Jenn Howard Maps her Milky Way before Playing Jazz Fest 2023

Jenn Howard, by Greg Miles

The singer behind “Valiant Women” recalls the valiant women—and a few guys—who shaped her musical universe.

There’s nothing I can say about Jenn Howard and Valiant Women that she doesn’t say for herself in her “Milky Way.” We asked her for the eight songs that define her musical universe, and her choices and explanations of them tell you why you should see her set at Jazz Fest on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. in the AARP Rhythmporium.

Howard got in the game with Project NIM as she finished high school, went to New York, got roughed up by the music business and the band business, came home and started a real life. She learned that she didn’t want what she wanted as a teenager, but he wasn’t done with singing either. She sang covers at parties and for a while performed regularly at The Rusty Nail.

Along the way she had jobs, got married, and had kids, but she realized that simply singing didn’t full scratch her itch. She felt a need to create music that reflected not just her voice but her, and Valiant Women, which came out this spring, is the result. The songs and her choices below tell you everything you need to know.

“Yesterday” - The Beatles

My Dad is a Beatles fan, so it’s some of the first music I ever knew, and ‘Yesterday’ is the first song I ever recorded. I was nine.

I grew up in New Orleans, and my favorite Saturday activity was going to Jackson Square, having beignets at Café Du Monde, and stopping into the Jax Brewery, where you could rent time in a sound booth and put a karaoke version of your favorite song on a cassette tape. It’s one of my oldest and fondest memories. I knew then that being in that space, pouring my own intensity and ache into a song I loved so much created a vibration and feeling of abundance in me. I felt alive for the first time.

“Ghost” - The Indigo Girls

‘Ghost’ by the Indigo Girls was another growing up song that tore at me the same way. The melody of the guitar part at the start of the song, the natural push and pull of the vocal, and that harmony hit me so sweetly. I was in the 8th grade the year that record came out, and it was everything to me. The Indigo Girls were my first true love of women in music, and I’ve been fortunate enough to hear them play all my life and even say hello a time or two.

“Me and Bobby McGee”—Janis Joplin

There has been no other song more requested for me to sing than “Me and Bobby McGee.” I started doing it in 1994 when I formed my high school band, Project NIM. People seemed to be moved by the fact that I had the growl and grit that Janis was able to produce in her vocal. I liked the swirling energy I could conjure up towards the end when it gets going. I’ve done it more times than I can count. It doesn’t make my setlist as a cover often these days, but my heart still belongs to Bobby.

“All I Could Do Was Cry” - Etta James

I was at a party at my cousin’s house on the night that my friend, painter Daniel Price, left me alone to listen to Etta James for the first time. He told me that it would change me, and he was right. She was what I had been waiting to hear, and I didn’t even know it until it happened to me. I wanted to sound like her. I wanted to be able to wrap up a feeling and deliver it that same way. I wanted to share the gift of emotion and intensity with the band, the room, the street, and the world. “All I Could do Was Cry” was the one for me. It shook and then settled my core and made me the vocalist that I am today.

“You Know that I’m No Good” - Amy Winehouse

In my twenties, I worked at an elementary school and shelved books in the library twice weekly. I was getting ready to record my CD, Up at Night, and was deeply inspired by Amy Winehouse. Back to Black came out after Hurricane Katrina, and I immersed myself in those wandering, soothing, and haunting vocals for years. I shelved thousands of books listening to ‘You Know I’m No Good,’ and it’s still one of my favorite songs to sing. Amy had this unique ability to effortlessly dance around her original melody and tempo and create something new from something already familiar. What a gem. What a loss. I’m still in awe.

“Angel from Montgomery” - John Prime and Bonnie Raitt

My favorite song to sing is ‘Angel From Montgomery’ by John Prine. And my favorite version of that song is a live duet of John and Bonnie Raitt doing it on a Tribute to Steve Goodman.  It has been the song that inspired us to write more harmonies for our record, Valiant Women. I love anything Bonnie sings, but this one stirs me in the right direction. I always have just enough breath to make it soar in the chorus, and when you blend it just right with some harmony, there’s not much like it.

“Hurt So Bad” - Susan Tedeschi

A number of my cherished women songwriters love to cover “Angel from Montgomery,” and not many sing it better than Susan Tedeschi. I discovered Susan when my band member, Cate Swan, told me I needed to cover, ‘It Hurt So Bad.’ Boy, did it hurt when I figured out I could have been listening to Susan all those years and didn’t know about her! Since then, I have been smitten with everything Susan has done and all the new work she and her husband have created with the Tedeschi Trucks Band. My husband and I had our first dance at our wedding to TTB. They are special to us, and we know our city is special to the two of them. We never miss a show at The Saenger in New Orleans, where Derek and Susan met.

“That Wasn’t Me” - Brandi Carlile

There is no artist more inspiring to me than Brandi Carlile. I loved “The Story” and “Give Up the Ghost,” but “Bear Creek” really turned me. I can listen to every single record all the way through over and over again. ‘That Wasn’t Me’ became my anthem when my mom died in 2012. It carried me through grief. It allowed me the space to forgive and be forgiven. Then, years later, at Brandi’s first all-women music festival in Mexico, I was inspired to write again after a long while, and I decided to make a push for my own singing career and write an album for people like me, who had lost footing in their hopes and dreams. It was Brandi who sparked the creation of Valiant Women. And now, I hope my record will inspire someone else to be valiant in their efforts to become the person they always knew they could be.

Jenn Howard, by Greg Miles