Rhiannon Giddens wears many hats: singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and historian. Her recent show at The Anthem with the Old-Revue allowed her to show them all off, entertaining the audience while educating about America’s folk music traditions and engaging with issues of race and class.
Originally, the show was scheduled to take place at The Kennedy Center, but it was moved after the shake-up there initiated by President Trump. As Giddens explained, she’s not afraid of this administration — there’s a real grit and toughness to Rhiannon — but she wanted her audience to feel welcome at the show. Fortunately, The Anthem was available and eager to host her on May 11; otherwise, she said, “There would’ve been a different conversation.”
With one of the great voices in contemporary popular music, Giddens’s singing is always a joy to listen to. She studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, but after graduating, gravitated the world of old-time string music, specifically the African American tradition in Appalachia. She learned at the feet of a musical elder, Joe Thompson, which led to the formation of the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Her most recent release, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, finds her reuniting with one of her old bandmates, Justin Robinson, who appeared with her Sunday night. He was part of an excellent cast of players, which included Dirk Powell. Powell is not a household name, but he’s a significant figure in roots music: He’s a four-time Grammy winner, and he was Joan Baez’s musical director for the last leg of her performing career. He’s also an accomplished songwriter and significant figure in the revival of Cajun music. The evening was also a family affair: Rhiannon’s nephew, who goes by the stage name Demeanor, open the show with Powell’s daughter, Amelia, both of whom joined the band for the main set.
And what a set it was, reaching across time and space, with songs in several languages — English, French, and African tongues — and including both traditional and contemporary music, drawing on blues, folk, and country. We got songs from Elizabeth Cotten (“Freight Train” and “Shoot That Buffalo”), Ola Belle Reed (“High on a Mountain”), Merle Haggard (“Somewhere Between,” sung by Amelia), originals by Rhiannon and Dirk (the harrowing “At The Purchaser’s Option,” recorded as part of the Our Native Daughters project, and “Red Bird Road,” respectively), the traditional Congolese ballad “Pipi Danga” (sung by Justin in Linga), a Cajun waltz (“Quio Fare,” by Canray Fontenot”), an instrumental by Etta Barker (“Marching Jaybird”), and more.
Watch Rhiannon Giddens perform “At The Purchaser’s Option” live for Augusta Vocal Week on YouTube:
Throughout the show, Rhiannon emphasized the historical and social context of this music. As Demeanor said at the beginning of evening, “Folk music is just the music of the people.” It’s the music of working people and the underclass, people just trying to survive tough times and conditions. And it’s grounded in communities — much of this music, as she said, was made for social events like square dances. (I tried square dancing once, but I’m not very coordinated, so it was more of a parallelogram or a rhombus.)
Giddens also talked about how this music creates connections across the distances of centuries and across oceans, between continents. In researching the origins of African American string music, she traveled to Africa, where she discovered the ties between the music of that continent and the enslaved in America, like the clear similarities between the American slave tune “Pompeii Ran Away” and “Papa Linga.”
Music can uplift us: not just the songs but coming together in one place to appreciate it together. Giddens reminded us that, while we may be going through some rough times right now, they pale in comparison to what her ancestors — and most of ours — went through. I once heard a Nashville songwriter say that her problems are mostly the same as her great-grandparents, and it struck me as a crazy thing to say my own. My paternal great-grandparents emigrated to this country from the Pale of Settlement, fleeing the pogroms in what is now Ukraine. My great-grandfather, a cobbler, spoke only Yiddish, except for the words “hello” and “goodbye,” and had at least 10 kids — the records are so messy and the family was so secretive, I’ll never know if that was the actual number. My dad’s father slept in a chair growing up, and that was on the nights he was lucky. As someone said to me once, “They were tougher than we are.”
Being able to enjoy this amazing music in a wonderful venue like The Anthem is a privilege, and I don’t take it lightly. It was food for both the heart and the mind.
