“They tried to keep her down
but there was nothing they could do”
You can hear an audio version of this post here.
Today’s song is We Could Fly written by Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell and it’s on Rhiannon’s 2017 album Freedom Highway. A North American from North Carolina, she is a singer, a banjo player, a fiddle player, a songwriter, a composer (and, judging from her social media, quite a cook too). You can hear the song here.
It may be that the starting point for this month’s project was ‘songs I heard at Montrose Folk Club 2004-18’ but when it came to gathering the songs I let the net spread a little wider than that. My justification is that going to the club when we moved to Montrose in 2004 led me to explore other folkie avenues and lots of other music. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I started listening to folk music radio shows and, in the case of this artist, I think I first heard her on a radio programme about the Cambridge Folk Festival* (that’s Cambridge, England). At that time Rhiannon Giddens was in the band the Carolina Chocolate Drops (she is one of the founding members). Looking online I think I must have heard them first in 2010.
From the very first listen, I loved the Carolina Chocolate Drops because their music was so vibrant and full. I guess they were touring their 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig (though that was the year my Mum died so I lost track of dates and record releases for a while). The line-up of the band changed over the years and you can read a 2014 interview where Rhiannon talks about the band and all the different members here. The older attendees at our local folk club loved the American music** they knew but, without much background in that, it was the newer releases that lit a fire for me (seeing Crooked Still in 2007 - I wrote about that here - and then hearing the Carolina Chocolate Drops a few years later). Both bands were shaking up what you might call American folk music in some way, it seemed – loving it but shaking it up all the same.
Some time later (I suppose in 2012) I got the Carolina Chocolate Drops 2012 album Leaving Eden and was drawn more and more to the band’s songs and Rhiannon’s voice (and in particular the song Country Girl, written by Rhiannon Giddens, Lalenja Harrington and Adam Matta). I listened to it over and over and was very pleased when her solo material (with more vocals!) was announced. She often talks and writes about the banjo, particularly the history of the instrument, its role in American music, the way the latter was split artificially along racial lines (as in, you people can have bluegrass and you people can have blues) and there are links to various interviews with her and talks she has given here, here and here. As for her singing, it is so strong, varied, careful and passionate – a voice like no one else’s. You might already know this but she trained as an opera singer, and just last week she was singing in Porgy and Bess in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 2016 she became the first American to be named Folk Singer of the Year at the (UK) BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. She can do anything!
I got her first solo album Tomorrow is My Turn as soon as it came out in 2015 (and loved it). Produced by T Bone Burnett, it is powerful interpretations of a really interesting mix of songs (songs by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Elizabeth Cotton, Dolly Parton, Geeshie Wiley, Charles Aznavour, some trad songs and only the final track Angel City written by the artist herself). Also, interestingly, considering she’s such a banjo enthusiast, it is lighter on that instrument than some releases (and there is none played by her, not according to the sleeve notes anyway, she is credited with arranging and vocals). To be honest I hadn’t noticed that before – I guess I was distracted by the singing and the songs (and maybe that was the aim of the album).
For the 2017’s Freedom Highway she has a writing credit on 9 of the 12 songs (including the co-write on today’s song) and she co-produced the album (also with Dirk Powell). At the start of this clip Rhiannon talks about writing the song We Could Fly with Dirk and there is a Scottish link as he is in Glasgow in early February 2022 for a Celtic Connections gig with Heidi Talbot (who sang here on Day 4). He has produced Heidi’s upcoming album so I am very much looking forward to hearing that. A multi-instrumentalist, Dirk Powell has his own studio in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana (we loved it there when we did a North American road trip in 2011). There’s a review of his most recent album Everything is Alright (here) and it features amazing musicians and singers, including Rhiannon Giddens, John McCusker and Donald Shaw (for the full list, see here). So far my favourite tracks, all written or co-written by Dirk Powell, are The Bright Light of Day, Say Old Playmate, the lovely Cajun sounds of Les Yeux de Rosalie (that one a co-write with Michael McGoldrick) and the very fine I Ain’t Playing Pretty Polly (with the lyrics “No more tales of women killed by drunken violent men/They don’t deserve their stories told, I won’t raise my voice again/I ain’t playing Pretty Polly anymore”). The last one reminds me of a piece I read by Karine Polwart not long back about Scottish Folk Tradition of Ballads About Violence Against Women (you can read it here). As we heard from Martin Carthy (via Chumbawamba on Day 24) “You should never try and freeze music…”. Well, yes, and for so many reasons. And as Karine writes at the end of her article “There’s work to do”.
The Rhiannon Giddens album Freedom Highway is a fantastic piece of work in so many senses (deep sadness, huge highs, old sounds made so very new, old stories told with new urgency) and it weaves its way around so many styles. I love the whole album but listening to it again recently I particularly loved the swing of The Love that We Almost Had. We were lucky enough to catch the tour for this excellent set of songs in November 2017 at the Glasgow Concert Hall. I’ve seen events there that haven’t really filled the space but Rhiannon and the amazing band raised the roof (the band was Hubby Jenkins, Dirk Powell, Jason Sypher, Jamie Dick, Lalenja Harrington, Justin Harrington and Alphonso Horne). It was simply one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen. Rhiannon was barefoot and glorious and by the end we were so enraptured that if she’d asked us all to follow her out into the centre of Glasgow I would gladly have followed her, wherever she was going.
Image from Freedom Highway CD sleeve
Rhiannon has put out a couple of albums since this one (both with Francesco Turrisi – 2019’s There Is No Other and 2021’s They’re Calling Me Home) and worked on other projects (as part of the group Our Native Daughters with Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell). Still, it was a song from Freedom Highway that just called to me for this month. We Could Fly is a song to break your heart but at the same time it feels hopeful. I think it is about remembering history but also letting people who lived through slavery be remembered for more than just their enslavement. The song is being made into a children’s book.
Last year (Jan 2021) we watched the online Celtic Connections event with Rhiannon and Francesco. It was quite a different experience to the live in-person show we saw in 2017 (what with the pandemic, the distance, the sad songs somehow seemed sadder than ever) and yet still it filled me with something like joy. The best artists do that – they keep us going artistically, emotionally, philosophically. And we are grateful!
Back to Scotland tomorrow, in fact it’s Scotland all the way from here on in.
*I might be wrong about that (it might have been a radio programme from Glasgow’s Celtic Connections) but I think it was Cambridge. Fun fact – Rhiannon Giddens guest-curated the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2018.
**I didn’t see many US artists at the folk club in Montrose (probably more Canadians, some Australians, an Italian… ) but of the acts I saw there one of my favourites was Jeff Warner. He didn’t do original songs at all but had such a lovely, simple touch on the old songs and we’ve never stopped listening to his albums. Other faves I’ve mentioned already elsewhere were two duos: Mollie O’Brien and Rich Moore, and Dana and Susan Robinson (see Day 13). Also there’s an American who lives in Edinburgh (Cera Impala) who I saw at the club in a couple of different forms (as Cera Impala and the New Prohibition and in a duo called Delightful Squalor with Lake Montgomery). Cera is another banjo player and they were great shows both times (in fact the Delightful Squalor show in Sept 2018 was my last visit to Montrose Folk Club – end of an era! Well, for me anyway ...).
This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022’s Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.
If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).
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