Meet Jamie Barton, Georgia’s international opera star with roots in Floyd County

These days Jamie Barton’s glorious voice rings out from the world’s great opera stages. But while she crosses the globe for her career, she is still close with her family and community in the Northwest Georgia valley where she grew up.

Ahead of Public Radio Music Day — this year focusing on rural music and musicians — GPB’s Sarah Zaslaw caught up with the award-winning mezzo-soprano to find out more about Barton’s musical roots, from bluegrass sessions in the living room to harmonizing in church.

Below are excerpts from the wide-ranging conversation:
 

By way of introduction…what are the most glamorous places you’ve sung?

Here in the United States, Carnegie Hall comes to the top of my mind. The Royal Opera House in London. In terms of glamor, I love Harpa Hall in Reykjavik, Iceland. It is one of the coolest looking buildings in the world to me.
 

Juiciest roles you've dug your teeth into?

I've gotten to sing all of the princesses of Verdi, several of the goddesses of Wagner. But some of my favorite roles in the world are the witches. Give me Ježibaba in Rusalka any day — I'm basically Ursula from The Little Mermaid, but a little bit worse. Way worse, actually.
 

Vocal range?

It varies depending on my age, the day, sometimes the environment. But basically I go from about an E below middle C up to a high C. In public, I should say. In the shower, it’s a very different kind of repertoire.
 

Awards won?

I've been very, very lucky. Cardiff Singer of the World, which is kind of the Olympics of opera, was really the thing that launched my career back in 2013, and I've been the incredibly lucky recipient of other awards like the Richard Tucker Award, the Marian Anderson Award, the Beverly Sills Award.
 

Caption

Singer Jamie Barton

Credit: Stacey Bode

Now that we've established your cred, I'd love to go back to your rural roots. You grew up outside Rome, in Northwest Georgia. Where, exactly?

I was raised on my family's farm, which is about 20 miles north of Rome, the peninsula tip of Floyd County, up in an area the locals call the Pocket. It's technically a part of a community called Armuchee, which is a Native American word that is highly mispronounced. Armuchee High School is where I went to school.

The reason they call it the Pocket is because it's a valley. The mountains come together on the northern end. So the further you drive into it, the more you drive into the Pocket. My family is one of the families that has larger plots up there. Super rural, super blue-collar kind of farmers. In fact, our farm was only for us. We had cattle when I was really little. That was for beef, and my grandfather ran that endeavor. But the rest of it was vegetable farms for us. A lot of canning at different times of the year, depending on the harvest season and stuff like that. But a super family-run sort of thing.

My residence growing up, until I was six, was across the road from my grandparents’, and that was the house that had been lived in and owned by my grandparents’ parents. So we are all on this big plot of land that is divided amongst the family.

For fun, I gather, there was a lot of musicmaking at the family home. Set the scene for us.

My grandparents, and also my great aunt and uncle, they would both hold what we would call "pickins and grinnins." Basically, anybody in the community up in the Pocket — whether it be the church community, the local community, friends, whoever — would show up with their instruments and usually a potluck dish. The musicmaking almost always happened in the house, usually in the living room, people just crowded in and jamming through everything from the Cokesbury Hymnal to popular tunes that people could pick up by ear. And then the porch was meant for the potluck and keeping the kids outside.

So while the rest of my cousins were running around and having lots of fun, I was being the little music nerd that I already was, sitting in a living room and just listening to this music, and trying to figure out the puzzle of how they knew what to play next, how to pick it up, what harmony to go to. It still is an endless puzzle that I am entranced by, even at the age of 42.

What genre would you call that?

Bluegrass. I mean, people brought what they had, but it was definitely a bluegrass setup: a lot of guitars, one or two upright basses at times, a lot of banjos, a couple of mandolins. Not a ton of mandolin players, because these are and were just amateur musicians. And so a lot of the instruments that they played were passed down through their families. So it's funny I ended up in a career where I'm also surrounded by historical instruments at all points.

It must be a very different style of singing than what you do now. Do you code-switch back and forth when you go home?

It’s harder to do that these days, but that word is absolutely correct: There is a bit of a code switch in terms of styles. I certainly switch how I use my instrument, my voice.

I'm thinking of a project I did with Bela Fleck a couple of years ago where we did two pieces. We did “Music for a While” by Henry Purcell, and then we did “Bury Me Beneath the Willow Tree,” which is an old bluegrass song. We were just nerding out to it, this crossing of the pool of genres to get to each other. Recording the bluegrass tune, I was lightening my voice up a little bit: I’m utilizing mic technique more than my volume projection technique, and just toying with it. That video is out there. [See below.] It’s cool to see the difference between the two, and the similarities. There are so many things that just work between a Baroque piece and an old bluegrass piece.

What about the way you speak? Did you grow up with a different accent?

Definitely. I go back and forth a little bit. My friends say that it does; I don't toggle on purpose. Even my family teases me and tells me that I've been "Yankeefied," which is a little true if you compare my accent to theirs, which varies across the board in terms levels of Southern within the dialect.

Recently you went back home for your church’s 175th anniversary celebration. Tell us about the church and the music there.

My family attended, still attends, Mount Tabor United Methodist Church, up in the Pocket. They just had that major marker last year, and I happened to have that weekend off. So I went up there and just sang some songs that made me think of the songs that I grew up listening to.

That church was a huge part of my getting my musical ear. The Bartons have sat in the exact same pews for the decades that I've been alive, at least. We would always be on that back right pew. And my dad would be singing the harmony of whatever hymns we were singing from the hymnal. I remember asking him, “How do you know what to sing?” So he taught me how to look at the notes and kind of get it, but how to hear it. That building, that church, that community, they were huge in terms of me developing my musical ear and my love of music, and the hymns that I sang — everything from “He Leadeth Me” to “Blessed Assurance”  ... some of the Methodist greatest hits — these things that I still have a connection to, that are kind of home in musical form.

It was a bit of a homecoming, too. There were people who came from all over the region for that celebration. It was very cool getting to be around people who have literally known me since I was born.

I'm curious how your musical world expanded from there. How did you get to classical music?

My parents are ridiculously cool. I've got the best family. But I got to be a teenager, and like every other teenager, I wanted to do something or have something that was so different from where I came from. And classical music, art, literature, all of that, that's just about as far away from a small farming community in the middle of a valley that still doesn't have Wi-Fi or cell service today — you know, an escape, and it was something that was only mine.

I came to it through a couple of different ways. A big part of it was choir. My first middle school choir teacher, Gwen Stephens, noticed that I had something and I was excited by the music. She helped clear opportunities for me to be able to participate in those sorts of things.

But really, the moment that made me just hook, line and sinker fall in love with classical music was, I was sitting in my bedroom one night — and this is back in the day when radio signals were a little bit stronger at nighttime. Late at night, I started to realize I could listen to the NPR station out of Chattanooga. And Chopin was what hooked me. I have this visceral memory of laying in my bed, having headphones on, listening to Ballade No. 2 by Chopin, and I didn't know what was coming up. It starts with this section that could lull you to the sweetest sleep, and then it jerks out of that into this cacophonous, thrashing sort of music. And it just stunned me. I didn't know classical music could do that.

So I got obsessed with it. I started asking for CDs for Christmas and birthdays and any way to consume more classical music. And then I heard what opera did. And when I heard the Queen of the Night aria for the first time I was like, “Humans can do that? Holy crap!”

Does GPB have decent reception around there these days?

It does now, yeah. Which I am delighted about, because I know that my family is going to hear this.

Musical theater was where you set your sights first, right?

Musical theater was and still is a great love of mine, especially what they would call “legit” musical theater, the older stuff that is more orchestrated, that takes more of a classical technique, all the way up to Sondheim. I'm a huge Sondheim fan.

Shorter College, in Rome, Ga., when I was going there, was a wonderful place for both musical theater and choir. I genuinely wanted to go into musical theater, and I also knew that it required an 8 a.m. dance class, and the thought of me having to, No. 1, be up at 8 a.m. in a unitard, and No. 2, having to figure out dance, intimidated me right out of musical theater degree and right into — "Oh, vocal performance doesn't require dance classes? Fantastic! Let me try that."

Do you feel that your low-key musical upbringing — in the sense of community-based, low-pressure musical settings — gave you any advantages now, when you're on stage?

Yeah, absolutely. Just being around performance as a way of life was integral to me being able to walk into this without too many performance nerves. I've been singing in front of crowds — I have a DVD of me doing my first performance when I was 6 years old. It’s been a part of what I do and my own expression for so, so long.

There's also the practical things. I was really, really good at aural [music] theory. I could hear anything and understand where it was going. So I was benefiting from having that bluegrass ear that understands how to listen.

Do you ever feel the same sense of community and connection when you're on stage, in costume, using your full volume, and they’re out there in the audience, as you did when you were making music in the round together?

It’s an incredibly different thing, but there are a lot of similarities in that the team sport of putting on an opera or doing a large concert, like with the Atlanta Symphony and the choir — that coordination, to make that happen, is a team activity. You have to lean on each other. You have to be in tune with where everybody is, almost on a mental level at times, to anticipate what's probably coming up.

In my experience in bluegrass, there is that as well. You really do have to be listening. You have to know when people are going to trade from one solo instrument off to the next one. You have to be able to hear, okay, that person's doing high harmony so I'm going to go for tenor harmony. It's like a psychic version of a Rubik's Cube.

Sitting around in a group and creating music together is a different sort of experience than being in a very well-rehearsed opera. But they do require that kind of leaning in and trusting your partners up there, making whatever beautiful thing you're making with other people. The beauty really is in the community.

Anything else you'd like to mention about rural musicians?

I actually come from almost the exact same valley, I mean about 10 to 15 minutes away, as Roland Hayes, who is a historical Black tenor from the South. The turn of the century was when his career was really going. He sang a lot in Europe. He was at Fisk University. He came back to the area and ended up purchasing the farm that his parents and he had worked on. That's over near Calhoun, Ga. They've got a museum over there in his name.

There must be something in the water over there, that two opera singers have come out of this valley in North Georgia, one of which is Roland frickin’ Hayes! I mean major, major historical singer for opera in general.

Where is home when you're not on the road?

Atlanta, Ga. I'm coming to you right now from my bedroom. Reynoldstown. I've been living down here since 2014. It's kind of the perfect triangulation between my chosen family, which is up in North Druid Hills, my biological family up in Rome, and the Atlanta airport, which is which is necessary for what I do.

This season you're touring a chamber program that starts Jan. 19 in Spivey Hall in Morrow, Ga. What’s the plan?

It’s going to be me, Matthew Lipman on viola, and Tamar Sanikidze on piano. I'm so excited about that. We are doing the Brahms viola songs, Op. 91. She and I will be doing a Clara Schumann set, Op. 13. And then Joel Thompson is writing us a whole new song cycle, which I am so excited for. I have known Joel since he was at Emory. I've been watching his career go. It is meteoric.

What else in 2024–25 are you excited about?

There’s a lot. I'm actually getting ready [in August, when this conversation took place] to leave for about a month and a half in Europe … Then I get to be back at the Met doing Trovatore … Then I get to go to Paris and make my Paris Opera debut. … And that takes me all the way up until Christmas. But beyond that, I also get to do my first professional musical theater this next year. In the spring, I'll be in Boston with Boston Lyric doing Carousel. So June is bustin’ out all over.

Finally, you use your voice a lot metaphorically, too, for causes that are important to you, off stage. Would you like to list some of those?

I'm a big believer in trying to bring equity to marginalized voices in the creative space. So I work with Turn the Spotlight, which is a micro-mentoring group, for a swath of time, usually about a year and a half. It's one-on-one. Me, an established artist, and other established artists are paired with up-and-coming creative, brilliant, people from marginalized communities.

But in general, I speak out about what is important to me. My own things that I tend to center on are queer rights, especially bi visibility. I'm a bi- and pansexual woman myself. I am in the lucky position to have a wonderful support system that absolutely accepts me as who I am, and there are just so many other people who don't have that kind of support system. So I try to be the person on the sidelines saying, you have a family and we're all queer. And so come on out, come out, there is love and acceptance out there for you, for exactly who you are.

And then also in the fatphobic realm, I like to speak out against that. I believe the audience wants to see themselves in this story and see people on stage who reflect who you are, who aren't a very narrow box of body types or skin colors or whatever else; it’s very powerful. I think that is not only wonderful and good and wanted, but also necessary for our industry going forward, to meet the masses where they are. There are so many other voices I want to see represented up there. So, just trying to use my big ol’ opera mouth for more than just opera.

Jamie Barton, thank you so much, and happy Public Radio Music Day!

Yay! And thank you guys. It's lovely to get to talk to you, too.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.