RHIANNON GIDDENS
discovered the truth about american folk music – namely, the erasure of key black contributions from its official lineage – she went into battle, armed with a banjo, a voice like silver and a passion for all things roots. Can she rewrite history? Just try
The greatest singer in roots music is also its most surprising storyteller: “Imagine realising that what you had been told your entire childhood was not true.”
In the living room of rhiannon giddens’ house, a new build down a quiet suburban street in limerick, a lute and a banjo battle for floor space with all manner of children’s toys. the greensboro, north Carolina-born singer and musician is in the kitchen, serving up the vegetable soup and hummus she has just made. and she needs to get our interview completed before it is time to pick up her six-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter from their gaelic language primary school.
giddens has split from her former husband and the father of her children, the irish musician and piano technician michael laffan, but the two remain close friends and he lives five minutes away. With her new partner, the italian early music scholar and jazz pianist francesco turrisi, giddens has just released career-best album There Is No Other: a starkly beautiful collection of traditional ballads, arias and original material that sits in the gothic shadows of opera, folk and jazz. she seems the archetype of the busy single mum, juggling childcare and hummus-making duties with releasing two albums and writing an opera in this year alone. and on top of all this she is on a one-woman mission to reclaim country and bluegrass, generally seen as the whitest musical forms of them all, as cornerstones of african-american culture.
“imagine realising that what you had been told your entire childhood
was actually not true,” says giddens on her discovery, aged 23, that the roots of countr y lay not only in appalachian hillbillies adapting irish and scottish folk music, but in the black string bands that played for balls and parties through the south in the 18th and 19th centuries. “it was a mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting moment. and then i thought: oh my god. What else haven’t they told us?”
The big moment Came for giddens in 2005, at a festival called the black banjo now & then gathering in boone, north Carolina. it was there she met Joe thompson, a black fiddle player and the last sur viving member of the string band tradition, which led to the formation of her revivalist black string band the Carolina Chocolate drops and an ongoing quest to uncover the hidden history of african american music. to really understand giddens’ unique musical position, however, you have to go back to her childhood. the daughter of a black mother and a white father who divorced when she was a baby, she and her elder sister lalenja were brought up by their maternal grandparents until giddens was eight.
“my grandparents lived in the countryside and they liked jazz, blues, old time music,” says giddens. “they were rural black southerners who watched [wacky country music variety show] hee haw every saturday night. but then i moved into town with my
dad, and he was a guitarist who liked all the folk revival stuff: Donovan; Peter, Paul And Mary. You become a teenager and buy your first CD, and I think mine was They Might Be Giants because I liked lyric-driven, wordy stuff. Countr y came in, mainly in the ’90s, when women reigned. You had Mary Chapin Carpenter, Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton doing bluegrass… this was when I went to a math, science and technology high school. I was a nerd!”
Bizarrely, given her rootsy leanings, Giddens went on to study opera at Oberlin college in Ohio. By her own admission she was hardly an expert – she arrived at college with a Yo-Yo Ma CD and two opera compilations – but was attracted to the form because she wanted to sing but hated the idea of having to talk on-stage, as you generally have to do in musical theatre, folk, country and pop.
“In opera they just sing all the time,” she reasons. “So I turned up to college, going, ‘Yeah, Hay-den is really cool…’ I was actually on track to make something of myself at Oberlin. I did five operas and three main roles, but by the time I graduated I was burned out. I thought: What am I offering this world that a million other sopranos can’t do better?”
Back home in Greensboro, Giddens chanced upon a compilation of black string band music on Old Hat Records, a label specialising in pre-war American vernacular music. She learned about a Wilmington, North Carolinabased musician called Frank Johnson, a fiddle prodigy born enslaved to a plantation family in the late 18th century. When Johnson was liberated in the 1830s he formed a band with his wife and children, played at the grandest balls of the South, and marched with Confederate regiments during the Civil War. Johnson became the first Southern black celebrity; according to a newspaper report of the time, his funeral in 1871 brought the biggest procession the city of Wilmington had ever seen. But he died before the birth of the recording industry, and after a racial massacre in Wilmington in 1898 decimated the city’s black middle classes and the people who might have remembered him, Johnson was, by the beginning of the 20th century, a forgotten figure.
With money saved from singing arias at local Italian restaurant the Marconi Grill, Giddens bought a fiddle. She learned, after reading a book called African Banjo Echoes In Appalachia by Cecelia Conway and contacting its author, that Joe Thompson, Frank Johnson’s last inheritor, was still alive.
“Joe was a nice old geezer,” says Giddens of the old-time fiddle player who died in 2012, aged 93. “Mainly he was excited that black people wanted to play his music, because none of his family wanted to pick it up. People in the white community valued what he did and thank the Lord for them, so he was used to people learning from him who were all white. Suddenly three black kids start showing up every Thursday night at his house in Mebane, wanting to play the same 10 tunes over and over again.”
Those three black kids were Giddens, Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson, AKA the Carolina Chocolate Drops. They revived Johnson’s repertoire on debut album Dona Got A RamblinÕ Mind, scored a hit with an old-timey cover of R&B singer Blu Cantrell’s spurned lover classic Hit ’Em Up Style, and generally shook up the staid Americana scene simply by being black.
“I like to think the Chocolate Drops took off because people came for the spectacle and stayed for the show,” says Giddens on the band’s surprise success. “It started off as, ‘Black people playing banjos, whaaat?’ But we were entertainers and historians, and traditionalists in that we respected old people. We put the hours in with Joe, which is how you apprentice. There really was a power in being in that band.”