RHIANNON GIDDENS’ 21ST-CENTURY SOUND HAS A LONG HISTORY
Inspired by long-lost folk melodies, gospel, opera and bluegrass, the electrifying singer and banjo player gives fresh voice to old American traditions
By Justin Davidson
This is the story of a singer who grew up among white country folk outside Greensboro, North Carolina, cooing along to Lawrence Welk and giggling to “Hee Haw,” the cornhusk-flavored variety show with an all-white cast. Graced with an agile soprano voice, she studied opera at Oberlin College, then returned to her home state, took up contra dancing and Scottish song, studied Gaelic, and learned to play banjo and bluegrass fiddle. She married (and later separated from) an Irishman and is raising a daughter, Aoife, and a son, Caoimhín, in Limerick. Among her regular numbers is a cover of the 1962 weepie “She’s Got You” by Patsy Cline, the country music matriarch and onetime star of the Grand Ole Opry.
This is also the story of a singer who grew up on the black side of Greensboro, reading the activist poet Audre Lorde and harmonizing to R&B bands like the Manhattans. She started the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a black string band that won a Grammy for its album Genuine Negro Jig. She excavates forgotten songs by anonymous field hands and pays tribute to the pioneers of gospel. One of her regular numbers is “At the Purchaser’s Option,” a haunting ballad written in the voice of a mother waiting with her baby on the slave auction block. She often begins a set with a declaration by the poet Mari Evans: “I am a black woman."
And because this is America, those two singers are the same person: Rhiannon Giddens, an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black. She was born in 1977, in a South that was going through spasms of racial transformation. Her parents—a white father, David Giddens, and a black mother, Deborah Jam- ieson, both from Greensboro and both music enthusiasts with wide-ranging tastes—married ten years after the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and just three years after the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, making interracial marriage legal in every state. When her parents split, Rhiannon and her sister, Lalenja, shuttled back and forth between the two halves of their clan, who lived 20 miles apart in segregated Guilford County. The girls found that those worlds were not, after all, so distant. One grandmother fried okra in flour batter while the other used cornmeal. One parent fired up the record player to accompany a barbecue, the other broke out the guitar. But both families were country people who spoke with similar accents and shared a deep faith in education—and music.
This is also the story of a singer who grew up on the black side of Greensboro, reading the activist poet Audre Lorde and harmonizing to R&B bands like the Manhattans. She started the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a black string band that won a Grammy for its album Genuine Negro Jig. She excavates forgotten songs by anonymous field hands and pays tribute to the pioneers of gospel. One of her regular numbers is “At the Purchaser’s Option,” a haunting ballad written in the voice of a mother waiting with her baby on the slave auction block. She often begins a set with a declaration by the poet Mari Evans: “I am a black woman."
And because this is America, those two singers are the same person: Rhiannon Giddens, an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black. She was born in 1977, in a South that was going through spasms of racial transformation. Her parents—a white father, David Giddens, and a black mother, Deborah Jam- ieson, both from Greensboro and both music enthusiasts with wide-ranging tastes—married ten years after the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and just three years after the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, making interracial marriage legal in every state. When her parents split, Rhiannon and her sister, Lalenja, shuttled back and forth between the two halves of their clan, who lived 20 miles apart in segregated Guilford County. The girls found that those worlds were not, after all, so distant. One grandmother fried okra in flour batter while the other used cornmeal. One parent fired up the record player to accompany a barbecue, the other broke out the guitar. But both families were country people who spoke with similar accents and shared a deep faith in education—and music.
Read more here... via {smithsonian magazine}
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