Rhiannon Giddens: Black History Month Bonus

00:00:15Speaker 1: Pushkin.00:00:20Speaker 2: Hey there, We're halfway through Black History Month now, and although we didn't intend to rerun some of our older conversations to celebrate the month, after realizing we needed to do something to mark Usher's super Bowl performance and the release of the new Bob Marley biopick One Loove, we figured we might as well keep going and celebrate the whole month long, because now we have a country album from Beyonce on the way. Beyonce released two songs from her upcoming album the Night of the super Bowl, Sixteen Carriages and Texas Hold Them, to a rapturous response. Not only are the songs good, but they sparked a lot of meaningful conversations about the usefulness of genres, the way marketing shapes are listening and gatekeeping and music. Those are all things very close to Rhann and Giddon's heart. As a black banjo player steeped in the American tradition and its Transatlantic roots, She's been living this conversation her whole career. Randon also happens to play on the song Texas Hold Them with Beyonce, which just this week hit number one on the country chart, the first time a black woman has ever held that spot. She also played on sixteen carriages too. So let's flash back to when we had Rann an unbroken record back in twenty twenty one to speak with Bruce Headlam about her album They're calling Me Home. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age.00:01:38Speaker 1: I'm justin Ritchman.00:01:40Speaker 2: Here's Bruce Headlam with Ryann and Giddens from twenty twenty one.00:01:44Speaker 3: Thank you, first of all, so much for doing this. We're talking about your new album and your last album and anything else you want to talk about your ballet. You wrote a ballet too.00:01:55Speaker 1: Didn't you.00:01:56Speaker 4: Yeah, I wrote a ballet an opera.00:01:59Speaker 1: I didn't know about the opera. What was that?00:02:01Speaker 2: Well, it was.00:02:02Speaker 4: Opposed to debut last year, and then it was going to debut this year, and I was going to debut next year. But yeah, it's called Omar. It's for Leo Festival, and it's about Omari. Vin Said, who was a Quranic scholar thirty seven years old, captured, sold from Senegal, brought over on the Middle Passage and ended up enslaved for fifty years until his death in North Carolina. He wrote his autobiography in Arabic.00:02:28Speaker 1: Wow that sounds incredible.00:02:30Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just there's a lot of a lot of stories within that one story. So yeah, you know, this new record is almost all you know, old material, traditional traditional songs or songs that were written you know, in that style, but are recent and all of my original material has been gone into an opera the last couple of years. So I was like, well, hopefully people will be okay, there's it's not an original record. But you know, it's like, it's never.00:02:59Speaker 1: Been my bag anyway writing stuff.00:03:01Speaker 4: Well, it's not, it's not my it's not never been my focus. Like, if the story is told best through an original song, I'll do it. But I was an interpreter for years before I ever thought about writing songs. So I'm never sitting down going Okay, I need to write a new album. It's like, if there's no inspiration to write the song, and there often isn't because it's just there's so many great songs out there already, there's so much great music, so it has to be something. Really I feel like I can tell in a way that's you know, specific to me. That means, you know, I'm just not gonna write for the sake of writing.00:03:38Speaker 3: Was it hard for you to start writing having been an interpreter for so long.00:03:42Speaker 4: No, because I you know, I don't really write about myself. I've only written a couple of songs from my points of view, and they're not on any of my records. You know, I write from a cultural point of view, from other people's point of view, and those are the songs that, you know, when they started to come out, it was those kind of songs like Julie, like at the Purchaser's option, like you know, he's very specific, trying to highlight like black and mostly female voices. You know that I feel like need to be highlighted, and a lot of times they come through as real spiritual kind of events, you know. I mean I have written songs like I wrote usually with partners, like with people like I wrote all of my most of my Nashville songs with my songwriting partner from Louisiana, Derk Powell. You know that I could do. I was like, okay, like I can co write songs that I'm not connected to, like in a cultural way, you know, but just coming for me. I did one for NPR. It was like songs you know, coming out of the experiences of Lockdown, and it was I found it very torturous. Like, yeah, I was just like, who cares about what I'm feeling? Like, it's my feelings, and really, my life's not that bad. What's what do I need to say here? It was very It was a very interesting thing, and it just solidified what I do and what I don't do.00:05:15Speaker 3: That's a very funny thing for an artist to say, though, who cares what I'm feeling?00:05:19Speaker 4: Well, I feel like everybody makes their art in the way that makes sense to them, and for me, I am the least important and interesting thing in what I do. You know, and I know that there's amazing songs out there that have come out of people's experiences that have made a great difference to people. And you know, I've enjoyed some of those songs, and it's a totally valid way to go. It's just not my way.00:05:44Speaker 3: Your new album is great, it's coming out in a little while, So tell me about making this album.00:05:50Speaker 4: You know, everybody has had to adjust to this pandemic, like and I say, like, there's just such huge differences between how you know, people who are comfortably off well off and people who aren't have had a pandemic. You know, there's been people who've never had to stop working and interacting with people because they're on front lines or their service industry or anything. You know, they needed the paycheck, and people who could just kind of hold up in their houses for a year. And there's detrimental things to all of it. But I just say all of it with an acknowledgement of privilege. You know, I think it's very important to do that, but to say that in general, you know, artists, musicians, there's an additional difficulty you know, with in that are very work. It's like we're like the restaurant industry, you know, it's like our very work involves people. You know, we can't just not work in an office and work at home and do emails like it's so that's been really hard. And then I just got the idea. We've been playing these old folk songs that were you know, they were just kind of cropping up. You know, I was just finding myself, you know, sit down, we sit down with our instruments, and I just start singing. And I just said, well, let's just start singing these. Let's just doing these in the stream. You know, this is my partner Francesco, and it was like night and day. It was like, oh my gosh, these songs have never been on stage, and we're doing them because we're connecting to them right now. And I said, let's just run into the studio and record these. I'm just feeling them right now.00:07:26Speaker 3: How did your situation isolation, how did they inform the choice of songs?00:07:33Speaker 4: Well, these songs, the songs that were coming up, I mean were ones I hadn't done in a long time. You know, a couple of them pre date the Carolina chocol Drops days, Like it was just when I was just getting into old time music and I think, you know, and the Italian ones were you know, they're ones that Francesco is known for a very long time. The two main themes of the record are like home and death. So we're like surrounded by death every day. It's how many people have died, like literally the news every day. And then we're like, how many people have died in Italy? How many people have died in the US, how many people have died in North Carolina? Are my parents going to die? Are we even going to be able to go home?00:08:08Speaker 1: You know?00:08:09Speaker 4: It's just like all the stuff that everybody's been dealing with. But like that's in the air all the time. So these you know, stuff like oh, death just comes up and the idea of not being able to go home. And so these songs are not just any songs, but there's songs when I was really coming into my own as as identifying as a North Carolinian, you know, like for me as a mixed person, multiracial, but like there's no there was no space for that. When I was a kid. It was like black, white, and other, and you had to check a box. And it's just I had this existential dilemma every time I filled out a form.00:08:54Speaker 3: Did you fill it out differently? At different times I did.00:08:59Speaker 4: Sometimes I fill all the boxes in. It depended on how much in trouble I would get if I you know, so it was like the sat or something I liked. You know, I've put it black because I I talked to my mom about it, and she's just like, look, you know, for all intents and purposes, in this country, you're considered black. So that's what you put down, you know. But you know, I circle that in. I think of my dad, who's white, you know, and I'm just like and Back then, I didn't understand the nuance of the one drop rule and the history and all that stuff. All I knew is this doesn't feel right to me. You know, neither one feels right. So when I started finding the music of the root music of North Carolina in my early twenties, that's when I started going, oh, I know, I know what I am like. Forget the color, I'm just like North Carolinian. And it really tied me to a sense of belonging in a sense. Even I was like, I've been living in North Carolina my whole life, other than college, and but all of a sudden, I felt like, oh, okay, ida what that means? And I found that through the music. So when I sing these songs, it takes me back to that feeling of belonging, you know, at home. It's it's interesting, it's just like stuff I would have never thought about recording ever, and they're coming up and just like seeing me like, Okay.00:10:13Speaker 3: What's an example of one of the first songs that occurred to you that you should you should put in this album for that reason?00:10:19Speaker 4: Well, like you know, Blackish Crow came up, and that that's what was one of the first old time tunes I ever learned. I still remember learning it from Steve Terrell wrote it. I wrote the words down like he's a kind of a Stalhart in the old time community in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I'm just thinking it was so beautiful. And then in and of itself, it's dealing with being separated from your loved one, and you know, I wish that I was going with you or you were staying here, you know, and especially in the beginning of the pandemic. You know, Francesco and I we don't live together because we have children who go to school in different cities, so we live where they live, and it's two and a half hours apart. So there were times when we were locked down, like it was serious lockdown, and like we didn't even couldn't even go see each other. So it's just like all of those thoughts in thinking about people who were separated, you know, continents, separated from their loved ones and not able to go see them, and you know, and there's a lot of songs about that. Because we haven't always been able to travel as easily as as we do now. That just came up and then it's like the combination of taking this really old song and feeling like, so it's an old song on its own, so it just has this connection, this kind of deep connection right to humanity. And then it's got this additional connection that I have, you know, as a North Carolinian, feeling like a North Carolinian missing North Carolina. And then we're doing it in a way that would never be done back home, you know, the way that Francisco plays the cello banjo, which was originally owned by Mike Seeger. Yeah, because I knew him and his widow when he died, Alexia made sure that his vast music collection. She let people that he knew and who knew him first come pick instruments to buy to be passed on to. And so I picked that in a beautiful little banjo, and that teleo banjo had been sitting in my house like I'd never played it. I didn't know why I bought it, you know, but I just love the sound of it, beautiful shape. He put these strings on it, It just made it sound like a lute. And then Francesco came to my house and picked it up and started playing it, and I was like, well, that's why I bought it.00:12:40Speaker 1: There you go.00:12:40Speaker 4: Yeah, and so that's all over the record, that banjo sound, what we found, that banjo and my viola. So it's just like there's a lot wrapped up in that. And then emer is bringing in Ireland with the flute, the Irish flute, and so it was just a really I felt so fortunate to be able to have been able to have that time.00:13:01Speaker 1: You're in Ireland now right.00:13:03Speaker 4: Been in Ireland since last March. We came from Australia.00:13:07Speaker 3: What's it like now to observe because you are in North Carolinian you're an American. What's it like to be out of the United States for now a year? Which is probably what you didn't expect.00:13:18Speaker 4: I didn't know it. It has been hard, it's been weird.00:13:23Speaker 3: It's part of it a little easier, you know. I'm thinking of people like Baldwin who who found life abroad. It relieved them of something.00:13:32Speaker 4: Well in normal days. Yes, it was kind of a breath of fresh air to come to Ireland, you know, because this is my work. Like when all the stuff went down the way it went down last year, you know, people were calling me up and asking my opinion about stuff I was like, my opinion has not changed. I've been talking about this for fifteen years.00:13:49Speaker 1: Go away.00:13:50Speaker 4: You know. It's just like I'm not surprised by any of this, you know, But in the before times, you know, I would be on the road talking about minstrel shows, coon songs, slavery every night and my you know, interviews, blah blah blah, doing this, doing that, And then I'd come back to Ireland and just kind of take a deep breath, and it's not you know that the specter of that. I mean, they have other issues here, but the specter of that is not here. And I do I definitely understand that of just being away from it when it is your work, but that again, is different all together than being completely unable to go back to the well and then when all the stuff is going on and people are protesting and I'm just like I have nothing to do and I can't do anything there, you know, like all my gigs have been canceled, but I can't even help.00:14:40Speaker 2: We'll be right back with more from Rhianna and get Ins and Bruce Headlam. After a quick break, We're back with more from rhiann and get Ins.00:14:51Speaker 3: You know, the sense of missing someone in folk music from Africa, from Scotland, I assume from Ireland is often about missing people across the whole ocean. That's sort of embedded in the music. So you must have felt that quite strongly when you were playing some of these tunes.00:15:09Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I haven't seeing my family in over a year, Francisco, like especially in the beginning, like Italy was hit really hard, like people were dying left and right, and like he had relatives who got sick, and you know, just the stress of like if something happens, I can't even get there.00:15:26Speaker 3: It comes out in funny ways in the album because your version of I Shall not be Moved, which is an old spiritual which has been adopted by the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and maybe the words there are movements, because suddenly it's a song about not being moved, not being able to move. Almost were you thinking that when you were recording it.00:15:47Speaker 4: I recorded that because for me, that was my connection to Joe Thompson, who was the black fiddler from MEDVN, North Carolina, the elder that I like learned his family's tradition.00:15:59Speaker 3: Can you explain a little bit of when you met him and who he was.00:16:03Speaker 4: Of course, Yeah, Joe Thompson was even more important than we knew when we started going down to see him. He was a massively important person. He was the last of a family of black string band traditions. It had been passed on as a family tradition. He was part of the Thompson family band. They played for the white and the black square dances in his area because everybody used to do. This is what people don't understand, because that's a whole other reason. There's a whole other story why people don't know that. And he was the last of his family to be playing this music, and nobody else had picked it up. And the people he used to play with were dead, you know, his cousin and his brother, and so he was playing with white musicians, you know, wonderful people in the area. And then me and the other two original Carolina Chocolate drops, Tom Flemens and Justin Robertson started going down to Meben to play with him because Meben was like forty five minutes away from where we all lived. And he passed on his family's tradition to us, you know. So he lived to be ninety two and We're incredibly lucky to have had him because I found out later through the work of John Jeremiah Sullivan, that he is the musical descendant of Frank Johnson, who was a very famous blackstring band musician from the eighteen hundreds and bought himself out of slavery with his fiddle. And there's been an oral tradition that's been passed down from Frank Johnson to Joe, not to us. So it's just to have that connection to the once vast, incredibly influential, super important black string band tradition that's now almost completely gone. Is you know, I sometimes like hyperventilate a little bit to myself when I think about, like how closely word to missing, you know, having a living connection to that. So I feel the responsibility and the importance of that quite a lot. And so anytime there's an opportunity to include one of his songs or to be able to talk about him. And now when in particular, I had quoted when I wrote a song earlier this what was last year? I wrote it around juneteenth and I performed it with Yo Yo Ma and I did a performance of it, a little video of it. It's called Build a house, and it's just, you know, kind of lamenting about the idea of that. You know, African Americans were like brought to the United States, built so much of the United States, and then continuously are just seems that people just want us gone, you know, and it's just like, yeah, I don't know, it's just I was just really despairing of everything, and I wrote this song, and at the very end it says, you know, I will not be moved. You know, you brought me here to build your house. I built the house. I wrote my own house. You burned it down. I wrote my song. You took the song. But you know what, my well, my well will never run dry. And I will not be moved. You know. It's a direct quote from not just I shall not be moved, but from Joe.00:19:06Speaker 3: Was there something idiosyncratic or very particular about the way he and his family played this music, because it's you know, not all fiddlers are the same. Things can be very local. Are there things you learned from him that you just wouldn't have learned technically from other fiddlers?00:19:23Speaker 4: Yeah, when you know, all three of us were just learning old time music when we started playing with Joe, so everything that I learn, everything that I play now is inflected by playing with Joe and with kind of absorbing that, and it's very rhythmic, it's very I learned a Joe could do more with like six notes. You know, a lot of people get DoD with twenty five. I mean, he just kind of an effortless being in the groove with the groove. You know, there's something about being a dance musician that you just cannot fake, you know, and we have you know, I played for dances, and so it does, it does affect everything that I do, and the and also the way he's sang. So when I'm singing, he had a beautiful voice and it just kind of came out of him in this way, and so that affects how I sing these kind of songs too. And then in this particular song, the way he I did it the way he does it, which you know, he didn't put a space in between the end of one verse in the beginning of the next, So it's not like it's.00:20:31Speaker 5: A shall not shall not be moved, ah, shall not shall not be moved Like a tree.00:20:47Speaker 4: Planet bird he would do that.00:20:56Speaker 6: Shall not be moved. Climbing Jacob right, so there's no space. It's not Ah shall not be moved.00:21:08Speaker 4: Climbing ja That's what you know, that's what we usually do, right, you have the ending and then the beginning of the next thing. But there's something about that, you know.00:21:15Speaker 7: Ah shall not be moved climbing Jacobs, let shall not you know, there's something about that.00:21:26Speaker 5: You know.00:21:27Speaker 4: It's very simple. But the thing that you you got from Joe was that it never ended.00:21:35Speaker 1: You know.00:21:35Speaker 4: It was just like this rolling river of sound and he would just kind of dip his foot in it and then take his foot out.00:21:41Speaker 3: Does that come out of playing for dances? That that idea that you just keep going?00:21:45Speaker 4: I think it comes out of playing for dances. I think it comes out of just being saturated in that music. Him and other old timers, you know who they're they're gone, that life is over. He was born into a community and he died in that community, and he had a function in that community. There was no thought to it. It was just like my you know, daddy played fiddle, and then I played fiddle, and you know I played with my brother and as soon as we were old enough, we took over the dances. You know, he became a performer, but he was a function musician. He was a community musician, and it was music that he grew up doing. And that's that's a special thing. And I would never pretend like that's what I do.00:22:30Speaker 3: Do you think that kind of world can exist, can coexist in the world as it is now? Not everybody's waiting for the dance on Friday night. It's not a necessary tradition the way it probably was for many people.00:22:42Speaker 4: Oh sure, I mean that was the entertainment. I mean, the reason why it died is because TV came. I mean, as unfortunately TV is a is a great culture killer. It's just this kind of stuff. I mean, it's not to say that stuff didn't survive. That it did. Obviously Joe could still play and sing, But it wasn't it changed function that music changed. It was then it became performance music for a ticket price and mostly white people and the audience and all this kind of stuff. And that's just it just changed. And it doesn't mean that it's not as good or doesn't need to be done. It's just different.00:23:15Speaker 3: Tell me why, particularly the black history of string bands and country music hasn't survived or isn't widely known because that's you know, and many people, you know, they look at you as someone who has really highlighted a tradition that very few people know about, you know, the exceptions that you know, Johnny Cash was taught guitar by black guitarists, so I think was Hank Williams. There's a lot of mentors who are African American, but they weren't well known. Their students were well known. Why isn't the African American string band tradition as well known as the Carter Family or other Mountain music?00:24:00Speaker 1: What happened on the.00:24:02Speaker 4: Carter family another example, you know Leslie Riddle going along with them, and a lot of that music would have come from how he wrote it down, how he discovered it, and he's given no credit at all. No, definitely, it's certainly no royalties. Isn't that funny?00:24:17Speaker 3: And I think he had a lot to do with teaching Mabel how to play the guitar, and she's that is the guitar method for so much country music.00:24:26Speaker 4: Yep, it's it's everywhere. We're everywhere except for you know, in the consciousness of the majority of the people.00:24:34Speaker 3: I mean, I realize ask I'm asking a long question that has a very simple answer. It doesn't well, it has an answer, which is racism.00:24:41Speaker 4: But no, no, it's not that, it's it's Look, I'll give you my my perception of it. Like I as I've been researching it and giving lectures on this. I'm not a I have a music degree. That's my disclaimer in Western art music. So all of this has been self researched, just as I'm trying to find the answer. So as I've been doing the research, I find three reasons and they're interconnected. Racism is one of them, absolutely, and actually sism is under all of it. So in a short answer, you are correct. But that's not enough for people because it's too big. It's all timing and crossroads. So the Great Migration is happening. Millions of people are leaving the South. Of course, why are they leaving the South Racism, So that's the heart of that. But there is this mass movement of people, people moving to the cities in the north and in the west away from the South, and they're bringing their ways with them to a point. But the banjo in particular is a very specific cultural instrument, as it was in the say eighteen hundreds, and you know, you get to the north and it's like, oh, this other stuff's starting to happen up here. Like I don't want to play old Grandpa's corn pone music, you know what I mean. I want to play the new stuff.00:25:55Speaker 8: Right.00:25:55Speaker 4: That's just a natural thing when people move. And then you have the recording industry coming in to play. So the courting industry is coming in in the twenties, and you have people like Ralph Pierre inventing billy and race records, like basically segregating American music at its source, right because they I mean, there was the whole idea of recording regular people in order to sell their music to themselves was a new thing, you know, because what was being recorded was like classical music or dance music or this kind of stuff. So even the idea of at the music saved a lot of music, which is great, but it saved a lot of music through a particular lens. And this is also what happened with Cecil Sharp when he came over Ballid collecting saying the Appalachian Mountains. And that goes into the third reason, which is blatant to white supremacy and a creation of a mythical white ethnicity and character as a direct pushback against what Henry Ford, for example, saw as the jungle music of jazz and blues and this collusion with Jews. You know, thought Jews were trying to take over the I mean, it's just all sorts of nasty crap. Then you have going on within this sort of stew of white nationalism and supremacy, the beginnings of the folk festivals and sort of the folk movement as it was called at that point, and so like, built on social sharps, discoveries of Barbary Allen or whatever, these these direct links as they saw back to the old country. Meanwhile, he ignored any black people he saw, hated them, called them the inward, and never recorded any of them, even though up to twenty percent of the people in the Appalachian Mountains were black up until the Great Migration. So he's like in his diaries, like he talks about like we lugged the machine. We heard about a likely family up the hill, and we lugged the machine all the way up there, and darned if it wasn't in a house full of inwards, you know, and we had to go all the way back down Hill didn't record them. So this is happening, and then they're coming up with these folk fiddle competitions. Black people aren't allowed, right, just straight up aren't allowed, even though in a lot of places they were the best fiddlers because the black fiddler, even more than the black banjo player, was like ubiquitous. They were everywhere. They were the juke boxes of the country. The black string band is just you know, at every function there's black string bands. I mean they are the jukeboxes, you know, in the radios before. You know, that's when square Dants goes into starts getting put into schools as like the American pastime. But what they mean is the white American pastime, even though you know square Ant's calling was most likely invented by African Americans and that they would have been playing a lot of these dances. It's just on and on and on and on and on. All the first players of bluegrass not just influence, but like we're taught by or learned from or we're coming straight out of that. You know, what is recorded is remembered, you know. So all of this is happening at a time where things are being put down on wax. And that's what lasts, you know, and the imagery and what they were doing, and this creation of the hillbilly character, which is it looks one way, it wasn't even real anyway. I mean, like you wouldn't have any kind of fiddle and banjo players worth their salt who would go into a studio or go into a gig dressed like they just wandered off the farm. You know, they made them do that for marketing purposes, because they were creating. They were also myth making in the mountains as well. So everybody's being made up. But what happens is that the black not influence, but co creation of the root of all American music is forgotten and we're sort of shunted into the you know, Okay, it's okay for us to be in blues and jazz and stuff in spirituals because that's coming out of our pain.00:29:35Speaker 3: Well that was the other reason. And I'm thinking of the book Escaping the Delta, which is about Robert Johnson, but it's about a lot of things. And you know, the writer points out that all of those musicians played in many many styles.00:29:51Speaker 4: Oh god, they played it all.00:29:52Speaker 1: They could do it all.00:29:53Speaker 3: But when it was marketed, when it was marketed as authentic black music, it was the blues and that's what they thought people wanted to hear.00:30:03Speaker 4: Blues was an incredibly important art form to black people because it did express part of a a lot of people's lives. But that wasn't the only way that they expressed themselves, you know. It was just the popular thing and that moment and so income these people and go, well, you listen to that, and you listen to that, and it's just like, well, we listen to everything, actually, but it's all about capitalism. It's all about like, we just need to sell this stuff the easiest way, and marketing. Marketing goes in there, and then it's like, who are you seeing doing this? And then that's the great divide begins there. You know. I think the portion of history and musical American musical history, for me, that is most fascinating where I think all of the seeds of all of this stuff were planted and start to bloom is between emancipation and the nineteen twenties. And that's the stuff that's not recorded. You know. All we have is stuff that's been written about it, and people talking about it and all this kind of stuff. But there's a lot of there's still a lot of things we can glean from that time, but it just takes time and smarter people than me writing books that I can then read come up with my theories, you know, to help people understand this, you know.00:31:14Speaker 3: But it's also a time when a lot of music was passed along through minstrel shows, which are kind of, for good reason, radioactive form of entertainment that it's hard to come to terms with.00:31:28Speaker 1: Now.00:31:29Speaker 4: Well, what I'm finding is that we have to separate the minstrel show and the music that went into the menstrual show in a lot of ways. It's not to say that the music that went into minstrel show is not problematic, because it is. But there's musicians and then there's the spectacle, and they are related. But I think what happens is that the music gets conflated into the show and then it's like we can't look at any of it, and it's like I can't do that because in that music is like my ancestors are in that music. So like when I pick up a book from eighteen fifty five, the Briggs banjo instructure and this is the very first banjo instructor in the United States. Now, banjos invented in the Caribbean by Africans and the African descended peoples and then comes up to the US and only makes the transition to white culture in the eighteen twenties, right, so thirty years after that is the first book written. So these all of these first generation of white banjo players where they get in their banjo licks, you know, from black players. So in this book, I've I've learned a lot of these tunes on a you know, a replica of banjo from eighteen fifty eight, so it feels very different to a modern banjo. And I feel so much like, okay, here is these black banjo players are in these tunes. There's like all this three against two you know, all of the all of the things that go into American music are all represented in miniature in these tunes.00:32:58Speaker 3: And three against two is that's very That's very West African sound, isn't it.00:33:02Speaker 4: Yeah? And like as I mess with these tunes, you know, because the fifth string, that's it right there, Like what that does to a tune, what that does to music? Like that's why I used to get so upset. You know that myth of the of a white guy inventing the fifth string.00:33:18Speaker 1: It's just like, I didn't know that.00:33:20Speaker 3: And the fifth string is it always? Uh, I'm sorry, I don't know. The banjo is it? Is it like a drone.00:33:26Speaker 4: It's a drone. It's a short drone string and what that means for playing And it's very unique, the Clawhimer style, which is called strokestyle during this time. It's like go around the world and see if you can find that. I mean, they do it in West Africa, you know, with the aconte and the patuon doing some other things. But it's a very unique style. You play the back in the back of the first finger, the nail and the thumb and that's it. It's just those two things. So there's all the syncopation that's built into the instrument. It's like deep, deep, deep cultural meaning in that. And so if you throw that away, you know, you throw away all of those nameless you know, black banjo players.00:34:09Speaker 3: Do you have a banjo there? Could you just demonstrate a little bit of the drone sound? And I don't know, if there's a song on the album, you just want to show us how you how you did it?00:34:18Speaker 4: So this is my gord banjo, so it's not it's not as uh steady as my minstrel banjo, but it's the same tuning. And that's a piece from eighteen fifty five for Expansion Instructor called hard Times. And there it is like what else do you want? That's just the one piece from that But can't you hear it all in there?00:35:35Speaker 3: It was beautiful, yeah, and you make it look very easy and it clearly is not.00:35:42Speaker 4: Well. I mean, the tune is actually quite simple, but there's a lot rhythmically that can be brought out of it. And that's where I feel like I have a I have an interesting perspective into these tunes because I've had the time with Joe Thompson. So you know, like on the surface, this isn't it's a jig. You know, four f six went to the physics, But there's so much d D duh duh in that and it's and it's just like even when you just take the little short string this fist string here, I mean, it's like the off accents that can be pulled out with this instrument that you can't really do with the regular band because this these strings have a lot of give, and when I think about, like I studied pre banjo instruments like the accoonting, and how that give gives you a balance that then shows just the natural syncopation in the instrument just sort of abuse everything. Do you know what I mean? I'm not crazy, like you hear that.00:36:51Speaker 1: No, You're not crazy.00:37:24Speaker 4: I mean it's just like there's some all of these tunes or have worlds in them. I hear so many different aspects of like American culture in these tunes. So that's really been a code It was kind of like a I feel like it was a code breaker for me. It was like, oh, here it is.00:37:44Speaker 3: You know well, it's like it's like you start to hear a different sound after you've played it a couple of bars.00:37:48Speaker 1: It just it has.00:37:49Speaker 3: Its own kind of momentum or something. It reminds me of the playing of your guitarist on this record, mem but he and there's a wonderful video of you playing uh I think will water Bound maybe where at some point you just you take your fiddle bow and you kind of point at him and he's playing these figures that just they just sound like they should go on forever that it has their.00:38:11Speaker 4: Water cascading or something.00:38:12Speaker 3: Yeah, it's got this whole other feeling. I wanted to ask you about working with him because I loved that sound of his guitar.00:38:18Speaker 4: It was amazing and in fact, one of my favorite moments is in the one called Niewell Goes to Town. It didn't have it. I had written the tune like in a sound check at some point, and it didn't have a title, and we were talking about how to arrange it, and I said, well, at this point, you know, Newell just needs to go to town, you know, because I knew he would just crush it. And then we're like, that's what we should call it Newell because he does go to town soon. But the beginning of that tune, there's this exchange between guitar and banjo and it just sounds so there's it's just so much stuff going on in that because it's like, here is Niewel playing like a Western instrument that has been adopted into Africa, you know, and there's a whole different, you know, ways of playing the guitar in different parts of Africa.00:39:02Speaker 1: You know.00:39:03Speaker 4: That comes straight out of that loot tradition of like angoni or kora or you know, all this. Then all of these things sort of being put onto the guitar, and there I am playing the banjo, which is a descendant of those same instruments that would have been the inspiration for where some of the guitar work is coming from. I would assume, like I don't know Newell's story, but I'm just my general knowledge of people that I've heard play the guitar who come from you know, that area, and it's just for me. That's what I love so much is when that happens, because like it's just different people are synthesizing stuff, and then when you meet you kind of realize, oh, there's this whole, this huge circle that just happened, and we just completed the circle. It is amazing.00:39:47Speaker 1: You know.00:39:48Speaker 4: This is like me kind of going as far back as I can as a musician to my black ancestors who played the banjo, the closest I can get to touching them other than through Joe, you know, that's the other way. So I'm going through the white man's book, you know, and then through the oral, the black oral tradition through Joe, and so between those two approaches. I've kind of found some something that's my own, but that feels that it's connected in some way.00:40:18Speaker 2: We'll be right back with Rhiannon Giddens and Bruce had them after this break. We're back with Rannon Giddens performing the Appellation Banjo song. Georgia Buck.00:41:07Speaker 6: Georgia Buck is dead. Last word he said, don't put no shortening in my bread.00:41:16Speaker 4: Georgie Buck is dead.00:41:18Speaker 6: Last what he said, don't you put no shoting in my bread. Georgie Buck's dead. Last word he said, don't you let je woman have her way. If she has her way.00:41:51Speaker 4: She will golden stale day.00:41:53Speaker 8: Don't let your woman have her way.00:42:14Speaker 6: George Buds dead. Last word he said, don't you put no shoning in my bread. Don't you put no shoning in my bread?00:42:25Speaker 4: Now?00:42:25Speaker 6: Now, now, don't you put no shorting in my libred.00:43:08Speaker 1: That was fantastic, a little Joe Thompson there.00:43:11Speaker 3: You have drawn a lot of attention to this tradition that people didn't generally know about. I mean, academics probably knew about it, but a lot of people didn't. And you know, and it informs so much of your playing. You know, so you've got tradition and then you've got the individual talent that's you, and you want to do different things with it. Sometimes when people, you know, particularly something you know as as as political as rediscovering this sortvein of African American culture, they want it curated and they kind of they don't want it messed with. That goes for that echoes for all kinds of traditions, you know, as you know, in sort of standard country music, they want to gain me. Yeah, yes, since since it started, it's been well, that's not real country music. Do you feel sometimes that being such a strong part of that tradition almost feels not like a burden, but it feels that it could be confining for what you want to do with it.00:44:15Speaker 4: You know, justin one of the original Chocolate Drops Along, you know, one of the co founders along with myself and Dom Flemons, you know, he used to say, tradition is a guide, not a jailer. And I think that's an important statement. Tradition has never been static. And this is what people conveniently forget is that until recorded, until we had had the opportunity, know, the ability to put music on a record, it was only through human memory and paper. And we all know that both of those things. Despite what people say about music notation in some and you know some with some music are notoriously unreliable. Human memory is what it is. And so even in the days of long recall, which still happened. I mean there's Jelly's you know, port musicians or whatever. He can still remains vast lineages and stuff. But there is going to be slippage, there's going to be changed, there's going to be disruption, there's going to be individual talent. So there's all of that going on. So it's just like I think that it's always a moving target. And a lot of times the people who are gatekeeping, not to say that there aren't people from within the tradition, you do that there are, but it always feels to me that people there's always more people from coming from without. You know, this especially happened in the Old Time Community. A lot of people came to the Old Time Community from the north or from other places looking for something and they found it, whatever that is. And in a lot of cases that meant that some music was saved and they took care of people, and that's wonderful, but in a lot of instances. It also came along with well, we know what it is, and you know it's this way. You play the tune this way because that's how Tommy played it, you know, and it's or that's what it's on the recording. And it's just like, man, he may have been eighty years old when that recording was made. He could have been drunk that day. He could have forg got in the tune that day. He could have been ornery that day. Like, that's only the moment of that performance of the tune, you know. It's just like, none of this is in stone, even though people think it is because it's been recorded down. It's just like just that moment of that day was recorded down. And I just think, on the one hand, you have people who want a gatekeeper, who want to keep people out, even though they themselves were walking in by those very old timers that they're protecting from other people. Right. We have people tell us, don't teach Joe new tunes because he wanted to learn Sourwood Mountain. We were teaching him. How don't teach Joe newtunes. I'm like, the man is a musician, he's not a relic He's not a museum piece. It's not going to ruin him. He already plays different than he did ten years ago. He had a stroke, for God's sake, like he is who he is right now. And that's what we got, and it's amazing. We have it.00:46:59Speaker 3: Your version of O Death, which is fabulous.00:47:04Speaker 1: It starts with death.00:47:06Speaker 3: In the morning, and I had never heard that line, and in fact, the only place because that's not how Stanley does it. Ralph Stanley or a lot of other people, is that a standard way of doing it? What was the origin of you choosing to put in the morning line?00:47:22Speaker 4: I got it from Bessie Jones, you know, I because I'd heard of Ralph Stanley version like everybody else an O Brother years and years ago, and of course knew that version, but I stumbled across her version somewhere and I was like, oh god, it's the black O Death. I love this so much. And I was like, this is what I want it just like I started singing and I was like, oh, yes, you know it just really kind of I was possessed when we recorded that, like absolutely, because all the voice all the voiceovers, they're just passes. He does not he's not constructing any of that. It's literally like I'm singing with myself three times through and that's it, and he just included everything. It's just it's insane. But yeah, Bessie Jones's version of that, and I just I connected to it in a way that I never really connected to the Rob Stanley version, and I was like, oh, this.00:48:13Speaker 2: Is this is it?00:48:15Speaker 1: Okay?00:48:16Speaker 3: That was just amazing.00:48:17Speaker 4: Thank you so much, You're welcome.00:48:22Speaker 2: Thanks to Anna and Gettins for keeping the black string tradition alive and for sharing some of her incredible banjo playing technique. To hear a new album, They're calling me home. Head to Broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast. We can find all of our episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced of help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafey. Our executive producer is me La Belle. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and interview us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond bass slip