Jonell Mosser grew up in Louisville on her mother’s jazz records — Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday — and fell hard for Otis Redding, James Taylor, and Little Feat before she found the Texas songwriter who’d shape her most, Townes Van Zandt. For four decades since, out of Nashville, she’s been the singer other artists call when a song has to land.

Her voice reached producer Don Was through a set of Townes demos, and he built a band around her — later making her the first and only woman he asked to sing in the New Maroons, alongside Benmont Tench, Ringo Starr, and Mark Goldenberg. One session from that era, a slow 6/8 read of the Supremes’ “Stop in the Name of Love,” ended up on the Hope Floats soundtrack in 1998.

Even people who don’t know her name likely own her voice: she’s sung behind B.B. King, Etta James, Trisha Yearwood, Wynonna, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Waylon Jennings, and Bruce Cockburn. She’s toured with Delbert McClinton, written a book’s worth of songs with John Hall of Orleans, and performed with the Freedom Singers, reviving songs that were once banned or censored.

Through it all she’s stayed a live artist above everything — a singer who finds the soul of a song and lays it bare, whether it’s a strut, a heartbreak, or a quiet moment held a beat too long. Nashville has known that for years. After four decades, she still does it several nights a month.