If you heard Amber Rae Dunn sing for the first time at the recent “A Tribute to the King,” you might want to know more about her.
The captivating singer filled the stage of Lafayette’s Music Room with her voice and personality at the event held August 11th, featuring headliner Ronnie McDowell as well as The Royal Blues Band with Wyly Bigger on keyboards.
“I am from Schererville, Arkansas,” Dunn says. “I grew up with six siblings and my dad was just a barber and my mom was a stay-at-home mom who took care of all of us. There was not a lot to do, but we had a three-acre garden. Just about every memory of my life, I have it in the garden. My favorite animal is a turtle, and I loved that I got to collect worms off tomato plants to feed to my turtle.”
Dunn also sang. “All the time. Everywhere around the house. I was definitely the loudest kid my parents have.”
If she wasn’t singing “This Little Light of Mine” in church, Dunn was listening to her mother’s Al Green, Michael Jackson, and Prince albums and her dad’s ’90s country music. “So, I’m sure I was singing those songs as well.”
Like she still does, Dunn worked at her dad’s barbershop, Larry’s Hair Design, in West Memphis, Arkansas. She learned how to cut and style hair when she was in high school. “Other kids go to soccer practice or others take acting. I enrolled in hair school.”
She began singing on stage while attending Memphis College of Art for a degree in sculpture. Yubu Kazungu, a fellow student, invited her to join him at an open mic. She asked Kazungu, who heads Yubu and the Africans, why he thought she could sing. She says he told her, “I can hear you humming in the sculpture room working on a pot. You hum on key, and I feel like you can sing on key.”
Dunn joined Kazungu’s band and appeared with the group at open mics around town.
Kazungu “had been pestering” her to write a song, so Dunn came up with “Arkansas Line.” After some persuading from Kazungu one night at a soul food restaurant, Dunn sang the song in front of an audience while keeping the beat by snapping her fingers.
People at the show told her she was really good, but that she needed to go to Nashville because “that’s not really the type of music we have in Memphis.”
So Dunn got a job at Wayne’s Unisex, a Nashville barbershop. She went to clubs at night to “work tips for the band.” She did whatever she could, whether it was “do handstands” or “pinch cheeks,” to get customers to put money in the tip jars. “Then, finally, at the end of the night when everyone was good and drunk and half the people were gone, they would let me get up and sing two or three songs at 3 in the morning.”
Dunn was realistic about living in Nashville. “My plan was five years. If nothing happened, I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this isn’t the path I’m supposed to get on.’”
But nine months after she got to Nashville, one of her brothers was killed in a motorcycle accident, so she returned home to comfort her parents. “I’m a sucker for family.”
Starting at an open mic at Earnestine & Hazel’s, Dunn thought, “I need to meet people. If you build it, they’ll come.”
Mark Parsell stopped in one night and invited Dunn to check out his venue, South Main Sounds. Singing at one of Parsell’s Friday night shows, Dunn met Andrew Cabigao, who helped her get a job as social media representative at Mark Goodman’s MGP The Studio. While there, Dunn recorded her first album, Arkansas Line. Attending a songwriters workshop at Visible Music College, Dunn met Billy Smiley, founding member of White Heart, a Dove Award-nominated Christian rock group. He invited her to come to Nashville and maybe do an album at his studio, Sound Kitchen Studios.
She was two songs into the album when Covid hit. She released a couple of singles, but the album, I Guess That’s Life, wasn’t released until March 2023.
One of those songs, her popular “Barbershop,” is “just kind of talking about my dad’s barbershop and the type of customers we have. It’s just nostalgic.”
She also began going to workshops in and outside of Memphis in addition to bartending on Friday nights at South Main Sounds and performing with her band, Amber Rae Dunn and the Mulberries.
Dunn is thinking about a new album, but it might go in another direction. “Vocally, there’s a lot of soul and blues to my voice. But there’s also a lot of country. So, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a way to navigate the two.”
She’d like to mix “a Memphis sound” with her “traditional country sound.”
When she’s not cutting records or cutting hair, Dunn, who is married to Justin Craven, is performing with her band around town. She’s also a guest host with Leon Griffin on Memphis Sounds on WYPL.
Not forgetting her visual art chops, Dunn, who recently got into mosaics, currently is working on a mural at the Super 8 motel in West Memphis.
But Dunn is primarily sticking with songwriting, which she decided at 25 was going to be her journey. She told herself, “I don’t know what the outcome is, but I’m going to give it my all.”
See Amber Rae Dunn live at Momma’s, 855 Kentucky Street, Wednesday, August 28th, 7 p.m., with Mario Monterosso.
