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PHOTO: RHIANNON GIDDENS (b. February 21, 1977)
Rhiannon Giddens
(b. February 21, 1977)
Artist Biography by Timothy Monger
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.
Do 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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
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"
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 Fernández contributed to this story.
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'White people are so fragile, bless 'em' … meet Rhiannon Giddens, banjo warrior
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 funky Better 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.
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.
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.
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, I didn’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.”
Rhiannon Giddens: ‘I see this album as part of a movement to reclaim black female history’
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.
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.
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.
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.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/rhiannon-giddens-and-what-folk-music-means
Rhiannon Giddens and What Folk Music Means
The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.
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.
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?
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.”
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