FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Paola Kudacki for The New Yorker
Part Thirty-Five: Rhiannon Giddens
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FOR this instalment of Modern Heroines…
I am including an artist who has not only produced some brilliant solo work; she has also worked in a number of different acts. I think that Rhiannon Giddens is already a legend, but I feel her stature will grow ever larger in years to come. She is a marvellous artist who has created some of the most beautiful and important music of the past fifteen years or so. If you are not familiar with Giddens, then hear is some Wikipedia information:
“Rhiannon Giddens (born February 21, 1977) is an American musician. She is a founding member of the country, blues and old-time music band Carolina Chocolate Drops, where she is the lead singer, fiddle player, and banjo player.
Giddens is a native of Greensboro, North Carolina, an alumna of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, and a 2000 graduate of Oberlin Conservatory at Oberlin College, where she studied opera.
In addition to her work with the Grammy-winning Chocolate Drops, Giddens has released two solo albums: Tomorrow Is My Turn (2015) and Freedom Highway (2017). Her latest album, There Is No Other (2019), is a collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. She appears in the Smithsonian Folkways collection documenting Mike Seeger's final trip through Appalachia in 2009, Just Around The Bend: Survival and Revival in Southern Banjo Styles – Mike Seeger’s Last Documentary (2019). In 2014, she participated in the T Bone Burnett-produced project titled The New Basement Tapes along with several other musicians, which set a series of recently discovered Bob Dylan lyrics to newly composed music. The resulting album, Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, was a top-40 Billboard album”.
I am going to finish this feature with a selection of Giddens tracks. You do not need to be a fan of Bluegrass to appreciate her music. There are elements of Folk and other genres. Her lyrics are spellbinding and immersive, whilst her voice is one of the richest and most expressive in music. I will come to news of an upcoming album. First, I want to bring in an interview from The Guardian from back in 2018. They spoke to Giddens as she was curating the Cambridge Folk Festival. She discussed the issue of race in genres like Folk and Bluegrass; we learn more about a terrific songwriter, innovator and musician:
“‘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.”
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.”
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”.
Whilst 2017’s Freedom Highway is my favourite Rhiannon Giddens work, I loved the collaborative 2019 album with Francesco Turrisi, There Is No Other. I want to source an interview from that album but, first, news of new work from the duo:
“Their last album together, There Is No Other, still regularly finds its way on to my turntable so news of another album from Rhiannon Giddens and Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi is worth celebrating.
The new release, titled They’re Calling Me Home, will be released April 9 on Nonesuch Records. Giddens and Turrisi, who both live in Ireland when they aren’t on tour, have been there since March 2020 due to the pandemic. The two ex-pats found themselves drawn to the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland during the lockdown. Exploring the emotions brought up by the moment, Giddens and Turrisi decamped to Hellfire, a small studio on a working farm outside of Dublin, to record these songs over six days. The result is They’re Calling Me Home, a twelve-track album that speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis”.
Aside from winning numerous awards and being hailed by so many people, I think that there is a very long future for Giddens. I think that she is going to inspire a lot of people to get into music. Let’s hope that she will be able to perform live this year, as there are so many people who want to hear her on the stage.
If you missed There Is No Other, then it is an album that is worth checking out. This is what The Guardian wrote when they reviewed the album:
“What There Is No Other resembles is a 21st-century version of Shirley Collins and Davy Graham’s Folk Roots, New Routes, the landmark 60s folk-rock record that showed how unusual musical connections on paper could sound utterly natural in the service of song. Giddens’ instruments are the minstrel banjo, octave violin, viola and her wide-open, rangy, contralto voice, which adds succour to songs such as civil rights activist Oscar Brown Jr’s Brown Baby (“As you grow up I want you to drink from the plenty cup”) and well-known traditionals such as Wayfaring Stranger, covered famously by Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash.
Noticeably, Giddens swaps around its verses, putting the one about missing her mother upfront, leaving the father for later. She also revisits Little Margaret, a variant of one of the Child Ballads, Sweet William, which she used to sing with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Again, the female protagonist is front and centre, with agency, and Turrisi’s glorious echoing rhythms on the daf (a Middle Eastern frame drum resembling an Irish bodhrán) provide extra menacing power.
Italian ballad Pizzica di San Vito and opera aria Black Swan fit seamlessly into the mix, and for an album recorded in only five days, it wallops with impact. Giddens is going supernova, and it’s a blistering thing”.
I shall leave things there, but I would encourage people to do some research and read more about Rhiannon Giddens and her story. Her music is incredible and, whilst I have included a selection of my favourite tracks (of hers), do some deeper digging and you will be hooked. Giddens, in my view, is definitely…
AN icon of modern music.