Opry debut. The event marks her — as far as our research shows — as the first Black woman born in Nashville to perform on the program.
But it wasn’t easy getting there. In 2020, she and her grandmother were displaced from their home due to the tornado. In fact, she was briefly living in her car in 2023 during the period of time that she recorded “Get the Hell Out of Dodge.” In 2023 she wrote down a list of stages on which she wanted to appear in 2024, and the Opry was one of them. The CMA Awards ceremony was another event she wrote down, and 2024 saw her there too (though not performing), rubbing elbows with Shaboozey.
Saaneah
While she had just five days’ notice to prepare for her Opry debut, in some ways, she’s had a lifetime. The singer-songwriter describes herself as a “genre-bender” when it comes to her style.
“I have always loved country, but it just was something I didn’t see myself in,” Saaneah says. “I never want to be in a box. I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work for me. I’m a very multidimensional Black woman. I was really proud to find freedom in creative music and just nailing it. I love to nail it.”
Her Opry debut reinforced to her that it was all possible.
“I felt like Michael Jackson,” she recalls with a laugh, noting that she and the King of Pop share a birthday. “When I got off the stage, I couldn’t go anywhere because everywhere I went, everybody was clapping and wanting to take pictures.”
Saaneah is an independent artist and has never had an agency or management. “It’s just me. I always say, ‘God is my label.’”
As she planned for 2025, she had a talk with that label about what’s next. “My goal is to be a change-maker in music. It’s time for my hit. I was talking to God, and said, ‘All right, it’s hit time.’”
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