Valerie June on Finding the Right Guitar, Crafting Her Sound, and Channeling Magic Through Music

Valerie June’s soundscapes stretch from Memphis soil to cosmic skies. Her voice is a mix of earth and ether, channeling gospel, blues, and folk traditions into something unmistakably her own.

“I’m basically an ambassador for joy,” she says, and it’s hard to argue otherwise. June’s latest album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles (Concord), offers a mix of love, sweetness, and light. Whether she’s playing the Newport Folk Festival or opening for the Rolling Stones, she creates a space where celebration and reflection coexist.

A Grammy and Americana Music Honors nominee, June has built her career around radical invitations—challenging listeners to embrace joy as a form of resistance. An author, poet, and certified mindfulness instructor, she has recorded three best-selling solo albums, written for legends like Mavis Staples and the Blind Boys of Alabama, and earned praise from Bob Dylan. Along the way, she’s collaborated with artists as wide ranging as John Prine, Norah Jones, Robert Plant, and Brandi Carlile.

This time, she’s joined by producer M. Ward, with contributions from the Blind Boys of Alabama, Norah Jones, and DJ Cavem Moetavation. When not on tour, she divides her time between Tennessee and New York.

On a crisp late winter morning, I caught up with June on a Zoom call. We began with a tarot reflection—pulling the owl card from the Spirit Deck, a symbol of wisdom and deep vision. It felt like the perfect place to start.

Let’s talk about owl medicine. What does it mean to you?

There’s a pond behind our house in Tennessee. One morning when I was making tea I saw an owl perched on a post across the water. I get visits from all kinds of animals, but owls are rare so I went to the deck thinking, what does it mean?

Magic, mystery, and even darkness—the owl feels like the ultimate oracle. I’m basically an ambassador for joy, and people are oftentimes like, “That’s so fake, you’re bypassing shit.” But that’s not my truth. My truth is understanding the darkness and understanding the night and the hard times and choosing to be in a place of joy.

The elders of indigenous communities I meet say that they were taught to think of seven generations in their actions—seven generations past and present. I thought, I’m this Black woman from the South. My people were enslaved. I don’t know a lot about them. I have no real culture from my family line that I can pull from, so let me listen to these elders, these plants and animals, this pond and the water and the sky.

I look at this world and say, “Who am I gonna be when I’m gone for those that are to come?” I think all of us today are oracles. We are telling the future in our actions. And the owl is saying, “Okay, I don’t know if y’all know, but y’all in a dark time. You about to have to make some quick, fast changes. What are you gonna choose?”

What are some of the practices you do to cultivate that joy?

One of the big practices I do is cry. Sunny War wrote the song “Cry Baby” and asked me to sing on it, and it resonates because I feel grief in this world today. When I go to joy, it is absolutely a choice. I lean toward blues and dark stuff. A lot of what I wrote before I started receiving songs of positivity were dark songs.

Do dark songs come differently?

The first time I met PJ Harvey, she asked me how I write songs. I was like, “Well, I hear voices.” She said, “Sometimes I hear voices, but I really see films.” I have written one song like that, “Shotgun.” I saw a white farmhouse, a door kind of open, fields all around with the grass tall and blowing. Nobody was in the house, but the energy was dark like Robert Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” He sings, “If I had possession over judgment day, Lord, the little woman I’m loving wouldn’t have no right to pray.”

So many songs from that tradition were murder ballads, abusive toward women, but I think that was coded language for the oppression they were facing. That’s what I did with “Shotgun” after so much gun violence, but I don’t want to sing it. It’s dark, even though it was moving toward a healing place. People don’t always dive into a song and ask, “Well, what do you think she was thinking about when she wrote this song?” I’m not saying that people are stupid. I’m just saying we’re busy, and we don’t have the time to go deeper.

That’s amazing. I’m going to use that. “I don’t think you’re stupid, you’re just busy.”

It’s true! It goes even deeper, but we ain’t got time. Let’s talk about guitars!

Tell me about the Martin guitar you play. When did it come into your life?

Actually, I have two of them now! The last time I spoke to Acoustic Guitar [in 2014, for the magazine’s Sessions video series —ed.], I only had that one. I had just made Pushin’ Against a Stone and was flying back to Tennessee from Canada when my guitar was busted up on the flight—totally destroyed.

It was a Gibson, like Robert Johnson played, an L-1. It was tiny, fit perfectly to my little body, and it broke my heart. I named that guitar Clyde after my grandfather because he gave me my first guitar, a little red Mexican guitar with paintings on the front that was in his closet my whole life until I finally begged so long for one my Granny made him give it to me.

When I got to Nashville and told Dan Auerbach [of the Black Keys] my Gibson was busted, he said, “Get a Martin—try something new. Go downtown to Gruhn and play them and see what happens.” The salesman wouldn’t sell me the first guitar I liked. He brought five or six more in that style and said, “You’re gonna sit here and play each one, and the one that you feel is the one you’re gonna get.” I fell in love with one [a 000-15] and I went to buy it. He said, could you read out the serial number to me? He was filling out this little form and I read the serial number, and the last four digits were my phone number. And I was just like, this is definitely mine.

You have this really cool open right-hand technique. Is that something you learned or just picked up?

I picked it up. I tried some teachers but I’m not a good student. I don’t have natural rhythm so the way they would teach, I just couldn’t do it.

What do you mean you don’t have natural rhythm?

Shoot. I just don’t. 

How would you pick up that Senegalese highlife rhythm that you do so naturally if you didn’t have rhythm? You were a polyrhythm master from the get-go! 

Well, OK. Thank you. You just kind of changed my life right there.

How would you describe what you do with your right hand?

I just like to play that way. I have very long fingers, and I don’t want to have pain in my hand, so I shifted the way I was playing and I got to where I was very comfortable. It’s about following what feels good.

On “Sweet Things Just for You,” is that you playing?

No. That’s M. Ward.

I wondered because there’s this alternate-thumb thing I hadn’t seen you do.

It’s similar to my song “Rain Dance” that I do alternate thumb on. I wrote it in the spirit of Mississippi John Hurt, but I don’t do the noodles. I played my version of it for M. and I was like, “OK. So, this song goes like this, but with the Mississippi John Hurt noodles.” He got the noodles in there.

Do you ever use fingerpicks?

No, I like to feel the strings on my skin, the vibration of the instrument against my body, the smell of the wood.

So, when you’re switching between banjo, uke, and guitar, do you have to physically recalibrate?

It’s part of my nature now. I play them all very similarly. You know how people have different styles—they clawhammer or fingerstyle or whatever with banjo. I play the banjo the same as I play the guitar. My friends who went to art school, their professors told them to learn the rules so they can break them. That’s cool, but I ain’t got time for that. I gotta sit down here and play it like I can play it. I was already 25, 26, when I picked it up. I had to get goin’!

Valerie June, Photo: DVSROSSYou’re following what feels good.

When I first started with the instrument, trying so hard to get a rhythm would create a pain in my shoulder and I was like, “Now, how am I going to make it to 80 doing this?” I rethought that situation, and I was like, “This feels good, let’s do this.”

What’s your sound setup onstage? Do you play through an amp or just straight through the system?

Usually just through the system, through the L.R. Baggs preamp, but I love artists who put their acoustic guitar through amps. I saw Lightnin’ Hopkins do that and I love that sound. Sometimes I do that, but not onstage because I haven’t learned how to master feedback with acoustic instruments and vocals.

I like a dirty blues, filthy, grungy acoustic guitar sound. I also like clean stuff, but I love when it’s just a dark rock ’n’ roll acoustic sound, you know? And that’s hard to do live. In my own space, when I’m working on the songs, I will plug in my little Pignose amp and crank that junk up and play with some pedals and go crazy.

Do you take both Martins out with you on tour?

I usually just take one, and I take two electric guitars because I use different tunings. And my banjo and ukulele travel together as the baby and the mama in the same case—so cute and cuddly.

You keep the acoustic in standard and use the electrics for alternate tunings?

If I don’t have another guitar then I sometimes tune the acoustic but otherwise I’ll keep the electrics tuned to DADGAD or C G C G A E.

And you don’t play electric with a pick, either?

That could be fun to try, and I like the sound sometimes. My fingers have little knots on them, and I don’t really have nails. I’m jealous of Dolly [Parton]—her nails, her playing, all of it. My friend Yasmin [Williams] has beautiful nails too and she plays gorgeous acoustic guitar. She’s so cool.

I love the question you ask in your song “Superpower”: “How will I face this day?” So, how are you facing this day that we have today?

Well, I started slowly just kind of lying there for a little bit. And I remembered this teacher I had years ago in yoga, and she said at the end of the class in savasana, “Begin to wiggle your fingers and your toes,” and so I started with just hearing her voice say that as I woke up. I wiggled my fingers and my toes and then took a few breaths then I was like, “Okay, I can open my eyes to this day.”

What She Plays

Valerie June’s main acoustic guitar is a Martin 000-15, set up with Martin extra-light strings. For amplification, she uses L.R. Baggs pickups and preamps for her guitars as well as banjo and ukulele. —NZ

This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.