Episode 6: “Stay Alive” by Geonoah Davis aka “geonovah”
Transcription:
I just released an album. It's called “sorry for the mess”. It's a letter to my people, it's a letter to my daughter, the listeners, and it's a letter to my younger self. It's basically just saying, like, “this is who I am and this is how I got here.” The album, like it says “sorry for the mess” but I'm not really apologizing, I'm just kind of letting you know. [MUSIC]
My name is Geonoah Davis. I use they or he pronouns. I am from and currently living in Big Stone Gap, Virginia which is the land of the Shawnee and Eastern Cherokee. I am a hip-hop artist and go by the name of Geonovah for that and I’m a Black Appalachian.
It was hard enough when I was younger growing up being a Black person in a small area let alone getting all the other, you know, bad sayings or whatever that came to do with being in this area, so it was almost like having to cope with two different pieces of myself that I felt people didn’t care for. But as I’ve gotten older and as I’ve gotten more involved with different communities, I’ve started to just really come to appreciate how much it means to be both Black and Appalachian because I get to basically put on for this entire area in a way that people, there’s not a lot of people that can relate so much to being both. So it’s just been really lovely to be able to come to terms, accept, and also live in that experience of being both Black and Appalachian.
[SOUNDS OF WATER] I moved to Johnson City to go to school and I was making music there for a time and I just started to meet other creatives and what not and I just started to realize more and more that there’s so many creatives, especially hip-hop and rap artists around this area that just, people just don’t know about because we don’t get that kind of recognition being in this area.
My whole thing is I want to be able to shine a light on all the other musicians around here too so we can help each other and so we can help show the world that there is a bunch of talent in this area and we need and deserve resources. So for me the thing with my art is just accepting who you are and diving into that and being unapologetically yourself. It’s about helping those around you, it’s about loving and accepting loss, and always wanting to try to succeed and do more because around here music isn’t persay the status quo unless it’s a certain genre like country or bluegrass to be specific. But there’s more than that, there’s more of us here doing all kinds of cool things with our art and I just want to be able to help show that, help showcase that because there’s so much and it’s just so lovely to just be in community with all these people. And that’s another thing - just community. [MUSIC]
Most of my songs consist of just the stuff I do with my friends when I’m with them because I love my friends. We’re young, we like to hang out, we like to smoke, we like to drink, we like to be with each other. We like to talk about the stuff that's bothering us in the world, we like to talk about different things within the culture. I can think of specifically like I’m thinking of bonfires in my youth as a teenager. I’m thinking of being surrounded by the mountains and smelling the air, smelling the rain as it comes in, watching the leaves change and fall. Thinking about how, actually, I was writing a song last week and I just mentioned how cold it was getting cuz it gets really cold in the mountains and so yeah like I’m just constantly inspired by the people around me and the things around me and I like to put it in my songs and it just helps me never lose sight of where I am and where I want to go and also the things I care about.
The song I submitted was a song called “Stay Alive”, and I wrote that song back in 2020. It was when I had moved to Johnson City in 2016, right when I started making music and then I moved back to Big Stone, my hometown, in 2020 right before the pandemic hit. A year before that I had gotten involved with this network of individuals called The Stay Project and they're just full of so many cool and beautiful people that I had to write a song about them. So the song, like I said it's called “Stay Alive”. It's about the people I love and how they help me Stay Alive and keep pushing and help me to be able to dream of and imagine a world where we can live in this region and thrive and just be with each other and share space and community.
[GEONOVAH’S MUSIC]
The Stay Project: it stands for Stay Together Appalachian Youth and it’s a youth network of individuals aged 14-30. We get together and we teach popular education, we teach just different things about leadership, we do community gatherings, and we do community mappings and stuff like that so we can know what's going on in each of our communities and how it relates and how it affects all of us, and yeah it’s just a network of young folk just trying to teach each other the things we need to know so that we don't have to leave our region. Because as a young person in this area too many times there's just instances where people can't exist here because there's just not a ton of things to do unless, you know, you go work in factories or you go get a 9-5 doing this or that and what not but there's like so many other options. Like there's so many things to be involved in and we just, we try to help teach people that you have options like you don't just have to do this or leave. Like you can do damn near whatever you want as long as you love it enough and as long as you care about it and as long as you're genuine and intentional in the things you want to do and the people you want to put yourself around and what not. To me The Stay Project is just a big web of lovely, talented, inventive, smart people that want to make this region the best that it can be so our young folk don't have to leave anymore. [MUSIC]
I also want to say that our generation or my generation is very aware of what's going on in the world, very aware of all the issues that we face. All the climate crisis, poverty, just not being able to afford to live in places and seeing how the world is constantly changing, constantly at war, like we're very aware of that. And I feel like that awareness has always been in my art. It's always been influenced like I talk about it constantly. It's put us in this space where everyone's at like a constant state of anxiety just kind of worried about like what's about to happen or what could happen or when it’s going to happen and what not. It absolutely influences my art. I like to talk about it. I'm not going to say I know every single thing that's going on or what's wrong or how I can help but I do know we have problems and I want to always be very transparent about that like I know, we know and we should do something about it.
I also use my personality like, I think I'm kind of funny, so I mean I use that, I guess it is kind of more of like a funny serious tone when I'm talking about it because it's kind of like, it's satire when you hear some things. It's almost like it's like there's no way that's real but it actually is. So like I kind of try to talk about it in that way in this like really dark humor kind of way in a sense. Like my music is kind of dark in that way but I'm also like I try to you know make jokes because like what else are you going to do. There's no sense in sitting in panic. I try to be optimistic in it but I’m also like very aware of how bad it is. So like that darkness definitely comes out.
It's just made things hard and so we've just decided that the best thing we can do is to just be as happy as we can and celebrate each other when we can. I've tried to hold more shows in town and stuff just to bring people together. Any time I hear about any grant opportunities I send them to my people whether it be with activism or art so that we can all get some money really because, you know, we need it, like we deserve it. There's a bunch of talent. I know a lot of folks that could use that step up, that money, those resources so I do that, I help share opportunities as much as I can, I shout people out as much as I can. We really do just celebrate in like mostly the physical sense, like we enjoy our presence with each other at any chance we have.
I have a lot of artists around me that I draw wisdom and inspiration from all the time. Generational wise, I have my family. They've always been super duper supportive of my music. Like ever since I started making music my mom came to my very first show. For the first few years my brother was at every single show until he got busy. Every chance they get they come to support me and that means a lot. I live in my great grandmother's old house— she passed away last year— she left this house in Big Stone [SOUNDS OF WATER] that my mom and her mom lived in also, I’ve lived there, my cousins have lived there. So we have this piece of ancestral land that I can just go and stand on at any given point in time just to like just draw those good feelings up. You know, talk to my granny and what not if I need to. Family is just everything to me and without their support, I don’t know how far I would’ve ever made it so yeah they’ve just made everything so much easier and I constantly draw inspiration and wisdom from them. [MUSIC]
MUSIC & SOUNDS USED:
Theme music : Water Fluid - Music by ItsWatR from Pixabay
Ambiance Brook Calm: Sound Effect by Nox Sound from Pixabay
Wind In Trees: Sound Effect by SoundsForYou from Pixabay
“Stay Alive”: Original music by geonovah
