J C Clements is an American folk songwriter and educator whose music carries the full weight of the mountain music of Eastern Kentucky and the Chicago blues circuit, both traditions that shaped her as a young artist. She does not separate them from each other, and she does not separate either of them from the work of teaching and healing she has done for three decades. For J C, music and learning have always been the same act.

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Rooted in the Appalachian testimony tradition and writing explicitly in the lineage of Hazel Dickens, she writes songs with teeth, with accountability, with the dignity of people whose lives are real and whose voices deserve to be heard. J C came to folk music through a path few artists share. Growing up in Southern Indiana, she was mentored by the legendary Lonnie Mack. That apprenticeship was not her destination, it was her education. In her early twenties she worked as a regular opener, each month for five years, at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago. While there she was absorbing one of the great living laboratories of American blues at its most authentic. The blues taught her what a song can carry. Appalachian folk music taught her what a song can say. She carried both forward into work that is entirely her own.

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The mountain music she grew up hearing was passed on from mother's family. JC is descended from the founders of Perry County and Hazard, Kentucky, a place where music was not entertainment but testimony, not performance but survival. That understanding has never left her writing.

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Her July 2026 single "Don't Pick a Fight with the Pope" was co-written with Si Kahn, one of the defining voices of American folk and labor music for more than five decades, whose songs have been recorded by Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, and Holly Near. That collaboration has since deepened into a full album: a collection of social-justice songs written and recorded for the nation's 250th, featuring Chris Dollar of the Henhouse Prowlers, set for release in January 2027. Both writers work in the tradition of folk music as social commentary, writing and performing songs that name what powerful people would prefer remained unnamed, delivered with enough wit that the truth lands before the listener sees it coming.

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Away from the stage, J C holds a Master of Science in Adult Education from Indiana University and an Indiana state teaching license. She has spent decades working alongside survivors, adult learners, and people rebuilding their lives. Her teaching has reached emergency shelters, transitional housing centers, college classrooms, and community education. At Job Corps she worked as both an instructor and a coordinator of disability services. She is the founder of the Hoosier Original Music Association and FARMette Indiana, and a committed member of the Folk Alliance and Folk Alliance Region Midwest communities. 

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Her podcast, You Are Not Being Chased by a Bear, brings together roots music and transformative learning, the two traditions that have defined her life, to explore what it actually takes to break a false frame, find your own voice, and build something true.

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J C Clements writes songs for people who were told a story about themselves that turned out not to be true. She has been one of those people. She knows what it costs to stop believing it. And she knows what it sounds like when someone finally puts it into words.  That is what her music is for. Photos by Tom Preston (Brown County, Indiana)