New Orleans singer-songwriter Joy Clark is having her moment. Lots of them.

With a show at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center and a new record deal, she’s on a roll

On a January night along Mexico’s Caribbean coast, New Orleans singer-songwriter Joy Clark glimpsed her potential future.

During Brandi Carlile’s Girls Just Wanna Weekend festival at the Hard Rock Hotel Riviera Maya, Clark performed as a member of Americana star Allison Russell’s band. As they unspooled a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” Russell beckoned for Clark to take a turn on lead vocals.

She wasn’t prepared for the sensation of several thousand voices singing along with hers.

“That hasn’t happened yet for me,” Clark recalled recently. “When you have that many people singing along. … I couldn’t act like I didn’t feel it. I had to just smile and step back like, ‘This is a huge moment.’

“I felt like it wouldn’t be my last. I felt like this is how it’s gonna be. I can visualize it now.”

To succeed in the music industry requires an elusive combination of talent, timing, tenacity, a good team and luck. It also helps to be both relatable and distinctive. Clark checks those boxes.

Her music, like that of Tracy Chapman, draws on folk, blues and Americana, but is uniquely hers. Her voice, like her tidy guitar solos, captures your attention without demanding it, then invites you in.

Onstage, her smile is contagious. She can cheerily announce that she wrote “Here” about going to therapy and make it sound like it applies to everyone. Intimacy, she likes to say, is her superpower.

After years spent in New Orleans clubs and on the road backing Russell, Cyril Neville and other bandleaders, the 38-year-old Clark’s national profile is ascendant.

She was featured on a recent episode of PBS’ “My Music with Rhiannon Giddens,” swapping stories and songs with the host.

On Thursday, Sept. 7, she’ll showcase her original songs during a solo acoustic show at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in Washington, D.C.

And next year, Clark is slated to release an album via Righteous Babe Records, the artist-friendly independent label founded by singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco.

Meanwhile, she’ll continue spreading her brand of joy to an ever-expanding fanbase. During the 2023 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, she turned heads backing Russell at the Sheraton Fais Do-Do Stage and fronting her own trio at the Lagniappe Stage. Her manager, Michael Paz, says his phone rings constantly with inquiries from other festivals wanting to book her.

“Jazz Fest did feel like I turned a little bit of a corner in my identity as an artist,” Clark said. “I had the time of my life. As a performer, sometimes your mind is somewhere else, you’re thinking about the sound or how your voice sounded on a certain note or whatever.

“But none of that was going on. I wasn’t concerned with anything. I was in the moment. I was like, ‘I’m on this stage at this time of my life. I’m really grateful, and I love it here. I don’t want to leave.’”

Honing her chops in church

Joy Clark grew up on the West Bank in Harvey’s Woodmere neighborhood. She is the youngest of five siblings in a tightly knit family. She was home-schooled by her mother while her father taught English in Jefferson Parish schools and preached on weekends.

Music was a constant in her young life. Her brother Farren played drums. The father of a friend of his let Joy fiddle around on his Les Paul electric guitar. They eventually formed an informal band called the Shoeless Crew, named for their habit of removing their shoes before entering the house.

She picked out Boyz II Men, Celine Dion, Sheryl Crow and Chaka Khan songs by ear on a Casio keyboard. By age 14, she’d learned enough folk chords to start playing in her father’s nondenominational full gospel church, where congregants sometimes spoke in tongues.

“You play to support that moment,” she said of her church gigs. “It’s not about you. It’s about what’s happening. You create an atmosphere and foster that through music. You don’t step on anybody. You support their story and what they’re saying.

“Whenever I’m writing, I’m doing that with myself. Church is in there. I can’t take it out. It’s the best training ground.”

After years of home-schooling, she enrolled at the University of New Orleans.

“I rolled with it. I thrived in meeting new people from other countries. Finding my place, but not really knowing where in the world I was going to be — that’s college.”

Her interdisciplinary studies focused on sociology, history and English; she considered a career as a professor. She spent countless hours reading, writing and editing, learning lessons about brevity she later applied to songwriting.

“The type of songwriting I’m drawn to is subtraction. Take this word out, it doesn’t flow, you’re going to forget it.”