Rhiannon Giddens & the Old-Time Revue bring American Roots to the bandshell
So, hey, Miami, how about a good, old-fashioned porch party?
The MacArthur 'genius grant-,' Pulitzer Prize-, Grammy-winning Giddens proposes just that with her Friday concert at the Miami Beach Bandshell. Rhiannon Giddens & the Old-Time Revue will play the kind of foot-stomping, hand-clapping, heart-lifting music that first brought her to prominence nearly two decades ago as a founding member of the Black string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
A North Carolina native, Giddens began her career as an opera singer, studying at the Oberlin College and Conservatory.
Degree in hand and back in her home state, her musical path took a 90-degree turn when she met 86-year-old Joe Thompson, one of the last living repositories of Carolina Piedmont music. He became her mentor. It wasn't long before Giddens and fellow Thompson acolytes Justin Robinson and Dom Flemons had formed the Chocolate Drops, and a whole genre of American music that had been on life support was revived. In 2011, their second album 'Genuine Negro Jig,' garnered the group a Grammy, and the accolades for Giddens' gifts have not stopped since.
If Giddens' musical journey has been full of twists and turns, it may be because her artistic boldness is only matched by her curiosity. The kind of person that says 'yes' first then thinks about it later, every time she has a creative itch, it seems like she can't help but scratch it.
For years Giddens has made her home in Ireland, and in the current season of the PBS series 'My Music with Rhiannon Giddens,' she explores the melodies and rhythms of the island, singing in Gaelic on some of the tunes. And although she hasn't taken a single class in composition, a few years back she decided that she would try her hand at composing an opera. Giddens and Michael Abel cowrote 'Omar' about a Muslim African scholar who was enslaved in North Carolina. It garnered its two creators a Pulitzer. She was chosen to succeed Yo-Yo Ma as a director of the Silkroad Ensemble. Under her tutelage, they put out an album in 2024 highlighting the music of the Native American and immigrant groups who built the Transcontinental Railroad.
With as many musical miles beneath her feet as those lines of railroad track, Giddens reveals in a telephone interview what brought her back around to her roots in the folk music of the Carolinas.
'Well, I guess kind of thinking back, it's coming on the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Black banjo gathering that kind of brought us together and, you know, I'm thinking about how that's how everything started for me and wanting to kind of pay respect to that,' she says.
The style of music Giddens and her band will be playing at the Miami Beach Bandshell emerged from people living through hard times and coming together to create connections, to forge community. If they could do it, Giddens seems to say, so might we.
'It's a very AI world right now and this music, this old-time music, made by people—poor people, you know—and made in community, is kind of like, for me, like anti-AI. I mean it's just about as real as you want to get. So, I thought, 'Man, it'd be really nice to have a tour kind of really leaning into that.''
For the musician, it just felt like time, she says.
'You know, 'Let's give the drums a rest for a second and the electric instruments, let's just let them go and sit down for a second and really just focus on a string band.' '
This tour is her way of sharing a piece of our history that could have been forgotten, and it is that idea, not of grandstanding, but of coming together through music to strengthen the ties that bind us—no matter our ethnicity.
Giddens may beguile listeners with her astonishing voice, but she isn't one to hog the limelight. 'I love backing up people,' she says, adding that the banjo is great for that.
'I just, I really love supporting someone else who's like killing it,' she says.
She gets to do that with Robinson. 'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow?,' the pair's first album since recording with the Chocolate Drops, came out on Friday, April 18. Fittingly, it was recorded outdoors, with birdsong included. Giddens is grateful to be once again touring and sharing a stage with a man she calls 'just a pure musician.'
'He's not doing any of it for fame or, you know, any of that stuff. Applause? He does not care,' she says.
'There's something about me and Justin starting our journey together in our 20s, you know, 20 years ago… Playing fiddle and banjo together, it just feels really great,' she says. 'He and I play together like we don't play together with anybody else.'
As with Robinson, her ties with the other musicians in the Old-Time Revue—multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, his daughter, guitarist Amelia Powell, bassist Jason Sypher, and Giddens' nephew, bones player and rapper Demeanor—have developed over years of playing together.
'These are blood family and chosen family, and it felt really important to tour this music with that kind of group…. I feel like we represent a lot of where American music came from,' says Giddens.
The tunes they will play in concert honor the diversity of their heritages: Cajun and Creole, Blues, four-part harmony and, of course, old-time Carolina string music.
'Oh, it's going to be all the things,' she says. 'It'll be like working class acoustic music, basically… That's what we're going to be playing.'
If you go:
WHAT: Rhiannon Giddens & the Old-Time Revue, presented by the Rhythm Foundation. Opening set by Quiana Major.
WHERE: Miami Beach Bandshell, 7275 Collins Ave., Miami Beach
WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday; doors open at 7 p.m.
COST: $53.46, general admission; $496.46, club level (includes up to 6 tickets)
INFORMATION: miamibeachbandshell.com
ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don't miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com
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