With her nose ring and her loose dreads sprouting every which way in a free-fro, Minneapolis singer-songwriter Chastity Brown, 25, looks like an urban Rastafarian, a Marley-loving Bohemian. When she opens her mouth in song, however, she reveals a complex soul – a country-born, gospel-raised, activist poet who sings about women, race, love and politics with an edgy tenderness.

	"This Minneapolis soul singer isn’t long for obscurity." -Mountain Xpress Review, Ashville, NC

"I suffer for my race," she wails in her song, "Woman Gotta Move." "I suffer for my skin. / Is it not enough to suffer / For the woman that I am? / Still she's beautiful / But half divided…."

Born and raised in Union City, Tenn., a small town two hours north of Memphis, Chastity found an outlet for her considerable musical abilities in her church. She picked up the saxophone in sixth grade and played on a praise and worship team. While her strict Pentecostal church frowned on "secular" music (a mentor warned her against Bob Marley, whose music she thought "gorgeous," because "people viewed him as a god"), she absorbed the gospel music of the Wynans, Gary Oliver and Stephen Curtis Chapman and occasionally sneaked Fats Domino, BB King and Jewel.

"While what immediately struck me was this young lady’s gorgeous vocals, I was also taken aback by how much trust she put in the audience. Like we were all a bunch of old friends, she opened up all of her pains and sorrows to us, she shed a few tears, and never seemed to hold anything back." -Jon Behm at Howwastheshow.com

She wrote her first song ("It was kind of a prayer," she says) at age 15. By the time she graduated from high school, she knew what she wanted to be: a music minister. "I was really attracted to the experience of music, to the involvement and power that music had," she says. Her dream changed after the small religious school she attended in Baltimore, Md., expelled her for breaking a rule against dating. She moved to Knoxville, took a few community college classes and began performing her growing repertoire in public.

"My heart was in free-fall," she says, "and the only way to get it out, to process it, was writing music."

	"Born just outside of Memphis and now residing in Minneapolis, Brown combines the best parts of her two hometowns’ musical legacies—the soulful gospel of Graceland-ville with the grittier roots of the place that produced Prince." - Mountain Xpress Review, Asheville, NC

In Knoxville, she abandoned many of the strict rules she had thought essential to religious devotion. "My whole world opened up musically," she says. She soaked up Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Lauryn Hill, all of whom she counts as significant influences on her music. She also discovered "the power of me just being myself."

In September 2005, Chastity moved with a friend to Minneapolis, where she now lives and performs with "The Sound," a world beat / acoustic groove ensemble featuring Don Strong on bass and Michael X. Johnson on drums. To conjure up Chastity Brown's unique style, think Van Morrison (especially his "Astral Weeks" album) jamming with Tracy Chapman, Nina Simone, throw in a little Lauryn Hill and Joni Mitchell, under girded with a driving funk-gospel blues, and you'll start to get the vibe.

Her lyrics are both personal, infused with a deeply rooted spirituality, and political, ethically hard hitting. In "Four Chords," she bemoans the isolation of the individual in contemporary America:

"...for those who appreciate songwriter-fueled jazz and a sense of organic greatness in the making, she is nothing short of a massage therapist for the ears and soul. A chill-out lioness for the ages. A free spirit who inspires others to follow suit." -Minneapolis Star Tribune

"To shut myself in, to shut myself down, to shut myself out / Like a blind man trying to find his way around in a city he's never been to / Never even wanted to step foot there anyway."

Many of her songs reflect the marriage of sacred and secular made possible after her break with her childhood church. "Music was always a very sacred time," she says. "It's still a devotion. I'm not trying to separate my two worlds anymore." Perhaps most notably, Chastity sings about women, about her identity as a woman.

"I believe in women," she says. "I believe that a woman can do whatever." She rolls a cigarette. "Don't think I can't just because I'm a woman."

"A Minneapolis-by-way-of-Knoxville roots-soul singer of the first order, Chastity Brown possesses the sort of rare chilled-out star quality that goes beyond time and place.

"Chastity Brown is one of the most exciting talents to hit the local music scene in the past year. The 25-year-old Knoxville, Tenn.-by-way-of-Claremont, N.H.-transplant has a voice and vibe that suggest an old blues woman or earth mama hell-bent on steering clear of the neo-soul ghetto that would seek to cage her. Her debut album, "Do the Best You Can" (self-released last week), is both intense and meandering -- a slow-burn nonevent that, like her live sets, creeps up on the listener long after the last note hits the ether."

-Jim Walsh, Star Tribune, March 18, 2007