Rhiannon Giddens, Freedom Highway

★★★☆☆

Download: At The Purchaser’s Option; Julie; Birmingham Sunday; Freedom Highway

On Freedom Highway, Rhiannon Giddens animates black American history – notably, the arduous journey from slavery to civil rights – in songs which pair her strong, sonorous delivery with arrangements echoing pre-blues minstrel music. The dry plunk of banjo, scrape of fiddle and thud of drum bring a weathered patina of authenticity to acts of imaginative engagement such as “At The Purchaser’s Option”, prompted by a period advert characterising a female slave’s child almost as a free gift, and “Julie”, a narrative of passive resistance in which a slave, asked to help her mistress save her riches as the Union army approaches, rejects the request on the grounds that the wealth was only obtained by the sale of her children. Elsewhere, the arrangements are further fleshed out with frisky horns, and the organ and piano bringing a suitably congregational ambience to “Birmingham Sunday”, Richard Farina’s song about the 1963 church bombing, set here to the traditional folk melody “The False Bride”.