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Los Angeles Times
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Rhiannon Giddens is ready to meet a major moment of revival in Black music history, with banjo in hand
Rhiannon Giddens is down at the river, carrying a flame of heritage, and she's inviting anyone who wants to join her to come down and light their own wicks. Rivers are traditionally sites of salvation, as well as play. Last summer, Giddens was making her new album of traditional banjo and fiddle tunes with Justin Robinson, 'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow,' and they were recording a few songs at Mill Prong House in Red Springs, N.C. Stepping inside the house, built on a plantation in 1795, Giddens recoiled at the intensity she felt. 'I knew who was working these fields,' she says. 'I knew who was serving in this house — and it was people who looked like me. And then seeing up on the wall, like, a reunion photo of these old white dudes who went to Chapel Hill, at the end of the Civil War, and one of them had my Black family's last name from Mebane [N.C.] ... I was just like: I can't right now. I had to run out to the river.' In a moment captured by a photographer, she was crouching by the water just before it started to rain, 'and I'm thinking: how many people have come down to this river for respite? How many people in the history of this plantation — turned manor house, turned private property — have come to exactly this spot, distressed over whatever reason?' Giddens carries the weight of this on her shoulders — of the distress, but also of the joyful culture and music-making of her ancestors — and she extends an open invitation to audiences to share and learn their stories and their culture. She did so at her inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival in her native North Carolina, and she's doing it in her current Old-Time Revue tour — which will make a special blockbuster stop at the Hollywood Bowl [on June 18]. The program will feature Giddens playing with Hollywood banjoists Steve Martin and Ed Helms, along with a reunion of the all-female banjo supergroup Our Native Daughters. 'So many banjos,' she says. 'This evening is going to be amazing. I wanted to call it a 'Banjo Jamboree,' but they wouldn't let me,' she laughs, speaking to The Times via Zoom. Balancing laughter and sorrow seems to come easily to Giddens, 48, who has been on a serious mission to rekindle the legacy of the banjo and string band traditions as authentically Black creations ever since she met fiddle player Joe Thompson in 2004 and became a disciple. She's referred to as an 'elder' in the 'Blackbird' liner notes, which doesn't bother her: 'To an 18-year-old, I am an elder,' she says. 'I'm almost 50, and we are the half generation. We're the point five, because our parents didn't pick this up.' From the Carolina Chocolate Drops to her solo music, from composing the Pulitzer-winning opera 'Omar' to helming the Silkroad Ensemble, Giddens is at the fore of a movement of Black artists — including Beyoncé, whose country album 'Cowboy Carter' features Giddens on banjo — reclaiming their cultural heritage and making it sing again. A river (of sorts) played a role in another piece of Black Southern iconography this year — in the climax of 'Sinners.' Giddens was a musical consultant on Ryan Coogler's blockbuster film and contributed her banjo to the song 'Old Corn Liquor' on its soundtrack. She was also meant to appear onscreen in the central juke joint — her Chocolate Drops bandmate, Justin Robinson, does — but she couldn't make it work with her busy schedule. She admittedly hasn't seen the film ('I don't like horror movies, so I actually don't want to see it') but she's still a fan. 'I think what they've opened up with the whole conceit behind it is super important,' Giddens says. In a way, 'Sinners' is a vampiric, IMAX-sized version of her own project, in that it's about how so much of our popular musical culture was invented by Black folks in the South and co-opted by white performers (whether Elvis, the Rolling Stones or the country and folk music industries) — but also about how music can be a time machine, a way to seance with people up the river of history. 'Beyoncé, 'Sinners,' and then, in its own small way, Biscuits & Banjos is like this little triangle of a cultural movement,' Giddens says, 'which I didn't see coming, and I'm just super grateful. Because it's been a desert. ... We're all toiling in our corners, on our own, and it kind of feels like we're carrying all of this on our own.' Her Durham festival, which took place in April, drew musical legends — Taj Mahal, Christian McBride, the Legendary Ingramettes — and basically 'most of my favorite people making music right now,' says Giddens. She also judged a biscuit competition and participated in contra dances, which is what got her into this music in the first place. 'People were just really ready,' she says, 'ready to come and feel good, and to celebrate our humanity together.' For Giddens, the stakes couldn't be higher. She and Robinson learned their tunes and their art directly from Thompson, who died in 2012; they were playing his music together in Ojai recently 'when it just hit me how important it was what we were doing,' she says, 'like how complete the sound was together. I said: 'If one of us gets hit by a bus, this tradition is dead.' ' That's why she wanted to record the tunes they inherited from Thompson, as well as from Etta Baker and other North Carolina string band players — hence the 'Blackbird' album. But she also insists that the only way to truly pass the flame is through playing together in person. 'I know that learning from Joe forms the center of my character as a musician,' she says. 'I learned stuff off of recordings, fine, but I have something to go back to that was a living transmission. And I just think you should have something of that, especially in this day and age.' Giddens has passed her tradition down to many students in the past 20 years, including her nephew Justin 'Demeanor' Harrington — who plays banjo and the bones, and also raps, and who is traveling with her Old-Time Revue. This will be Giddens' first time at the Bowl; likewise for Amythyst Kiah, a banjo player from Johnson City, Tenn., and one of Our Native Daughters. That project began in 2019 as a one-off album recorded in a small Louisiana studio, of songs inspired by the transatlantic slave trade and the suffering and often unheard voices of Black women. 'Music has a way of disarming,' says Kiah, 'so it allows for people to be able to engage with the subject matter in an easier way than just talking about it.' The fierce foursome — which also includes Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla — toured with their songs before the pandemic, and later brought their banjos to Carnegie Hall in 2022. 'Now we're playing in a stadium,' says Kiah, 'which is insane.' The star-studded Bowl show is 'not what I usually do,' says Giddens. 'It's stepping out a little bit for me, not to mention the size of the place, which is kind of freaking me out.' But really it's just another river — or rather, the same river Giddens has been inviting folks to join her at for the last 20 years.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
DOGE Went After Arts Funding. Music Docs Are Paying the Price
For documentary filmmaker Randall MacLowry, the Black folk hero John Henry was a natural subject. The mythical 19th-century figure who helped install railroad tracks by way of his sledgehammer skills, Henry has been saluted in literature (Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days), dance (part of a program by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), and especially music. Bob Dylan named-checked Henry in a 2015 speech, Jason Isbell wrote a song about him ('The Day John Henry Died') during his Drive-By Truckers days, and Johnny Cash recorded 'The Legend of John Henry's Hammer.' On their new duo album, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson cover 'John Henry' as well. But thanks to the new Trump administration and Elon Musk's DOGE agency, it may be a while before we see the planned documentary John Henry: Unmasking America's Real First Black Superhero — if we see it at all. More from Rolling Stone Senator Meets With Trump Immigration Victim in El Salvador Trump Dodges on El Salvador Court Orders: 'I'm Not Involved' Judges Smack Down Trump's 'Shocking' and 'Lawless' Arguments in Abrego Garcia Case On April 2, the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has for 60 years funded historical sites, museums, and documentaries (including a portion of Ken Burns' The Civil War), announced it was terminating most of its grant projects. The documentary world was hit particularly hard. As Deadline has reported, planned movies about fictional teen detective Nancy Drew and a 19th-century New York City riot are now endangered, along with, as Rolling Stone has learned, a few music docs in various stages of development and completion. As MacLowry discovered when he received his NEH email, the money he'd been promised last year to develop his John Henry doc was now gone: 'The NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda,' the letter (from Trump-appointed acting NEH head Michael McDonald) read, in part. 'The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration, and due to exceptional circumstances, adherence to the traditional notification process is not possible.' MacLowry and his production partner and spouse, Tracy Heather Strain, weren't alone in their shock. Last summer, Immy Humes, an Oscar-nominated documentarian who was planning a movie on groundbreaking jazz-world filmmaker Shirley Clarke, received what she recalls as the 'miraculous news' that her project had been awarded a production grant. 'It was literally life-changing for me,' Humes says. 'Every molecule of my brain was like, 'Oh my God! Joy and rapture!' My project start date was stated as Feb. 1. I was in heaven.' But like MacLowry and dozens more documentary makers, Humes too received her NEH termination notice two weeks ago. 'It looked like spam,' she says. 'It read like spam.' But it wasn't, leaving her Clarke movie in the lurch. In a somewhat comical turn, one termination letter was sent to director Augusta Palmer for an NEH-funded film, The Blues Society (about the legendary Memphis Country Blues Festival), that was already completed and released. (That doc's 2022 NEH agreement extended until this month.) But there was nothing funny about the other notices, which also applied to now-canceled funds for Sounds of the Uyghurs, an in-the-works doc on the traditional music of northwest China. According to reports, some of those collective NEH funds will now go toward building a patriotic-themed 'Garden of Heroes' at the White House. (The NEH did not respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.) While NEH funding doesn't always cover a film's entire production costs, the grants play a crucial role in the process. 'The NEH is one of the few places you can get that significant amount of money to really push a project forward,' says MacLowry, whose work has been featured in PBS' American Experience series. 'Getting that amount of money really gives us a better guarantee that the project will get made. The NEH was quite unique in being able to be public funding that actually could make such a significant difference in getting a project from the development stage to the screen.' The NEH once distributed anywhere from low five to upper six figures for such projects (and only after filmmakers completed an intense and arduous application nearly 100 pages long). The doc makers insist that those levels of funds are necessary. 'This money employs people,' says MacLowry, who received a $75,000 development grant for his Henry movie and, before the cuts, was planning to apply for a full-production grant closer to $700,000. 'It's not just a filmmaker getting lots of money to do what they want. You're hiring camera people, sound recorders, editors and composers. One filmmaker has 14 people working on that one and getting paid. For John Henry, we want to use the Johnny Cash song, and that's not going to be cheap.' In keeping with the NEH's past goal of enlightening history and telling untold stories, MacLowry says his goal with John Henry was to 'investigate how this mythical Black figure wielding a hammer in the afterlife of slavery becomes an American hero.' He adds, 'It's a powerful lens revealing how Black people interpreted their world in social status, expressed discontent and fantasized escape and resistance. John Henry also delves into issues of myth making, industrialization, racial exploitation, and cultural appropriation and Black masculinity.' As MacLowry says, Henry's story — about a worker who has to prove his worth against a machine built to replace men in those jobs — even speaks to concerns over AI. Although Shirley Clarke was a peer of renowned filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Jonas Mekas, she hasn't received nearly enough attention, a situation Humes had hoped to remedy with her film. Clarke's 1985 doc Ornette: Made in America took an unconventional approach to chronicling the life and music of saxophonist Ornette Coleman. The Connection, from 1961, was a fictional found-footage 'doc' about jazz heroin addicts that included pianist Freddie Redd and saxophonist Jackie Maclean in its cast. Clarke's 1964 The Cool World featured a score by Mal Waldron and performances by Dizzy Gillespie. 'She's considered by many to be the greatest jazz filmmaker who's ever lived,' Humes says. 'My film is about a filmmaker, but it's really a lot about music. She was way, way into jazz, and a lot of people say she was trying to make films that were like jazz composition.' Now Humes — who was told last year she'd received a $600,000 production grant for her untitled Clarke doc — is scrambling for replacement funding, along with many of her peers. 'It's been an intense two weeks,' Humes says. 'We're trying to support each other and brainstorm ways to help each other. I'm trying to figure out how to continue working, and I haven't gotten there yet. It's pretty disastrous.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
