Rhiannon Giddens & the Old Time Revue
The most surprising thing about Rhiannon Giddens’ Old Time Revue wasn’t that Justin Robinson – Giddens’ collaborator on her recently released album of traditional North Carolina fiddle and banjo tunes – was part of the band, but rather that he was more of a featured sideman. The core of the group performing that night was multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell and bassist Jason Sypher, who have been touring with Giddens since the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the band she founded with Robinson back in late 2005, broke up. And although it was clear that it was Giddens’ show, she made ample use of the myraid talents she had assembled onstage, performing songs in Acadian French and Yoruba (among others), in styles from old-time to new fangled.
The show – at Thalia Hall in Chicago this past Friday night – confounded my expectations from the start. No opening act was listed on the bill, but it opened with a three song mini-set from Justin “Demeanor” Harrington and Amelia Rose Powell. Demeanor (the name he used onstage) and Amelia, we learned later in the performance, are, respectively, Giddens’ nephew and Dirk Powell’s daughter. Amelia played a standard acoustic guitar throughout the night, but Demeanor would play banjo, bones, and, at one point in the opening segment, an electric guitar in conjunction with a looping station. The use of electronics brought jam bands to mind, a musical reference I was not necessarily looking for in that context. But I breathed a sigh of relief shortly thereafter, as Rhiannon Giddens took the stage and delivered a faithful rendition of Elizabeth Cotton’s classic “Freight Train,” accompanied by Dirk Powell’s elegant finger-picking guitar.
The first time I saw Giddens’ play was with the Chocolate Drops back in 2013, at the band shell in Chicago’s Millennium Park. The group at that time featured Dom Flemons and Hubby Jenkins, both brilliant performers in their own right. One of the stand out performances that night was when Giddens sang a song in Scots dialect Gaelic, such as one might have heard in the mountains of North Carolina in the 18th century, where many of the early settlers came from the Scottish countryside as a result of the Acts of Enclosure. It was clear that night that, although the group’s repertoire was traditional American folk music, Giddens was already straining the limitations of the genre.
Some years later, after the breakup of the Chocolate Drops, I discovered her podcast Aria Code, in which she dissected arias from classic operas (another genre of which I am enamored). Through that I learned that she had majored in classical vocal performance at Oberlin College, a field of study that would have required her to sing in various languages (Italian and German particularly). When she met Robinson and Dom Flemons at a gathering of Black banjo players in 2005, it would seem she was in search of a project that would engage her extraordinary talents. The Carolina Chocolate Drops would go on to win Grammy Awards and garner widespread critical acclaim, and establish Giddens as among the foremost traditional musicians in the US.
So, when she brought Robinson onstage for her second song of the evening, a spirited rendition of a dance tune they’d learned from an elder Black banjoist by the name of Joe Thompson, it felt like something of a reunion. Until that moment, it had not been clear that Robinson would be there at all, as his name did not appear on the billing, and we (my partner and I, that is) were tremendously excited by his appearance onstage. This was the music we had come to hear – amped-up, stripped-down, rip-roaring old-time fiddle and banjo tunes, and they did not disappoint. For all her versatility, Giddens is clearly rooted in North Carolina old-time music, and is at her very best when playing it. Having grounded the performance in old-time, Giddens brought out the rest of the group for another North Carolina classic: Ola Belle Reed’s “High On the Mountain,” a song made sepia toned by its lonesome, wistful lyric and modal harmonies. The set then took a detour into Louisiana, as Dirk Powell took the lead on the first of several Cajun songs we would hear that night.
Powell, it turns out, married into a storied family of Cajun musicians, and is a longtime member of his spouse’s group, Balfa Toujours. He played the button accordian for the Cajun songs, singing in Acadian French and adding a distinctly swampy flavor to the night’s performance. He played banjo and fiddle as well during the set, showing remarkable proficiency on each instrument and as a singer. But perhaps most notable of all his many talents, he was able to share the stage with Giddens without ever taking the spotlight from her.
And it was Powell who contributed the story which stuck with me afterwards. While introducing the Merle Haggard song “Somewhere between me and you,” featuring Amelia on the lead vocal, he recalled an interaction between Haggard and Joan Baez from the decade or so he spent as the latter’s touring one-man band. Baez asked Haggard about his infamous “Okie from Muskogee,” which he explained had been written as a joke and that they were “high as hell” during its writing (the song opens with a line about not smoking marijuana). And I wanted to say in response “but that’s not how his audience took it.”
It was striking to me that Powell told a story that underlined a kind of ironic distance between a songwriter and his audience during a show that celebrated the authenticity of its music. I sincerely doubt Haggard ever thought of his audiences as fools, or his songwriting as a mere vehicle for commercial success. That a sophisticated 21st century Chicago audience would think of 1970’s era Merle Haggard fans as a horde of unreconstructed country bumpkins seems altogether reasonable to me. And I sometimes wonder if such an attitude is itself foolish.
What makes for popular music is a funny thing. Giddens at one point informed us that, until recently, her top two songs on Spotify were a pair of tracks she created for the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. This was before playing her current top track on Spotify, “Ole Corn Liquor,” which appears on the soundtrack of the hit film Sinners. Another wild and woolly old-time number, Powell broke 2 strings while playing it, prompting Giddens to tell us afterwards that she had broken a banjo string on the same number only the night before. The first banjo string she had ever broken onstage.
A while later in the night Giddens told what was easily the best story of the evening when she introduced a new version of a tune from the Chocolate Drops days: “Negro Jig.” The tune came from an 18th century French book of dance tunes, but she had played it once for a Congolese musician friend of hers, who remarked “that sounds like a song from when I was growing up.” He sang the song for her, and there was, indeed, a remarkable likeness to the melody. And when asked for a translation of the lyric, her friend said the words were “my mother says not to go outside because my friends will sell me to strangers.” There was an audible gasp in the audience when she said that. And then she sang the song in its original language – an astonishingly cheerful piece of music given its dark subject matter.
The set closed with an original extending the theme of African-American bondage, Giddens swaying in rhythm with her face set in deadly seriousness, followed by another raucous old-time dance number – she quipped in between the two songs, “we’re not going to leave you like that” – that closed with her flatfoot dancing at the side of the stage, a sight that elicited whoops of joy. The six musicians locked arms centerstage and took two (maybe three?) bows before meandering offstage to thundering applause.
And then they came back a minute later for an encore, because of course they did. Before treating us to another original song, this one inspired by the Virginia Hamilton’s well-loved collection of African-American folk tales, “The People Could Fly,” Giddens gave a little speech about the need to support musicians, especially younger, up-and-coming artists. “Things are always different,” she said, “but this is about structures set up to extract what’s in our souls…everything is flowing into the tech oligarchy.” It was a brave thing to say, and sent the show off with a kind of moral urgency along with the hopeful message of her song “We could fly.”
Giddens is an extraordinary artist who has dedicated herself to the celebration of the ordinary. Coming away from the show I was reminded of some of my favorite artists – Shane McGowan of the Pogues, who similarly spent his career writing and performing folk music of the very finest quality; or Hanif Abdurraqib, Giddens’ fellow MacArthur Genius Grant awardee, whose book “There’s Always This Year” a paean to community and finding a sense of home in wherever you are. Never one to stand in one place, Giddens has gathered musicians around her that allow her to go everywhere and anywhere she cares to go. And she is fearless in her explorations, because she is always rooted in tradition.
I look forward to seeing where she goes next.