Carnegie Hall

Acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award–winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she has been nominated for seven additional Grammys for her work as a soloist and collaborator. She most recently won the 2022 Grammy in the Best Folk Album category for They’re Calling Me Home, her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. The 12-track album was recorded in Ireland during the recent lockdown; it speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis.

Giddens’s lifelong mission is to lift up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. Pitchfork has said of her work, “Few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration,” and Smithsonian magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and Black.”

Among her many diverse career highlights, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House, served as a Carnegie Hall Perspectives artist, and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. Her critical acclaim includes in-depth profiles by CBS News Sunday Morning, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among many others.

Giddens is featured in Ken Burns’s Country Music series, which aired on PBS in 2019, where she speaks about the African American origins of country music. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other Black female banjo players—Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah—and co-produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters, which tells stories of historic Black womanhood and survival.

Named artistic director of Silkroad in 2020, Giddens is developing a number of new programs for the organization, including one inspired by the history of the American transcontinental railroad and the cultures and music of its builders. She recently wrote the music for an original ballet, Lucy Negro Redux, for Nashville Ballet (premiered in 2019), and the libretto and music for an original opera, Omar, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said for the Spoleto USA Festival (premiered in 2022).

As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville.

The Rounder Records debut from Amythyst Kiah, Wary + Strange marks the glorious collision of two vastly different worlds: the iconoclastic alt-rock that first sparked her musical passion, and the roots / old-time music scene where she’s found breakout success in recent years, including recognition from Rolling Stone as “one of Americana’s great up-and-coming secrets.” Along with tapping into the vibrant musicality she honed, in part, through her studies in East Tennessee State University’s Bluegrass, Old-Time, Roots Music program, the Chattanooga-bred singer-songwriter expands on the uncompromising artistry she’s displayed as a member of Our Native Daughters, whose Kiah-penned standout “Black Myself” earned a Grammy nomination for Best American Roots Song and won Song of the Year at the Folk Alliance International Awards.

Produced by Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers, Amos Lee, Andrew Bird) and made with esteemed musicians like Blake Mills, Wary + Strange arrives as a deeply immersive body of work, endlessly redefining the limits of roots music in its inventive rhythms and textures. With an unforgettable voice that’s both unfettered and exquisitely controlled, Kiah gracefully interlaces political commentary and personal revelation, ultimately offering a raw yet nuanced examination of grief, alienation, and the hard-won triumph of total self-acceptance.

Combining original compositions and traditional Haitian tunes with historical broadcasts and contemporary interviews, Leyla McCalla’s remarkable Breaking the Thermometer album offers an immersive sonic journey through a half century of racial, social, and political unrest as it explores the legacy of Radio Haiti—the first radio station to report in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people—and the journalists who risked their lives to broadcast it. McCalla’s performances are captivating, fueled by rich, sophisticated melodic work and intoxicating Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and the juxtaposition of voices—English and Kreyòl, personal and political, anecdotal and journalistic—is similarly entrancing, raising the dead while shining a light on the enduring spirit of the Haitian people. McCalla isn’t just a detached observer, though; she writes with great insight and introspection, grappling with memory, identity, and her own experiences as a Haitian American woman, unraveling layers of marginalization and generations of repression and resolve in search of a clearer vision of herself and her role as an artist. The result is at once a work of radical performance art, historical scholarship, and personal memoir—a wide-ranging and powerful meditation on family and democracy and free expression that couldn’t have arrived at a more timely moment.

Born in New York City to a pair of Haitian emigrants and activists, McCalla developed an early fascination with the country and its culture thanks in part to the time she spent visiting her grandmother there as a child. After moving to Ghana for two years and later graduating from New York University, McCalla eventually drifted south to New Orleans, where she planned to make a living playing cello on the streets of the French Quarter. Her dedication to illuminating the Black roots of American culture eventually led her to The Carolina Chocolate Drops. After two years touring and recording with the Grammy-winning group, she left to pursue her own career as a solo artist. In 2014, she generated considerable buzz with her critically acclaimed debut, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, which prompted The New York Times to rave that “her voice is disarmingly natural, and her settings are elegantly succinct.” Two more similarly celebrated releases followed, 2016’s A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey and 2019’s The Capitalist Blues, which yielded even more glowing reviews and profiles.

Born and raised in Montreal, poet, singer, songwriter, activist, and multi-instrumentalist Allison Russell imbues her music with the colors of her city—the light, the landscape, the language—but also the trauma that she suffered there. Outside Child, her acclaimed debut album, is a heartbreaking reflection on a childhood no one should have to endure, and at the same time a powerful reclamation—asserted from a place of healing, of motherhood, of partnership—and from a new home made in Nashville.

The record features contributions from many of the artistic family members she has found there, including producer Dan Knobler, Erin Rae, Jamie Dick, Joe Pisapia, The McCrary Sisters, Ruth Moody, Yola, and JT Nero. “It was about making these songs live and breathe in the most honest way,” Russell says. “We were laughing, we were crying. And the communion between musicians, I hope people can hear that on the record. It felt like magic.”

Outside Child, says Russell, “is about resilience, survival, transcendence, the redemptive power of art, community, connection, and chosen family.” Singing about this on “Nightflyer,” Russell ponders the healing power of motherhood, using the track’s wide-open expanse to convey the strength she didn’t know she had. The line “I am the mother of the evening star / I am the love that conquers all,” she explains, is “the most defiantly triumphant, hopeful line I’ve ever written ... that’s about the birth of my daughter and how that transformed me,” she explains. Though they had a fraught relationship, Russell remembers how she’d crawl under the piano and listen to her own mother play. “I would hum along with her,” Russell recalls. “She said I was humming before I could talk. I was able to feel some kind of comfort or love or connection in a way that she couldn’t verbally or physically express—but I could feel in her music that there was love in her.”

In the end, Outside Child is not only a radical reclamation of a traumatic childhood and lost home, but also a lantern light for survivors of all stripes—a fervent reminder of the resuscitative power of art.