Bio
Talibah is a recording artist and writer focused on storytelling through music, and experience curation. Safiya’s 2024 record, Black Magic, was released in collaboration with the University of Memphis’s School of Music Business where she served as Artist in Residence. This project, listed as one of Ann Powers of NPR’s favorite albums of 2024, interprets and reframes the University’s Hill Country blues catalog housed by Highwater Records. Her goal was simple: revive the conversation around these artists and work with the Highwater legal team to rework their posthumous publishing deals to honor their lineage and legacy.
Recognizing the power of storytelling to shape possibility, Safiya is currently serving as Narrative and Storytelling Manager for the Memphis Culture Coalition powered by the Big We. Her latest body of musical work, ETERNAL, a mixtape exploring themes of radical self acceptance, joy as resistance and therapy through dance is telling a story of self directed liberation. It’s 4th single, Blue Moon was featured on MAX’s Get Millie Black in 2024.
This notion began in the spring of 2024 when her songs “I Love You Me” and “Unlimited” were featured in Walmart X Raedio’s latest “Black and Unlimited” compilation project.As a songwriter, she recently contributed to the soundtrack for shows on both MAX (Rap Sh!t) and STARZ (P Valley, Down in the Valley) and has writing credits with Drake, Sexyy Red and several local Memphis artists.
Also in 2024, Talibah was featured alongside her husband, Bertram Williams Jr. on Nicco Annan’s Down in the Valley on STARZ. This show is about what real life in Memphis and the Delta is like from the music, to the church to the club.
From the studio to sold out shows, Talibah knows how to pack the house and give the people a grand show. In 2025, she performed at BRIC, Celebrate Brooklyn and shortly after did a short tour in Colombia headlining their Blues and Folk festival. This year she is headed for a tour in London and Manchester with her good friend and collaborator Marcella Simien. Everywhere Talibah goes she represents Memphis and her lineage with pride and intention.
See Talibah live here.
The voices of the elders offer guidance toward the light, and Memphis' most imaginative soul daughter turns to them, literally, on an album incorporating the voices and playing of her forebears via samples from the Highwater label archives. Safiya's own glinting voice reanimates the spirit, pain and passion of hill country blues.
“a whirlwind, a storm, a creatrix of worlds and herself”
Combining “bad luck” and “Black magic,” Safiya’s Memphis is a place of expansive, continuing possibility.
Charles Hughes Oxford American
Safiya can seamlessly inhabit these different sounds and styles because, regardless of genre, there’s one unifying element at the core of all her music: peace. To know Safiya’s music is to know peace. She exudes it in every note and every word. It’s not performative or sporadically sprinkled in. It’s genuine and unapologetic. You deeply feel whatever emotion or story she’s conveying with her songs and you, beautifully, understand yourself better after hearing them.
"At the festival, she was performing for a tent of people who didn't know who she was, and she was just zeroing in on people speaking directly to them. She was witty, she was bawdy, she was frank." - Jewly Hight
https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2018/09/18/648784458/the-best-of-americanafest-2018