Sontia Ware is a Wichita-based singer-songwriter and gospel vocalist.
“I used to listen to James Brown a lot. I grew up listening to blues, gospel but James Brown for whatever else was just it for me. I wanted to be dynamic and incredible and just get into peoples’ faces. It took a long time to find my voice and what it was that I actually wanted to do musically.
“I started off just singing and then, one day, there was boy that I liked. I was 15-years-old. He had a guitar and I said, ‘I’m going to get a guitar too and learn how to play it and then he’ll be impressed. But then I never learned how to play it.
“Then he moved on, so I had a guitar that I carried around for five or six years. It was ridiculous. Then I hit a low point. All of my high points come from low points. One day I picked it up, hit a C chord and said, ‘I can really learn how to play this and see where it goes.’ It just took off from there.”
