Jonell Mosser Remains a Great Interpreter

For Jonell Mosser, who has worked in Nashville for more than three decades, the role of the interpreter is bound up with the gravitational pull of Music City, where singers are often asked to bend their ideas to suit the fashion of the day. Mosser is indeed what’s called a singer’s singer, but she’s not exactly a country singer, and while her style lends itself to soul music, she avoids the excesses of many modern R&B singers. What Mosser does, quite simply, is sing in a superbly modulated voice that can be gritty or reflective, depending on whether she’s covering a blues standard or neglected classics by the likes of Nick Lowe and Townes Van Zandt. Her taste has guided her through a career that contains the kind of music-business machinations that can generate a black hole.

Mosser is one of the city’s most accomplished interpreters, and her versatility and refusal to be limited by genre have produced albums as deep as her 1996 debut, a collection of Van Zandt songs called Around Townes. Lately, she’s been working on a live album pulled from performances she’s given over the past few years at Madison venue Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, where she continues to play regular gigs. She performs there under her own name and with her current band, The Tajmaholics, which is named after guitarist and singer Taj Mahal. As she says, Mahal’s continuing career helped inspire her latest music.

“The Tajmaholics was my idea,” Mosser tells me via phone from her Nashville home. “My repertoire has changed over the years. After [I was] about 50, I thought, ‘Am I fooling myself that I’m still doing this?’ So I started looking around at artists that I felt were older but still killin’ it, you know what I mean, in their own idiom. The first who came to mind were Taj and Ry Cooder.”

Mosser added Mahal’s folk-country-pop arrangement of a 1960s song by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Take a Giant Step” — which Mahal and Cooder’s band The Rising Sons also recorded an uptempo version of in 1966 — to her set list. In her recent shows, she’s also sung Little Feat’s “All That You Dream” along with her own tunes, like “Nicer to Me,” a co-write with Tajmaholics guitarist Tom Britt. From the stage, Mosser sounds like the great interpreter she is, and her arrangement of “All That You Dream” vies with the treatment Little Feat gave the song on their original 1975 recording of the tune.

Mosser was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1959, and moved in 1977 to Bowling Green, where she planned to study theater at Western Kentucky University. After dropping out of Western, she began playing around Bowling Green, singing Top 40 hits, standards and rock tunes. She also sang with an all-female group, Yo Mama, during her years in Bowling Green. In 1985 she moved to Nashville, where she sang with another group, Girls Girls Girls.

“I know a ton of songs,” Mosser says. “I’m one of those weirdo people that loves words. As long as the lyrics are memorable, that song stays with me. Harlan Howard was a dear friend, and Harlan told me, ‘Do what you’re doing. Nobody can sing like you. Sing all kinds of songs, and don’t be prejudiced against country music.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna break you of that,’ and he did.”

As she tells me, somewhat ruefully, her attempts to sign to a major label and become a full-fledged star were thwarted by the expectations of an industry that couldn’t see beyond standard genre boundaries.

“I was told over and over again that I was going about it all wrong,” she says. “I was never going to be successful if I tried to do all the things I was trying to do, musically. They thought, ‘You’re a dumb girl, and you don’t know what’s going on [in the studio]. We’re gonna tell you one thing and do something else.’ I was the problem.”

It took more than a decade of performing in Nashville, but Mosser finally released Around Townes to critical acclaim. The record peaks with “Nothin’,” which Mosser & Co. render with ice-cold precision.

Caught live, Mosser is in her element. Little Black Dress, a live album recorded at a 1994 engagement in Bearsville, N.Y., hit the market in 2020. She played the show with Orleans singer and former U.S. Rep. John Hall, who will appear on the bill with Mosser Thursday night at 3rd and Lindsley. Mosser’s in-the-works live album sounds promising too. Produced by Dee’s sound person Chris Mitchell, the collection meets her exacting standards.

“I came to [the studio] and listened. I’m very picky. If there’s a big old clam in the middle of it, it’s done. But we’ve got enough for a record, we really do.”