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