Songs of our Native Daughters

Rhiannon Giddens leads a group of four musicians on a new album from the Smithsonian Folkways label, putting the experiences of African-American women into historical and musical context. William Dart calls it epoch-making.

When Captain Beefheart delivered his "Smithsonian Institute Blues" back in 1970, his ploy was palaeological, inviting us down to the big dig for dinosaur discoveries and delights. Well ... with the expected Beefheart twist.  

But the Smithsonian is about much more than just fossicking for fossils. For those with a yen to venture into a world in which history and heritage are still alive and alert, then the Smithsonian CD catalogue is a treasure trove.

Whether you want old cylinder recordings, classic blues, world music or chamber music, it’s one of the first calls for cognoscenti.

To many, the name Smithsonian is indelibly linked with the Folkways label, founded in 1948 to preserve everything from blues and folk music to field recordings and the spoken word. The Smithsonian acquired Folkways in 1987 and has made some of its most celebrated recordings democratically available to all.

The latest release on Smithsonian Folkways, falling into its African American Legacy division, is an album that, if there were any justice in this world, would be a chart-topper. A chart-topper with its heart and politics in the right place.

Rhiannon Giddens is the driving force behind Songs of Our Native Daughters, and she’s been featured on New Horizons a number of time over the years, most recently singing folksongs, very beautiful indeed, with Kronos Quartet in 2017.

But my first taste of this extraordinary woman came some years before that, singing, fiddling and playing wild clawhammer banjo with the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

When she takes the lead in the song "Ruby, are you mad at your man?", we’re far, far away from Kenny Rogers country.

Songs of Our Native Daughters is a project with substance. It's a baker’s dozen of songs that, in Giddens’ words, shine new light on African-American stories of struggle, resistance and hope, pulling from and inspired by seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century sources. While the stain of slavery is a central theme, this is very much an exploration of the suffering of African-American women.

On the cover Giddens and her fellow musicians, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, are all proudly holding their banjos. Inside the booklet, Giddens explains that this is an instrument that they link to their own West African heritage rather than the various minstrel traditions of the nineteenth century.

And it’s very much to the fore in the album’s opening track, Amythyst Kiah’s "Black Myself".

Within just one song, Rhiannon Giddens is alongside Amethyst Kiah and Allison Russell in the rousing stand of "Moon Meets the Sun".

The three women, one by one, set out the theme of the album, infectiously, finding escape and vindication in dance, subtly coloured with the electric guitar of the project’s co-producer, Dirk Powell ... proving, as if we didn’t know, that you don’t need more than two chords to cast a spell of utter exhilaration, especially when the three singers work themselves into some goosebumpy harmonic tangles.

These women make the point, gently, but forcibly, that things have not changed over the centuries.

In a track titled "Barbados", Rhiannon Giddens reads two us two texts. The first, from the eighteenth-century English poet William Cowper, talks ironically about what hardships would be endured if the Europeans didn’t have their sugar and rum — both thanks to slave labour. It’s just a few seconds of wryness and Giddens points it beautifully.

Her second selection of words were written by Dirk Powell, the project’s co-producer. His text brings us up to date and doesn’t hold back. We may profess to be shocked at children sewing our fashion garments and prisoners working in mines, but how could we possibly do without tablets, laptops and phones.

The music that connects the two pieces of speech is based on a theme of great historical significance — it’s the first notated piece of New World enslavement music. Written down by a D.W. Dickson in Barbados, it would have been twisted and straitjacketed to fit into formal western dress but Giddens makes it into something else.

Allison Russell has written one of the most moving and certainly one of the most personal contributions on Songs of Our Native Daughters.

"Quasheba, Quasheba" tells the story of one of the singer’s own foremothers, a woman who was abducted from Ghana and sent across the Atlantic, experiencing multiple rapes and sales, surviving these as well as her brutal working conditions in America.

At first I had mixed feelings about Leyla McCalla’s cello, which she used to good advantage when she was one of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. But once one is over the uncomfortable harmonics in the song’s introduction, the instrument is an apt musical avatar for the courageous heroine. 

Songs of Our Native Daughters comes with impressive paperwork: a 35-page booklet that shamefully isn’t included in the deal if you buy the album through iTunes. This consists of a producer’s note from Dirk Powell, full background and lyrics for the 13 songs and a six-page introduction from Rhiannon Giddens that’s scholarly and persuasive.

It’s there that she makes the point that white American bluegrass is quite different from the African-American string band music that the Carolina Chocolate Drops made their field of study.

This comes to mind during Amythyst Kiah’s song "Polly Ann’s Hammer" which gives us the woman’s angle on John Henry, famed in both legend and song.

Now we’re told of John Henry’s wife, who took on the work of her husband when he became ill and survived, all the while coping with the arduous life of a working slave. A strength and resilience well caught in Giddens’ spirited fiddle.

The range and variety of the music-making on Songs of Our Native Daughters simple staggers.

The few minutes of "Lavi Difisil" are a tribute to the Haitian troubadour Althiery Dorival. It’s beguilingly catchy and finds Leyla McCalla taking on the challenge of writing the song in kreyòl ayisyen, the voice of her ancestors.

On the musical, you’ll hear the versatile Allison Russell twining her clarinet around Rhiannon Giddens’ fiddle.

The joyousness of that song is pervasive, complete with an invigorating Creole swing to its rendering ... if pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk were still alive, he might well consider transcribing it as a concert piece.

Yet just minutes before, there’s a searing number delivered a cappella apart from hand-clapping and Jamie Dick’s ominous drum.

"Mama’s Crying Long" was inspired by a slave narrative telling us how abuse can so easily lead to violence and tragedy. A scenario that we still see again and again, from the teenage Noura Hussein in Sudan last year to, just weeks ago, Sally Challen in Surrey, England.

Songs of Our Native Daughters is a complete journey encompassing life and death, tragedy, joy and, most importantly, affirmation.

Allison Russell’s final song, "You’re Not Alone", provides the stirring summation that the project needs.

She sings to her five-year-old daughter Ida, remembering her own childhood of sexual, physical and psychological abuse.

The stories, history and spiritual continuity that these songs give us will make sure that there is, in the last count, love. Whether the sparrows are singing in the morning or the crows at dusk.

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'The Smithsonian Institute Blues' (Van Vliet) – Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band
The Dust Blows Forward: An Anthology
(Rhino)

'Das Lied von der Erde' (Mahler arr Schoenberg, Riehn) – John Elwes (tenor), Russell Braun (baritone), Smithsonian Chamber Players/Kenneth Slowik
Das Lied von der Erde: Chamber Version
(Smithsonian)

'Baby, I’ve Been Thinking (aka Society’s Child)' (Ian) – Janis Ian
The Best of Broadside 1962-1988
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'Ruby, Are you Mad at Your Man?' (Cousin Emmy) – Carolina Chocolate Drops
Leaving Eden
(Nonesuch)

'Black Myself' (Kiah) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'Moon Meets the Sun' (Giddens et al) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'Barbados' (Trad/Dickson, Cowper, Powell) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'Quasheba, Quasheba' (Russell) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'Polly Ann’s Hammer' (Kiah, Russell) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'Lavi Difisil' (McCalla, Russell) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'Mama’s Cryin’ Long' (Giddens) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)

'You’re Not Alone' (Russell) – Our Native Daughters
Songs of Our Native Daughters
(Smithsonian Folkways)