Our Native Daughters was an album before it became a super-group, and it began at two very clear moments. The first was at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. My then seven-year-old daughter and I were lucky enough to have Rex Ellis (the museum’s associate director) take us on a private tour, so we really had time to look at so many things in silence and focus. I came across a quote by William Cowper that read, “I admit I am sickened at the purchase of slaves ... but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar or rum?” Not knowing then that the author was most likely an abolitionist and had written the words in deadly earnest satire, I was massively struck by the sentiment, and I thought of the modern-day slavery that produces all the things we can’t do without—iPhones, TVs, and so much else. I took a picture with my iPhone, and I remember immediately texting the image to the album’s co-producer Dirk Powell, saying this needs to be a song. That quote stayed with me for a long time afterward.
The second moment was during a screening of The Birth of a Nation (2016), the much-heralded but little-seen movie by Nate Parker—taken down, along with him, due to some unsavory behavior in a prequel to the #MeToo movement. In the scene, one of the enslaved women on the plantation is forced to make herself available for a rape by the plantation owner’s friend; afterwards, she leaves his room, in shame, while the others look on. The gaze of the camera, however, does not rest on her, the victim’s face. It rests on her husband, the man who was “wronged” as an impetus for him to rebel against his white oppressors—and as I sat in the little theater in New York City, I found myself furious. Furious at the moment in a long history of moments of the pain and suffering of Black women being used to justify a man’s actions; at her own emotion and reaction being literally written out of the frame. The idea of taking historical words and notions and observations about slavery and making art with them then came to me.
There is surely racism in this country—it’s baked into our oldest institutions—just as there is sexism millennia old. At the intersection of the two stands the African American woman. Used, abused, ignored, and scorned, she has in the face of these things been unbelievably brave, groundbreaking, and insistent. Black women have historically had the most to lose and have therefore been the fiercest fighters for justice—in large, public ways that are only beginning to be highlighted, and in countless domestic ways that will most likely never be acknowledged.
Silenced and displaced by her own gender, and disregarded and belittled by her own race (in the grand tradition of Victorian morality), she has—nevertheless—persisted. I’ve always seen this project as a part of a larger movement to reclaim the Black female history of this country.
This project also centers around that most American (and often white male–identified) of instruments, the banjo; every woman on this stage tonight is a banjo player of either the five-string, tenor, or minstrel varieties. The banjo has been used to tell the story of America in so many different ways, from the widespread and insanely popular minstrel shows of the 1800s to the country and bluegrass worlds of the working class in the early 1900s and the counter-culture folk revolution of decades later.
But the roots of the banjo lie in West Africa, in the lands of the akonting, the ngoni, the buchundu, and many other spike-lute instruments that existed and have been played for many years by the regular folk and griots alike. When people from this area were captured and sold into the international slave trade, they brought the memories of these instruments (and, occasionally, the actual instruments) with them, along with the attendant music and modes and rhythms. People often forget that there was no monolithic “slave,” there were only countless numbers of “enslaved persons” brought from all over the enormous continent of Africa. These souls found themselves yoked together with no common language, religion, or culture—but music is universal.
Paying homage to James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955), this project reflects one of the many strains that Baldwin intones: “It is only in his music ... that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.”
And so here we take the stage at Carnegie Hall, joined by the same musicians who recorded the album with us in Lafayette, Louisiana and toured with us in all our glory during the summer of 2019. Together, Our Native Daughters performs these songs to uplift and persist, to understand and feel our past, to share our voices and stories, and to bring sharply into focus America’s true history, knowing that what’s past is prologue—but only if we let it be.
—Rhiannon Giddens