Rhiannon Giddens, who appears at Perth Concert Hall on Sunday April 30, is a remarkably resourceful musician across a remarkable range of music.
A trained opera singer, North Carolina-born Rhiannon can glide over Monteverdi’s Si Dolce è’l Tormento. She can slip into puirt à beul – the Scottish Gaelic songs that became dance music when instruments were proscribed – as naturally as she can the Seminole powwow songs in her family background.
And when the television country music drama series Nashville needed a gospel singer to help one of its wayward young stars, Rhiannon played the part as to the manner born.
Fiddle and banjo
This barely scratches the surface; she’s also a fiddler and banjo player, a fine folk dancer, writes children’s books and is officially a genius, thanks to the MacArthur Fellows Programme granting her that status.
Rhiannon first came to UK audiences’ attention with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group she formed in the noughties to honour black old-time string band figures such as fiddler Joe Thompson.
Of multi-racial descent herself, she felt that black musicians’ contribution was in danger of being air-brushed out of what was largely perceived as white music.
The Chocolate Drops made an impression and gave Rhiannon a platform from which she launched a solo career.
Her second album under her own name, Freedom Highway, named after the Staple Singers’ civil rights anthem, was a powerful statement, although responses such as “you sing that song so nicely” aren’t quite what she had in mind when she decided to cover such material.
“It’s kind of unfortunate that Freedom Highway itself was so topical at that point,” she says. “But the things that were going on in the U. and being seen on the TV news had been going on all the time.
“We’d uncovered them rather than discovered them. If, by singing those songs, I made people get up off the couch and start voting, then I feel I’ve achieved something.”
Lives in Ireland
These days Rhiannon lives in Ireland with her partner, Italian musician Francesco Turrisi, with whom she appears in Perth. She’s far from out of sight, out of mind, as far as her US audience is concerned, however.
She won Living Blues Awards for her outstanding musicianship and record production abilities in 2020 and the album she and Francesco released in 2021, They’re Calling Me Home, won the Best Folk Album category at the Grammys the following year.
It was during a previous appearance at Perth Concert Hall that Rhiannon stunned the audience by singing in Gaelic. It turns out that she learned from two great sources, Cathy-Ann MacPhee, from Barra, and Margaret Bennett, a singer and respected scholar of Gaelic culture.
“Some years ago, I was seeing this fellow who spoke Gaelic and I got heavily into it too,” she says.
“I’m really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.
“And of course, it turned out there were African Americans who spoke Gaelic, so I thought, this is part of my heritage.”
Rhiannon Giddens plays Perth on Sunday, April 30.
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