It’s hard to imagine St. Louis native Valerie Kirchhoff as anything but a blues performer.
With a predilection for bygone fashion and a voice low and soulful, fronting Miss Jubilee and the Yas Yas Boys seems a role she was always destined to take. But despite a deep, lifelong fondness for music, Kirchhoff once saw herself on a different path.
“I thought I was going to be a visual artist. That’s what I went to school for,” Kirchhoff said. “Both of my parents (are artists), so I went to college after high school just loving music and always singing it, but it didn’t occur to me until much later that I missed music being a part of my life.”
Growing up in a large family, Kirchhoff recalls her elder siblings receiving lessons on the household piano.
“I remember getting to the age where I would sit with my sister right above me,” Kirchhoff said. “And after she would have her lesson, she’d show me what she learned, and then I would make up a song based on, you know, the rainstorm we had the day before. I just always liked the idea that music could express the everyday around you.”
Joining a church choir solidified Kirchhoff’s love of singing; evenings reserved for rehearsal held a special excitement. When her sister began driving, she brought home vinyl records from the library–mainly consisting of genres past.
“She’d bring back things like The Doors, and a lot of things more ‘60s and ‘70s,” Kirchhoff said, “And I loved that you got to see the musician first from the cover. I remember walking to the library with my sister much closer (in age) to me and … that’s not the first time that I’d heard old music, but one of the albums I remember picking up specifically was a Bessie Smith one.”
Initially drawn to Smith’s image, Kirchhoff was even more enamored with her voice.
“I just really fell in love with that sound,” Kirchhoff said.
By 2007, the ache for music was so strong that Kirchhoff decided to form a band. While at the outset more Ska or R&B influenced, “I kept getting pushed back, inside of me, to that older music,” Kirchhoff said. “It’s kind of still what I would sing at home–I just didn’t know how to make that an actuality as a band,”
In 2010, after years of studying historical music, Kirchhoff fully embraced The Jazz Age and Depression-era blues.
“I started to know more musicians who wanted to do more acoustic-style music,” Kirchhoff said. The realization that performances requiring amps and other electronics held little interest to her spurred Kirchhoff further; live music didn’t have to be overpowering–live music didn’t have to be loud.
“It just kept luring me back to doing that more 20s music,” Kirchhoff said. “Eventually, around 2013, ‘14, different musicians were moving into St. Louis, and these are some of the folks I still work with now.”
Two of these players include T.J. Muller and her now-husband, pianist Ethan Leinwand. In 2022, on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, Leinwand was planning his trip to The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival when a number of performers were unable to fulfill their slots. Pianist Bryan Wright, who serves as artistic director and board member for the festival, asked Leinwand if he’d be willing to perform in their place.
“Well (Ethan) was like, ‘You know, you guys are celebrating the women of ragtime this year–I’d love to bring my wife along,’’’ Kirchhoff recalled, laughing. And so a tradition was born. “It was really fun, and it fit so well.”
While Kirchhoff relishes the genres she performs, she’s quick to point out that the roots of the music are laid in historically marginalized communities.
“I’m the least qualified to be talking about Scott Joplin of all the people there (at the festival),” Kirchhoff said. “But I think about it a lot, being from Missouri…even if you don’t care about ragtime, Scott Joplin is a wonderful person to know his life. He’s an example of somebody who just went for what he wanted to do, and he did all the work to do it.”
While ragtime is regarded as music from the history books today, Joplin and his fellow musicians were inventors of their time, playing piano in a way that had never been explored before.
“But what makes him stand out is his ability to be so refined,” Kirchhoff said. “His melodies, to me, they stand out more than anyone else and that’s why people recognize his tunes even if they don’t know ragtime.”
Moreover, Kirchhoff said, Joplin’s compositions still reach people on another level. “Every portion of his rags stays beautiful and interesting; it tells a full story, and to me, that goes back to what I’ve always loved about music: Can you guide me through a story?” Kirchhoff said.
The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival runs through May 30 in Downtown Sedalia. For a full schedule of events, visit https://www.scottjoplin.org/.
“What made Joplin so special was that he was able to take this sound that was taking over African American communities and this music you would have heard all over the Midwest, which was an improvised style, a fresh, new kind of style–and write it down with such elegance that anyone could play it,” Leinwand said. “You could take that music home and capture that syncopation and those rhythms.”
What keeps music relevant through time is its ability to speak to human experience, Kirchoff concluded.
“If you hear someone (perform) now that actually, sincerely feels it, you realize how much this music has in common with now,” Kirchoff said. “That’s always the thing that kind of bums me out, like when we think of our own American music of the past as something that should be done and over with. I think that’s something that should be thought of more as a tradition, and that people should know this music.”
