Brooklyn-born gospel artist and documentary filmmaker Cinnamon Jones joins Jaclyn for a wide-ranging conversation about music, faith, advocacy, and what it means to carry your origins with you across continents and creative forms.
About This Episode
The title of this episode is not just a play on the podcast's name. It's an accurate description of who Cinnamon Jones is — a Brooklyn-born artist whose soul, in the deepest sense of the word, is embedded in every note she sings and every frame she films. This conversation with Jaclyn is one of the most expansive of the season: part music biography, part reflection on faith and advocacy, part meditation on what it means to let your origins follow you everywhere you go.
Cinnamon Jones is an internationally recognized gospel artist whose career has taken her far beyond Brooklyn and far beyond any single genre or form. Her work has earned her recognition in the Bay Area music community, where her sound — rooted in gospel but reaching across soul, R&B, and contemporary worship — earned her awards that put her in rooms with artists who have been doing this for decades. She has toured internationally, bringing music to audiences who may not share her language but who respond to the emotional honesty that gospel, at its best, is built on. She has also been the subject of tribute concerts, including a Lady of Song event that recognized the breadth and depth of her contribution to American sacred music.
But Cinnamon's artistry doesn't stop at music. In 2020, as the country was reckoning with itself in profound ways, she turned her documentary instincts toward the generation living through that moment. Her film "Generation Z" captured youth voices during one of the most turbulent periods in recent American history — not as subjects of adult observation, but as witnesses and participants in their own right. The film reflects something central to Cinnamon's worldview: that art and advocacy are not separate callings but different expressions of the same impulse to bear honest witness.
In this conversation with Jaclyn, Cinnamon talks about what keeps her grounded through all of it — the touring, the recognition, the filmmaking, the activism. The answer, consistently, comes back to faith and to identity. She knows who she is, where she came from, and what her work is for. That clarity is rare, and it comes through in every creative decision she makes.
The episode also touches on what the podcast's central theme means to Cinnamon personally. Brooklyn, for her, isn't nostalgia — it's a foundation. The directness, the cultural richness, the creative density of that borough shaped her before she could name what was happening. Wherever she has gone since — internationally, creatively, spiritually — those roots have traveled with her. This is a conversation about what it means to let your origins be a source of strength rather than a limitation, and how the most powerful artists usually do exactly that.
About the Host
Jaclyn Richard is the host of I've Got a Little Brooklyn in Me, a Rochester, NY podcast celebrating the entrepreneurs, civic leaders, artists, and changemakers shaping the city's future. New episodes drop biweekly on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.