“IT DRIVES ME CRAZY. THE LARGEST BLACK AUDIENCE I PLAYED TO OUTSIDE A SCHOOL WAS AT SING SING PENITENTIARY.”
Rhiannon Giddens
hip-hop so the black press wouldn’t cover it. I would say my impact on the black community is nil, apart from on a few weirdoes like me. I have a handful of black people coming up to me after shows, admitting they are closet country fans. The hard thing for me is that Beyoncé taps into the black Zeitgeist, that’s great, she does her thing, but the only way to be black is to be like Beyoncé? Bullshit!”
I ask Giddens what she means. “I know the history of black people in the USA,” she replies, getting increasingly heated. “There are lots of ways to be an authentic black person. Justin from the Chocolate Drops is from Gaston County in North Carolina, he keeps hunting dogs and he has a mum who was an opera singer. Black people have been singing classical music and doing ballet forever. That is the thing I can’t seem to crack. Do I have to get with some famous hip-hop artist and make a breakthrough track with a banjo to get anywhere in that world?”
Giddens has actually played with a hip-hop artist, her nephew Justin Harrington, AKA Demeanor. “But he also plays banjo because he’s been going to the folk festivals since he was five,” she says. “He goes to his black friends and they say, ‘You play the banjo? What the hell!?’ Then he goes to the folk festivals and they say, ‘You’re a rapper? What the hell!?’ It comes from both sides. Hip-hop is folk music, but it is not seen that way. It has been commercialised, but Peter, Paul And Mary were commercial. They were put together to sell records and make a lot of money.”
Then there’s the recent instance of country pop smash hit Old Town Road by Lil Nas X, which was kept off the Billboard country chart for not being sufficiently ‘country’. “Pissed me off!” shouts Giddens. “Lil Nas X is a black guy who came up with this song, it went to the top of the country charts, they took it off because it wasn’t country enough, and you listen to it and say: exactly how does this sound different from 80 per cent of the commercial pop country? You have a video of a black man in a cowboy hat and all of a sudden I hear white people talking about cultural appropriation. I’m like, y’all motherfuckers need to get your shit straight. There were lots of black cowboys. They just got written out of history.”
This might make Giddens sound like she’s on an all-out crusade to represent the forgotten face of Black American history, which isn’t exactly the case. “Often I’m standing in a room full of white people and I’m thinking: I have to represent. I have to say something profound. That is why they hired me, to be the serious black person who speaks about serious black stuff. But sometimes I wish I could just say, ‘Man, I really like this country music because it reminds me of when I was four.’”
ALL OF GIDDENS’ MUSICAL AND CULTURAL journeys so far soak into There Is No Other, and in Turrisi she found a professional and romantic partner whose obsessions mirror her own. A Sicilian transplanted to Turin in the Italian north, he studied jazz piano at The Hague, took a supplementary degree in early music, and found that the Arabic influence on European music was far stronger than generally acknowledged. Eight years ago he read an article on the Chocolate Drops and wanted to meet Giddens, and after being connected by the cellist Kate Ellis (who plays on the record), the pair car ved out time in August 2018 at Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin. Giddens’ regular producer Joe Henry flew over, and with very little forward planning the whole album was recorded live, over five days, capturing a moment in time. Giddens came up with Ten Thousand Voices, the haunting lament opening the album, on the spot.
“Every project has its own spirit,” says Giddens of There Is No Other. “The spirit of this record was going in without knowing what
would happen, and Francesco is the only person who could have met me the way he did. We both have the vernacular and classical ability on our instrument, which for him is the piano and for me is the voice. He has the folk instruments in his European tradition, like the tamburello, frame drum and lute, and I have the banjo and violin in mine. I’m no Béla Fleck on the banjo but what I do on it is deep enough for the instrument to have its own thing, and it is the same with him. Meeting someone from across the ocean allowed us to be completely ourselves. That album is ever ything I have in one.”
Giddens has squeezed in other projects too. Earlier this year she released an album with Our Native Daughters, a band of four black banjo-playing women; two years previously she took a part in Nashville, the popular TV series about the lives of two semi-competing female country singers. She plays a mystical figure who appears before one of the leads after a plane crash and imparts sage advice.
“I would not have watched it had I not been in it,” says Giddens, of her foray into TV drama. “Still, I got to bring the banjo in and we recreated the Chocolate Drops on screen, which was fabulous.”
Giddens and Turrisi wrote the music for Lucy Negro, Redux, a ballet about a black woman in 16th century London who may have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets, which was staged by the Nashville Ballet earlier this year. She is also working on an opera about Omar ibn Said, a Senegalese Koranic scholar who was sold into slavery in the early 1800s, escaped, ended up in a North Carolina jail and became a local celebrity after writing and publishing his biography in Arabic. Too busy, in other words, to get out to the pubs and join in with the music of her neighbours in Limerick, although her daughter is learning tin whistle and fiddle. Time away from music is spent washing, cooking, being a mum.
“Having my kids is challenging but humanising,” she says. “When you spend half the year on tour, living out of hotel rooms, it’s good to remember what normal life is like. And the kids don’t care.”
They must be a bit pleased to have a mother who, for want of a better phrase, does cool stuff?
“My daughter is kind of aware of what I do,” Giddens concludes. “But mostly it’s a case of, ‘Mum, can you make that bread again?’”