A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
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Saturday, June 1, 2019
Rhiannon Giddens (b. February 21, 1977): Outstanding and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher.
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens is best known as the frontwoman of African-American string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, whose 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig earned them a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album. Raised in Piedmont, North Carolina, Giddens
studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory before relocating back home,
where she became immersed in the rural musical traditions of that
region. A chance meeting with future bandmates Justin Robinson and Dom Flemons at the 2005 Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina resulted in the formation of their first folk project, Sankofa Strings.
Originally an outlet to perform various early African-American musical
styles like blues, country, hot string jazz, and Caribbean, the
bandmembers ended up learning much of their early repertoire from
legendary old-time fiddler Joe Thompson. Adopting the name the Carolina Chocolate Drops,
they released four eclectic and well-respected albums before signing
with Nonesuch Records to release their wildly successful 2010
breakthrough album.
Following the success of Genuine Negro Jig, the band continued to tour and record with an ever-evolving lineup that remained centered around Giddens' powerful vocals and fiddle/banjo playing. Drafted by producer T-Bone Burnett to perform solo at the 2013 Another Day, Another Time concert (celebrating the musical era of the film Inside Llewyn Davis) in New York, she gave a showstopping performance of the Odetta
classic "Waterboy," which was widely considered the highlight of the
evening. Just a few months later in early 2014, she again worked with Burnett on the collaborative New Basement Tapes recording project, which featured Elvis Costello, Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Marcus Mumford (Mumford & Sons), and Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) writing new music to recently discovered Bob Dylan lyrics. Her own Burnett-produced solo debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn, was released a year later in February 2015. At the end of the year, she released an EP called Factory Girl, which was culled from the same sessions as Tomorrow Is My Turn;
its title track received a Grammy nomination for Best American Roots
Performance in 2017, while the EP itself was nominated for Best Folk
Album. Giddens released her second solo album, Freedom Highway, which she co-produced with Dirk Powell, in February 2017.
Our Native Daughters (from left): Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah.
The song came to the Grammy award-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens
a few years ago. It sounded like a nursery rhyme sung from the
unquestioning perspective of a child. “Mama’s cryin’ long,” it began.
“Mama’s hands are shaking.” A tale unfurled from this point about an
enslaved woman, forced to lie down “again and again” by the “boss’s
man”. One night, she kills him, then the story’s denouement plays out.
“Mama’s in the tree,” Giddens sings. “And she can’t come down,” a chorus
of voices reply. Those other voices are traditional roots musicians Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah and the Haitian-American Leyla McCalla. Over 12 intense days in Louisiana in January 2018, they came together with Giddens to make Songs of Our Native Daughters,
forming a supergroup of sorts, trying to do something new with
traditional music. It shouldn’t have felt new: the project’s source
material was old, taking in overlooked slave narratives (Mama’s Cryin’
Long was inspired by one of them) and neglected female characters in
folk songs. But the collective aim of these artists was to do something
that hadn’t been done before: to tell forgotten stories of the African
diaspora in North America, with its women upfront.
The fact that their album is being released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
– the nonprofit label of the Smithsonian Institution, the national
museum of the US – is also significant. The label has recently started
signing contemporary musicians again for the first time in 30 years,
with its director, Huib Schippers,
saying this is to “show folk music as a living, changing tradition,
informed by the past, but relevant to the present, and with an eye to
the future”. Giddens agrees with this in her liner notes: “I see this
album as a part of a larger movement to reclaim the black female history
of this country.”
This mission has a contemporary weight for her, too. Her notes also detail how modern protest movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter
were started by women of colour, who are often told to “put their
intersectionality on hold” [ie put issues of race aside]. “Black women
have historically had the most to lose,” she writes, “and have therefore
been the fiercest fighters for justice.” In the music wrapped up in her
words, that spirit roars.
The
ambition of this project will be unsurprising to anyone who already
knows of Giddens. A gifted Oberlin Conservatory opera student who fell
in love with traditional music in the early 2000s, she quickly became a
brilliant banjo player, songwriter and folk singer. Awards rushed in: a
Grammy in 2011 for her old-time band, Carolina Chocolate Drops, a BBC
Radio 2 folk award for best singer in 2016 (the only time an American
has won it) and, soon after, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a
five-year national artistic endowment for her future career. Giddens has
mastered other fields too, joining the cast of the US musical drama
series Nashville for two seasons in 2017, and writing a ballet, Lucy Negro Redux, about the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which had its world premiere earlier this month in Nashville.
Giddens explains, warmly, how The Songs of Our Native Daughters
project sprung from two sources: a poem she read with her young
daughter at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American
History and Culture in Washington, and a scene from the 2016 Nate Parker
film, Birth of a Nation. The poem was Pity for Poor Africans
from 1788, by English satirical poet and abolitionist William Cowper.
“Although I didn’t know it was satirical at first,” she says,
half-laughing. Then she reads it: “‘I own I am shock’d at the purchase
of slaves… but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar or rum?’
I texted Dirk [Powell, her regular co-producer] straight away. ‘Oh my
God! This has to be a song!’”
The poem’s sentiment also made Giddens think about things people see
as necessities in modern life, such as smartphones and TVs, which
require people to work in terrible conditions to make them. “I mean,
people say things Cowper did in his poem today, without irony. People
want to get on with ordinary life. And ignoring the way people are
treated – that’s how holocausts begin.” This experience turned into a
track on the album, Barbados, fitted around a haunting minor-key melody,
the first to be notated by westerners from new world enslaved music.The scene in Birth of a Nation
that provoked Giddens showed a black woman being raped, then the camera
ignoring her as her attacker left, but instead focusing on her husband
as the wronged party. “It made me so mad. So many stories and
perspectives just get pushed to one side.” Her ire extends to how often
musicians of colour in folk music are often ignored, too. She talks
passionately about how the banjo was originally the “banjer” or “banza”,
an instrument that came over from Africa to the Caribbean in the 17th
to 18th centuries. It became claimed by white musicians as their own,
and was played often in blackface minstrel shows in the mid 19th-century
US. Giddens includes some minstrel banjo tunes on this record,
pointedly reclaiming their roots. Giddens knew she wanted other female musicians to join her on
this project, so she began, as she calls it, “casting the room”.
McCalla had been a fellow musician in the Carolina Chocolate Drops;
she’d known Russell for years on the traditional gig circuit. Kiah, a
southern gothic blues player, was someone she’d first seen singing Trouble So Hard on YouTube, the song best known for its remix by Moby, featuring the vocals of Alabama singer Vera Hall.
One of Kiah’s songs, Black Myself, starts the album brilliantly; it
reflects how black girls start getting treated differently when they
mature into women. “When I was a girl growing up in a predominantly
white, religiously conservative middle-class community, I was seen as
harmless,” she tells me. “Then I was suddenly treated differently by
people that I had played with for years.” Her lyrics reflect experiences
that have sadly travelled through time (“You look in my eyes, but you
don’t see me/ ’Cause I’m black myself”), but it ends with a hope for the
future, as many of these songs do, albeit with a twist in the tail.
“I’ve washed away my blood and tears/ I’ve been born brand new/ There’s
no more workhorses/ But still some work to do.”
Recorded in Dirk Powell’s studio on the banks of a bayou outside
Breaux Bridge in Louisiana, the 12 days making the album were full-on,
says Russell, on the phone from Nashville. “But there’s this beautiful
pressure that comes with needing to hit a deadline,” she says. “Every
day we could have talked for 24 hours, but we had to just get on with
it. Get our stories out as they felt.”
On the first day, Giddens, Kiah and Russell wrote Moon Meets the Sun,
proposing a delicious message of strength in the face of adversity (“ah
you put the shackles on our feet/ But we’re dancing”). McCalla joined
the gang a day later, heavily pregnant with twins. The experience
focused Russell’s mind on the connections between past and future
generations of black women. “We kept thinking of our foremothers, and
our kids, and seeing that line of strength and resilience in those
songs,” she says. The making of Mama’s Cryin’ Long – videoIn
this setting, giving bigger stories to female characters mentioned in
passing in folk songs also felt right. The song Polly Ann’s Hammer takes
the “little wife” mentioned briefly in the folk ballad John Henry, who
handles “steel like a man” while her husband is sick, and gives her her
dues. He dies from the effects of his work, but she survives. “The
supposedly weaker sex survives… raises the babies, and perhaps lives
long enough to see their children campaign for civil rights and true
freedom,” Russell says.
It is a song about one of Russell’s Ghanaian ancestors that tells
perhaps the album’s most powerful story. Quasheba, Quasheba came to
Russell late at night near the end of recording. She herself was
fostered young, then endured years of abuse at the hands of a white
adoptive father before meeting her biological father at 30, and delving
into her family history. She then discovered Quasheba, sold into slavery
from Africa, crossing the Atlantic in the hold of a ship, doing
backbreaking work in the cane fields, suffering multiple rapes and
sales, and having her children taken away.
“And she survived too,” Russell says. “To find out I am here, that my
child is here, because of this woman, and to know her name…” The
album’s goal burns in her words. “I wanted to sing for her.” And she
does, pushing towards the future, the chorus of other Daughters
fittingly rallying around her: “How far your spirit’s flown/ Blood of
your blood/ Bone of your bone/ By the grace of your strength… we are
home.”
Rhiannon Giddens
isn't afraid to carry the weight of history in her music. The North
Carolina singer-songwriter and banjoist is a founding member of the
Grammy-winning group the Carolina Chocolate Drops which won both critical acclaim and loyal fans for their revival of the African-American string band tradition. 2017 was a big year for Giddens. She released Freedom Highway,
a solo album of haunting songs inspired by slave narratives. She also
received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially known as a
"genius" grant, awarded to individuals who have shown exceptional
creativity in their work. She's on tour now, and stopped by
NPR's headquarters in Washington D.C. to talk to NPR's Michel Martin
about her work and perform two songs from Freedom Highway. Hear
their conversation at the audio link, read an edited transcript below
and listen to two a live performance of two songs from Freedom Highway. Michel
Martin: Well, first of all, congratulations on the MacArthur grant. I
have to ask: Where were you and what were you doing when you found out? Rhiannon Giddens: I was on tour, as usual. I think. Or maybe I wasn't. I don't know [laughs].
I don't even know anymore what my life is. But I was out somewhere; I
wasn't home. I was working and I got a phone call. I was at a cafe and
this woman I didn't know said, 'Are you somewhere we could have a
private conversation?' It's like, 'I guess, I'm in a cafe...' And you
know, the bomb dropped and I was just completely floored.
o you remember what went through your mind when you heard? You know, I was super shocked. Of course, every year the list comes out
and every year you think, 'God, what I wouldn't do for one of those.'
But you never think you would actually get one. And to get that phone
call — I was kind of in shock when I got it, but then when she went on
to read what they'd written about me, it just really made me feel
amazing because I went, 'Gosh, people are actually listening and
appreciating what I'm doing!' Because you just like do and you do and
you do and you do what you feel like you're supposed to be doing. And
you don't know what's landing, you don't know what's affecting people.
You don't know. You just kind of do it until something like this
[happens]. It's not the money so much as the validation from people, my
peers who are in these industries who are like, 'We want to encourage
you to keep going.' That was the best thing for me. Here's what they said:
The Foundation honors you for "reclaiming African American
contributions to folk and country music and bringing to light new
connections between music from the past and the present." Not too bad,
not too shabby. (laughs) Well,
speaking of the money, one of the first projects that I've heard you
say that you're going to work on is a musical about the — is musical the
right word? Like an opera? No, it's definitely not an opera. A theatrical treatment? With music, for sure.
A theatrical treatment of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, and I know that you said this was actually a coup more than a riot. Yes.
So this is the only coup that's ever happened on American soil, as far
as I know, which is an enormous event. I'm a North Carolina native, grew
up in North Carolina — never learned about it. So not only was it a
coup, it was also a massacre. It was not an insurrection, it was not a
race riot. It was a massacre. But that is the language that has been
used about it to change the narrative. What happened was a fusionist
party of white and black political working class people, got together
and made this party and were gaining ground, were getting successful in
the political arena in North Carolina, and the white supremacists were
having none of it. They were like, 'Nope, we're going to take this back.
This is not happening.' And so for the year leading up to this
election in 1898 they employed the Ku Klux Klan to do their
intimidation and terror and all this kind of stuff and people were so
scared. A lot of them didn't even go vote. So they got a lot of those
seats back, but there were still fusionist politicians who were in
office a few days after that. [The supremacists] get a bunch of rifles,
just literally started shooting people, shooting black people in the
streets. And a bunch of people go hide in the swamps, a lot of them die
of exposure because it's November and it's days they're hiding out
there.
Absolutely.
They not only killed a bunch of black people, but they ran the white
politicians out of town and they ran any prominent black businessperson,
any prominent black cultural leader, ran him out of town. They said,
'You can leave or die.' So they ran them out on a rail basically,
replaced those offices with their own politicians and the federal
government didn't do a thing. How did you know of this? How did you hear about this? There's an amazing writer who lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, he's been doing a lot of work with this, called John Jeremiah Sullivan.
And we were talking about a different project and he brought this up,
and I was like, 'The what? Of what? What are you talking about?' I had
no idea. I started digging and I was like, 'Oh my god.' So we're working
together on it. And the idea is that there was this promise of this
biracial coalition, culturally as well. And you think: That's what Reconstruction was trying to do.
The thing is, we think Reconstruction failed. It didn't fail. It
was deconstructed. It was destroyed, right? And this is what happened:
There was this pocket where this was actually working in Wilmington; it
was a majority black city. The only, I think, full-time black paper was
there. This is actually one of the first places they went and burned it
down to the ground. That's like a whole 'nother part of the story. For
me, it's like, yeah, a lot of people were killed, which is horrible.
There was this whole political thing that happened, which was horrible.
But also there was this destruction of hope. There was this destruction
of what we could be and it was a setback. It was an enormous setback for
the black populist movement, for black political power. For not just
black political power, but for the idea of working together. And
the idea of making this a theatrical presentation with music, is that
because that's your language, or do you hear the music already? Well,
you know, the thing is like, there's a lot of action obviously that
goes on with this. And that's what some people would want to focus on —
'We want to focus on the violence!' — but I'm actually more interested
in focusing on the culture that existed before. Because this is what we
don't hear about. We don't hear about where this actually was working.
And that's all to the good of the people who destroyed it. That's what
they wanted, you know? They erased it from history. They changed the
terminology. Words matter. And the people who took the power?
Their names grace our schools and our streets, and the people who were
run out we don't hear about. So the idea is to create this moment of
where this culture was. There's a lot of beautiful music from this time
period that nobody talks about. They kind of go, on black culture, to
spirituals and work songs and they skip ahead to the Harlem Renaissance
with a little blues in between. I'm like, 'Wait a minute.' There are
actually all these years of this incredible mixing of styles and
cultures that was going on that then feed into all the things we think
of in the 1910s and the '20s. But we don't hear about it.
This is fascinating. You've given us so much to think about. Have you started writing it at all? Yeah, I have started.
I'm
thinking the last person that many people would know who created a
theatrical musical work after winning a MacArthur grant was Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created Hamilton. No pressure, though.
No pressure [laughs].
Do you have any of it in your head? Can you give us even a couple bars?
No, I can't, but I have worked on some of the music. My songwriting partner Dirk Powell, who I did a lot of Freedom Highway
with, we've been working on songs and it's very exciting. I was just
there in Wilmington. There's no commissioning body for this, you know,
so whenever we have time ... and this is part of what the grant is for,
so that I can create space for that and try to find residencies to do
this and not have to be beholden to the the record cycle and all of
that.
Rhiannon Giddens
Claire Harbage/NPR
Can you tell us about the banjo's role in the music that you are creating and that you have been reviving all these years? Absolutely.
And particularly this banjo that I have with me — I mean, obviously, I
got started in old-time music and roots music, and the history of the
banjo was a great spur for where I ended up, really getting into the
historical milieu for the music that we were doing. So finding out the banjo was an African-American instrument,
all of that just blew my mind because I had no idea. And then, I found
this banjo which is a replica of a banjo from 1858. People always are
like, 'Whoa!' They act like it's a new banjo, but actually this is what
banjos sounded like. Because before whites took up the banjo in the '40s
and the '50s — that is, the 1840s and '50s — they were gourd
instruments, they were homemade instruments and they sounded like this.
They were deep and they were dark and that's what the banjo sound was. Eventually
it changes and it becomes the sort of bright sound that we know today,
but for the first few hundred years of its existence, it was much more
of an earthy instrument, you know? And so the sound really attracted me.
When I started working on these narratives, these songs that were
inspired by slave narratives, I couldn't handle all emotions reading
these stories, and then I started thinking, where are these stories
existing? Where are they existing? Where are they in the songs? And you
realize: People couldn't write about this stuff back then. They had to
put it all in code, and it's in the religious music and all that, so
it's like, what if we had a narrative ballad tradition in our history,
in our culture? What would it be like? I wanted this banjo to go hand in
hand with that. For me, when I picked it up, I went, 'This is my
instrument.' I was literally like, 'I hope you're selling this, because
I'm walking out of this room with it.'
Thank you. What are you going to play?
I'll do the first one that I wrote. This was years ago. It's called "Julie" and it was written after I read this book called The Slaves' War
by Andrew Ward. What he did is he took all of these pieces of slave
narratives and he put them in the context of the Civil War. So as you
read the beginning, the middle, and the end of the war, you know what
people's experiences were — a lot of people, not just one. It kind of
gives you the idea of a community. It's a really beautiful book. And
there was a story in there that inspired this song of two women who were
seeing the Union army coming and one of them was the mistress and the
other one was, you know, the person that the mistress thinks she owns in
her mind. And there's this conversation that goes on and it really hit
me hard. It was like, this woman deserves for her story to be told. You
know, this was the first time that I sort of thought, 'Oh my gosh.' The
song wrote itself and the name came from nowhere. It was Julie. I don't
even know the women's names.
Rhiannon Giddens, "Julie"
You're a mother yourself. How do you get through that, singing that song on tour every day? How did you get through it?
I
am drawn to those stories. The song we almost name the record after,
"At the Purchaser's Option," is also about a mother, you know? And I am
drawn to those stories because you know we we pay the price in so many
different ways of the system. You know, women. And I don't think it's a
story that gets told enough. And I don't think what happened to the
African-American family, you know, the way that it was torn apart time
and time and time again — these details and the subtleties of these kind
of stories, I think that's what I'm here to to say. I didn't have any
control over this. This is what I was given to do. And having children
myself definitely gives me a strong connection to that. I get through it
because I didn't have to live it. The least, the very least I can do,
is tell these stories because all these ancestors and all these people
who came before me lived this so that I can sit here with you and talk
about it. So I cannot be self-indulgent. Has the way
people have responded to your music changed in recent years? It's just
interesting that your work has been dedicated to giving voice to voices
that have been forgotten, suppressed, ignored, buried. Now, we are
having violent conflicts over whose story gets told and how. You know,
last year in Charlottesville, a tragic death after these white supremacists [were] protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue. In New York just this past week, the statue of a man
who experimented on enslaved women without anesthesia who is revered as
the father of obstetrics and gynecology. And people had been asking for
this thing to be removed, remembering what he did. He treated people in
a way we don't even allow people to treat animals now. And so I'm just
wondering where your work fits into this conversation. What do you
think?
This is what I tell people. It's like, when you look at something
like, say, the massacre of 1898, you understand what's going on in North
Carolina today. You understand the politics that are going on now.
And so that's why I think this stuff is so important: This is not
relics. I'm not doing this for fun. Of course I enjoy music. But in
terms of this message, the white supremacist stuff they have in
Charlottesville all make sense when you know the history. Even the
cultural history that the music reveals, you know, when you learn coon songs and you learn minstrelsy and you realize how deep this is in our culture when you get into the history realize where we are everywhere.
The more I dug in finding out the true role of African-Americans in the
creation of old-time music and square-dancing, for example, which is
considered the ultimate American thing. Right? It was a white American
thing. Well, that was a narrative that was created in the '20s
that was wholesale fabricated because all of the players for these
dances back in the day were black and there was a lot of evidence that
black people invented dance calling, which is what sets square dances
apart from the quadrilles and things in Europe. They didn't have that.
So when you look at that, it's not just, 'Oh, wasn't it interesting,'
it's like, no, actually, it didn't just disappear. It was actually
dismantled, this idea that we were involved in all of these different
things. So when you go back and you look at that it's actually very freeing. Yeah, I mean, there was a Great Migration,
there's changing musical taste — all this stuff contributed to the
decrease of African-Americans playing the banjo. But the biggest piece
is this destruction of the real story and the creation of a false story
and then a separation into boxes of American music. And when you do that
to our culture, that allows politically things to slot in. Because then
you believe, 'Oh, we're so different,' when we're actually a lot more
similar than we are different. It shows up in music over and over and
over again and that's why they have to stop it. Do you feel that the music is changing things? Do you feel that the work changes anything? What,
my work? I have no idea. I mean, that's the hardest thing about being
an artist: You literally just have to do what you were given to do and
you don't know until somebody walks up and says, 'I'm now playing the
banjo,' or until somebody walks up and says, 'I read that book and I
have a different idea of what's going on,' you know? I feel like if five
people walk up to me and say that, I feel like I've made a difference. I
don't know what the impact is overall. I know The Carolina Chocolate
Drops has contributed to the conversation. I know what I'm doing is
contributing to the conversation and I don't really think about what the
impact is. I can't. All I can do is get feedback from my audiences, and
people say, 'We love the history, keep it coming.' That's really
powerful feedback for me because nobody's coming to my show to hear me
talk. But the fact that they still appreciate that I contextualize these
pieces, that means a lot. So I take that feedback and I just sort of
sink it into my brain and I go, 'OK, let's just keep going.'
Rhiannon Giddens, "At The Purchaser's Option"
Well, keep going. What's the last song you're going to play?
I'll
play the other song that was inspired by being a mother called "At the
Purchaser's Option" that was inspired by an ad that I saw in the late
1700s that was for a young woman who was for sale. This was very common,
like used car ads. Seriously, you needed some cash, you just put an ad
in the paper. It was horrible; these are human beings. But it was so
common and it said at the end of it: She has with her a nine-month-old
baby who is "at the purchaser's option." And those words said everything
to me. I tried to put myself in her position. Her frame of mind.
Web editor Sidney Madden and web intern Stefanie Fernándezcontributed to this story.
She pours fire and fury into powerful songs that target everything from
police shootings to slavery. The musician reveals all about her mission
to put the black back into bluegrass – and Shakespeare
‘I’m not here to be famous’ … Rhiannon Giddens, who is curating the Cambridge folk festival.
Photograph: Tanya Rosen-Jones
‘We’re
all racist to some degree,” says Rhiannon Giddens. “Just like we’re all
privileged to some degree. I have privilege in my system because I’m
light-skinned. I hear people say, ‘I didn’t have it easy growing up
either.’ But when did it become a competition?” As someone on a mission to bridge such divides, Giddens thinks about
this stuff a lot. The Grammy-winning singer and songwriter was born to a
white father and a black mother in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the
late 1970s. Her parents married only three years after the landmark
Loving v Virginia decision, which reversed the anti-miscegenation laws
that had made interracial marriage illegal. Their union was still
shocking enough that her father was disinherited. While much has changed in the 40 years that Giddens has been alive,
her latest album, Freedom Highway, is a powerful testament to the
inequality and injustice that remain. It opens with At the Purchaser’s
Option, a devastating track inspired by an 1830s advert for a female
slave whose nine-month-old baby could also be included in the sale. “It
was kind of a statement to put that one first,” says Giddens. “If you
can get past that, you’ll probably survive the rest.” ‘If you can get past this, you’ll probably survive the rest’ … the slave trade song that opens the new album.
Other songs span various aspects of African American history, from the civil rights era to Black Lives Matter,
while revealing the breadth of her musical influences. Soul, blues,
gospel, jazz, zydeco – her versatile voice wraps itself around them all.
It also proves a wonderful counterpoint to her nephew Justin
Harrington’s rap on the funkyBetter Get it Right the First
Time, a song she wrote in response to police violence (“Did you stand
your ground / is that why they took you down?”). The lyrics came
tragically close to home when she performed it in Dallas just a few days
after the shooting of 15-year-old Texan Jordan Edwards, who, like the song’s protagonist, was a bright young student shot dead as he left a party with friends.
“People
say, ‘I’m tired of thinking about race, it’s a drag.’ Yeah, well,
welcome to my life! I don’t care who you are. We have the time and the
headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.” Giddens has become known for her brave and articulate works and words. Her group the Carolina Chocolate Drops,
in which she plays banjo and fiddle, won a Grammy for their inspired
revival of black string-band music, while her combination of
musicianship and musical activism has earned her multiple prizes,
including comedian Steve Martin’s Award for Excellence in Banjo. In 2015, Giddens’ solo album Tomorrow Is My Turn
introduced her powerful voice – she trained as an opera singer – to a
mainstream audience. That album included only one original song, Angel
City, but its compilation of covers showcased her virtuosity. Intimate
renditions of folk ballads sat alongside brassy, Broadway belts; and
there too, Giddens made a point of recognising forgotten female artists
such as Geeshie Wiley and Elizabeth Cotten. It earned her the BBC Folk award for singer of the year.
Counter culture Giddens at the Freedom for All gala, New York, in 2016.
Photograph: Timpone/BFA/Rex/Shutterstock
Her
fame grew even wider thanks to a recurring role in the TV series
Nashville. Now her status is underlined by the fact that she is curating
next month’s Cambridge folk festival, which will showcase a number of female artists of colour, including Britain’s Yola Carter, Canada’s Kaia Kater and Tennessee’s Amythyst Kiah. Also on the bill is her great hero Peggy Seeger. “She’s an amazing example of an uncompromising individual, with unbelievable amounts of compassion.” Giddens’ own Cambridge set will be her last live date for some time.
Last October, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellowship, which
gives “individuals who show exceptional creativity” a
no-strings-attached $625,000.This will allow her to
spend more time with her five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter
in Limerick, Ireland, where they attend a Gaelic school.She is separated from their Irish father. “My stuff lives in Nashville,” says Giddens, “but I live wherever my children are.” We meet less than 24 hours after she has landed at Shannon airport.
“That is why it’s such a mess,” she says, waving at the firetruck and
other toys on the living room floor. The belief in music as a space where people can set aside their
differences is sacred to Giddens. The MacArthur grant has allowed her to
continue to tell the stories that inspire her – in particular, to
reclaim narratives and restore voices to the ignored or silenced. She
particularly enjoys collaborations. One recent project came about when
choreographer Paul Vasterling, the CEO of Nashville Ballet, introduced
her to the poems of Caroline Randall Williams, whose works explore the
theory that Shakespeare’s dark lady sonnets were written about a black madam in London.
Rhiannon Giddens, and banjo, performing at the Boston Pops Fireworks
Spectacular this month. Photograph:
Michael Dwyer/AP
The
poetry inspired Vasterling to write a ballet, Lucy Negro Redux, for
which Giddens is writing the music. “The ballet includes both the black
Lucy character and Shakespeare’s fair youth,” says Giddens. “So you have
a man and a black woman inspiring some of the most beautiful poetry in
the English language.” She’s also researching minstrelsy, hoping to reclaim a genre that has
become associated, in both the US and the UK, with blackface
performance. “When you look into the minstrel band in the US and you see
banjo, fiddle and tambourine, you might think they’re all ‘white’
instruments. But the banjo is from Africa, there are one-string fiddles
all over the world, and the tambourine comes from frame drums that were
brought up from north Africa through the Middle East and Italy. That’s
world music right there. Musical and cultural ideas have been crossing
over for ever. My projects are all going towards the theme, ‘We’re more
alike than we’re different.’” Perhaps the most exciting prospect, though, is a musical that will
tell the story of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, when white supremacists
in North Carolina murdered the town’s black elected leaders in what
Giddens describes as “the only successful coup d’etat on American soil”.
It’s a project she is passionate about, and she has enlisted the help
of Dirk Powell, her songwriting partner on Freedom Highway. Finding
financial backing for the project, which won’t be finished before 2020,
will be half the struggle, she admits.
Funny turn … Giddens with Steve Martin, after winning his
Award for Excellence in Banjo. Photograph: Gary West. Courtesy: Compass
Records
One curious issue for the singer-songwriter is her audience: it’s
largely white. “Trying to penetrate the black community has been really
difficult,” she says. “It’s not enough to produce the work – you then
have to connect it to the audience. Like the ballet: the lead ballerina
is black. Here’s an opportunity for black girls to connect with someone
on stage who looks like themselves. So what can be done to get them
among this audience?” To this end, she hopes to get more involved with the production side
of the industry, just as curating the Cambridge folk festival gave her a
way to exert some influence. She has often felt that Britain
appreciates the breadth of American roots music more than the US. “I
love the UK folk scene. In the States, nobody knows what to do with me.
There’s still a very narrow definition of Americana.” The term, says Giddens, often simply means “the singer-songwriters
who got pushed out of commercial country”. Unlike many country stars,
Giddens has no intention of plundering her personal life for songs
(“Although you can call me out on that in 10 years’ time”). Nor does she
seem particularly interested in self-glorification. “I don’t even wear
makeup any more,” she says. “When I did the Letterman show, I looked
like a barbie doll. The older I get, the more I realise I’m not here to
be famous. I’m here because of the mission and the voices.” In a provocative speech at the bluegrass industry’s annual awards
last September, she asked: “Are we going to acknowledge that the
question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we
get diversity back into bluegrass?” Giddens believes the true
African American experience still isn’t taught in schools. “I made it
through an entire year of North Carolina history and never heard about
the Wilmington Massacre. It’s not a story people want to tell, because
nobody wants to face the facts of how horrible it was.” She pauses. “White people are so fragile, God bless ’em. ‘Well, Ididn’t
own slaves.’ No you didn’t. Nobody is asking you to take personal
responsibility for this. But you’re a beneficiary of a system that did.
Just own that and move on.”
Giddens plays and records what she describes as “black non-black music,” reviving a forgotten history.Photograph by Paola Kudacki for The New Yorker
To
grasp the significance of what the twenty-first-century folksinger
Rhiannon Giddens has been attempting, it is necessary to know about
another North Carolina musician, Frank Johnson, who was born almost two
hundred years before she was. He was the most important African-American
musician of the nineteenth century, but he has been almost entirely
forgotten. Never mind a Wikipedia page—he does not even earn a footnote
in sourcebooks on early black music. And yet, after excavating the
records of his career—from old newspapers, diaries, travelogues,
memoirs, letters—and after reckoning with the scope of his influence,
one struggles to come up with a plausible rival. There are several
possible reasons for Johnson’s astonishing obscurity. One may be that,
on the few occasions when late-twentieth-century scholars mentioned him,
he was almost always misidentified as a white man, despite the fact
that he had dark-brown skin and was born enslaved. It may have been
impossible, and forgivably so, for academics to believe that a black man
could have achieved the level of fame and success in the antebellum
slave-holding South that Johnson had. There was also a doppelgänger for
scholars to contend with: in the North, there lived, around the same
time, a musician named Francis Johnson, often called Frank, who is
remembered as the first black musician to have his original compositions
published. Some historians, encountering mentions of the Southern
Frank, undoubtedly assumed that they were merely catching the Northern
one on some unrecorded tour and turned away. There is also the
racial history of the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where
Johnson enjoyed his greatest fame. In 1898, a racial massacre in
Wilmington, and a subsequent exodus of its black citizens, not only
knocked loose the foundations of a rising black middle class but also
came close to obliterating the deep cultural memory of what had been
among the most important black towns in the country for more than a
century. The people who might have remembered Johnson best, not just as a
musician but as a man, were themselves violently unremembered. A
final explanation for Johnson’s absence from the historical record may
be the most significant. It involves not his reputation but that of the
music he played, with which he became literally synonymous—more than one
generation of Southerners would refer to popular dance music simply as
“old Frank Johnson music.” And yet, in the course of the twentieth
century, the cluster of styles in which Johnson specialized––namely,
string band, square dance, hoedown––came to be associated with the folk
music of the white South and even, by a bizarre warping of American
cultural memory, with white racial purity. In the nineteen-twenties, the
auto magnate Henry Ford started proselytizing (successfully) for a
square-dancing revival precisely because the music that accompanied it
was not black. Had he known the deeper history of square dancing, he might have fainted. As
a travelling “Negro fiddler,” Johnson epitomized the one musical figure
in American history who can truly be called “ur.” Black fiddlers are
the trilobites of American musical history. A legal record from the
mid-seventeenth century details a dispute between Virginia households
competing for the services of an enslaved man who had played the fiddle
all night for a party on the Eastern Shore. After that, for more than
two hundred years, black fiddlers are everywhere in the written sources.
Then, around the start of the twentieth century, they fade, abruptly
and almost completely. Johnson was born in the late eighteenth
century, most likely on a plantation owned by a family named Hawkins, in
North Carolina, near the Virginia border. Early on, he was recognized
as a prodigy who could master almost any instrument, but his specialty
was the fiddle—the instrument most desired for dances. His owners
started hiring him out for parties and dividing the earnings with him, a
common practice. Sometime in the eighteen-thirties or forties, he
became free. The only attempt at a biographical treatment of him, an
article written around 1900 by the Virginia newspaperman Frank S.
Woodson, says that he bought his own freedom “on a credit,” using money
that he had made playing music. He then, according to Woodson, purchased
the freedom of his wife, a seamstress named Amelia. His former master
“threw in the five or six children, all boys, for good measure.” The
boys became his band. Johnson and his wife tended to produce talented
sons. What did they sound like? It is a profound frustration, for a
person interested in early African-American music, not to be able to
hear them. Johnson died ten years before the recording era began, and by
then his influence had grown diffuse. But a defining quality of his
band’s sound is how much mixing it involved—how many styles and
instrumental arrangements. There were brass instruments and wind
instruments. Johnson’s sons played horns of all kinds. Frank, Jr.,
played a snare drum. There was a bass drum. Cymbals. In 1853, a
kettledrum was introduced. But there were also the instruments we
associate more closely with a “minstrel” band—fiddles and banjos. A
fife-and-drum sound is mentioned in a Wilmington Daily Journal
article published in 1858. Johnson’s band played everything at once,
moving across a range of stylistic attacks, all geared for dancing. It
seems impossible that its sound would not have approached, at times,
proto-jazz. It is a genuine challenge to describe how prevalent Johnson was, how
dominant. According to one source, he had “for half a century ruled
with absolute autocracy the aristocratic ball-rooms of the South.” By
any calculus, he was one of the first black celebrities in the South. I
have never come across an ostensibly “lost” figure who, once you know to
look for him, turns out to have left behind such an obvious trail.
Johnson went from being hard to find to being impossible to escape.
Researching him was like writing a history of baseball and
“rediscovering” a hitter named Babe Ruth. His music was so woven into
the social life of the South that it would not be an exaggeration to
describe it as a kind of ever-present soundtrack. Plantation balls,
picnics, barbecues, sporting events, Renaissance-style “tilting”
tournaments (they were big for a while), random town ceremonies (think
cornerstone-layings), university commencements (for many years, he
performed at Chapel Hill, and for at least some years at Wake Forest),
state fairs, agricultural fairs, firemen’s balls, military “muster
days,” moonlight excursions on trains and boats, extended summer
bookings at resort hotels, society weddings, holiday parties (including
an annual Christmas party in Wilmington, where his band performed for
mixed audiences, “thereby creating a warmer fellowship between the
races,” according to the Wilmington Star), funeral
processions, and political rallies. In 1840, “when the new Capitol
building was completed in Raleigh,” according to an item in an 1873
issue of the Hillsboro Recorder, there were “two
successive nights” of dancing, with “the well-known Frank Johnson . . .
furnishing the music.” During the Civil War, his band often marched at
the head of regiments and was called in to play at recruitment parties.
According to a story recounted by Woodson, Johnson accompanied a
Confederate brigade into battle, but turned around when the shooting
started.
Johnson
fell on hard times after the war, and, in the end, according to a 1901
piece written by someone with the initials A.M.W., he “moved about a
pathetic figure—a sort of melancholy reminder of departed joys.” His
death, in 1871, was reported all over—in Cincinnati, in Chicago. One
newspaper in Wilmington described the turnout for his funeral as “the
largest, we think, that has ever occurred in this city, it being
estimated that there were at least two thousand persons in the
procession, including the colored fire companies in uniform, with
standards draped in mourning, the colored Masonic fraternity in regalia,
etc., the whole preceded by a brass band.” Pine Forest Cemetery, where
he was buried, is down the street from my house; I’ve spent countless
days looking in vain for his grave. Johnson’s
flame never quite flickered out. Other fiddlers followed in his nimble
footsteps. Some of them had played with him; all of them had heard his
band. Pomp Long, a fiddler whose owner, according to the Richmond Leader,
had “placed him under Frank Johnson when he recognized his natural
talent,” was briefly considered a rival to Johnson in ability. Then came
Cripple Dick Foster, Uncle Baldy, Dick Jumper, Blind Lige, Emp
Wright—each with his moment on the mountain. Wright, who seems to
have been active in the years just before 1900, was one of the last pure
products of the Frank Johnson school. He knew how to make fiddles.
There is some confusion over whether he was black or white. He
supposedly lived for a time in a “mulatto community” called Little
Texas, near Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the few things we know
about him is that he mentored, and passed his internal songbook on to, a
man named John Arch Thompson, who lived in various rural pockets of the
Piedmont: Cedar Grove and Cheeks (both in Orange County) and, finally,
in Mebane (pronounced “meh-bun”), north of Greensboro. Thompson
had a son named Joe, and Thompson’s brother had a son, Odell. The first
cousins played the fiddle and the banjo, respectively, for small house
parties. A folklorist named Kip Lornell got turned on to them in the
nineteen-seventies, and other researchers published interviews with them
and recorded them playing. The Thompson cousins performed at some folk
festivals. Then Odell died, and only Joe was left. He was the last of
the old line, the rag end of whatever Johnson started. Or he would have
been. Something happened fourteen years ago, in Boone, North Carolina,
to change the story. In 2005, a festival called the Black Banjo
Then & Now Gathering took place at Appalachian State University, in
Boone. Joe Thompson was an honored guest and a featured performer. Many
of the attendees had come expressly to see him. Among the scholars and
the players and the scholar-players were three passionate young
revivalists, black musicians who had been getting lost in the old stuff.
Two of them were multi-instrumentalists: Justin Robinson, from the mill
town of Gastonia, North Carolina, had studied the violin since
childhood, and Dom Flemons, at the time still living in his native
Arizona, had already begun turning himself into an old-fashioned
songster. They were walking around and, for the first time, seeing
people with faces like theirs who were digging, and making, the kind of
music they loved. The third musician, a twenty-eight-year-old
singer from Greensboro, was starting to experiment with stringed
instruments. She was Rhiannon Giddens (pronounced “ree-ann-un,” like in the Fleetwood Mac song, after which she was, surprisingly, not named). She had recently graduated from the Oberlin
Conservatory of Music, where she focussed on opera, and had only begun
wading into the muddier waters of what the cultural critic Greil Marcus
calls “the old weird America.” Her background was in youth choir and art
song, but, since college, she had become increasingly interested in her
home ground. She was picking up new instruments. Thanks to a job as a
hostess at a Macaroni Grill, where her duties included singing old
Italian arias, she earned enough to buy a ninety-nine-dollar Chinese
fiddle and her first banjo, a Deering Goodtime. She had read “African
Banjo Echoes in Appalachia,” by Cecelia (Cece) Conway, and was
corresponding with the author. Conway told her that Joe Thompson was
still playing and that he would be performing in Boone. “And I
went, ‘What?’ ” Giddens recalled, not long ago. “I was just starting to
understand the history, and here was the man, practically in my back
yard. It was proof of what I’d been reading about, living proof that
this stuff had a place in my community.” I
first met Giddens one afternoon in the spring of 2015, in the kitchen
of a cozy Greensboro ranch house she’d recently bought. It was the first
of many meetings and conversations throughout the past four years, a
running discussion about the origins of the music she draws from, a
style that she transforms in her playing, and which has been an
obsession of mine for twenty-five years. That day, I started by asking
her to describe Thompson. “Joe?” Giddens said, and gave a
characteristic sideways glance, drawing in her cheek and seeming to
conjure him in her mind. “He always wore a button-up shirt, and dark
pants and a hat—always a hat, like a trucker’s hat of some kind.” He was
“formal and friendly all at once—very Southern that way.” She’d
immediately noticed “how assured he was,” she said. “Like a rock, secure
in his place in the world and in his purpose.” His purpose? “To play
fiddle,” she said. Thompson’s father had grown up playing music at
“wood choppings” in rural Orange County. When Giddens and Thompson met,
at the festival, Giddens mentioned that her grandmother Armintha (Mint)
Morrow, who helped raise her, came from Mebane, too. From then on,
Giddens said, “I was Miss Morrow.” The trio called themselves the
Carolina Chocolate Drops. In 2005, they started making trips to Mebane,
to sit at Thompson’s feet. The formation of the band was inseparable
from these pilgrimages. In playing with Thompson, they were learning to
play with one another, and in reading his human songbook they
established their own repertoire. Thompson had suffered a stroke in
2001, Giddens said, “but he was still pretty good for a while, and he
played till he died.” There were barbecues at his house, and people from
the town came, some to join in the playing, most to listen. Giddens
watched his hands. Many of the songs he taught her, like “Old Mollie
Hare” and “Polly Put the Kettle On,” were those we find in the handful
of preserved Frank Johnson playlists. When I arrived at Giddens’s
house, she had been making some sort of healthy broccoli dish for her
children, who were passing in and out of the kitchen, followed closely
by her husband at the time, Michael Laffan, a gentle, soft-spoken
Irish-born piano technician with a quiet wit, who is still her good
friend and parenting partner. Their children have thick dark hair, rosy
cheeks, and lyrical, hard-to-spell Celtic names: Aoife (pronounced “ee-fa”) and Caoimhin (“kwi-veen”). I asked what Thompson had been like as a teacher. Would he demonstrate licks? “Nah,”
she said. “We just played. That’s how it always was with Joe.” There
wasn’t a banjo player in the group at that time, and, although Giddens
had initially hoped to learn the fiddle from Thompson, she volunteered
to play banjo because he didn’t really play without one. “That’s what we
ladies do—what needs to be done,” she said. She had learned from
Thompson what she called “the feel, the energy, the flow.” “The notes
themselves,” she said, “were unimportant. It was, How did he engage with
them?” She described his bowing as “magical, something you can’t break
down. You just have to absorb. Sometimes I am playing and I hear him
come out when I’m not thinking too hard.” I asked her to tell me
about Greensboro. I have spent a lot of time in the city—my in-laws live
there—and its vagueness has always struck me as compelling. Regionally
speaking, it does not signify, even for people who are
otherwise somewhat familiar, at a distance, with North Carolina.
Charlotte folks sort of know it. Their brains go, “Banks . . .
insurance . . . Nascar.” The so-called Triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and
Chapel Hill is the cultured part of the state. Wilmington is the beach.
Asheville is the mountains. Winston-Salem is cigarettes and the
Moravians. What is Greensboro? “I don’t know,” Giddens said, with
precision. I was prepared to leave it there, but she continued, “It’s
such an interesting place. It has a lot to do with who I am. Because of
the cultural mix here.” She pointed out that Greensboro has a
significant Jewish population, a Baha’i population,
universities—including two historically black colleges—and a general
Piedmont weirdness that keeps people guessing. “The beginning of the
sit-in movement was here”—at the Woolworth’s counter,
downtown, now a civil-rights museum. “There’s just a lot of interesting
agitation,” she said. “I kind of grew up with all of that around me.” Whenever
Giddens and I have talked about Greensboro, she has, with a surprising
frequency, mentioned the K&W Cafeteria there. She loves it. K&W
is a popular regional chain restaurant, a buffet-style eatery, that got
started in Winston-Salem, and the one at Friendly Center in Greensboro
has been there for more than fifty years. “When you walk into that
place, everybody’s there,” she said. “You’ve got your folks off work,
you have all of the working class there, white and black, country folk
who are in the city, city folk who have been there all the time. It’s my
family. Both sides of my family would go to K&W. The food is
unpretentious and Southern. It represents Greensboro, blacks and whites
together. It’s hard to explain the feeling I get.” Giddens’s
father, David, who is white, taught music and then worked in computer
software for most of his career. “As a teacher, he got all of the
hardened kids,” she said, meaning behaviorally challenged students. He
met Rhiannon’s mother, Deborah Jamieson, when they were both students at
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Theirs was a rare
interracial marriage in a city where, cultural diversity aside, the Klan
murdered five civil-rights activists in 1979. Rhiannon’s parents
divorced when she was a baby, around the time that her mother came out
as a lesbian. The years after the divorce were complicated enough
that Giddens spent the first eight years of her life in the country, in
Gibsonville, North Carolina, with her maternal grandparents and her
older sister, Lalenja. Her grandmother Armintha and grandfather Eugene
“grew corn and tomatoes and all sorts of stuff.” Armintha religiously
watched “Hee Haw.” Her favorite banjo player was Roy Clark, Giddens
said. When Giddens saw Clark one time in the flesh, at the Grand Ole
Opry, she “almost freaked out.” Giddens talks about her “black
granny” and her “white granny.” At one point, her black grandfather and
her white grandmother were both working at the Lorillard Tobacco factory
in Greensboro. Once, when her white granny needed help with her taxes,
she went to Giddens’s black grandfather to get it. But Giddens dismissed
the idea that her life was defined by a two-sidedness. “It’s the South,
isn’t it?” she said. “The point is that they are different—but the
same.” When Giddens was eight, she and Lalenja moved back to
Greensboro, to live in a house with their mother. Giddens, who was
gifted at school, describes her younger self as bookish, withdrawn, not
very social or popular. She says that she was a nerd, and the details
she offers in support of that leave one unable to argue. “I would make
models of video-game characters,” she said. “I used to subscribe to Nintendo Power.
The first issue had Mario 2, and it had all the characters rendered in
clay. So I started making all of these characters out of clay.” Her
family recalls that she sang constantly. When she was three or four
years old, she and her father began to make up “little fugues, cadences
together—before I knew what a fugue or a cadence was,” Giddens said. In
the car, they would listen to Peter, Paul and Mary. She took the harmony
she had learned with her father and practiced it with Lalenja. “I was
always in harmony with my sister,” she said. The two girls would sign up
for talent shows, but their parents would not let them audition with
their voices, so they did karate demonstrations instead. “Neither one of
us was Brucette Lee,” Giddens said, recalling that, after waiting in
line for hours to audition, “we’d do this sad little kata, and be shooed
along. We wanted to sing Whitney Houston!” Her father wouldn’t let them
take voice lessons until they were sixteen. “He said it could ruin the
developing voice—and he was right,” Giddens said. “I’m very grateful.”
Implicit in her words was how clearly her parents must have recognized
her talent, to have taken these steps to protect it. Greensboro
boasts a first-rate youth choir, which was overseen for more than thirty
years by a local music teacher named Ann Doyle. It was with the choir
that Giddens had her first public experiences with performing music.
“Mrs. Doyle taught me discipline, and how to not breathe with my
shoulders, and sit up straight,” she said. Her first solo, a song called
“They Said I Can’t Carry a Tune in a Bucket,” was given to her, she
realized only later, because “it had all these crazy leaps in it, and I
could sing it.” Doyle, who recently retired, remembers Giddens as a
“rather introverted child”—gifted but not marked for fame in any
obvious way. “I had thirty-five to forty kids in my choir,” Doyle told
me. What mattered was “that you could sing in tune, and that Mama and
Daddy could get you there.” The thing about Giddens that had stood out
more conspicuously, she said, was that she had been “way beyond her
years developmentally, in her emotional and intellectual persona.” I
asked what she meant. “I just thought, There’s something about this
child that is unique, her perception.”
In the cafeteria at Kiser Middle School, Giddens hung out for half the year
with the white girls and then for the other half with the black girls.
“I didn’t really fit with either group,” she said. “The black girls
criticized me because I was a hippie. The white girls didn’t know what
to do with me. Then at the end of the year I started hanging out with
the guys.” When she moved to the School of Science and Math, “black
girls were my friends for the first time as a teen-ager,” she said.
“Black-girl nerds.” In high school, she became active in a group
called Akwe:kon, which was dedicated to Native American culture and,
more specifically, to its music and dance. There were Lumbee students at
the school, “because of the way they find their students—there are
always some from Lumberton,” Giddens said. She herself has Native
American heritage (Lumbee, Occaneechi, and Seminole on her mother’s
side). She has never tried to claim a tribal affiliation, but she grew
up with people calling her Pocahontas. One of her teachers, Joe Liles,
“a white dude,” was, she said, “just very supportive of Native American
culture. When I go to a powwow, I know what it is. When I hear that
drum, I feel very connected.” In the summer before her senior year
of high school, she started attending choral camp at Governor’s School
East, in Laurinburg. “I was fired up,” she recalled. “I was sick of math
and science.” Choral camp was where she first heard the songs of
Stephen Sondheim. Singing with the group of forty kids, she said, gave
her “that feeling of, I had found my tribe.”
About
a year after the Black Banjo Gathering, the Carolina Chocolate Drops
put out their first album, “Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind.” It had been a
long time since something so wonderfully disruptive had happened on the
Southern-folk scene. They shook things up by being black, of course,
but, more important, by reminding people that the music itself was
black—as black as it had ever been white, anyway—and by owning it
accordingly. They remind a person of the Pogues, which made a statement
about the continued relevance of traditional Irish music just by showing
that it could be played by punks. In the early days, the Chocolate
Drops played coffeehouses, busking on street corners. They noticed that
people were initially drawn to them by the novelty of the sight but
would stay for the songs. Not long after the band’s formation,
Giddens had a romantic relationship with Dom Flemons. It lasted less
than a year, but their influence on each other as performers was
enduring. “I learned from him to loosen up my opera-school thing,” she
said. “And I think I tightened him up. He used to stop in the middle of a
song to talk.” Flemons favored a more curatorial approach to the music,
and was less than excited when Giddens started writing neo-slave songs
and narratives. Original tunes were not his thing—he wanted to be a
preservationist, almost a reënactor. In September of 2013, as the
band was “going through a transition,” as Giddens delicately described
its dissolution, the über-producer and roots aficionado T Bone Burnett
invited Giddens to participate in a concert titled “Another Day, Another
Time,” at Town Hall in Manhattan. It was meant to be a kind of
celebration and exploration of sixties music, put on in conjunction with
the Coen brothers’ movie “Inside Llewyn Davis.” (I wrote the liner
notes for the film’s soundtrack, which does not include Giddens.) Joan
Baez, Patti Smith, Gillian Welch, and Jack White performed, but in the
days after the show it seemed that everyone was talking about an
unforgettable performance by a woman from North Carolina, who had come
onstage in a sleeveless scarlet dress and sung “Waterboy,” an old
convict song from Georgia made famous by Odetta. “There ain’t no hammer /
That’s on a’-this mountain / That ring like mine, boy, / That ring like
mine.” People had probably assumed that they more or less knew what to
expect that night—what “folk music” meant. That they would be drinking
from the bucket. This was something else. This was the well. After
Giddens finished, there was silence, and then a standing ovation. Within
a few months, she was in L.A., making her first solo album, “Tomorrow
Is My Turn,” for Nonesuch Records, with Burnett at the board. Giddens’s
multicultural background has presented particular challenges of
self-definition. She is an artist of color who plays and records what
she describes as “black non-black music” for mainly white audiences.
It’s interesting to note that, on her first two major solo releases,
“Tomorrow Is My Turn” and “Factory Girl” (both from 2015), the strongest
cuts were a couple of country songs: a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Don’t
Let It Trouble Your Mind” and a wicked original track titled
“Moonshiner’s Daughter.” What did that suggest about the future of her
career? Was she a female Charley Pride—a black artist who had succeeded
at “white” styles? A couple of years ago, I had lunch with Giddens
in New York, shortly after she had returned from doing a concert for
the prisoners at Sing Sing. Telling me about it, she broke down in
tears—in part because of the fact that the prison concert was the first
time she’d played to a majority-black crowd. “It was so many beautiful
brown faces all together, listening to my
music, and responding to it in a cultural way I don’t get to
experience—talk-back, movement,” she recalled. “They called me Rhi-Rhi.” Giddens
told me that, on principle, she has no problem performing for mostly
white audiences. “Half my family is white, you know?” she said. “But I
would like to see more people from my other community at the shows and
in the know.” A few years ago, she tried to bring a tour to H.B.C.U.s
(historically black colleges and universities), but interest seemed to
be lacking. “It’s hard,” she said. “I don’t feel black enough,
sometimes, to be bothered with. I know it’s childhood stuff, but it’s
hard to shake.” She recently helped to form the band Our Native
Daughters, which comprises four female musicians of color, all of whom
play the banjo in the group. When I asked if she had been excited for
black people to hear the band’s music and experience it as their own,
she responded, with characteristic bluntness, by jumping from
hypothetical scenarios to material realities. The band’s record, she
said, had been released by Smithsonian Folkways. “It won’t be covered by
any black press,” she said. “We took the platform that was offered.”
She told me recently that the Apollo Theatre, in Harlem, had turned down
the Native Daughters’ offer to play a show. The reasons were unclear,
but, Giddens said, rejections like that make her wonder, “Am I truly
that out of the black cultural Zeitgeist, or are the gatekeepers just
that narrow-minded?” The prospect of gaining a wider, and blacker,
audience is, one imagines, always an option for Giddens, who could, if
she really wanted to, cut a pop record and presumably ascend to a higher
sales bracket. But she has been unwilling to compromise her quest,
which is, in part, to remind people that the music she plays is
black music. In 2017, she received a MacArthur “genius” grant, a
validation that has reinforced her tendency to stick to her instincts.
“You do what you’re given,” she told me on the phone recently. “I’m not
gonna force something or fake something to try to get more black people
at my shows. I’m not gonna do some big hip-hop crossover.” She paused,
and remembered that she is about to do a hip-hop crossover, with her
nephew Justin, a.k.a. Demeanor, a rapper who also plays the banjo.
“Well,” she said, laughing, “not unless I can find a way to make it
authentic.” She told me that she does not really like hip-hop. This
threw me into the comical position of trying to sell her on the genre.
“The stuff I like is the protest music,” she said. “I like Queen
Latifah. But the over-all doesn’t speak to me. I’m not an urban black
person. I’m a country black person.” A curious case of the
cultural static that sometimes buzzes around Giddens’s work is the
guest-starring role she played a couple of years ago on the CMT series
“Nashville.” The role was undoubtedly good for her career, in that it
exposed wide audiences to her music. When I have been walking around
with her, a lot of the people who have recognized her have asked not if
she was that famous singer of old Southern music but if she was “that
girl from ‘Nashville.’ ” Or, actually, more often, they’d say, “Do
people tell you you look just like that girl from ‘Nashville’?” I should
add that it has mostly been white people who have said these things.
She remarked to me recently that, in the mainstream black entertainment
community, “nobody gave a shit I was on ‘Nashville.’ ” On a rainy
evening in 2016, I visited Giddens on the set of the show, in an
industrial-looking studio building on a remote road at the edge of
Nashville. Earlier in the year, the show, which was originally broadcast
on ABC, had been cancelled, but, after an outcry on the Internet, CMT
picked it up. The show’s plot centers on the lives of two successful
female country singers, played by Connie Britton, of “Friday Night
Lights” greatness, and Hayden Panettiere, who is best known for having
starred on the show “Heroes.” At the time, Panettiere was engaged to a
Ukrainian boxer almost twice her size. They FaceTimed while I was on
set, and she held up the phone, saying, “Say hi to Wlad, everybody!”
Wlad said nothing. Giddens’s character on “Nashville” is one of the most perfect examples on film of what Spike Lee
has called the “magical Negro”—the black character whose role in a
white film is to be full of wisdom, to save the white characters’ souls,
and then to disappear or cease to matter to the story. Giddens, who is
very professionally gracious, never used that term, but, unless she’d
recently undergone a temporary reversible lobotomy on the sly, she was
aware of the reality. The way her character gets introduced is amazing.
Panettiere’s character is in a plane crash. She survives—her seat seems
to have popped out of the airplane and landed in a field, and her legs
are broken, but she’s alive. Giddens’s character sort of walks up out of
the field, through a cold mist. In a cotton dress. I’m telling you,
it’s amazing. She squats down by the broken Panettiere and tells her
that everything is going to be O.K. She also goes ahead and sings her
some things about Jesus—because Giddens’s character is also a preacher
of some kind, and deeply spiritual. Just . . . magical as hell. On
set, I got to peek in on a scene in which Giddens and Panettiere were
sitting in a restaurant discussing life, and Giddens’s character was
laying down major—I mean bone-crushing—wisdom across
an Applebee’s-style table. I also watched a church scene. That was very
interesting. Black church, pews full of African-American faces.
Panettiere was standing in front of them, delivering an apology speech.
Apparently, she had come to them at some point in the show’s arc to
learn about their music but had then gone and used the music in a
self-serving way, not really respecting the tradition. Luckily for her,
the people in that room had hearts full of magic, so there was a sort of
spontaneous group vote or instant decision to forgive her. Followed by
choral singing.
A
few days after I visited Giddens on set, she went to a low-key
recording session in the basement of a suburban house in East Nashville
that belonged to Chance McCoy, a multi-instrumentalist with the band Old
Crow Medicine Show, who was just starting to be known as a songwriter, a
film composer, and a producer. McCoy had been hired to create a
soundtrack for a short informational film about President Andrew
Jackson, which would play on a loop, presumably for years, at the
Hermitage, the house where Jackson lived, east of the city. The film
included information about Jackson’s life and legacy, about the
generations of slaves who lived on the plantation, and about the
Cherokee people whom he fought beside in frontier battles and later
helped to massacre and displace. Giddens ate some Chinese food and
drank a hard cider. Then she moved to a chair, picked up her old
minstrel banjo, and sat quite upright, tuning it. The banjo: an
instrument whose origins are so contested—is it African? European? or a
“cross-bred instrument,” as one scholar has called it?—that it expresses
the messiness of American history before a person has played a note.
The record that Giddens had just finished making, in Louisiana, with the
musician and producer Dirk Powell, “Freedom Highway,” is built on the
sound of the minstrel banjo, which represents a mid-nineteenth-century
phase in the instrument’s evolution. It has no frets and is tuned
differently. The sound is lower and plunkier. The lyrics of a handful of
songs on that record are based on slave-era stories from the South, and
this banjo exerted the real presence. “It’s my axe,” Giddens said. McCoy
sat at his computer, recording and letting her riff. The film was
running on a screen, and the voice of Jon Meacham, the Tennessee-born
editor and biographer of Jackson, among other Presidents, was narrating
Jackson’s life in his distinctive drone. Images of the house and the
grounds flashed by, pausing for Ken Burns-style zooms and pans. Giddens
bowed her head and started to play. She was doing runs on the fretboard,
and she was moaning melodically, with them and against them. The job, I
suppose, was to create something simultaneously Southern white (i.e.,
Appalachian), early African-American, and Cherokee. There was no one on
the planet more suited to the moment. Giddens strummed, channelling. She
could have been sitting in a pub in Cork; on a street corner in Dakar
or in Temple, Texas; or by a campfire on the old Southern frontier. The
exercise was also a musical articulation of a set of ideas that Giddens
has been developing for the past four or five years. This past
September, in the keynote address at the three-day AmericanaFest
conference, in London, she told the audience, “Nobody owns an
instrument. No culture gets to put the lockdown on anything. Say the
word ‘bagpipes,’ and, if you are anything like the me of a few years
ago, it conjures up the image of a kilted Highlander and the land of
moors and heather—but now I know it should also bring to mind an old man
in a doorway in Sicily, the smartly uniformed military band in Iraq, or
a modern young woman from Galicia.” She then referred to the
thirty-year-old book “Origins of the Popular Style,” by the South
African scholar and librarian Peter Van der Merwe. It has become a cult
classic. She used it to illustrate her point that the instruments that
we typically “think of in modern music—the guitar, the banjo, bagpipes,
violins, the list goes on—have been in constant movement and constant
change since the time of the ancient world.” In the book, Van der
Merwe attempts to address why the popular music of the twentieth century
sounds the way it does. He notes that many different folk-music
traditions tend to contain a particular kind of melody or set of notes,
“neutral intervals,” between major and minor. In America, we call them
“blue notes”—flatted thirds and sevenths and fifths. They can suggest
moaning and dissonance. The cord that binds the various global
sub-styles of folk in which these notes occur is what the
ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax termed the “Old High Culture” of Eurasia,
which stretched back to Mesopotamia. Strangely, perhaps, given that we
are talking about twentieth-century popular music, it was often Islamic
song traditions that acted as the conveyor for these deep strains in
world music. Van der Merwe shows how the “gliding chromaticism”
characteristic of the blues spread via
Islamic influence into West Africa (in particular the Senegambia region)
and, via Spain, into Ireland and the “Celtic fringe.” From those
places, these styles and sounds rode farther west, to North America, on
slave ships and immigrant ships. In the American South, the Celtic and
the African musical traditions met. It was an odd family reunion. Each
culture had its own songs, but the idioms understood one another. The
result was American music. The title of Giddens’s newest record,
“there is no Other,” released this month, plays on a kind of double
entendre between the romantic phrase that it initially calls to mind and
the intellectual assertion that it reveals on second reading. To my
ears, the album is the first true Rhiannon Giddens record. Joe Henry
produced it, beautifully, by getting as far out of the way as possible.
The arrangements are stark. The engineering and the mike placement are
direct and intimate. It’s the sonic equivalent of a long still shot in
natural light. Giddens’s collaborator on the record, and one of
the only other people who plays on it, is the forty-one-year-old Italian
multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, who is now also Giddens’s
romantic partner. When I asked how they met, she said, “He saw an
article about me in a magazine seven or eight years ago—and, as he has
taught the history of jazz as a course, he went, ‘Aha! The missing
link—black string-band music.’ ” The cellist Kate Ellis connected them.
Giddens and Turrisi recently finished composing the music for a ballet,
staged in Nashville, titled “Lucy Negro Redux,” about Black Luce, the
Afro-British brothel keeper who some scholars think may have been the
inspiration for the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Turrisi
trained at the Hague Conservatory, in the Netherlands, where he worked
with early-music ensembles, which exposed him to the traditional drums
of southern Italy and the Mediterranean. He has since become an expert
on drums from all over the world—frame drums, mainly, the stem cells of
human percussion, of which almost every culture has some version.
Ireland’s is the bodhran, and others include the tamburello (Italy), the bendir (North Africa), the pandeiro (Brazil), and the tambourine. There are hundreds, and Turrisi is expert at half of them. The
album that Giddens and Turrisi have made together functions as a kind
of proof of Van der Merwe’s musicological thesis. Styles blow through
the record like winds through a shack. The blues, Appalachia, American
art song, and music from Italy, Africa, Brazil, Scotland, and Ireland.
Perhaps the most powerful song on the record is a version of “Little
Margaret,” a ballad that can be traced back to fourteenth-century
England. The song is a ghost story. A girl named Margaret is combing her
hair, sitting “in her high hall chair,” and she sees her lover ride by
with another girl, his “new-made bride.” Her heart dies. She throws down
her comb and declares that she will visit him one last time, then never
again. She appears at the foot of his bed in the night, “all dressed in
white.” She asks how he likes his sheets and pillow, how he likes his
fair young maid. He answers that he likes them fine, but not as much as
he loves her. He realizes that he must have her:
He called the servant man to go, Saddled the dappled roan, And he rode to her father’s house that night, Knocked on the door alone. Saying, “Is little Margaret in her room? Or is she in the hall?” “Little Margaret’s in her cold black coffin, With her face turned toward the wall.”
The
North Carolina balladeer Sheila Kay Adams, whom Giddens calls “a
tradition-bearer,” taught her the song at a conference many years ago.
“When you hear a good ballad singer, they disappear, and the story
lives, and you kind of trance out listening to it,” Giddens said. The
American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded Adams performing the song
in 1982. In January of last year, at Turrisi’s apartment in Dublin,
Turrisi, who had worked with an Irish singer who sang sean-nós, unaccompanied ballads, asked Giddens if she knew any. She didn’t, but she knew what she called “American sean-nós, the Appalachian ballads.” She sang “Little Margaret” for him. “We just put it together,” she said. Turrisi was using the daf, an Iranian frame drum with metal rings in the back, which is used a lot in Sufi music. In the album version of the song, the daf
pounds furiously behind Giddens’s vocals. You can hear the sound of
someone running away in the drumming, a tantivy of hooves, death
approaching. Little Margaret dies. Her lover kisses her in the coffin,
then he dies. It seems doubtful that his new bride lives much longer.
The result is an authentically frightening piece of music. It puts me in
mind of the song “Jackie,” from Sinéad O’Connor’s first record, about a
woman who refuses to believe that her man has died at sea and who walks
the beach for the rest of her life, watching for him. “This is the
cornerstone of what we do and what we’re doing,” Giddens told me.
“Here’s a song from the mountains of America, and here’s a drum from
halfway across the world, and they’re speaking the same language.” In
the eighteen-nineties, a new political movement calling itself the
Fusion Party—a multiracial group made up of white populists and radical
Republicans, many of whom were black—was gaining power in North
Carolina. Although much of the state was controlled by white
supremacists, Wilmington had become a stronghold of Fusionist power. The
wharves there had created work opportunities for free black people.
After the Civil War, African-Americans in the city began to start
businesses, own property, and win political office. In 1898, a local
black newspaper editor, Alex Manly, published an editorial arguing that,
as often as not, interracial relationships in the South were
consensual. Democratic editors reprinted it over and over, for months,
in newspapers friendly to the white-supremacist cause, deliberately
fomenting a readiness for violent action among a large part of the
state’s white citizenry. On October 27th, Alfred Moore Waddell, a
onetime Confederate colonel and a former U.S. congressman, whose career
was in decline, gave a speech to hundreds of white supremacists from the
stage at Thalian Hall, a big theatre downtown, advocating for a violent
takeover. He declared that the whites of Wilmington would “have no more
of the intolerable conditions under which we live,” and that they were
“resolved to change them, if we have to choke the current of the Cape
Fear with carcasses.” Two weeks later, on November 10th, Waddell went on
to lead the takeover, marching at the front of a white-supremacist mob
with a rifle over his shoulder. An unknown number of black people were
murdered in daylight, and the progressive Republican city and county
governments were overthrown. Some historians consider it the only
successful political coup in American history. Curiously, Waddell
was “A.M.W.,” who, as the reader may recall, had remembered Frank
Johnson in the musician’s decline and dotage. In fact, Waddell left us
some of the most vivid portraits of Johnson, having seen him play at
numerous balls in the eighteen-fifties. The fiddler, Waddell recalled in
one essay, “usually wore a stovepipe hat, a stock of the old style,
instead of a cravat, and a spike tail coat with brass buttons.” At a
ball one night, while Waddell and a pretty girl were dancing together
near the center of the dance floor, Johnson stepped down from the stand
where he had been playing and walked up beside them and fiddled to them,
for them. As Waddell recalled, Johnson, with the violin “still under
his chin,” cried out, “That’s the thing! Please God, it reminds me of
when I was young.” One night a few months ago, Giddens was
scheduled to do a performance in Wilmington, at Thalian Hall, to
commemorate the hundred-and-twentieth anniversary of the 1898 race
massacre, which casts a perpetual shadow over the town. The night before
the show, Giddens flew in for the rehearsal from Ireland, where she
lives much of the time. She was dressed in a windbreaker and jeans. At
the event, I was to interview her onstage, and she would play songs
related to 1898. “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” for instance, had
been a hit that year, and was also a phrase trotted out by sarcastic
white newspaper reporters to describe the killings. We had planned to do
an informal run-through in my kitchen. The room was set up for the
rehearsal with instruments and sheet music, notebooks, laptops, and a
portable piano. The North Carolina writer Clyde Edgerton, who happens to
be a crack piano player, would be providing accompaniment. Giddens
passed on the hard cider, asked for black tea. There was work to be
done. Giddens’s tone became quick and matter-of-fact, almost curt—the
outward sign of an internal focussing. In front of her, on the
table, lay the original sheet music, yellow and brittle, for a piece
published in 1898 and titled “Negro Love Song.” It was written by the
Englishman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the first great black
composers of classical music. The piece has never been recorded, so far
as I have been able to determine, and seems not to have been performed
in a century. Like Frank Johnson, it was effaced by a doppelgänger:
another song titled “Negro Love Song,” by another early black composer,
Will Marion Cook, became more famous and nudged it out of the popular
repertoire. Coleridge-Taylor’s song, however, is often cited by
musicologists, who identify it as the first appearance of true blue
notes in a piece of surviving sheet music. The piece has a
little-known Wilmington connection. It was composed shortly after
Coleridge-Taylor heard the famous Fisk Jubilee Choir perform in London,
in 1897. That year, the lead soprano was Carrie Sadgewar, a Wilmington
girl and the beloved daughter of a free black family there, who went on
to marry Alex Manly, the editor of the Wilmington Daily Record.
After Coleridge-Taylor heard her sing, he wrote “Negro Love Song.” I
have owned the sheet music for a long time, and I have often looked in
fascination at the notes I knew were blue, but I cannot read music well
enough to play it and had never actually heard the piece. Giddens picked
up her violin and pulled it to her chin. The music started sobbing out.
When she was finished, she immediately began to make fun of her
playing, how she wasn’t really up to it, how she couldn’t play beyond
first position; she was a folk fiddler, not a real violinist. The
next night, at Thalian Hall, she played it again. Giddens is something
of a favorite daughter of North Carolina, and 1898 is an increasingly
relevant-seeming topic, as awareness grows that many of the legal roots
of the state’s current political dystopia reach back to the violence of
that year. The audience was huge, but, as Giddens talked and played,
there was throughout the house an unnerving silence. She was sitting in
the chair and playing her banjo when, suddenly, she stood up. Edgerton
and I were watching her, uncertain. She walked to the front of the
stage, away from the mikes. She was playing, picking. She looked up and
addressed the crowd. “I just want you to notice this,” she said. “You
people in back—can you hear this?” A few people shouted that they could.
“The acoustics in this place are amazing,” she said. She explained to
the audience that we were in a mid-nineteenth-century theatre, meant to
function without amplification. And it did so function. The banjo had
carried. The night ended at the town’s memorial to the victims of
1898. We had all marched there together. People were holding candles. It
was cold. A young writer named Griffin Limerick had spent a year
compiling the names of the known victims, by scouring sources, collating
lists, and crawling around in the cemetery (the one where Frank Johnson
was buried). In the end, he’d found eighteen names. We knew that this
number represented a mere fraction of the total killed. Giddens stood in
front of the crowd and read the names into a microphone. At the end of
the list, the word “Unknown” was written over and over. Her plan, she
told me later, had been to repeat this word as many times as she could
manage—twenty times, thirty—but, in the moment, her voice broke after
four or five. Watching her, I was reminded of the time when, in the
basement in Nashville, she had been sitting and improvising that
music—black, white, Native American, and American—in that she seemed, in
some more than figurative way, to have been born for it, for the
moment. I think she knew it. ♦
An
earlier version of this article misstated the location of Appalachian
State University, as well as the name of the band Rhiannon Giddens
helped to form.
This article appears in the print edition of the May 20, 2019, issue, with the headline “Folk Like Us.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John
Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the Times Magazine and
the southern editor of The Paris Review. His forthcoming book is “The
Prime Minister of Paradise.”
How Rhiannon Giddens Merged Her Musical Selves With the Help of an Italian Jazz Musician
“I don’t want to make the same record over and over again,” says
the folksinger, who explores opera and classical sounds with Francesco
Turrisi on new LP ‘There Is No Other’
"This record is a little bit more all of me," says Rhiannon Giddens
of her new album with jazz musician Francesco Turrisi, 'There Is No
Other.' Karen Cox
“I started realizing how much [those
regions] were actually an indelible part of the Renaissance, or what we
think of as European music. The instruments were all coming from these
areas,” Giddens says. “When you dig into things, you realize how local
and connected these cultures have always been. People have always been
on the move, and nothing is pure.” Underlying the musical bond with Turrisi was a cultural one. Much as
Giddens’ family was surrounded by racism in North Carolina, so Turrisi’s
faced discrimination when it migrated from Sicily to the Italian
mainland in the 1940s. “They still had people putting signs up saying,
‘We don’t rent to Sicilians,'” Giddens says. “There’s always been this
struggle and discrimination. And that doesn’t even consider how many
Sicilians moved to the Unites States and were considered ‘black,’ or
considered ‘other.'” On There Is No Other, the interplay between Giddens and
Turrisi lends a wiry, often eerie edge to their reading of a standard
like “Gonna Write Me a Letter” or the Italian aria “Black Swan.” But she
singles out “Trees on the Mountains,” a cascading piano ballad pulled
from Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah opera, as a personal favorite. “That’s
more of my classical background, but part of my mission is to make
classical music in a form that people who don’t listen to classical
music can appreciate without it being inauthentic,” she says. Compared to the thumping groove and bloodied, broken imagery of Giddens’ last solo record, 2017’s Freedom Highway, and even to the arch storytelling of her contributions to Songs of Our Native Daughters, this new album finds her striking a noticeably gentle tone. As its title suggests, There Is No Other
exists on a plane where cultural differences are a point of
celebration, not exclusion. That alone is enough to warrant a mental
health break. “It’s exciting to be able to do things differently. I don’t want to
make the same record over and over again. I don’t want to be like,
‘Here’s another record of slave narratives,'” Giddens says, with a wry
peal of laughter. “I was really feeling the need to do something to
pivot a little, get out of my head a little and be in my heart and in
the sounds.” If Giddens revels in being a citizen of the world on There Is No Other,
it may in part be because, as an African-American woman, she feels more
welcomed abroad than she does at home. Having now been in Ireland for
more than a decade — her ex-husband is Irish, and she’s remained there
so her children can be close to their father — Giddens appreciates the
distance.
“I’m just an American here. I don’t have to be an [African-] American
in America, dealing with these thoughts every day,” she says. “I
understand why a lot of black artists went to Europe… It’s doesn’t make
you think each country doesn’t have its own problems, but it gives me
moments where I can breathe for a second.”
Rhiannon Giddens’ 21st-Century Sound Has a Long History
Inspired by long-lost folk melodies, gospel, opera and
bluegrass, the electrifying singer and banjo player gives fresh voice to
old American traditions
Giddens with her beloved cherry, maple and rosewood minstrel
banjo, a replica of a design by the 19th-century Baltimore luthier Levi
Brown.
(Photographer: Celeste Sloman; fashion
stylist: Stephanie Tricola; makeup: Campbell Ritchie; hair: Traci
Barrett; wardrobe: Zimmermann (top): the Row (camisole); 3X1 (pants))
8.8Kshares
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE |
March 2019
This is the story of a singer who
grew up among white country folk outside Greensboro, North Carolina,
cooing along to Lawrence Welk and giggling to “Hee Haw,” the
cornhusk-flavored variety show with an all-white cast. Graced with an
agile soprano voice, she studied opera at Oberlin College, then returned
to her home state, took up contra dancing and Scottish song, studied
Gaelic, and learned to play banjo and bluegrass fiddle. She married (and
later separated from) an Irishman and is raising a daughter, Aoife, and
a son, Caoimhín, in Limerick. Among her regular numbers is a cover of
the 1962 weepie “She’s Got You” by Patsy Cline, the country music
matriarch and onetime star of the Grand Ole Opry.
This is also the story of a singer who grew up on the black side of
Greensboro, reading the activist poet Audre Lorde and harmonizing to
R&B bands like the Manhattans. She started the Carolina Chocolate
Drops, a black string band that won a Grammy for its album Genuine Negro Jig.
She excavates forgotten songs by anonymous field hands and pays tribute
to the pioneers of gospel. One of her regular numbers is “At the
Purchaser’s Option,” a haunting ballad written in the voice of a mother
waiting with her baby on the slave auction block. She often begins a set
with a declaration by the poet Mari Evans: “I am a black woman.” And because this is America, those two singers are the same person:
Rhiannon Giddens, an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories
of forgotten predecessors, white and black. She was born in 1977, in a
South that was going through spasms of racial transformation. Her
parents—a white father, David Giddens, and a black mother, Deborah Jam-
ieson, both from Greensboro and both music enthusiasts with wide-ranging
tastes—married ten years after the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and
just three years after the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia,
making interracial marriage legal in every state. When her parents
split, Rhiannon and her sister, Lalenja, shuttled back and forth between
the two halves of their clan, who lived 20 miles apart in segregated
Guilford County. The girls found that those worlds were not, after all,
so distant. One grandmother fried okra in flour batter while the other
used cornmeal. One parent fired up the record player to accompany a
barbecue, the other broke out the guitar. But both families were country
people who spoke with similar accents and shared a deep faith in
education—and music.
Today, Giddens, 42, is both a product and a
champion of America’s hybrid culture, a performing historian who
explores the tangled paths of influence through which Highland fiddlers,
West African griots, enslaved banjo players and white entertainers all
shaped each other’s music. She belongs to a cohort of scholar-musicians
who have waded into the prehistory of African-American music, the period
before it was commercialized by publishers, broadcasters, dance bands
and record producers. “Rhiannon uses her platform as a clearinghouse of
source material, so the history can be known,” says Greg Adams, an
archivist and ethnomusicologist at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife
and Cultural Heritage. “Her role is to say: Here’s the scholarly output,
here are the primary sources, and here’s my synthesis and expression of
all that knowledge. She shows how the historical realities connect to
what’s happening today.”
Realizing those noble intentions depends on
Giddens’ one essential tool: her gift as a performer. With a
galvanizing voice and magnetic stage presence, she sings traditional
songs, supplies new words for old tunes, composes fresh melodies for old
lyrics, and writes songs that sound fresh yet also as if they have
existed for centuries. Her latest recording, Songs of Our Native Daughters,
just released on Smithsonian Folkways, uses ravishing music to draw
listeners through some of the darkest passages in America’s history, and
out to the other side.
* * *
One summer afternoon, I find Giddens in a Victorian house in
Greensboro she has rented for the weekend of the North Carolina Folk
Festival. A handful of people cluster around a dining room table,
rehearsing for that night’s show. Giddens’ sister, Lalenja Harrington,
runs a program for students with intellectual disabilities at the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, but she’s signed on for a
temporary stint as vocalist and tour manager. She looks up from copying
out the set list long enough to suggest a change to an arrangement, then
checks her phone for festival updates. She’s the designated worrier.
Giddens with her sister, Lalenja Harrington. The memory of
their mother’s collection of books by black women, Harrington says, “is
centering for me.”
(Lexey Swall)
The tap dancer Robyn Watson quietly beats out rhythms with her bare
feet under the table. She’s one of Giddens’ relatively recent friends;
they laugh ruefully at the memory of grueling sessions when Watson
trained Giddens for her abortive Broadway debut in Shuffle Along.
(The show closed in 2016, before Giddens could step in for Audra
McDonald, the show’s pregnant star.) Jason Sypher, in town from New
York, perches on a stool and hugs his double bass. He says little, but
his fingers slip into sync as soon as Giddens starts humming. The musicians improvise intros and try out tempos. “They know my
vibe,” Giddens shrugs. “I have a flavor: kind of modal-y, kind of
Renaissance-y, kind of eastern-y, trance-y and rhythmic. They get it.”
During rehearsal, just as she’s sliding into “Summertime,” the voluptuous aria in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,
Giddens receives a text message asking if she’d like to star in a
staged production of the opera. “Cool,” she says, then falls right back
into the song. Bass and piano have started at a tempo so languid you can
practically hear the cicadas, and she joins in with a throaty flamenco
rasp, which elicits giggles all around. She grins and continues, drawing
out the “n” in “cotton” into a nasal hum. It’s almost magical but not
quite there, and she loses her way in the words. She nods: It’s OK; everything will come together a couple of hours from now.
(It does.) At one point, the pianist, Francesco Turrisi, also Giddens’
boyfriend, improvises a Bach-like two-part invention on the house’s
out-of-tune upright. “Did you just make that up?” Giddens asks, and he
smiles.
image:
https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/lB59B6vGLub23ZrDyTbthKPGKzA=/fit-in/1072x0/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/82/76/82767dbe-2fcc-4092-a746-9a148287537f/mar2019_h18_rhiannongiddens.jpgpromises some good post-concert hangout time. This
impromptu conclave of musicians and researchers, sharing a couple of
bathrooms and a refrigerator stocked with beer, is the kind of
extravagance she has been able to indulge in since the MacArthur
Foundation awarded her a $625,000 “genius” grant in 2017. (The prize
recognized her work “reclaiming African American contributions to folk
and country music and bringing to light new connections between music
from the past and the present,” the foundation wrote.) Giddens tells me,
“My life used to be record, tour, record, tour. You can never say no as
a freelance musician. I was on the road 200 days a year. If I wasn’t
touring, I wasn’t making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get
off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn’t have to do anything.”Actually, it liberated her to do a great many things: compose music
for a ballet based on the theory that the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s
sonnets was a black brothel owner named Lucy Negro (the Nashville Ballet
gave the premiere in February); write an opera for Charleston, South
Carolina’s 2020 Spoleto Festival, based on the life of the
Senegalese-born Islamic scholar Omar Ibn Said, who was later enslaved in
the Carolinas; and host a ten-part podcast, produced by the
Metropolitan Opera and New York’s WQXR, about operatic arias. Then there
is her long-gestating project for a musical theater piece about a
horrific but little-known episode in U.S. history: the Wilmington
insurrection of 1898, in which a gang of white supremacists overthrew
the progressive, racially mixed local government of Wilmington, North
Carolina, murdering dozens of blacks. Such distant deadlines and grand
ambitions mean months of solitary work in her home in Ireland, a luxury
few folk singers can afford.
Giddens,
who once described old-time music as “dance music” and bluegrass as
“performance music,” leaps during a set in Greensboro.
(Lexey Swall)
That evening in Greensboro, Giddens saunters onstage barefoot,
magenta-streaked hair hanging past a somber face, and paces a bit as if
lost in her own thoughts. An emcee introduces her as “the girl who came
home for the weekend,” and the virtually all-white crowd jumps to its
feet.
“I don’t know why y’all are trying to make me
cry. We haven’t even started,” she says in a Piedmont drawl that comes
and goes, depending on whom she’s talking to. Then she strums her banjo
and starts on a journey from introverted ballads to moments of rapturous
abandon. There’s a buzzing grain of sand in her voice, a signature that
allows her to change timbre at will yet remain instantly recognizable.
In the course of a single number, she slips from a sassy blues to a
trumpeting, indignant holler to a high, soft coo and a low-down snarl.
Giddens gives each tune its own distinctive color, mixing luscious
lyricism with a dangerous bite. It’s her sense of rhythm, though, that
gives her singing its energy, the way she’ll lag just behind the beat,
then pounce ahead, endowing simple patterns with shifting drama and
doling out charisma with playful, bighearted generosity.
If the current chapter of Giddens’ career can be said to have a
start date, it is 2005, when, a few years out of college and beginning
to investigate Appalachia’s intricate musical heritage, she attended the
Black Banjo Gathering, a music-and-scholarship conference held at
Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. There she met two
other musicians with a yen to rejuvenate traditions, Dom Flemons and
Justin Robinson. Together they formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an
old-time string band, and declared themselves disciples of Joe Thompson,
an octogenarian fiddler from Mebane, North Carolina. These new
friendships, along with increasing quasi-academic meet-ups and
Thompson’s informal coaching, helped crystallize for Giddens the truth
that blacks were present at the birth of American folk music, just as
they were at the beginnings of jazz, blues, rock and virtually every
other major genre in the nation’s musical history. This reality, though,
has long been obscured by habit and prejudice. “There was such
hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument,” Giddens
recalls. “It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time
music was the inheritance of white America,” Giddens says.
Giddens’ replica banjo, with a backless body that gives it
an extra hollow sound, was built by James Hartel, who specializes in
19th-century banjos.
(Lexey Swall)In the early 20th century, when the story of American music was
first being codified, researchers and record companies systematically
ignored black rural traditions of fiddling and banjo playing. But the
banjo’s origins date back at least to late 17th-century Jamaica, where
an Irish physician, Sir Hans Sloane, heard—and later drew—an instrument
with animal skin stretched over a gourd and a long neck strung with
horsehair. The basic design of that homemade banjo, which descended from
African forebears, spread quickly, and by the 18th century, versions of
these round-bodied, plucked-string resonators were found in black
communities along the coast from Suriname to New York City. It was only
in the 1840s that the banjo seeped into white culture. By the early
1900s, blacks were moving to cities en masse, leaving the instrument
behind. And that’s when white musicians commandeered it as an icon of
the nation’s agrarian roots. Hoping to learn more about African musical traditions and maybe
even trace her own sensibility to its origin, Giddens traveled to
Senegal and Gambia—only to discover that her musical roots lay closer to
home. “When I went to Africa, to them I was white. And I realized, I
ain’t African,” she says. “I need to go to my own country.” Around that
time, Adams, of the Smithsonian, and a companion, played a replica
19th-century banjo for Giddens. With its wooden hoop covered by animal
skin, its fretless neck and gut strings, the minstrel banjo has a
mellow, intimate sound, more like a lute or an Arabic oud than the
bright, steel-stringed instrument that twangs through the soundtrack of
Americana. Eventually, Giddens bought a replica of an 1858 banjo, and it
led her forward into the past. “That was her gateway to understanding
how interconnected we all are,” says Adams. “She’s legitimized this
version of the banjo. Nobody else has been able to do that.”
In the long American tradition of picking
up tunes wherever they happen to lie, dusting them off, and making them
fresh, Giddens has turned to Briggs’ Banjo Instructor, an 1855
manual collecting the notations of Thomas Briggs, a white musician who
reportedly visited Southern plantations and jotted down tunes he heard
in the slave quarters. Giddens fitted Briggs’ melody “Git Up in de
Mornin” with lyrics that chronicle the struggles of slaves and free
blacks to educate themselves; she has renamed the song “Better Git Yer
Learnin.’”
The Banjo's Evolution
The centerpiece of America’s musical tradition draws on diverse
cultural influences, from West Africa to the Spanish and Portuguese
empires (Research by Anna White; illustrations by Elizabeth M. LaDuke)
Akonting | West Africa
(Reference photo by Chuck Levy)With a long, circular neck, a body made from a hollow
calabash gourd and a sound-plane of stretched goat skin, the
three-stringed akonting is one of 80 lutes from West Africa that
scholars have identified as early banjo predecessors. But unlike many
others, it was traditionally a folk instrument, played not by griots, or
trained singer-musicians of high social status entrusted with oral
traditions, but by regular Jola tribespeople—millions of whom, abducted
and sold into slavery from their native Senegambia, brought their
traditions to the New World.
It’s a testament to Giddens’ willingness to
look the past in the eye that she invokes Briggs, one of many whites
who performed in minstrel shows. Those wildly popular blackface
entertainments relied on a central paradox: The music had to be black
enough to seem authentic and sanitized enough to make white audiences
comfortable. “His fine features and his genial smile were white through
the veil of cork,” one observer wrote of Briggs in 1858. The minstrel tradition, cartoonish and offensive as it was, still
has plenty to offer the contemporary scholar and musician. Giddens takes
out her phone and scrolls through images of mid-19th-century posters
and covers of song collections. Even 150 years later, the illustrations
are shockingly racist, but Giddens appears to hardly even see that.
Instead, she’s hunting for clues to the local traditions that minstrel
shows exploited and satirized: banjo, tambourine and fiddle tunes and
techniques, dances and rituals that varied from county to county or even
from one plantation to its neighbor. “The method books took something
that was different for everyone and standardized it,” she says. The
nasty iconography of minstrel music may be one reason why black
musicians were not eager to celebrate the old songs and the banjo, and
instead largely moved on to new styles and instruments. “Blacks have not
clung to minstrelsy for obvious reason, so some of this stuff gets
missed.”
The late-18th-century watercolor known as The Old Plantation shows an early gourd banjo player on a romanticized South Carolina plantation.
(Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
By the 20th century, the classic
five-string banjo had faded from African-American culture as an
increasingly professional generation of black musicians migrated to
guitar, brass and piano. Whites continued to play the banjo as part of a
broadly nostalgic movement, but blacks couldn’t muster much wistfulness
for the rural South. A few black groups, such as the Mississippi
Sheiks, kept the string band tradition alive in the 1920s and ’30s, but
white-oriented hillbilly bands, even those with black fiddlers,
guitarists and mandolinists, included virtually no black banjo players.
One rare standout was Gus Cannon, an eclectic entertainer who played
blues and ragtime on the vaudeville circuit, navigating treacherous
waters where art and satire mixed. But even Cannon’s performances were
layered with racial and cultural ironies. Dom Flemons, of the Chocolate
Drops, admiringly refers to Cannon as a “black man in blackface
performing as Banjo Joe.” Another holdover was Uncle John Scruggs, who is known almost
completely from a short film shot in 1928. The elderly Scruggs sits on a
rickety chair in front of a collapsing shack and plucks out a quickstep
tune, “Little Log Cabin in the Lane,” while a passel of barefoot
children dance. It all looks very spontaneous so long as you don’t
intuit the presence of a Fox Movietone News crew behind the camera,
ushering a few more picturesquely bedraggled kids into the frame. By
this time, the music business’s apparatus was so well developed that it
was hard for even genuine traditions to be pure. Cannon’s recordings and
the film of Scruggs fed the minstrel revival of the 1920s, twice
removed from the reality of rural music in the 19th century. But they’re
all we’ve got.
* * *
Giddens steps into this speculative void with her own idiosyncratic
brand of folklore. The vintage sound of her instrument and the old-time
tinge in her voice can make it difficult to tell the difference between
her excavations and her creations. But her sensibility is unmistakably
21st century. One of her best-known songs is “Julie,” drawn from an
account she read in The Slaves’ War, a 2008 anthology of oral
histories, letters, diaries and other first-person accounts by slaves of
the Civil War. The song features a deceptively amiable dialogue between
two Southern women on a veranda watching Union soldiers approach. The
panicked white woman urges her chattel to run, then changes her mind: No, stay, she begs, and lie to the Union soldiers about who owns the trunkful of treasure in the house.
But the black woman, Julie, won’t have it. “That trunk of gold / Is
what you got when my children you sold,” she sings. “Mistress, oh
mistress / I wish you well / But in leavin’ here, I’m leavin’ hell.”
“They know my vibe,” says Giddens,
complimenting her band during some downtime at the North Carolina Folk
Festival. “I have a flavor: kind of modal-y, kind of Renaissance-y, kind
of Eastern-y, kind of trance-y, and rhythmic. They get it.”
(Photographer: Celeste Sloman; fashion
stylist: Stephanie Tricola; makeup: Campbell Ritchie; hair: Traci
Barrett; wardrobe: Zimmermann (top): the Row (camisole); 3X1 (pants))
For Giddens, the banjo is not just a tool
for remembering the past but a way to project herself back into it, to
try on the identities of ancestors whose lives she can reach only
through musical imagination. “I’m interested in the interiors of these
characters,” she says. “I don’t worry about whether it sounds
authentic.” More precisely, Giddens treats authenticity as a quality to
be pursued but never achieved. That interplay of history and imagination
has also yielded Songs of Our Native Daughters, which gathers
the banjo-playing African-American singer-songwriters Amythyst Kiah,
Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla (also a veteran of the Carolina
Chocolate Drops) to pay tribute to history’s forgotten women—slaves,
singers, resisters, Reconstruction-era teachers. One song tells the
story of black folk hero John Henry’s wife, Polly Ann, also a steel
driver. Another takes the perspective of a child who watches his
enslaved mother hanged for killing her overseer after she was repeatedly
raped. At the intersection of racism and misogyny, Giddens writes in
the liner notes, “stands the African American woman, used, abused,
ignored, and scorned.”
Songs of Our Native Daughters was
born from two similar, but separate, epiphanies. The first took place at
the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and
Culture, where Giddens was gobsmacked to read a bitter snippet of verse
by the British poet William Cowper: “I own I am shocked at the purchase
of slaves / And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves.../ I
pity them greatly but I must be mum / For how could we do without sugar
and rum?” The idea ended up in the song “Barbados,” where Cowper’s
satire about exploitation is extended to today: “I pity them greatly,
but I must be mum / For what about nickel, cobalt, lithium / The
garments we wear, the electronics we own / What—give up our tablets, our
laptops and phones?” The other provocative moment was during The Birth of a Nation,
the 2016 movie about Nat Turner. “One of the enslaved women on the
plantation is forced to make herself available for a rape by the
plantation owner’s friend,” Giddens writes in the liner notes.
“Afterwards, she leaves his room, in shame, while the others look on.
The gaze of the camera, however, does not rest on her, the victim’s
face. It rests on her husband, the man who was ‘wronged.’...I found
myself furious . . . at her own emotion and reaction being literally
written out of the frame.”
With Songs of Our Native Daughters, Giddens alchemized
that fury into art. Americans of all colors created a brand-new musical
culture, what Giddens describes as “an experiment that’s unequaled
anywhere.” To force a simple, palatable narrative onto such a complex
and varied legacy is a form of betrayal. “I just want a clearer, more
nuanced picture of what American music is,” she tells me. “It came out
of something horrible, but what did all those people die for if we don’t
tell their story?”
A week after the Greensboro concert, I meet
Giddens again, this time in North Adams, Massachusetts, where she is
scheduled to debut a new, half-hour suite commissioned by the FreshGrass
Festival. “We put it together this afternoon,” she tells me with
impressive nonchalance. One of the band members flew in just minutes
before the show.
Giddens laughs with the participants of the
festival’s “Roots of American Dance” public workshop, where she showed
off her fiddling skills.
(Lexey Swall)
That evening, she’s barefoot as usual, wearing
a flowing purple dress. After warming up with a few familiar numbers,
Giddens nervously introduces the centerpiece of the program. “As I was
researching slavery in America, as you do in your spare time,” she
jokes, eliciting an appreciative holler from an audience member, “I got
this book about Cuba and its music, and the first four chapters go back
to the Arabic slave trade.” The new piece is barely 12 hours old, yet it
brings antiquity alive: Slave girls in medieval North Africa were
valued, and sold, for the thousands of tunes they knew by heart—“they
were like living jukeboxes,” Giddens remarks, with a mixture of pity and
professional admiration. Then Turrisi picks up a large-bodied “cello
banjo” and plucks out a quiet, vaguely Arabic lead-in. “Ten thousand
stories, ten thousand songs,” Giddens begins, her voice filled with
sorrow and gold. “Ten thousand worries, ten thousand wrongs.” The
incantation floats through the outdoor hush, and as the keening energy
of her sound wanes into a tender coo, you can hear centuries of lament,
and consolation, mingling in the warm late summer night.
MELISSA BLOCK, host: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. A few years ago, three 20-something musicians met at the Black
Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina. They were drawn there by their
curiosity about old-time Southern folk music and its African roots. Now
the trio plays together, a modern-day black string band called the
Carolina Chocolate Drops. And they're here in our studios to play some
songs from their new CD and to talk a bit. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson. Welcome. Thanks for coming in. Ms. RHIANNON GIDDENS (Member, Carolina Chocolate Drops): Thanks for having us.
Mr. DOM FLEMONS (Member, Carolina Chocolate Drops): I'm glad to be here.
BLOCK: Let's talk a little bit about this battery of instruments
you've brought with you. You've got a couple of banjos, a fiddle, a jug -
a ceramic jug. There's some bones, a kazoo. You're holding up a kazoo,
Rhiannon?
Ms. GIDDENS: Oh, yeah.
BLOCK: Where are the bones?
Mr. FLEMONS: The bones are in my back pocket right now, as we speak. BLOCK: And what are those bones?
Mr. FLEMONS: Oh, these are cow short rib bones.
BLOCK: Now, okay. We're going to get a taste of a bunch of this. Justin, you're going to be playing jug. Rhiannon, you're on...
Ms. GIDDENS: I'm on kazoo for this one. BLOCK: Kazoo. And, Dom?
Mr. FLEMONS: This one, I'm on the four-string banjo. We're going to have a four-string and a five-string.
BLOCK: And you're going to be doing a song recorded in the '20s
by jazz and blues singer Papa Charlie Jackson, "Your Baby Ain't Sweet
Like Mine." This is a good raunchy love song. Mr. JUSTIN ROBINSON (Member, Carolina Chocolate Drops): Yeah, I guess it's a little bit. But ain't that how love is? (Soundbite of laughter) (Soundbite of song, "Your Baby Ain't Sweet Like Mine") CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS: (Singing) Everybody talking about the
sweetie nowadays. I got the one with the sweetest ways. Your baby may
roll a jelly fine, nobody's baby can roll it like mine. Your baby ain't
sweet like mine. She bake a jelly roll all the time. And when I'm
feeling lonesome and blue, my baby know just what to do. Yes, sir. She
even calls me honey. She even let me spend the money. Never has a baby
put me out of door. She even buy me all my clothes. I don't want to
brag, just want to put you in line, your baby ain't sweet like mine. No.
No. Your baby ain't sweet like mine. Your baby ain't sweet like mine. She bake a jelly roll all the
time. And when I'm feeling lonesome and blue, my baby, baby know just
what to do. Yes, sir. She even call me honey. She even let me spend the
money. Never has a baby put me out of door. She even buy me all my
clothes. I don't want to brag, just want to put you in line, your baby
ain't sweet like mine. No. No. Your baby ain't sweet like mine. Oh,
yeah. Your baby ain't sweet like mine. BLOCK: The Carolina Chocolate Drops playing here in our studios. Let's talk about how you all found your way to this old-time
sound. Rhiannon Giddens, you were classically trained in opera at
Oberlin Conservatory. Ms. GIDDENS: Mm-hmm. BLOCK: Justin, you played classical violin, came back to the fiddle. And Dom Flemons, you're from Arizona. You... Mr. FLEMONS: That's right. BLOCK: ...I guess, have a background in slam poetry, guitar, a
little bit of everything. And here you all are in this string band. What
brought you here? Ms. GIDDENS: In our current incarnation we were brought together
by Joe Thompson, who is now 91, he was 86 at the time, black fiddler
from Mebane, North Carolina. And we all went down to learn his music.
That's kind of where the genesis of the band came from, because we were
all three going at the same time. And so we were playing his tunes and
then other tunes that we all sort of brought and became the core of our
repertoire. BLOCK: Justin Robinson, why don't you talk a bit about learning
from Joe Thompson in North Carolina? I have this image of you all
sitting around at his house, at his feet maybe, trying to learn what
he's gotten through decades of playing. Mr. ROBINSON: Yeah, we'd go to his house mostly and we still do.
We play the same tunes every time until we got it. Arguably we have it
now. We've done something else with it. BLOCK: What did Joe Thompson tell you about watching the three of
you young black musicians coming together to form the string band? Mr. FLEMONS: The first time we had Joe say something, he said
something like, he was telling somebody else like: You see my band? Mr. ROBINSON: He said: How do you like my band? Mr. FLEMONS: How do you like my band? That was it. And that was
like our first real compliment. Besides that, he was like: All right,
y'all, you're sounding good. Ms. GIDDENS: Not even say that. (Soundbite of laughter) Mr. FLEMONS: He would just say: All right, y'all, we'll see you next time, you know? Ms. GIDDENS: Yeah. But, you know, he clearly looked forward to us
coming down 'cause if it had been a while since we'd come down, they'd
call us. Like, where are you guys at, you know? But it's also good for
him to kind of have a completion and have to see - since nobody in his
family is picking it up - to see some young black folk even just
interested in his music, you know? I think that's been really good for
him to see. BLOCK: You have a dance tune that you learned from Joe Thompson
on the new CD. It's called "Cindy Gal." And I wonder if you would play
us a version here in the studio? Ms. GIDDENS: Of course. Mr. FLEMONS: All right. (Soundbite of clacking) BLOCK: The bones are coming out. (Soundbite of song, "Cindy Gal") CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS: (Singing) Oh, Cindy Gal. Oh, Cindy Gal.
Oh, Cindy Gal, where did you stay last night? Oh, Cindy Gal. Oh, Cindy
Gal. Oh, Cindy Gal, cross the river last night? Aww, hit that banjo. Oh,
Cindy Gal. Oh, Cindy Gal. Oh, Cindy Gal, images in the morning. Oh,
Cindy Gal. Oh, Cindy Gal. I see them right behind you, woman.
(Unintelligible). Yeah. BLOCK: That's the Carolina Chocolate Drops singing the song "Cindy Gal" here in our studios. And, Dom Flemons, watching you play the bones - those percussive
bones - it's like watching your arms dance. I mean you're - they're up
above your head, they're banging on your knees and on your chest. It's a
wonderful thing to watch. Mr. FLEMONS: Oh, thank you. BLOCK: Fun to play. Mr. FLEMONS: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. (Soundbite of laughter) BLOCK: What's fun about it? Mr. FLEMONS: If you really put a lot of abandon into your body
movement and really don't care about how you look as you're doing it,
you're going to have a real ball with the bones. And that was the thing I
noticed when I learned the bones. First, the lady showed them to me and
then taught me how to play them. And then I started looking at some of the imagery of the
blackface performers, as well as other bones players that have come
along. And one thing that was distinctive about the blackface minstrel
players was they had their hands up in the air when they were playing,
and a lot of the pictures showed this. And I said, okay, well, let me
see how it looks if I just start clicking them up here. They're very interesting instruments. They've changed the way I
play everything else too. You can imply anything that you do with the
bones on any other instrument. BLOCK: Ha. You know, you mentioned the blackface minstrel shows.
And I'm curious to ask about how you see yourselves fitting in with the
tradition that has been the subject of parody and derision. I'm thinking
about the name of your new CD "Genuine Negro Jig," the name of your
band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops. How do you see yourselves? Are you making a statement about the tradition and how it's been interpreted? Rhiannon? Ms. GIDDENS: Here's the deal: We play fiddles and banjos and
we're black. So it's out there. I think what we're striving to, not
recapture but to just put out there is the joyous side of this music,
the good side of some of these time periods. Because, yeah, there's a
lot of bad stuff. You know, we're not going to deny that, but you can't
throw everything out. Mr. FLEMONS: A friend of mine and I came up with a really nice
thing to say about it, which is when you dig your hands into the soil of
American culture, your hands get dirty, just like when you're doing
gardening or anything. If you don't get your hands dirty, then you're
not going to get anything accomplished, and that's something that we do.
We've put the hands in, the hands have gotten dirty, and now we're just
digging into stuff and also being true to ourselves. That's the thing
too. Ms. GIDDENS: We often say that we are able to do this because of
what our parents went through and our grandparents went through. We are
able to look back without some of the pain of actually having gone
through some of those things, and so we're able to say, well, let's look
back and see what joy we can find from some of these times, you know?
And I think that's what children's job is. You know, the next generation
is, you know, supposed to do that, you know, and that's kind of just -
we're just fulfilling our role, really. BLOCK: Well, thank you all so much for coming in. This has been
great. The California Chocolate Drops: Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and
Justin Robinson. Thanks. Ms. GIDDENS: Thanks for having us. BLOCK: And I wonder if you would take us out with one more song. Ms. GIDDENS: Sure. Mr. FLEMONS: Absolutely. BLOCK: What would you like to do? Ms. GIDDENS: We'll serve you up some "Cornbread and Butterbeans." Nothing better than that. (Soundbite of song, "Cornbread and Butterbeans") CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS: (Singing) Cornbread and butterbeans and
you across the table, eatin' them beans and makin' love as long as I am
able. Hoein' corn and cotton, too, and when the day is over, ride the
mule, a crazy fool, and love again all over. Goodbye, don't you cry, I'm going to Louisiana to buy a coon dog
and a big fat hog and marry Susiana(ph). Sing a song, ding-dong, I'll
take a trip to China, cornbread and butterbeans and back to North
Carolina. Oh, yeah. Cornbread and butterbeans and you across the table,
eatin' them beans and makin' love as long as I am able. Hoein' corn and
cotton, too, and when the day is over, ride the mule, and crazy fool,
and love again all over. BLOCK: We are listening to the Carolina Chocolate Drops: Dom
Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson in performance here in our
studios. Their new CD is called "Genuine Negro Jig." (Soundbite of song, "Cornbread and Butterbeans") CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS: (Singing) Wearing shoes and drinkin'
booze, it goes against the Bible. That's right. A necktie will make you
die and cause you lots of trouble. Really true. Streetcars and whiskey
bars and kissin' pretty women. Women, yeah, that's the end of a terrible
beginning. (Unintelligible). And cornbread and butterbeans and you across the table, eatin'
them beans and makin' love as long as I am able. Hoein' corn and cotton,
too, and when the day is over, ride the mule, a crazy fool, and love
again all over.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc.,
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process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and
may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may
vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published in September 2007. The rhythm of the music makes your ears perk up, and before you know
it you’re clapping in time. The beat clips along lightly with a tune
that has been played for generations. Although you might not hear it
often, the sound of old-time country music is familiar. It’s a harmony
only a banjo, fiddle, and harmonica can bring when blended together. Add
a jug, snare drum, and stovepipe, and you have the makings of the
Carolina Chocolate Drops, connoisseurs of old-time string-band music. It’s the beat that makes an African-American string-band legend laugh
with approval when he talks about the trio. “They’re all right,” he
says. “They’re all right.” Joe Thompson should know. He’s the oldest living black Piedmont
string-band master in North Carolina. “I have been playing the fiddle
ever since I was a little boy,” he says. Now at age 88, Thompson
couldn’t have found a more talented or appreciative trio than the
Carolina Chocolate Drops. Deriving their name from a black string band
from the 1920s, “The Tennessee Chocolate Drops,” the group in the past
year has taken the folk festival arena by storm and, in the process, has
brought to thousands a style of music that was in danger of vanishing
with Thompson’s generation. Dr. Cece Conway, English professor at Appalachian State University and author of African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia,
met cousins Joe and Odell Thompson while working on her Ph.D. at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1970s. “I was a
graduate student and had a small grant which enabled me to work on a
documentary on black banjo and fiddle players,” she explains. “There
were a lot of white old-time fiddler players at the time but very few
black musicians.” Conway is pleased that the young trio has such a respect for
Thompson. “He’s the last traditional black fiddle player from an
unbroken line going back to Africa,” she explains. “There were no black
young people learning his style of music until the three met Joe at the
Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in 2005.
Practicing with Joe allows them face-to-face contact to experience the
cultural context and meaning of the music as well as its sound,” she
adds.
• • •
Drawn to the music
Thompson’s influence blends with other string-band music, bluegrass,
and the blues to give the Carolina Chocolate Drops their distinct sound.
Two of the members, Justin Robinson and Rhiannon Giddens, are native
North Carolinians. Robinson is from Gastonia, and Giddens grew up in
Greensboro. Dom Flemons, originally from Phoenix, Arizona, moved to
North Carolina in 2005 after attending the Black Banjo Gathering. It was
there that Giddens met both Robinson and Flemons. Giddens grew up listening to the folk revival and was exposed to old
country music and jazz by her grandparents. Trained as a professional
opera singer, she is a graduate of the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory
of Music in Oberlin, Ohio. While she was singing classical music
professionally, a college friend invited her to attend a contra dance,
where couples line up and complete patterns dictated by a caller. “I
went because I thought it was going to be like the English country
dances in Jane Austen [novels],” she says with a laugh. But it was at this dance that Giddens found her love of string-band
dance music. She then began thinking that maybe opera just wasn’t where
she was supposed to be. Her resonant voice now sings songs like “Hit ’Em
Up Style,” about a lady getting revenge on her faithless lover. Robinson grew up with a diverse music background, heavily influenced
by his grandparents’ tastes. “My grandparents loved country music and
never missed ‘Hee-Haw,’” he says with a smile. “My grandmother loved
Grandpa Jones. Also Earl Scruggs was from Gastonia, so you couldn’t
throw a rock without hitting a banjo.” On the other end of the spectrum, Robinson’s mother sang opera. He
took classical violin from age 9 to 13. “I liked listening to classical
music, but I didn’t like playing it,” he admits. “When my parents told
me they weren’t going to pay for any more lessons if I wasn’t going to
practice, I thought, ‘Thank goodness my plan worked,’” he says. Years later, while attending UNC, Robinson picked up the fiddle to
play string-band music. He learned about the festival at ASU from a
website. “I saw that Joe Thompson was going to be there, and off to
Boone I went,” he recalls. Growing up in Arizona, Flemons listened to a mix of smooth jazz and
country music. He often heard Buck Owens and Charlie Daniels while
riding in the car with his father. With a passion for music of
yesteryear, Flemons is the rhythm master of the band, playing the
harmonica, snare drum, bones, jug, and stove pipe. As a boy, he played
the drums and percussion in the school band and picked up the guitar and
harmonica at age 16. “I just got the bug one day and started playing
them both,” he explains. Flemons immersed himself in different styles of music during college
and became a self-taught banjo player. Playing solo and working as a
street singer, he traveled to North Carolina during his last semester of
college for the Black Banjo Gathering. “I decided after seeing all that
talent — including Joe Thompson — I was moving to North Carolina,” says
Flemons.
• • •
Developing a sound
That weekend at the , fate took over and the trio’s paths crossed. “I
met both Justin and Dom at the festival, but they didn’t meet each
other,” explains Giddens. Not long after that, the three moved to Durham
and started visiting Thompson on a regular basis, absorbing everything
they could. “By visiting Joe at the same time, we clicked into a sound,”
explains Robinson. During the summer of 2005, the three visited with Thompson often. “I
was in awe and starstruck when I went to visit him the first time,”
admits Robinson. Giddens echoes Robinson’s sentiment. “He’s a treasure,” she says of
Thompson. “We’ve never stopped learning from him. Each time we’re with
him, there’s something for us to learn. Just to watch him and hear him
play and sing is a gift to us as musicians.” “By the ’70s, black string music had lost its context,” explains
Robinson. “The reasons it was played had been lost. String music was
played for social dancing and at occasions like barn raisings, corn
shuckings, and weddings. After World War II, blues and jazz took over.
People started moving to the cities. Things changed. There was less and
less reason for the string bands to continue. It was not part of the
mainstream.” But the mainstream didn’t matter to Thompson, who continued to play
his Piedmont string-band music. After folklorists like Kip Lornell and
Conway and white string-band musician Tommy Thompson started visiting,
Joe began making music with his banjo-playing cousin, Odell. They were
soon invited to play at festivals and eventually played at Carnegie Hall
and in Australia and toured nationally until Odell died in 1994. “We have really spent a lot of time with Joe, watching his hands,
listening to his sound, and following his beat,” explains Flemons.
These sessions would sometimes last as long as five hours. “Joe never
seemed to get tired as long as we were playing,” says Giddens. Even with the benefit of these visits, the group took a while to get
everything together. “It was a crazy time,” says Flemons of their early
months together. Performing as street players in Chapel Hill, they
received their first paying gig at the Arts Center in Carrboro in
January 2006. After that, things took off rapidly, and they began
booking concerts across the state and throughout the region. Their travels now take them around the country, and in June they performed on “Prairie Home Companion.” They’ve also become popular with schools. “We visit elementary and
middle schools to share the history of the music with children and let
them learn it first hand,” explains Giddens. She laughs when she thinks
of some of the middle schoolers they’ve entertained. “At first, they sit
slumped in the chairs and look at us like we’re crazy in our simple
clothes and making music from a jug and a banjo. But we have
incorporated a type of hip-hop song for them so they can understand what
they listen to now had its roots in music their ancestors played.”
Giddens has been known to grab a couple of girls up on stage and teach
them the Charleston while Flemons shares his talents making music on the
jug.
• • •
The historical context
Marshall Wyatt, owner of Old Hat Records, met the trio at their
performance at the North Carolina Museum of History. His company
specializes in rereleasing Southern string-band music from the ’20s and
’30s. Having researched this style of music for more than two decades,
Wyatt says the three young musicians bring something special to the
music they play. “They have an infectious kind of energy; every time I
go to see one of their performances, they get better,” he says. “They
give a new lease on life to this music.” The group has immersed themselves in the history of the style of
music they perform. All three are a wealth of information about the
historical context of their music. “They’ll drop by, and we’ll spin old
78 records until well into the night,” laughs Wyatt. “Once, Justin asked
me where all the records were of Gaston County musicians, and I showed
him what I had. He suggested I put together a collection of their music,
and I’m working on it. They’re curious and keenly aware of the music
they play.” The group’s undeniable energy shows in their concerts. They converse
with the audience about the songs they’re performing. They play off each
other with ease, exchanging barbs as fluidly as they exchange
instruments. As they play the tunes Thompson taught them, like “Georgie
Buck”, you see the music weaving generations together. Blowing into the
jug, Flemons sets the rhythm for a song while Giddens launches into the
lyrics with her rich, full voice and banjo playing. Robinson can make
the fiddle sing like few others. Before long, a grandfather in his 80s
starts dancing to the music while a 3-year-old joins in with her mother,
clogging right along as Giddens dances on stage. Not bad for a musical
style that, in the mid-20th century, had come close to dying. “When we play, we want the audience to have that old-time feeling,
just as when the music was played for Saturday night dances,” says
Robinson. “It’s a time for them to enjoy something simple and pure.” Giddens agrees. “Like the musicians of Joe’s time, we bring our own
separate talents to the band. And, just like in those days, there’s
nothing we enjoy more as musicians than seeing an audience responding to
music that Joe played for his friends in Mebane,” she says with a
bright smile. “It’s nice to know the Carolina Chocolate Drops had a hand
in making it come full circle. It doesn’t get much better than that.” Carolina Chocolate DropsP.O. Box 1086409 Fayetteville Road, Suite 120Durham, NC 27713
In 2005, Giddens, who at that time was spending time competing in Scottish music competitions,[4][5] attended the Black Banjo Then and Now Gathering, in Boone, North Carolina. There she met Dom Flemons and Sule Greg Wilson. The three started playing together professionally as a "postmodern string band", Sankofa Strings.[6]
During that same time period, Giddens was also a regular caller at
local contra dances and featured in a Celtic music band called Gaelwynd.
Later in 2005, after both Gaelwynd and Sankofa Strings had released CD
albums, Giddens and Flemons teamed up with other musicians and expanded
the Sankofa Strings sound into what was to become the Grammy winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.
In 2007, Giddens contributed fiddle, banjo, "flat-footin'" dancing and additional vocals to Talitha MacKenzie's album Indian Summer.
Performing as a soprano, Giddens and mezzo-soprano Cheryse McLeod Lewis formed a duo called Eleganza to release a CD in 2009. Because I Knew You...
consists of classical, religious, theater, and movie music. Giddens and
Lewis were middle school classmates who reconnected after college while
working in the same office. The friends started singing together in
2003, but did not begin recording until 2008.[7] As of November 12, 2013, Giddens is now the only original member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.[8] In 2013 Giddens began pushing further into her solo career.
Giddens participated in "Another Day, Another Time", a concert inspired
by the Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis.[9] Many critics have stated that Giddens had the best performance at what was called "the concert of the year".[10][11] Late in 2013, Giddens contributed the standout a cappella track "We Rise" to the LP We Are Not For Sale: Songs of Protest by the NC Music Love Army – a collective of activist musicians from North Carolina founded by Jon Lindsay and Caitlin Cary.[12]
Giddens' protest song joins contributions from many other Carolina
musical luminaries on the Lindsay-produced compilation (11/26/13 via Redeye Distribution), which was created to support the NC NAACP and the Moral Monday movement.[13] In early 2014 Giddens recorded for Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes alongside Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford, Taylor Goldsmith and Jim James. The album was produced by T-Bone Burnett and is a compilation of partial, unreleased lyrics written by Bob Dylan.[14] In February 2015, Giddens released her debut solo album, Tomorrow Is My Turn, on Nonesuch Records. Also produced by Burnett, the album includes songs made famous by Patsy Cline, Odetta, Dolly Parton, and Nina Simone, among others.[10][15] The Wall Street Journal
said the album "confirms the arrival of a significant talent whose
voice and distinctive approach communicate the simmering emotion at the
core of the songs."[16] Additionally, the Los Angeles Times called the album "a collection that should solidify her status as one of the bright new lights in pop music."[17] In July 2015, she had a big stage at world music folk and dance festival at TFF Rudolstadt in Germany.[18] Her performance was also broadcast live by the German national public radio Deutschlandfunk.[19] Rhiannon appears on Jon Lindsay's single "Ballad of Lennon Lacy" (Redeye Distribution, August 21). The song tackles the mysterious hanging death of Lennon Lacy, a black teen from rural Bladenboro, North Carolina. The case is currently under investigation by the FBI, and widely suspected to be a lynching.[20] On November 27, 2015, to coincide with the Black Friday Record Store Day event, Giddens released Factory Girl (EP) on Nonesuch Records, which contained music culled from the same T Bone Burnett–produced sessions that yielded Tomorrow Is My Turn.[21] A digital version of Factory Girl was made available December 11, 2015. The sessions for the album and EP took place in Los Angeles and Nashville, with a multi-generational group of players assembled by Burnett. Musicians on Factory Girl include Burnett; fiddle player Gabe Witcher and double bassist Paul Kowert of Punch Brothers; percussionist Jack Ashford of Motown's renowned Funk Brothers; drummer Jay Bellerose; guitarist Colin Linden;
veteran Nashville session bassist Dennis Crouch; and Giddens's Carolina
Chocolate Drops touring band-mates, multi-instrumentalist Hubby Jenkins
and beat-boxer Adam Matta.
She was selected to take part in Transatlantic Sessions
in January 2016. This collaboration between American and Celtic
musicians is a coveted honor. The ensemble performed as part of Celtic Connections in Glasgow, and a short UK/Irish tour. Her performances on the tour included the stirring tribute to David Bowie "It Ain't Easy". Later in the year, Giddens became the first American to be honoured as Folk Singer of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Later in the year, it was also announced that she would be receiving the prestigious Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass.
Winning this award makes Giddens both the only woman and the only
person of color to receive the prize in its six-year history.[22] In 2016, it was also announced that Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops would be inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.[23]
In 2017, Giddens became only the fourth musician to perform at both the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals.[24] Later that year, she delivered the keynote address at the World of Bluegrass Business Conference 2017.[25]
According to Bluegrass Today, "Giddens shattered long-held
stereotypes...By the time she was done, she had systematically
dismantled the myth of a homogenous Appalachia." [26] In June 2017, Giddens appeared in the multi award-winning documentary The American Epic Sessions, directed by Bernard MacMahon, where she recorded "One Hour Mama" and English folk ballad "Pretty Saro", on the restored first electrical sound recording system from the 1920s.[27] Both performances were released on Music from The American Epic Sessions: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.[28]
Upon hearing the playback of these direct-to-disc recordings
recordings, she exclaimed "you feel like your soul is coming out of the
speaker."[28] In October 2017, Giddens was named one of the 2017 class of MacArthur "Genius" Fellows.
The organization noted, "Giddens's drive to understand and convey the
nuances, complexities, and interrelationships between musical traditions
is enhancing our musical present with a wealth of sounds and textures
from the past." [29]
Rhiannon further demonstrated the broad range of her musical interests
with several subsequent projects. In early November, she performed as a
soprano with the Louisville Orchestra in Teddy Abrams' multimedia tribute to Muhammad Ali, The Greatest.[30] A week later, she sang with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra for their live recording of American Originals: 1918, which explored the early development of jazz during the post WWI era.[31] In January 2018, Giddens co-produced (with Dirk Powell) Songs of Our Native Daughters for Smithsonian Folkways. Written and recorded with fellow artists Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla,
and Allison Russell, "The album confronts the ways we are culturally
conditioned to avoid talking about America's history of slavery, racism,
and misogyny." [32] Also in early 2018, the Nashville Ballet announced that Rhiannon Giddens has been commissioned to write the music for Lucy Negro, Redux, a new dance choreographed by artistic director, Paul Vasterling. Based on the book of the same name by Caroline Randall Williams, its premise is that Shakespeare's Dark Lady was of African descent. The ballet premiered in February 2019.[33] Then in March 2018, Giddens fulfilled a previously announced engagement as guest curator for the Cambridge Folk Festival by inviting Peggy Seeger, Kaia Kater, Birds of Chicago, Amythyst Kiah, and Yola Carter to perform at the event.[34] Giddens recorded vocals for Silo Songs, an audio installation created by composer Brad Wells for Hancock Shaker Village. She contributed a song, "See The Fire In Your Eyes", to the popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 which was released in October 2018. The song was written with Daniel Lanois. Beginning in December 2018, she is hosting a podcast called Aria Code with Rhiannon Giddens produced by the Metropolitan Opera and WQXR-FM. The program examines why individual arias have a lasting impact on audiences and how singers prepare to perform them.[35] In 2019, Giddens released two studio albums: Songs of Our Native Daughters with Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Amythyst Kiah, and There Is No Other with Italian musician Francesco Turrisi.[36][37]
Acting
In 2017 and 2018, Giddens appeared in the fifth and sixth seasons of the CMT's Nashville as Hannah Lee "Hallie" Jordan, a social worker with the voice of an angel.[38] Hallie is a significant character in Juliette's
storyline. To date, Giddens has appeared in 11 episodes and has
performed several songs that have been made available following each
episode.
Personal life
Giddens is multiethnic in ancestry.[39] Her father was European-American and her mother African-American and Native American.[40]
Her sister Lalenja Harrington is a director for Beyond Academics, a
four-year certificate program supporting students with intellectual and
developmental disabilities, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A singer and songwriter herself, Harrington occasionally collaborates with her sister on musical projects.[41] Giddens married Irish musician Michael Laffan in 2007;[42] they have a daughter and a son,[43] however they are now separated.[44] She has homes in Greensboro, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; and Limerick, Ireland.
As Gaelwynd
Out On the Ocean: Music of the British Isles (2004)
"Waterboy", "'S iomadh rud tha dhìth orm / Ciamar a nì mi 'n dannsa dìreach", and "Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby", Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis (Various Artists) (concert recorded live September 29, 2013, album released January 2015)
"Woman of Constant Sorrow", "Just Drive By, Firefly", and "Bach, Stevie Wonder and Janelle Monae", A Bottle of Whiskey and a Handful of Bees (Sxip Shirey) (2017)
"West End Blues (Live)" and "Shake Sugaree", Tunes from David Holt's State of Music 2 (Various Artists) (2017)
"I'm Just Wild About Harry", "I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle", "Swing Along", and "I Ain't Got Nobody", American Originals: 1918 (Cincinnati Pops Orchestra) (2018)
"Dream Variation", Holes In The Sky (Lara Downes) (2019)
"The May Morning Dew", The Great Irish Songbook (Dervish (band)) (2019)
"See The Fire In Your Eyes", Red Dead Redemption 2 -- Original Game Soundtrack (Various Artists) (due Spring 2019)
Rhiannon Giddens pours the emotional weight of American history into her music. Listen as she performs traditional folk ballads — including "Waterboy," "Up Above My Head," and "Lonesome Road" by Sister Rosetta Tharp — and one glorious original song, "Come Love Come," inspired by Civil War-era slave narratives. The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more.
Since winning a MacArthur Genius Grant Rhiannon Giddens has taken time
off from touring to work on big projects, maybe even a musical. Her
dedication to teaching and preserving the roots of folk music in America
continues.
“Georgie Buck”, a traditional Appalachian folk song, performed on the
banjo by Rhiannon Giddens. Filmed in the André Mertens Galleries for
Musical Instruments of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 15,
2018.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/b5/b2/b5b21b58-fd2d-4184-9332-834caa43d209/mar2019_h15_rhiannongiddens.jpg)
The late-18th-century watercolor known as The Old Plantation shows an early gourd banjo player on a romanticized South Carolina plantation.
(Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
