American folklore is full of people whose stories were told by somebody else.
Songs of Our Native Daughters goes looking for some of those missing voices. The project brings together Rhiannon Giddens and her former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Leyla McCalla, Birds of Chicago's Allison Russell and Tennessee singer and songwriter Amythyst Kiah. Four Black women, all deeply versed in American roots music, digging into a history in which people who looked like them were frequently present but rarely allowed to control the narrative.
There is an element of musical archaeology to the project, similar in spirit to what the Chieftains explored on San Patricio. Here, the excavation leads into slavery, resistance, survival and the African roots buried inside what eventually became American folk music. The descendants of the people whose experiences supplied so much of that history are the ones doing the digging.
One of the ideas that set the project in motion was Giddens' desire to revisit the legend of John Henry through the eyes of his wife, Polly Ann. In the familiar version, John Henry is the hero, the steel-driving man who races a machine and dies with his hammer in his hand. Polly Ann usually occupies the margins of the story. "Polly Ann's Hammer" shifts the perspective. She has a voice, a life and a burden of her own.
That change of viewpoint runs through Songs of Our Native Daughters. Familiar stories, historical events and inherited traditions are approached from the position of African American women, people whose experiences were essential to the making of America while their own accounts were often ignored, softened or erased. The history hasn't changed. Who gets to tell it has.
It would be easy, and perhaps a little lazy, to frame all of this exclusively against the political climate of 2019. Obviously the album doesn't exist in a vacuum, and songs about race, power, violence and whose version of history gets remembered inevitably speak to the present. But the material reaches much further than the news cycle. This is an American Gothic populated by people who have always been there, even when the mythology preferred to leave them out.
The accompanying booklet is therefore more than packaging. Essays and notes provide historical background, explain the origins of songs and instruments and identify the people behind some of the stories. Reading it changes the experience of hearing the album. In that sense, the score and libretto belong together.
But the scholarship would mean considerably less if the music weren't so good.
Banjo sits at the center of much of Songs of Our Native Daughters, and its presence carries its own historical significance. Long before the instrument became synonymous with white Appalachian music and bluegrass, its ancestors came to America with enslaved Africans. Giddens and her collaborators have spent years recovering that part of the instrument's history, and here the banjo becomes both musical voice and historical evidence.
Around it, mandolin, percussion and other acoustic instruments mix with electric guitar, drums and more contemporary arrangements. The record feels rooted in old music without attempting to recreate an old recording. These women understand tradition well enough to use it rather than imitate it.
Their voices give the album its greatest power. Giddens, McCalla, Russell and Kiah are very different singers, and the contrast between them keeps the project from becoming overly uniform. Sometimes a voice stands alone. Elsewhere they gather together, harmonizing, answering and reinforcing one another. The communal singing is particularly affecting because it fits the larger purpose of the record: individual stories becoming part of a shared history.
"Polly Ann's Hammer" remains one of the album's most striking songs, precisely because its intervention is so simple. A story most listeners already know suddenly looks different when somebody moves the camera a few feet to the side.
"Quasheba, Quasheba", meanwhile, reaches into Allison Russell's own family history, tracing an ancestor sold into slavery and transported from West Africa. The distance between folklore and genealogy suddenly collapses. History becomes intimate, carried through names, families and generations rather than dates in a textbook.
That movement between the historical and the personal is what keeps Songs of Our Native Daughters from becoming a lecture. The women aren't standing outside this material and explaining it. Their own histories are tangled up in the larger story, and the music makes those connections tangible.
There is anger here, inevitably, but also tenderness, humor, resilience and considerable beauty. That's important. A project dealing with slavery and historical erasure could easily become unbearably solemn. Songs of Our Native Daughters allows the people inside these stories the full range of human experience rather than defining them entirely by what was done to them.
The result is a fresh angle on Americana in the most literal sense. These are American stories, played partly on instruments that helped create American music, viewed through experiences that conventional versions of American folklore too often pushed to the margins.
Songs of Our Native Daughters digs into the past, but what it uncovers was never really gone. The songs, instruments, names and stories survived. What changes here is who gets to stand at the center and tell us what happened.
GENRE: Folk, Blues
RELEASE DATE: February 22, 2019
PRODUCED BY: Rhiannon Giddens & Dirk Powell
LABEL: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
RATING: 9/10