Iris DeMent

The Arkansas-born singer and songwriter whose debut, Infamous Angel, opened with the first song she ever wrote and led to two Grammy nominations, duets with John Prine and the Americana Trailblazer Award.

Origin
Paragould, Arkansas, United States
Years active
1991-present
Genres
country folk, Americana, gospel, folk, alt-country
Labels
Philo, Rounder, Warner Bros., Flariella, Yep Roc

Paragould

Iris Luella DeMent was born in Paragould, Arkansas, on 5 January 1961, the youngest of fourteen children of Pat and Flora Mae DeMent, who farmed on an island in the St. Francis River. Her father led a wildcat strike at the Emerson Electric plant and stood a year on the picket line. When it collapsed in 1964 he lost his job, and the family sold the farm and moved to Buena Park, California, and later to Sacramento.

Music filled the house. Her father played fiddle, first at dances and then in church, and her older sisters sang gospel as the DeMent Sisters. At about five she forgot her words at her first performance with the little DeMent sisters, the audience laughed, and she kept away from stages for years. Raised Pentecostal, she left the church at about sixteen. She quit high school in tenth grade to work at a Kmart, took a GED, and cleaned houses and waited tables in the Midwest. At Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, an English composition teacher's encouragement set her writing.

Infamous Angel

In 1986, aged twenty-five, she wrote her first song, Our Town, about a fading town she had driven through in Kansas. Let the Mystery Be came next. She moved to Nashville in 1988, and Rounder signed her soon afterwards. The producer Jim Rooney had seen her at the Bluebird Cafe and heard her singing harmony on an Emmylou Harris session, and Rounder's Ken Irwin asked him to work with her.

Infamous Angel came out on Philo, a Rounder label, in 1992. Rooney cut it live at Cowboy Jack Clement's studio in Nashville, adding only harmony vocals afterwards. The day before the sessions she dropped Let the Mystery Be from her list, and he insisted it go back in. Her mother sang lead on the closing hymn, Higher Ground, and John Prine wrote the liner notes. Her father died the same year. Word of mouth carried the album to about 80,000 sales, Lenny Waronker bought her out of her Rounder contract, and Warner Bros. reissued it in 1993.

Warner Bros.

My Life (1994), dedicated to her father and again produced by Rooney, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album, was Spin's third album of the year, and drew an A+ from Robert Christgau. The Way I Should (1996), produced by Randy Scruggs, was her political record, with There's a Wall in Washington and Wasteland of the Free, and brought a second nomination. She sang Big City on Tulare Dust, a Merle Haggard tribute, and later wrote This Kind of Happy with Haggard. In 1999 she sang four duets on John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves, the title song among them, and she played Rose Gentry in the film Songcatcher.

Her songs also found the screen. Let the Mystery Be was used in Little Buddha, and Our Town played over the last moments of Northern Exposure in July 1995. The Goo Goo Dolls' Iris is named after her: John Rzeznik saw her name in an LA Weekly listing.

Flariella

She married the songwriter Greg Brown in 2002, and in 2005 they adopted a daughter from Russia. Pitchfork describes the decade as a dry spell in which she battled depression. Lifeline (2004), a gospel album, was the first release on Flariella, her own label, named after her mother. Her Leaning on the Everlasting Arms later played over the closing credits of the Coen brothers' True Grit (2010). Sing the Delta (2012) was her first album of originals in sixteen years, and Christgau heard the piano as its backbone. The Trackless Woods (2015) set poems by Anna Akhmatova, and that year The Leftovers took her Transatlantic Sessions performance of Let the Mystery Be as its opening theme. Workin' on a World followed in 2023.

Prine introduced her when she received the Americana Trailblazer Award in 2017. Yep Roc, which now handles her early catalogue, remastered Infamous Angel for its thirtieth anniversary in 2022. She calls herself extremely shy and says she never wanted to be on a stage: "The music propelled me there." In October 2026 she opened for Big Thief at Red Rocks and closed her set with Our Town alongside Adrianne Lenker.

Records

Songs

John Prine, Emmylou Harris, Greg Brown, Merle Haggard, Big Thief

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Discography and data

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Film and video

Sources

  1. Iris DeMent, Wikipedia
  2. Iris DeMent, Encyclopedia of Arkansas
  3. Iris DeMent: Infamous Angel, Pitchfork (2021-01-24)
  4. For Iris DeMent, music is the calling that forces her into the spotlight, NPR (2015-10-21)
  5. Classic Tracks: Let the Mystery Be, Mix (2020-11)
  6. My Life (Iris DeMent album), Wikipedia