In the middle of a record populated with sexual violence, police shootings, and church bombings, Rhiannon Giddens sings, “My heart it is a-shakin’ with an old, old song.” This has been the simple, guiding principle of her decade-long career in roots music. Her powerful interpretation of American folk reclaims its old vernacular and redistributes it among its oft-untold complex history. After years of soaking up American musical traditions with her long-standing string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens has emerged as a peerless voice of roots-minded music as a solo artist on her new album, comprised of original compositions alongside a few relevant covers, including the Staples Singers’ 1965 title track.
The album’s beauty and gravitas come from how Giddens collapses the last two centuries of American history, juxtaposing songs about antebellum slave plantations with 1960’s Civil Rights anthems and narratives of 21st-century state violence. The record opens with “At the Purchaser’s Option,” a title taken from a 1797 slave advertisement. The song—a tale of a mother considering the doomed fate of their child born into bondage—immediately establishes the primacy of family across the album. Despite its historical pretensions, Freedom Highway is fundamentally a story of black mothers and their children, a record that traces black women’s eternal labor as they sacrifice for and grieve over the uncertain future of their kin.
Giddens has always been interested in upsetting the continuum of African-American song. She began experimenting with more recent, mid-late 20th-century styles on her solo debut, 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn, and she arrives at Freedom Highway with her most expansive and adventurous musical palette yet. Featured prominently are the banjo/fiddle string-band and Piedmont blues stylings she explored so deftly in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, but Freedom Highway weaves hip-hop, gospel, Dixieland jazz, folk balladry, and guitar-driven rhythm and blues into a coherent whole.
It remains challenging to find the right environment that fully modernizes Rhiannon Giddens’ perfectly ornate soprano. But roots expert Dirk Powell, who produced the album, relies on understated, predominantly acoustic arrangements that end up humanizing her vocal approach more fully than the museum-piece elegance of T-Bone Burnett’s production on Tomorrow Is My Turn.
Likewise, the emotional intimacy of Giddens’ first collection of original material is better served by the close collaborators and assorted family members who appear on Freedom Highway than the array of well-chopped session pros who populated her debut. Giddens’ sister Lalenja Harrington, who co-wrote and shares vocals on “Baby Boy,” and her nephew, Justin Harrington, who raps a verse on the police brutality polemic “Better Get It Right the First Time,” provide moments of dramatic interplay that firmly contemporize Giddens’ creative vision.
As a songwriter, Giddens achieves immediacy by imbuing her stories with striking interpersonal drama and emotional depth. On the banjo tune “Julie,” one of several songs that take place during the Civil War, a heart-wrenching exchange between slave and mistress ends with a devastating narrative reveal. On the stomping “The Love We Almost Had,” an otherwise unremarkable tale of romance-that-never-was becomes a tragic statement on the far-reaching bonds of white supremacy.
But the record's most affecting moment comes during “We Could Fly,” a modern spiritual that traces a family’s multi-generational search for enlightened freedom. The song delivers a rare gift from a piece of music: the sense that it’s always existed, that it’s always been sung, that it must have been written in 1854, and in 1963, and in 2016. That shared sense of African-American tradition is the driving force behind Giddens' art as she lays bare the ugly symmetry of America’s history. Here is timeless, striking proof that what was once worth protesting in song 200 years ago remains every bit as vital today.
