Rhiannon Giddens: You're The One

Rhiannon Giddens has a voracious musical appetite and a big talent that uses everything to fuel her many creative activities. With a MacArthur, a Pulitzer, and multiple Grammys on her shelf, this has not gone unnoticed. In a body of work that includes musicological projects along with different types of art, You're The One focuses on Giddens as a songwriter, in a variety of idioms. "I hope that people just hear American music," she says. "Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock—it's all there. I like to be where it meets organically."

For her, where it all meets has a bullseye on the banjo. She often plays a beautiful mellow-toned replica of a mid-19th century fretless model, the kind used in blackface minstrelsy. In writing songs on this troubled vessel, her stated intent has been to create new music that reminds listeners of its original purpose, one that is "rooted in spiritual connection." She looks to "recast it in a modern light" without totally decontextualizing it, so that the music is not completely divorced from its history. This makes for a powerful aesthetic, which is at the core of the soulful title track, "You're The One," a ballad written for her newborn son. The sounds arranged around her banjo and voice appear as present day reverberations of an old bell, still ringing. One hears that resonance again in the zydeco-inflected "You Louisiana Man," which she seems to have sung live in the studio, banjo in hand. (See the YouTube at the bottom of the page.)

Giddens was looking to branch out with this project, which meant collaborating with new artists and dipping into other genres in order to reach "people who might dig [it] but don't know anything about, you know, what I do," she says. Her work fills in a history of American music that has omitted contributions of African Americans, particularly regarding country string bands and the banjo. She came to the job with solid tools and training. An Oberlin Conservatory graduate, she can sing in many timbres and tongues, research like an ethnomusicologist, and play fiddle and banjo like the old-time players she learned from in North Carolina; a well-rounded combination.

In creating You're The One, "I just wanted to expand my sound palette," Giddens explains. "Another Wasted Life" is a stunning example of this expansion. Inspired by the singular voice of the great Nina Simone, especially Simone's protest songs, Giddens' lyric responds to the horrific story of Kalief Browder, a young man incarcerated on Rikers Island for three years without trial ("given solitary time at institutional caprice"), who committed suicide after his release. The groove has a relentless chromatic ostinato at its center, and the performance culminates in a howling wordless improvisation, a unique jazz-blues moan that sends chills down the spine.

You're The One is yet another extraordinary offering from a great American musician whose work is consistently and superbly "beyond category," to quote Duke Ellington. One looks forward to the next.