MUSIC
Rhiannon sings for modern folk
Although nominated for two awards, Rhiannon Giddens didn’t go to the Grammys last Sunday. The North Carolina folk singer was busy filming series five of Nashville. In the US TV show, she has a recurring role as a banjowielding social worker. The 39-year-old also adds, quite frankly, that going to the Grammys ‘is just too damned expensive’.
‘I have two kids, I’m working on the show. It’s really expensive to go, especially for a chick,’ she laughs.
‘You’ve got to get the hair and the make-up done and the dress and all that. I’m jazzed that I got two nominations but I’m really focused on this record.’
The record in question is Freedom Highway. It is one which could become her career-defining release. The vagaries of the Grammys meant that she was nominated for an EP called Factory Girl which was actually released in 2015. If there is any justice Freedom Highway will be showered with nominations in 2018 or 2019 or whenever they deem it eligible.
The singer also performs with the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops. She has written most of the songs on her second solo album and covered others that speak of the experiences of African-Americans, especially women, through the generations and which has particularly powerful resonance in 21stCentury America.
‘I’ve been working on these songs for quite some time. But they didn’t fit in with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and I didn’t offer them up for (her debut solo album) Tomorrow Is My Turn because that didn’t seem the right place for them either. It was about giving a voice to the voiceless; the women in slave-era America and what they had to go through.’
She is well known as a great interpreter of other people’s work but though she covers tracks by the Staple Singers (Freedom Highway) and Birmingham Sunday, most famously performed by Joan Baez, she says these weren’t the jumping-off points for the project.
‘My own songs, which speak of things going on now and the ones which were recounting slave narratives were the core of the project,’ she says.
‘The songs you mention were the connections. People always asked me when I was going to start writing songs and put them on an album. Well here they are and here it is. Dirk (Powell, coproducer) had played with Joan Baez for eight years and he said that she spoke about when she went down to Birmingham right after the massacre in the church there in 1963. I wrote a song about the Charleston massacre in 2015 when Dylann Roof went in and killed all those folk in the black church there. The connections between the past and recently was just so marked to me.’
Rhiannon contends that she will have mixed emotions if Freedom Highway is seen as a political album. ‘It annoys me that when an artist starts talking about the human condition people call it politics,’ she says.
‘I’m just talking about things that happened in this country (the US). Commercial art is a relatively new thing. It used to be about artists, minstrels talking about the things that couldn’t be spoken of. At the same time I’m not afraid that people will call it a political album. I’ve been in the trenches for over ten years.
‘It began with the Chocolate Drops. I was playing the banjo and you have to know that the history of the banjo begins in slavery. I wasn’t suddenly inspired by what was going on; this is just a natural progression.’
She says that being married to an Irish man, musician Michael Laffan, she is well aware of the parallels between the experiences of African-Americans and that of Irish people. She also feels that it is too simplistic to suggest that the historic Obama presidency being followed by a potentially reactionary, regressive Trump incumbency will impact negatively on African-Americans.
‘Just because we had a black president, it doesn’t mean things became suddenly progressive,’ she says. ‘As we saw, racists really started coming out in force. I think the rock has been turned over.
‘What started to come out in terms of racism during the Obama era will now be rampant and unfettered. But what gives me hope and keeps me positive is that reasonable people who might have been inactive now want to get educated to become engaged with the political process.
‘We all need to become a community – not just because it is the right thing to do but also to take care of each other. Whatever I can do as an artist to facilitate that is what I’m going to do.’
Rhiannon Giddens – Freedom Highway which will be released on Friday is on Nonesuch Records. Rhiannon Giddens plays Whelan’s, Dublin, on April 3.
‘Just because we had a black president, it doesn’t mean things became suddenly progressive’