At a time when the powers that sadly be in America are trying their damnedest to erase and rewrite history, the latest release from Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson is a welcome reminder of the rich culture of the Black community and how much it has given to the world. Twenty years after the Carolina Chocolate Drops emerged from the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, two of its founding members get together once more for a collection that comes quite literally from the back porches and orchards amid the low rolling hills of the Piedmont, a discrete province of the Appalachians.
A story of “music, place and tradition”, as ethnomusicologist Joe Z Johnson writes in one section of the album’s erudite (and footnoted) liner notes, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow: Fiddle and Banjo Music of North Carolina captures the prolific Giddens and Robinson in the historic homes of Joe Thompson and Etta Baker, both distinguished old-time musicians from the Piedmont who lived well into their nineties. Joe was one of the last African-American fiddle and banjo players raised amid the centuries-old Black community, where both Giddens and Robinson began visiting him after they’d met at Boone in 2005. It was from those encounters that the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops emerged, bringing Thompson’s music to the wider world. Giddens and the band changed the way the banjo – so often derided as an instrument of blackface minstrelsy – was perceived and appreciated. A renaissance had begun.
The 18 tracks recorded here capture the sounds of the Piedmont’s “rich sonic ecosystem” – including sounds of birds and cicadas – as Giddens and Robinson sit face to face playing and singing into acoustic microphones, making music as people have done for generations. (Be sure to check out the video.) They are joined occasionally by Justin Harrington on bones. Many of the numbers were taught to Giddens by Johnson; the others are old local tunes crafted with “the lifeblood of the Thompson family tradition”. This was the sort of material Alan and John Lomax were collecting for the Library of Congress back in the 1930s and, in the 1960s, many of the musicians who played for them came north to play for much larger audiences at the Newport Folk Festivals. Pete Seeger, whose life’s mission it became to bring the five-string banjo out of the backwoods and have people play and appreciate it, performed and recorded many of the tunes – “Old Joe Clark” and “John Henry” for example - showcased here.
The playing is down-homey yet virtuosic, as is expected of these two accomplished and ever-curious musicians. Their business here is “Black community caretaking” of a family’s musical traditions, an honouring of “the Black banjo bodylands… the deep connection between banjos, land, and the Black musicians who breathe life into them.” Too bad so many people in Washington are deaf to it all.
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