Bringing with her songs both societal and personal, originals and covers, Amythyst Kiah hit her stride inside Central Ohio’s Natalie’s Grandview, the eighth stop of a nine-show mini tour. 

From the traditional “Darling Cory” to Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” Amythyst Kiah’s banjo “ha(d) all the answers.” The five-stringer, Kiah told the assembled, has long been the rhythmic backbone of American roots music, so she turns to it when it’s not “immediately obvious” how she could pull off songs like Gaga’s. 

Banjo thus proven correct, Kiah’s guitar had some answers, too, as on Green Day’s “Hitchin’ a Ride” and Lead Belly’s “In the Pines.” The four numbers sounded like Kiah songs as much as the originals – including “Trouble so Hard which recently received a boost as featured in “The Abandons” – that fleshed out the setlist.  

Working alone, eyes clenched while singing and dressed in black with a gold blazer, Kiah transformed the covers in the same way she did full-band recordings from Still + Bright and Wary + Strange. The onstage arrangements left ample room for Kiah’s deep, sonorous voice to fill the listening-room space amid the bluegrass banjo of “I Will Not Go Down” and the folk guitar of “Empire of Love,” which owes a debt of gratitude to Neil Young’s “Don’t Let it Bring You Down.” In these songs and others, Kiah’s haunting, wordless interludes imbued her earthy performances with otherworldliness.

“Play God and Destroy the World” represented Kiah’s societal perspective as she declared to the hushed audience: “I wanna burn every cross you hide behind/but we’ve all seen that before.”

In the home stretch of the 90-minute performance, she turned toward the personal with a boozy trifecta – the shuffling “Hangover Blues,” the Piedmont picking of “Firewater” and the brooding folk of “Wild Turkey” – to reflect on her party days, cleaning up and her mother’s suicide, respectively. 

The two perspectives collided on “Black Myself,” Kiah’s perennial show closer first recorded with Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla under the banner of Our Native Daughters. It’s a song, Kiah said, that makes white people sing “I’m black myself!” back to her and one that echoes through the centuries to the present day. 

“Nobody wants to be put in shackles and nobody wants to be kidnapped from their home or off the street,” she said to supportive, empathetic applause.