Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens: American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation

Rhiannon Giddens is not afraid of big projects. American Railroad, the album, is part of a larger work, subtitled A Musical Journey of Reclamation, which Giddens initiated with the widely acclaimed Silkroad Ensemble, a diverse international collective of performers, improvisers and composers created by Yo-Yo Ma. American Railroad digs into the building of America's transcontinental railway system, focusing on voices that have been missing from public narratives: voices of the laborers on whose backs the hard work fell, of those whose lands the rails crossed and altered—people of Black, Indigenous and immigrant communities.

The release is essentially multimedia, accompanied by a podcast (with PRX), a PBS television series (My Music with Rhiannon Giddens Season 2, 2024), a booklet (available on the Silkroad website) and a US tour.

The story is one of "connection, culture and countless voices, many of which were silenced or erased from the narrative altogether," Giddens emphasizes. She and the ensemble researched and collaborated across the country, interacting with descendants of railroad workers, scholars and artists of various types. In historic sites from San Francisco to New York, Swannanoa to Standing Rock, they listened and learned, asking themselves what they could "create from hearing their stories."

"Swannanoa Tunnel" / "Asheville Junction"

Giddens and company use "Swannanoa Tunnel" (aka "Asheville Junction") as a throughline in the album program, rearranging and reprising it at various points. For North Carolina scholars Kevin Kehrberg and Jeff Keith, the composition was "kind of a pathway into what has been a very muted and underappreciated and critically important aspect of southern history" ("Somebody Died, Babe: A Musical Cover- Up of Racism, Violence, & Greed," The Bitter Southerner, 2020).

The song passed from Black into white hands, as the podcast and booklet point out, losing and changing meaning on the way. Originally a hammer tune it was sung—at gunpoint—by African American prisoners serving long sentences for petty (or nonexistent) crimes. The men created the piece to synchronize their movements as they dug and drilled through rock to build the rail tunnel ("hammer falling from my shoulder all day long, babe, all day long"). It became a disaster song when the tunnel collapsed on opening day, killing all inside.

Verses were added and alterations made over time. By 1961, the Smithsonian library—on its Folkways release of folklorist and banjoist Frank Warner's rendition—lists the tune's "culture group" as "Anglo-American" (The Folk Music of the Newport Folk Festival 1959-60, Vol. 2). The recording shows Warner breathing into his vocal hammer strokes, but the festival audience's cocktail tittering suggests that the real story had been lost in translation. But not forgotten...

Memorable tracks

After a beautiful "Invocation," in which Pura Fé Crescioni seems to pull the sound of a train whistle out of a conch shell, Giddens and her crew pick up the old hammer as the album program begins. Giddens sings "Swannanoa Tunnel" a capella at first, save for the ensemble's percussive thwacks, then switches to violin, accelerating into a fiddle-and-drum version of "Steel Driving Man" (the story of John Henry, who "died with a hammer in his hand"), with Sandeep Das' tablas providing the locomotion.

Das' "Rela" appears a little farther along in the set. A solo piece, it takes its name from the fast-paced improvisatory tabla genre it represents, which has become associated with the sound of the railway. As the booklet tells us, Das' work is "an homage to the railroad workers of the Indian subcontinent" who built India's rail system under British colonial rule, in a parallel history of "modernization and exploitation in the name of industrial progress."

Maeve Gilchrist found her way into "Far Down Far" by looking for "a seed that felt relevant to the turn of the century era when Irish migration was at its peak." The Irish harp player and composer found "The Far Down Farmer" in Francis O'Neill's The Dance Music of Ireland: O'Neill's 1001 (1907), an important collection of jigs, reels and other popular forms. In an interview on Giddens' PBS series (Episode 2), Gilchrist said she had chosen the tune because it refers to a "slightly derogatory" name some Protestants gave Catholics (Far- Downer). Her hope is that the composition "serves both sides of the economic and cultural divide and pays tribute to the backbreaking work that all the men did."

Gilchrist deconstructed and recomposed the original piece, breaking the melody into small bits and reorganizing them, dividing the segments among the instruments, creating precise polyrhythmic layers and countermelodies to evoke the motions of both laying tracks and riding the rails. Toward the end, she used metric modulation to increase the speed, dropping beats and changing time signatures "to create this forward sense of urgency; the train starts to accelerate, the people get closer to their destination." Video concert footage shows the full multicultural mosaic that is the Silkroad Ensemble participating, working together and separately in tight musical quarters, reminding us that laborers from different cultural milieux found ways to work with one another in building the railroad.

Cecile McLorin Salvant's commissioned composition, the podcast indicates, responds to another of the many unsung railroad stories of the twentieth century: the dual struggles against racism and sexism faced by the women (the Ladies Auxiliary and the working maids) of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, "a hierarchical, grassroots partnership of men and women that embraced unionization as a vehicle for attacking racial and economic inequality" (Maurine W. Greenwald, "Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters by Melinda Chateauvert" [review essay], International Labor and Working- Class History, Spring 2000). In a shorthand way, without explanation, Salvant summons intense emotions inherent in the simple question, "Have You Seen My Man," relying on allusive lyrics, a familiar blues mode and steady rhythmic motion to convey "the secret that no one knows." Crescioni sings the first verse alone, then Mazz Swift and Giddens join in, until all the women are singing together and the ensemble seems to move slowly but perceptibly forward.

Bringing up the markers

As much as Giddens' You're The One (Nonesuch, 2023) was about studio production, American Railroad is about sounds created in the live moment, their ephemeral nature and how things can be lost over time. Each project has a deep historical dimension that relates individual stories to larger currents. Giddens is passionate about righting and rounding out the record, burrowing in to find hidden facts. Her earlier work on Black roots of country music and the history of the banjo feeds into the American Railroad project, and there are parallels between the American railroad and the old Silk Route between Asia and Europe, which inspired Yo-Yo Ma to create the Silkroad Ensemble and promote its collaborative spirit. As Crescioni, a Native American activist and singer-songwriter, put it, "Our hearts are full. Our ancestors come and they bring us strength. And we say never forget who you are or where you come from."

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