Rhiannon Giddens: A global voice that resonates with curiosity and purpose in these troubled times

Rhiannon Giddens / there is no Other

When Rhiannon Giddens released her latest album, the intense and sparsely-arranged there is no Other – recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi – earlier this year, it “at once was a condemnation of ‘othering’ as well as a celebration of the spreading of ideas and connectivity and of a shared experience.”

Together, Giddens and Turrisi traced an overlooked movement of sounds originating from Africa and the Arabic world and found common ground in how those sounds influenced European and American music. The original songs which Giddens penned for there is no Other as well as interpretations of others such as Ola Belle Reed’s “I’m Gonna Write Me a Letter,” Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby” and the Italian traditional “Pizzica di San Vito,” collectively illustrate both her adoration of Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, opera and traditional Italian music and the commonality it brings to the human experience. Her interpretation of the gospel standard “Wayfaring Stranger” ranks up there with those of Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash.

It was in this spirit that I saw Giddens and Turrisi perform selections from there is no Other last week in the 450-seat Terrace Theater at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. It was the first time I had seen Giddens in concert. I hope it’s not the last.

Giddens, 42, is a celebrated Grammy Award-winning artist and MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient, who loves to dig through the past to reveal bold and candid truths about our present. The messages in her songs have drawn upon slave narratives as well as African American experiences, including the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and are often told from the point of view of black women’s suffering and resilience. In concert, Giddens painstakingly takes the time to weave her excellent storytelling skills to put each song into an historical context.

Giddens recently was featured in the Ken Burns Country Music documentary film series. In an interview with the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record, she said, “I have played country, I have sung country. I’ve listened to country or what we say is country. I’ve played a lot of music that has been funneled into what became country. I play music that country has been borrowed from.

“But it’s just a strand of what I do. You can’t box the music that I do. People ask me all the time, ‘What do you play?’ Well, I play American music. That includes what we would call country.”

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi

During her performance with Turrisi, the North Carolina-born Giddens sang in a beautiful contralto voice – she’s a conservatory-trained opera singer – and played a 1858 replica of a minstrel banjo as well as octave violin. Meanwhile, the jazz-inspired Turrisi performed on piano, accordion, frame drum, tamburello, banjo and colascione among many instruments.

Over the course of their two-hour show that was full of interplay between these two gifted musicians, Giddens and Turrisi criss-crossed cultures – African, Arabic, European and American – that reflected a wide global sensibility and brought together old and familiar – and new – stories. It was as if a music appreciation master class broke out extemporaneously. There’s a sense of curiosity and purpose in Giddens’ music that is both thoughtful and reflective – and, on this night last week, it was refreshing to hear it resonate clearly during these troubled times we live in.

Credits: Cover photo – courtesy of Google Images. Story photo – courtesy of rhiannongiddens.com. Video – courtesy of NPR Music.