Jodi James
On discovering her voice, capturing the beauty, and helping others heal
A dusky drive southeast on US-61 leaves the light-polluted sky of Baton Rouge in the rearview, giving way to the kind of silent darkness that belongs mostly to the cries of night birds and the glint of faraway stars. The hiss of smooth asphalt underneath the tires distorts into the static of gravel on the backroads of Burnside, paths which wind toward the warm glow of a winsome cottage where musician-cum-photographer-cum-aromatherapeutic-apothecary, Jodi James, answers the door in a leather apron, the clean scents of eucalyptus and lavender lingering in the air.
Inside, a cleverly arranged assemblage of antiquated curiosities adorns the walls and shelves. Every artifact seems to have been selected with intention by James, whose keen eye finds beauty in the creative repurposing of forgotten things. What was once a produce crate in the days of small-town sidewalk markets finds new utility housing a formidable collection of LPs. The age-yellowed pictures displayed along the walls feature mostly burnished Western landscapes and are as rustically charming as their weathered wooden frames. There is a past here; every patchwork quilt and bygone bauble suggests a story, and James, the curator herself, is no exception.
In a backroom, beyond the kitchen where antique cast-iron skillets hang in a display of form and function, Clay Parker, James’s partner in life and music, tinkers with a vintage two-track recording machine. A joke that passed between them earlier resurfaces as James settles herself at a round oak breakfast table behind rows of slim glass vials containing fragrant herbal tinctures. It happens that James and the two-track are the exact same age; at this discovery, Parker teased that both are still going just as strong as ever.
“I grew up on a sugar cane farm on Highway 22—over by the Sunshine Bridge. All of that was sugar cane.” A farmer’s daughter, James said she “grew up in that rural, connected-to-the-land type of setting. We were very isolated. There was no one my age out there.” This seclusion bred an affinity for exploration and self-amusement, which, as James recalled, meant “singing in my room by myself to my favorite singers—trying to make my voice sound like theirs.”
At age seventeen, this musical mimicry guided James to the stage, where she sang two to three times a week around Baton Rouge and Ascension Parish in a cover band called The Mayflies. For three years, James built up her chops as a performer, until the opportunity to branch out beyond the cane fields arrived in the form of a spontaneous move to San Francisco. “I had a friend who was moving there, and I just said, ‘I want to go, too,’” she explained. “And it was everything I wanted it to be. It was completely different from anything I’d experienced so far.”
In the four years that James lived in San Francisco, she started playing guitar and writing songs privately. During that time, she worked as a window display designer for “fancy stores” in Haight-Ashbury, where she “learned a lot about design aesthetic and décor.” San Francisco proved invaluable to broadening her world view, and when James moved back to Burnside, she started sharing her experiences through original songs. Her current house, as the story goes, was originally down the road on the land of a relative who said he would give it to James’s parents if they helped him put up a new fence to extend his pasture. So, they relocated it next door to their own house, subtly calling their daughter home. “I always say they used this place to lure me away from Sin City,” James laughed.
“I was totally alone, seeing all of these beautiful things, and I had no one to share them with, so I started taking pictures.”
—Jodi James
When she returned home, however, she found that the newly relocated house needed significant work. “Everything was gutted down to the studs, and me and my dad rebuilt it together. It took seven years to make it completely livable,” James reminisced. This renovation, though a huge undertaking at the time, proved fundamental in shaping James as a musician. “I was kind of lost at the time and I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I just sort of squatted here. My parents were next door, but mostly I was a total recluse.” No stranger to the solitude of rural Louisiana, James found herself once again alone and singing. “I wrote so much music while working on the house, and learned so much about myself and what I was capable of,” James mused. “Me and this house sort of rebuilt each other.” In that time, James no longer tried to match the voices on her well-worn records. Instead she discovered the uniquely haunting timbre that has since become one of the most recognizable in the Baton Rouge-area songwriting community. Delicate but direct, soft yet stalwart, James’s clean, bell-like voice, along with the raw honesty of her lyrics cause listeners to reflect on their own personal bruises and what beauty might be found there.
Before long, the same wanderlust that tempted James to San Francisco beckoned again. On a track entitled, “The Road Song” from her album, Far Between and Fleeting, she poetically expresses her restless desire for adventure: “I’ve always had a thing for leavin’/Just another place, gonna add it to my list/ In a world where there’s so much to believe in/I guess I’m one of those that need to find out for myself.”
“I always wanted to tour,” James said. Following this desire, around 2011, James submitted her music to booking agents for consideration—an effort that proved fruitful. “I was chosen by a booking agent out of Nebraska and spent six weeks traveling ten thousand miles up the Puget Sound,” James said. On tour, she was captivated by the experience of sharing her music with a wider audience, as well as by the scenery, or as she called it, “the beauty between point A and point B.”
“I was totally alone, seeing all of these beautiful things,” James recalled, “and I had no one to share them with, so I started taking pictures.”
This developed into yet another medium for James to artistically share her stories, eventually culminating into a book of photographs documenting her tours alongside Parker, from 2015 to the present. The project was entitled Just Another Road. The book, with a forward written by Parker, is truly characteristic of James, who said, “When I see something beautiful, or when I discover something that helps me in some way, I have to share it.”
Nothing captures this mission more completely than James’s most recent creative enterprise, Leaf & Lore Herbals, a line of aromatherapeutic wellness products that aims to alleviate a variety of common discomforts. Like James’s other endeavors, Leaf & Lore emerged through necessity and represents a significant personal journey.
“I started having some mysterious health problems a while back. It was rare that I had a good day. My body just felt really weird,” James remembered. “We were on tour, and I was just always down. I was popping ibuprofen just so I could go on stage and was curling up with a heating pad every night. I felt so bad that there came a point where I just said, ‘There has to be a way I can do something to get myself out of this and feel better.’”
After researching her symptoms and exploring alternative treatments, James continued to come across evidence pointing to the therapeutic properties of essential oils, but was wary at the time of jumping on the cultural bandwagon. “Then a friend gave me an essential oil blend just to try,” she said. “When I used it and it worked, I started to research more seriously each individual oil and to make my own blends specifically designed to ease my symptoms.”
When James started treating herself, she began to experience not only the physical, but psychological, benefits of her new regimen. “There is something so empowering about taking control of your own wellness,” she said. “So many people are dependent on other people telling them what they need for their bodies. With Leaf & Lore, I want to provide options for people who want to treat themselves.”
Currently, Leaf & Lore Herbals has three product lines: soaps, lip balms, and therapeutic essential oil blends. James plans to expand her brand to include a natural perfume line in the near future. “I’d like to ultimately work toward my certification as an aromatherapist and herbalist, so I can create custom blends for customers based on their specific needs.”
In the meantime, James continues to tour with Parker throughout the country where her collection of inspiring experiences is ever-growing. However, though the road may take her far from home, it is certain that when James returns, she will have stories to share. h
Local audiences can next see James and Parker on Saturday, January 11th at The Red Dragon Listening Room with Ordinary Elephant.