“It gets really hot in here,” Kori Black says, laughing. “I call it the sweat box.”
We’re standing inside the closet-sized booth where she records her music, in a studio on West Broadway. A camouflage bandana covers her black hair, cropped short in her music videos. Thick egg-crate foam lines every square inch of the walls except for a large window looking into the studio. The 25-year-old R&B artist says she prefers to sing in the dark so no one can see her.
Black grew up two blocks from Churchill Downs, living with her grandparents. She says she takes after her father, a local rapper named Corey Cracc. Black sang in church as a kid but has only been recording music since 2015, so far releasing the EPs All the Way Back and #Vybez. She has performed in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Atlanta and won five Kentucky Urban Entertainment Awards. On May 3, she played the Mayor’s Music and Art Series on the west lawn at Metro Hall. Despite her quick success, Black only wants to make enough money to lose her side jobs — printing T-shirts and marshalling planes and lugging baggage at the airport. “I don’t want to get signed to a big label,” she says. “But if a label did come to me with a deal that made sense, I would definitely take it.”
This originally appeared in the May 2018 issue of Louisville Magazine on pg. 109 as the Meet bit. To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, click here. To find us on newsstands, click here.
Photo by Terrence Humphrey
