Joan Osborne ready to ask Kentucky Theatre, ‘What if God was one of us’

Walter Tunis

September 9, 2024 at 5:59 PM·7 min read

Careers sometimes begin in the wake of scholarly pursuits, the mapping out of a chosen trade or simply an employer’s eye for an eager worker.

Joan Osborne’s career began on a dare. Well, it didn’t fully start that way. The Anchorage-born songstress — known for the 1995 hit “One of Us,” but with three decades of follow-up adventures that have taken her through regions of folk, soul, rock, blues and even country — made her way from Kentucky to New York in the early ’80s to study film-making. Then one night, when she was out at a neighborhood blues bar, a friend dared her to get up and sing.

Kentucky-born songstress Joan Osborne will perform at the Kentucky Theatre.

He said, ‘I’ll pay for the drinks if you do.’ I have no idea to this day why he said that, because I hadn’t been singing anywhere. He certainly had never heard me sing. But I did go up and I sang the Billie Holiday song ‘God Bless the Child’ with this piano player. And the piano player said, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good. You should come back. We have an open mic night here once a week.’

“It was literally a one-minute walk from the front door of my apartment to get to this place. I started going every Tuesday and singing my one song. Then I began learning other songs and meeting other musicians and finding out about other places to sing and other open mic nights. That was sort of my entry into this whole incredible music scene that was going on in New York.”

Career includes The Dead, Mavis Staples, Bob Dylan tribute

With that, Joan Osborne and New York got to know one another. In the ensuing decades, the singer would find herself touring in one of the first post-offshoots of the Grateful Dead (dubbed simply The Dead), co-headlining a concert tour with gospel colossus Mavis Staples and settling into a New York engagement at the Café Carlyle centered on the music of Bob Dylan (she released an album devoted to his compositions, “Songs of Bob Dylan,” in 2017.)

What brings Osborne back to her home state for a Sept. 10 concert at the Kentucky Theatre is a 2023 record titled “Nobody Owns You,” a collection of original songs centered on themes of family, mortality and a pronounced awareness of the realities and raptures in the world around her.

“You get to a certain point when you’re like, ‘Why am I doing this? What is the point of it?’ Yes, it’s a way to make a living and all that, but if I couldn’t do this tomorrow, what kind of record do I want to leave of what I’ve been able to do in this life on this planet while I’ve been here?’ That sounds very heavy, but it’s something that I wanted to keep in mind.

“These songs come from that place of ‘What if all this ended a month from now, what do you want to leave behind?’ That was the question that was sort of the guiding principle of this record. Now, I’m in fine health and I don’t expect to check out anytime soon. But it’s a good thing to keep in mind, I think, for anyone, but in particular, for an artist. ‘What do you want to leave behind?’”

Sifting through Osborne’s career

In the case of Osborne’s career, there will be much for future generations to sift through. Among her many performance milestones was an invitation to participate in the 2002 film “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a documentary focused on the often-unheralded studio musicians, known collectively as the Funk Brothers, responsible for the grooves and orchestration on some of the most cherished pop-soul hits of the 1960s and beyond. One of the film’s most emotive segments has Osborne singing the 1966 Jimmy Ruffin hit of elegant despondency, “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” with then-surviving members of the Funk Brothers. It serves as a generational summit of soul music magic.

“These guys ... they sounded just like those records,” Osborne recalled. “They hadn’t lost anything. If anything, they had increased in their abilities. They’re incredible players, sounding amazing as individuals and also as a group.

“The day that I met them, I walked in and sitting there, I think, was (drummer) Pistol Allen (who died four months after the film was completed.) We were chatting and he said, ‘So why are you here? I said, ‘Oh, I’m going to be singing with you in the movie.’ They thought I was the make-up girl. They didn’t know me from Adam. To come in to that situation and then step up to the microphone to sing and feel like they were as accepting of me and enjoying what I was doing as much as I was enjoying what they were doing was a great experience.”

Osborne carried her love of soul and blues into collaborations with the Harlem-rooted Holmes Brothers. She served as producer for two of the trio’s finest albums, 2001’s “Speaking in Tongues” and 2010’s “Feed My Soul.” Osborne is exploring the possibility of creating a documentary on the Holmes Brothers, rekindling her original artistic pursuit of film-making.

“My connection to the Holmes Brothers goes back to my very first days singing in New York City. These guys, particularly Sherman Holmes (now the trio’s only surviving member), were very encouraging and very welcoming. Sherman was running an open jam session every Sunday afternoon at this little blues bar called Dan Lynch’s in the East Village.

“I was incredibly timid and didn’t have a lot of self-confidence, but there was something that was compelling me to get up and sing blues songs. And Sherman was so encouraging. All those guys were all very smart, very aware and very welcoming. They were patriarchs in the very best sense of the word in that they were kings of the scene, but they were using that position to help elevate and encourage other people.”

And that song, ‘One of Us’

Of course, any discussion of Osborne’s career leads back to a single record, the tune that introduced the world to a singer with a taste for rock, pop, soul and the blues. In short, the career of the all-in-one vocalist comes down to “One of Us.”

The debut single from Osborne’s debut album, 1995’s “Relish,” the song explored spirituality as an invitation for self-examination. The popular chorus of the Eric Bazilian-penned composition asked the perhaps unexpected question, “What if God was one of us?” With Osborne’s delivery, “One of Us” became a global hit.

“Well, I do get asked about that song a lot,” Osborne said with a laugh. “But the truth is if I have to be known for just one song, that is a pretty good song to be known by. No shame on booty-shaking, dance floor hits or anything like that, but, for me, to have a song that has so many different shades of meaning and that has had a real impact on people in the way it has is a real blessing.

“The song is more than up to the challenge of being interpreted in different ways. That’s part of its strength. It’s not telling you what you’re supposed to think. It’s asking you to explore your own consciousness and your own ideas about spirituality.

“What I think about when I sing this song is the experience I had singing with Mavis Staples. We’re living in a time where we’re very divided as a country and where there are a lot of forces attempting to separate us from each other. Mavis’ whole thing was, ‘The doors are wide open. Everyone is welcome.’ She didn’t have to say a word about it. It was just about who she was, how she made music and how she performed. That’s the lesson I try to bring when I sing that song.”