Old-time musician-singer Rhiannon Giddens looks in new directions.
After nearly a decade as a vocalist, fiddler and banjo picker in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an acoustic band that plays old-time string-band music, much of it dating back a century, Rhiannon Giddens stepped out on her own in February with an album titled “Tomorrow Is My Turn.” Produced by T Bone Burnett, the boldly eclectic disc has received rave reviews and led to feature stories in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and appearances on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and “A Prairie Home Companion,” and at the White House.
“She’s poised to cross over,” Bonnie Raitt has said of the Greensboro, N.C.-born singer. “There’s nothing about her that wouldn’t appeal to anyone, in any genre.”
Varied arrangements
Giddens applies her ringing alto pipes on “Tomorrow Is My Turn” to 10 songs drawn from the repertoires of vocalists such as Dolly Parton, Odetta, Patsy Cline, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, Florence Quivar, Elizabeth Cotton, Jean Ritchie and the obscure 1930s blues singer Geeshie Wiley, plus one she wrote herself.
The arrangements vary greatly from track to track. An old-school-style soul horn section underscores the 1962 Cline hit “She’s Got You.” Charles Aznnavour’s “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” which Giddens learned from a 1965 recording by Simone, is rendered as an art song, complete with violin, viola and cello. And the folksong “Black Is the Color (Of My True Love’s Hair)” is propelled rhythmically by human beatboxer Adam Matta, a former member of the Chocolate Drops.
Eclecticism is nothing new to Giddens, who was exposed to a wide variety of music while growing up in Greensboro.
“My parents were hippies,” says Giddens, 38, by telephone from Albany, N.Y., during a rare day off on her debut solo tour, which began March 28 in Knoxville, Tenn., and ends Aug. 1 in Cambridge, England. “I listened to Peter, Paul and Mary, and I heard my dad singing a lot of Donovan, Cat Stevens and stuff like that. My uncle had a bluegrass band. I heard mass choirs on Sunday mornings and blues and jazz from my grandparents and watched ‘Hee Haw’ on Saturday nights. My mom would have Andres Segovia and Take 6. I kind of heard a bit of everything, except for old-time music.”
Giddens’ interest in old-time country music came in a rather roundabout way. While studying opera at Oberlin College in Ohio, she decided to attend what was advertised as an English country dance.
“I’m a big Jane Austen fan,” she explains, “and I went, ‘That’s what they do in the Jane Austen novels.’ So I went, and it was a contra dance. I loved it so much that I stayed, and I found the contra community in Oberlin. It was like New England music and Celtic music and stuff. I loved it.
“When I went back to North Carolina, I looked for contra dances in the area and found one in Winston-Salem. It was 80 percent old-time being played, and I went, ‘Ooh, I like this stuff.”
Drawn to banjo
She was particularly taken by the sound of the banjo in the band and became even more interested in the instrument upon learning that it is of Afri- can origin and that many African Americans had played it prior to the advent of white minstrels in blackface who helped give it a negative stereotype that persists.
Giddens plays neither banjo nor fiddle on “Tomorrow Is My Turn.” “I played on five Carolina Chocolate Drops albums,” she explains. “I’ve been a singer since I was 3 years old. I started playing banjo and fiddle when I
was in my mid-20s. The guys who T Bone hired for the record and the guys I brought (Matta and current Chocolate Drops multi-instrumentalist Hubby Jenkins) could play everything. It was nice to just sing for once. I enjoyed that.”
The singer is currently touring with the other three Chocolate Drops — Jenkins, multi-instrumentalist Rowan Corbett and cellist Malcom Parson — plus a bassist and drummer.
‘Loves swing jazz’
“We’re able to play everything from the record,” Giddens says, “and Malcolm’s soloing, where the fiddle would have a solo, is beautiful. Hubby loves swing jazz and knows all the jazz chords.”
“We’ll do a combined show in San Francisco,” she adds. “We’ll do some Chocolate Drop things and things from the record. Everywhere else, it’s been focused on my record, and we’ve thrown in a few Chocolate Drop things.”
When she’s not touring, Giddens divides her time between homes in North Carolina and Ireland.
She and her husband, Irish musician Michael Laffen, have two children — Aoife, 5, and Caoimhin, 2.
At Oberlin, Giddens had sung African American spirituals in a European classical manner. For her CD, however, she decided to do the spiritual “Round About the Mountain” differently.
“I brought in the sheet music, and I watched all these studio musicians go, ‘Listen to that chord progression.’ I was like, ‘Score. Oh, man, that’s awesome.’ The challenge was to take a spiritual that had been translated into classical style and then translate it back to vernacular and decide what voice to use to go with that arrangement.”
On April 14, Giddens participated, along with other singers — including Aretha Franklin, Shirley Caesar and Rance Allen — in a gospel concert in the “In Performance at the White House” series for President and Mrs. Obama and invited guests.
Harmonizing
She sang harmony with Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell and played a fiddle solo on an Appalachian-style treatment of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” and also delivered a rousing rendition of Tharpe’s “Up Above My Head,” a tune that appears on “Tomorrow Is My Turn.” Giddens was backed by a rhythm section put together for the occasion by drummer Bill Maxwell, as were most of the other performers.
“Only Aretha,” she says, “got to bring her own band.”
“I’ve been a singer since I was 3. I started playing banjo ... in my mid-20s” Rhiannon Giddens