OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS

SONGS OF OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS

SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS, 2019

With fellow songwriters Amythyst Kiah, Leyla Mccalla and Allison Russell, Giddens tackles themes of racism, slavery and identity through the historical experiences of black women in America I’d been talking to Smithsonian and they were telling me about wanting to take the label back to its roots and rejuvenating it. So they asked me if I thought there might be room for me to do something. I went to the NMAAHC, the African-american Museum in Washington DC, and started thinking of artefacts from the time period and going, ‘What if we started writing songs that pull from these sources of the time? And what can we do with this?’ Then it started heading towards women, then women of colour and that’s when it clicked: ‘Here’s the people I want to work with and they all happen to be black. This is a thing.’ These were all women that I’d worked with before in some shape or form. I couldn’t predict how well it was going to turn out, but it felt like it needed to be done. Leyla came into the Chocolate Drops at one point, but all my bands have really been male. It was a beautiful moment for all of us, because we were all kind of in the same situation; we’re all used to being the only one in whatever thing we were involved with – the raisin in the oatmeal, as we love to say. Ally was in a real dead-end place with her songwriting, so she was jumpstarted by it. She co-wrote a lot of the songs on the record and was on fire. We wrote “The Moon Meets The Sun” on the first day. After that it was, ‘OK, this is going to be cool.’ I like getting in there and just hitting it.