Sarah Jane Nelson - A Country Christmas (2020)

A girl in Star City, Arkansas grows up with loving parents who would flirt and sing in harmony to 1960’s break-up songs by Elvis Presley and Skeeter Davis. Summers were spent with her Mammy and Pappy traveling to bluegrass festivals in their motorhome, the little curly haired girl dancing to the fiddles and banjos, embraced by the tight-knit bluegrass community. Her father’s work takes the family to the bayou of Monroe, Louisiana where the utopia is interrupted when her idyllic home breaks up, rocked by infidelity that nobody saw coming and her world is turned upside down. She retreats to the radio, back to her sad country songs, stories woven around her own pain.

In the aftermath, she is determined to split town to make a life on her own terms. In a head-turning spin, a month after high school graduation, she wins America’s Miss T.E.E.N. Beauty Pageant where she is scouted by a talent agent. She puts her college plans on hold, moves to New York and in a few short years, this small-town girl is making her Broadway debut in Julie Taymor’s “The Green Bird.”

As if that wasn’t a ripe enough story for a roller coaster of a country song, fast forward a few years, girl meets boy, girl gets married, has children, spinning on stage after stage until her history catches up to her and she’s playing the part her mother originated, blown sideways by cheating. As a newly single mother in Nashville, Tennessee, she turns back to the country and gospel music from her childhood, writing her way to resilience, through the grief, and toward love.

With her newest album, “I’m Not Broken,” Sarah Jane Nelson adds her own defiantly triumphant voice to the Americana-Country field. Set in a sonic landscape that recalls the era of artists like Wynonna, Kathy Mattea and Mary Chapin Carpenter, “I’m Not Broken” is an honest breath of fresh air, a deliberate throwback to the days when a fiddle, an acoustic guitar and a rich alto voice could celebrate the fullness of a life hard-fought and hard-won.