A mother who opened for Stevie Wonder, a daughter with a guitar

India Arie Simpson was born in Denver in 1975, the daughter of Joyce and Ralph Simpson, and music was encouraged at home. Her mother was herself a singer, signed to Motown as a teenager and an opening act for Stevie Wonder and Al Green, and she is now her daughter's stylist. After her parents divorced, her mother moved the family to Atlanta when India was 13. A DNA analysis traced her ancestry to the Mende of Sierra Leone, the Kru of Liberia and the Fula of Guinea-Bissau.

She had tried several instruments through school, but it was the guitar, taken up at the Savannah College of Art and Design, that led to what she describes as a personal revelation about songwriting. Writing, she said, made her more sensitive to other people. Back in Atlanta she co-founded an independent collective called Government Earthseed. A one-song turn on a locally released compilation led to a second-stage slot at Lilith Fair in 1998, and in 1999 a Universal/Motown scout signed her and introduced her to the former Motown CEO Kedar Massenburg.

Her debut album, Acoustic Soul, came out on 27 March 2001. It entered the Billboard 200 at number ten and the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums at number three, and without the radio airplay that normally drives pop and rap albums it was certified double platinum within months, with 2,180,000 copies sold in the US and 3,000,000 worldwide. The lead single, “Video”, peaked at 47 on the Hot 100; the second, “Brown Skin”, did not chart there.

Voyage to India followed in 2002, then Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship in 2006, Songversation in 2013 and Worthy in 2019. Her music blends R&B, soul and neo-soul around themes of self-empowerment, spirituality and social consciousness. She has sold over five million records in the US and 10 million worldwide, and has won four Grammy Awards from 23 nominations. She was named to Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul100 list of visionaries, and in 2017 performed Songversation on motivational cruises.