Rick Rubin
In addition to being a podcast host, Frederick Jay “Rick” Rubin is an American record producer and former co-president of Columbia Records. Along with Russell Simmons, he is the co-founder…
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For more than 20 years, Rhiannon Giddens has explored the musical traditions that shaped American culture, often bringing overlooked Black musicians and their contributions into focus. On her new album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, she brings together collaborators from throughout her career for a collection of songs deeply rooted in her native North Carolina.
In this conversation with Bruce Headlam, Rhiannon talks about the making of the album, how Emily Dickinson’s poetry inspired the title track, and why preserving the human element of music is more important to her than ever. She also discusses her new book, Go Back and Fetch It, which explores the early history of Black music in America and the Caribbean, and the influence of musicians like Elizabeth Cotten and Ola Belle Reed. Along the way, Rhiannon reflects on the importance of making music with other people, the traditions we’ve lost along the way, and the creative process behind her Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, Omar.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Rhiannon Giddens HERE.
Pushkin. So welcome, Rhiannon Giddens. Thank you so much for coming in.
00:14
Speaker 2
Thanks for having me.
00:15
Speaker 1
And you're talking about your new album, Hope is the Thing with Feathers. Tell me how that came about.
00:23
Speaker 2
You know, it was just time to make that record. I mean, I've been in the industry for 20 years now, and I tend to work with the same folks kind of over and over again in kind of different contexts. configurations and it's kind of a cyclical thing, you know? And it just felt like I needed to just bring as many people as I could from my musical family into the studio and just make some music. So we actually made a bunch of music. There's a whole nother probably two records in what we made in addition to what we have today. But what's really beautiful about this collection is that it showcases my love and kind of rootedness in North Carolina and through the people, the styles of music, and the choice of songs. And it also really is an opportunity for me to have, like, the breadth of my musical collaborators all together. So from my sister, who I was singing with since children, to, like, my most recent collaborator, Newell Tsumbu from, you know, from the Congo, who lives in Ireland, and everybody in between. And so... I feel really lucky to be able to do that. And it is like, it's been 20 years. So it is kind of one of those, like it's 20 years as a generation. So it is kind of that moment I'm going through menopause or I've been through it or whatever, going through this shift in my life and sort of looking back as I think about looking forward.
01:49
Speaker 1
Tell me about working with Neewall because he has such a distinctive sound, such a distinctive way of playing. How does that fit in with the way you do music?
02:02
Speaker 2
He's just a really singular musician. I feel so lucky that he's, you know, happy to play along with my simple music because his brain is just off the charts, you know. He's got a very unique harmonic sense because he's drawn from a lot of different traditions. Obviously, he's kind of an embodied researcher in terms of ethnomusicology. Like, he's collected all these different old, you know, guitar styles that are kind of tied to the earlier instruments, you know, say in regions of the Congo. He carries that in his body. He's also played a lot of flamenco music. He's been in Ireland for years. He plays Irish music. And then he's got his own compositional sense, you know. So the title track, Hope is a Thing With Feathers, which is obviously an Emily Dickinson poem, I, you know, sort of downloaded this tune for it in a hotel room somewhere and brought it to Newell. And I was like, what do you hear? I just started singing it, and he just started playing immediately what you hear, what you end up hearing on the record. As much as the melody came to me, that tar part came to him, and it so perfectly fit the words and the idea of, especially Emily's, if I can call her Emily, her punctuation. So often she leaves things with a dash, and you get this feeling that it's not over. You know, there's always going to be another thought that you can't hear it, but you know it's being thought somewhere. And I love that about this poem because, I mean, that's hope, really, is that it can't ever stop. Even if it goes down to a low ebb for a while, it can't really, you can't really stop it, you know. And so his guitar just perfectly matches, you know, I feel like the words and the melody. And he just has, I think he has a genius that is just of his own.
03:55
Speaker 1
You said that you downloaded it in a hotel room.
03:58
Speaker 2
Yeah, like from the infinite, like the tune just came into my head.
04:03
Speaker 1
Did it come with the words?
04:04
Speaker 2
Like I saw the words, you know, on the Internet. I don't know. I stumbled across the poem or whatever. You know, I'm in good company with this song. You know, I mean, Alice Randall wrote a song with that as the first line, the first line of that poem and thinking about that. So, you know, it's an obvious, like obviously great. sentiment, you know, it's like I said, I'm in good company with that. But I loved the whole poem. And I don't know, I just like heard the, well, Saul was reading the words almost for the first time again, you know, they just hit me in a different way. And I just sat there in the chair, I remember it, and just started singing the poem. And so I recorded myself, you know, you know, something like, you know, hope is a thing with feathers, perches in the soul. sings the tune without the words, never stops at all, never stops at all. It was kind of like a ballady kind of thing. And then, you know, when I started singing it with Newell, it sort of found the rhythm, you know, we found that kind of together and the repetitions. But yeah, that tune just really came. I didn't work on it. I didn't go, okay, let me try this upper note, lower note. It just came.
05:18
Speaker 1
Does that happen to you a lot?
05:20
Speaker 2
Happens sometimes. When it happens more and more, the kind of more I can, you know, get ego out of the way and get all this other crap out of the way and just kind of like be in the moment. It has happened, you know, and those are usually my favorite tunes. Like at the Purchaser's Option, which is a few records ago, it happened that way. Like the chorus just downloaded into my brain. And so I always say that those kind of songs, I shepherd them into existence. I like conduit i'm a conduit for them and it is really i i feel a very spiritual experience and i feel very lucky to have those moments and now my my what i'm chasing is not chasing but what i'm trying to do is to continue to let my brain be receptive in that way and and it's only receptive when i fully acknowledge how not in control i am you know it's like none of this is mine It's just mine for a while, and it's not about me. And the more that I situate myself in that, the more gifts, I look at them as gifts come, and I just feel really, really lucky.
06:33
Speaker 1
Is that happenstance, or are there things you can do to reinforce those ideas?
06:38
Speaker 2
It's like bird seed. As soon as you put some bird seed in your hand and it's like you're staring at the seed waiting for the bird to land, it's never going to happen. As soon as you look over here and just relax, the bird comes, you know. And as soon as you stop focusing on the outcome, I mean, my mom told me this years ago. It's been something I've really tried to model my life after. If you're looking for a specific frame, you know, a specific outcome, a specific shape, size, color to whatever it is that you're trying to do, then you often miss the cooler thing over here that you couldn't see, you know. And so... I try to aim for a substance and then let how it looks or how it sounds come as it may. So for me, the substance is about trying to be as centered as I can, trying to use this life that I've been given as much as I can. It is a responsibility that I feel because what friction do I have in my life? So it behooves me to really use it to its utmost to do what I'm trying to do.
07:47
Speaker 1
It's true, but Modern society makes it very hard to not think about the outcome.
07:53
Speaker 2
Yeah, it does. It is a discipline. It's a discipline. And we tend to focus on, I mean, I've done a bit of research, you know, it was for a project, but I just, I've been a fan of Thich Nhat Hanh for a while. And, I mean, this is not about wellness. Like, this is not the wellness industry, right? This is really about the discipline of trying to find the silence within ourselves. so that it can be filled with other things, so that it can be receptive to inspiration or movement or whatever it is that we want to call God, the infinite, whatever that is bigger than ourselves, right? Even just the energy between two people is bigger than yourself. Our culture is so much about commodification. So even the idea of meditation, even the idea of focusing on this discipline becomes a product of And it becomes seven easy lessons and it becomes books and it becomes an industry. When really, like, of course, there's writings that can help and there's people's wisdom that you want to take in. But it's really just you and yourself and you at the end of the day. And modern society is built to distract you from that because how can they sell you something if you don't need it? You know?
09:08
Speaker 1
I don't know why this comes to mind. But when I was listening to the record, because you're talking about being centered and you were talking about silences. You taped this in different studios over the course of a year and a half?
09:22
Speaker 2
It was all in one studio.
09:23
Speaker 1
Oh, it was all in one studio.
09:25
Speaker 2
Okay. We made several trips.
09:28
Speaker 1
Okay. This was one of those albums that when I listened to it, I thought I could hear the room. And maybe it was because they're quiet songs, they're loud songs, there are silences within the songs. But I really felt the room, which you don't always feel with records.
09:47
Speaker 2
That's great because that's what we want. We did a lot of live recording, so there's only overdubs when they have to be, like somebody can't play two instruments at once.
09:59
Speaker 1
You know?
09:59
Speaker 2
Um, and we tried to be very sparing with that is we is my co-producer, Dirk Powell. It's also his, his studio. It's kind of like a small house, very old house that he sort of turned into a studio. So it's very warm, old wood. It's next to a bayou, you know, it's, it's, on family land and all of this so it's a very welcoming space and i've been making music there for a long time with him um but for this one you know we had there's moments like angel fire where there's like five people playing at once and so it's all being recorded there's no isolation booths none of that you know it was it's literally like we're all in the room together so we wanted the room to be its own you know i mean obviously without being distracting like But it's kind of an extension of what I did last, the last record I released, which was made outside with the nature sounds and the locusts and the birds and everything. And this was obviously more of a studio recording, but still wanted that feel. Because for me, we're going further and further and like, look, we can go as far down the road as you want, you know, in terms of the elephant in the room of AI. But in terms of music being something that for most of human existence is created by the hands and the voice and the human body and was unable to be separated from the human, right? Until the recording industry, which is only a hundred years old. And so when we do make recordings for me, I'm more interested now at this point in my life and maintaining the humanness of it, you know? So you don't forget like this was people making this in a room, not, some, you know, zeros and ones or whatever, you know. So I'm kind of leaning into that because I'm like, the other stuff is covered. You know what I mean? No one needs me to do that. So this is what I'm good at is, you know, is handmade music and reminding folks if they need reminding that this can also be a good thing.
12:07
Speaker 1
Reminds me of another project you just did I wanted to talk about. And I happen to have it right here, which is your amazing book of African-American music called Go Back and Fetch It. First of all, can you explain the title for people who don't know it?
12:24
Speaker 2
Yeah. Go Back and Fetch It is Sankofa, is a translation of Sankofa, which is an Akan proverb. And it means, you know, it's often represented by a bird walking forward but looking back. sort of having a seed that it's looking back to get. And the idea is that you reach back and then you pull it forward. I first heard it from Sule Greg Wilson, who was, you know, in the chocolate drop universe, Carolina chocolate drop universe back in the day. He's a great kind of folklorist and musician from, from Arizona. But the idea of, you know, it's not just enough to go back. You got to fetch it and bring it forward, you know? And so this book is really, um, kind of the first, I hope, in a series of reframing the pieces that we have from early Atlantic, the Atlantic world, because really it's not African American. It's really also the Caribbean. It's the Atlantic world. We often don't, in mainstream culture, when we talk about history, we don't look at it as a world, but it was. All of the seaboard and the as many enslaved people were brought from the Caribbean up into North America, which were many from the very beginning, 1600s. So it is a constant sort of thing that needs to be remembered. But this book came out of my need of this book, actually, in this weird kind of way. Because the thing about if you're trying to research music made by enslaved people, it's very difficult because the historical record is very slim. The historical record is slim for poor people in general, like especially back in the day. The historical record is usually negative for people who aren't part of the aristocracy or who have money. So by negative records, I mean court cases, runaway slave ads or self-emancipatory ads, whatever you want to call them, advertisements for people, wills. I mean things like that where people are being left to other people in their will, right? These are negative sources. So it's sometimes really hard to find the voice of these folks and let alone their names. So what I was doing was I kept going to the websites that would post these scraps of, you know, here's a tune written down in 16 whatever and here's a tune written down in 17. And I kept like downloading the JPEG. And there was Laurent Dubois and his group in Duke put up a website, and I kept going to that one. And then Christina Gaddy was the other who had collected all these things for her book, Well of Souls, about the early history of the banjo. And I just said to Christina, God, can you send me these JPEGs? She sent me some JPEGs. I was like, we just need to make a book and put them all in one book. And then here it is. It's just kind of wild.
15:24
Speaker 1
That's an amazing book.
15:25
Speaker 3
Yeah.
15:26
Speaker 2
Thank you. I'm really, really proud of it. I mean, Christina is like doing the heavy lifting with the historical frameworks, but luckily she had already done a lot of that work and it was just kind of had been, there wasn't space for it in Well of Souls. So it was actually a great for both of us because she could use all of this that had been kind of cut from that book in this book. And then I engaged with each tune to make a tablature for banjo, which is, you know, kind of a simultaneous, you know, making it accessible for anybody who plays any kind of five-string banjo, but then also a chance to explain some of the techniques that I've learned by studying 1850s banjo tutors. So I kind of took those techniques, which, because I play a replica from 1858, so they would have been gut-strong and... fretless and so it's a very different technique to the modern wire strung metal banjos that you know just just the mechanics of what you're doing with your hand is different and they called it stroke style and so i kind of extrapolated that backwards because i'm like that's coming from already a couple hundred years of acculturation on the banjo so there's clearly if i want to take it back and i was playing these tunes with the with that style and going wow it really works So it is an act of creation, but an act of creation that's very rooted in the sources that we have.
16:54
Speaker 1
It's a music book that reads like a detective story. Yeah, I like that. You're going through and you're like, oh, they're putting all this together. What you said about music being between people, this is like writing down things that were handed down.
17:09
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah.
17:10
Speaker 2
And also it's very important to remember that You know, like there's a concept in quantum mechanics, right? The act of observing disturbs the observed because of the nature of the photon. Like it knocks the particle off its right, all that. And it's the same in cultural life, right? If you see something, the act of observing it often changes even the person playing it because they see they're being watched. That can change. If you're observing it and you write it down, you've already put your lens on it. So however you see it... A lot of this music was written down by European observers. There's some that were written or from actual black sources. There were some that were named something like Congo, but like feel like we don't know where they're coming, you know. So we say all of that in the book. Then I'm putting it in tablature. So I'm bringing my own, you know, kind of lens onto it. So it's very important to declare your position. So my position is thinking about sitting knee to knee. I sat knee to knee along with the other original Chocolate Drops with Joe Thompson. And as an apprentice, we were apprentices. He didn't charge us money. This was the old style, whereas you carry on the lineage. That's the repayment. So for him, the fact that we went down and played with him the same tunes over and over and over again, that was what was in his culture. You know, that's how you learn. Now, it was already one step out because we didn't grow up with him. You know, like my family's from that area, but I didn't grow up in Mebane, you know, and I didn't grow up with him. So that's already one step out, but it was still, here we are.
18:48
Speaker 1
It's still a remarkable experience that you don't get much in the world anymore.
18:54
Speaker 2
It's incredible. Like the older I get, the more I go, wow, we were so lucky, you know, and we did like, we did do it. We did go, but we had that opportunity to go. We were young. We were unfettered. I wasn't married with kids. They were younger than me. And we had the opportunity to do that. We had enough. We had a car. We had the time. All of these things that not everybody has. And then we had the desire to go. And then we had Joe. All of that came together in a way that the older I get, the more I'm like, wow. Obviously, you can't go back in time. But how do you look at what's happening now? I'm very... Like even the book... It's supposed to be a starting point. You know, like if somebody came up to me and said, can I just sit with you and play Georgia Bug for an hour? I'd be like, sure. I'm not going to charge them for that. You know, that's why I don't teach. I'm not interested in teaching something to a student. Like I'll go to a teacher. done a teaching week where, you know, you kind of teach a class for the week, whatever. I've experimented with that some. But if somebody came to me and said, you know, I want to learn a Joe tune, can I sit with you and learn it? I would sit and play with them. Like that feels right to me. You know, nobody does that. which is interesting. It's been very, very few people, you know, have reached out. And when they do, it's been great. You know, here, come to the gig. We'll sit for an hour, you know. And I can't do it all the time, obviously. I'm not even close to that, though, because it's been, you know, I think people are so used to purchasing a book, purchasing a lesson, purchasing a degree and learning music that way. It's like the academization of music. Which is okay. I went to a conservatory. That's how I learned European art music. It's really important to say I'm not pooping on that. There's different ways of learning different things. But I think that I would love to have a bit more nuance as to what is seen as a good way to learn things. I think we look at the book learning and the classes as the only way. Because of the way that our economy is set up and the way that our modern life is set up, it doesn't offer a way of having that be a part of life. That's hard, you know, and I get it.
21:13
Speaker 1
The institutions that used to make that possible, I mean, I guess people still learn gospel singing in church. That's not something they, I mean, they have hymnals, but that's not the primary way they do it. You're living in Ireland where I'm sure there are still people learning Irish tunes in the old way, but made a lot less of it.
21:32
Speaker 2
It is very interesting to be in Ireland because it's a very fascinating case study for traditional music and the commodification of it, the institutionalization of it, and yet it's still being passed on in communities today. It's also, you know, there's places where people come and they learn a tune for the week and then they go back home and, you know, do they pick up that instrument again? I mean, you know, it's a larger topic than I think we could get into, but I don't know what to think, to be honest. I guess that's why I'm not really articulate with this, even though I think about it a lot, is what we're doing to music and what music did for us for so long. I just feel like we're getting, we're really getting away from it. It's like, even the idea of like playing tunes, it's like a lot of people just like collect all the, they just collect a bunch of tunes that they play. And I'm like, but what are we doing with those tunes? You know, I mean, obviously, Joe Thompson came out of a period of history where music was a part of culture in a certain way, like handmade dance music, Obviously, World War II and after that, television killed it all over the place, killed these folk traditions and communities, storytelling, dance music, all of this kind of stuff. It really did a number on it. So I understand music comes out of necessity. It comes out of culture. But I think we have a lot of choice in how we go forward. And I think it's just... It would be really important to be intentional about what are we doing with this music. I think art has been taken out of people's everyday lives in a way that I find distressing because it's not like everybody was a genius player and an artist like back in the day. There's variations always. There's people who just have a knack for it. There's people who want to focus on it and get really good. And there's people who just want to play. play a little bit, sing a little bit. Everybody used to be able to sing a little bit, you know? And I really feel like there's so much focus on, I mean, I have taught workshops of singing in the past, you know, and the amount of people like, well, you know, I was told I wasn't a good singer when I was in fourth grade and you can just see the pain still, you know? And it just makes me so sad. I'm like, who told them that and why? Well, because they didn't have a fantastic voice that maybe they could be a professional singer. Like who gives a crap? You know what I mean? Like, But that's the music has been co-opted by, you know, capitalism in this, you know, there's only one reason to make music and that's to be a professional music maker, a professional content provider, a professional thing maker. I think that's unfair, you know. So like instead of making a bit of music, you like work the job and then you go listen to the music or you have the music on all the time and you don't even notice it anymore. You know, the experience of listening to music has changed so much, you know. And all of this, of course, there's variation within this. In general, that is what you see. And I'm an advocate for picking up an instrument. I just picked up the concertina. I'm 49 years old. It's a hard freaking instrument. And there's nothing like breaking yourself back down to basics and sucking at something. Bruce DeBauer is a great photographer and his website is Permission to Suck. It's so good. I mean, I've thought about that so much. I love the idea of just letting go and being bad because that's the only way to be good. Nobody starts good. There's a few geniuses that can just pick it up, right? But even then, they're not really good. You know what I mean? They still got to work. So my daughter does because she's one of those that just picks up shit and plays it. I'm like, yeah, but you'll never be actually really good unless you practice. And it's like, I love it. I love learning something new because it just Levels me out and takes me down all the pegs that I've climbed up thinking I'm so good. And, you know, I'm such a good singer. I can't play a freaking, you know, tune on, like, I can't play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on this thing. Like, what's going on, you know? And I think it's just great for the brain, you know?
26:01
Speaker 1
Well, a lot of what you're talking about is the social aspect of music that's been lost.
26:07
Speaker 2
The social aspect is really... I think one of the biggest tragedies from singing in.
26:14
Speaker 3
A choir, because the other thing.
26:16
Speaker 2
About, you know, or playing in a garage band or, you know, playing tunes with somebody, because the other thing is that you have to negotiate. When you're in groups of people, you have to learn how to negotiate. You have to be like, you know what? I don't like the way you did that. Okay, moving on. You know what I mean? You don't always like it. You don't always get on all the time. You have to learn, and that's what we're in our sort of little isolated moments. We're losing the ability, and you see it in our discourse, of having a disagreement. So when you're in a band or you're in a choir and you're like, I don't think we should sing it this way, you have to learn how to figure out how to get to a place where everybody is, maybe they're not ecstatic, but they're content. And I think those are skills that we're losing because- I mean, I'll just keep to music, you know, that used to be a really good place, a really safe place if you were lucky to like work that stuff out. And if you do that from children, you know, it works that muscle. And so then you can apply it to other things. But like just, you know, push and play doesn't give you that.
27:28
Speaker 1
Well, you also, the few, the little playing I've done in ensembles, you have to watch other people. Yes.
27:34
Speaker 2
It's a communication always.
27:37
Speaker 3
Always.
27:37
Speaker 2
And like to be a good ensemble player, I say this in Silk Road, like the Silk Road Ensemble that I'm artistic director of, you have to listen louder than you play. That is the only way to be a good ensemble player because if you're so loud that you can't hear them, that's not a conversation. You're talking over somebody and it's the same when you're just having a chat. We're losing the ability to listen to people, you know? As much as we're gaining other things, right, it's always a push and a pull. But I just– I really feel like singing in a choir was so fundamental for me, singing with my sister, singing with my dad, you know, listening to music with my mom. I mean, I didn't play any instruments, but, like, we sang all the time. And I am really grateful for that because I think it really has shaped, you know, how I look at things.
28:29
Speaker 1
You know, I do love– the emphasis, this is what the book is about, on instrumental music because so much, you know, when I think of, you know, Blues People, the famous book about African-American music, it's very, very focused on vocal music.
28:45
Speaker 3
Yes.
28:46
Speaker 1
And so this is this whole history that people, I just don't think it's common currency for people.
28:54
Speaker 2
No, I mean, that's been kind of part of my push.
28:57
Speaker 1
When you say, oh, a fiddler from 1830s, We know what we have in mind.
29:01
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. And also when you look at the similarities and the differences between like what's happening. So like because I'm working on a book right now about the working class cultural collaborative nature of American music, right? So to understand what people were doing on this side of the ocean, you have to understand what they're coming from. And that has been a really interesting conversation. kind of enlightening thing. And it's like, what traditions are happening here? What traditions are happening here? And you see some things like, you know, when I went to Africa, I went to the Gambia to study the Akonteng, which is like a band. ancestor. And I noticed that they never played without singing. They're playing and singing like constantly, right? And I started thinking about like other traditions, like the Angoni, like these other like lute traditions. And then you think about traditional divisions from, say, the British Isles where you have ballads and then you have instrumental music or you have an accompanied. But the dance tunes with words, it's not really a thing. And so in America, you get that. All of Joe's tunes had words.
30:16
Speaker 1
Really?
30:17
Speaker 2
Most of them that I was taught by him, that's all I can say, had words. And they may have been like, silly words or whatever, but there were words. And that started making me think, I'm like, wow, there's all of these like things that we take for granted here that could very well be like born of these combos of, I say like Africa and Europe, but like this combination in a way that has nothing to do with rhythm, you know? So it's like, these are the things that I think are really interesting, but you have to like take into account what's happening before You know, you have to think about all the different lute instruments that are like all over West Africa, like that would have been brought by, you know, the Arabs, you know, which themselves, they're getting them from China and India. You know, there's like the instruments are making this long trek with people like over the continents and over the centuries. So like, it's just a constant thing. But to know more about what's happening beforehand, you can really start to see oh, that's really interesting. Well, maybe this is that, you know, and I'm not a, you know, I just have a degree in music, opera performance, you know what I mean? So I'm, all my stuff is self-taught and I rely heavily on academics, but I'm trying to find a way through where I can just, you know, people who are never going to read those books to give them a different kind of way of looking at American music. That's not the sort of simplified narrative that we're given, you know?
31:46
Speaker 1
I have one more question, which is, When you were in this book, and I promise we'll get to your album.
31:52
Speaker 2
That's all good.
31:53
Speaker 1
You said a lot of the tunes were probably in 12-8.
31:57
Speaker 2
What I've discovered in engaging with this early material, whether it's from Caribbean sources or early American sources, is that the feeling of duple and triple that happens at the same time in music all over the world, but particularly you really feel it in a lot of different kind of African musics, right?
32:18
Speaker 3
Right.
32:19
Speaker 2
Is very present in these tunes. And the whole reason why, you know, I even got here is because when I started with the tunes from the banjo tutor in 1850, 1855, and I started playing with Francesco Teresi, who plays, you know, kind of North African Mediterranean percussion, I was like, oh, that really worked with some of them. But then I also started playing with Newell. And immediately it was like, whoa, like the three verses to just, I just started playing like the emphasis popped out in a, in a way that I hadn't before. And you really hear that in these tunes. And so just trying to think about how do you notate them for a Western, Western notation to, so the 12, eight kind of gives you in some ways the, the, the feel. of that you know if you don't have a cultural feel for it you're trying to put it so that people can approximate that you know what i mean but when you take the the stroke style of banjo eventually becomes claw hammer banjo right and because it you know it has different cultural functions and it's it's in different communities it eventually gets a little bit flattened i don't want to say flattened because it's got its own complexities but it loses very much that that feel, you know? And so for me, like just being able to try to articulate that into, that's why you don't see jigs in Kloheimer banjo because there's no ambiguity anymore. Whereas in a lot of these tunes, it's like when I play them with Newell, like I feel like he taps the three sometimes, you know, it's like we did a Pompeo ran away, you know, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Which is in here. So he'll tap that.
34:23
Speaker 4
Oh, wow.
34:23
Speaker 2
And I'm playing. Whoa.
34:31
Speaker 3
Right?
34:32
Speaker 2
It's the most simple tune. But all of that rhythmic complexity is in its DNA, which you don't know unless you play it on a minstrel banjo. Like you don't feel that on– I don't feel that on a modern banjo because there's just– the strings don't have to– which is why embodied research is so important, right? It's important for me to take these tunes onto the instrument that it was made for and then have those discoveries play with a musician from Africa. There's no guarantee that he's going to feel a certain way because like music has moved on. But he's also interested in what did they play because so many things have been destroyed, you know, in Congo, right? So– We're both making this sort of excavation and kind of meeting in the middle, which has been really beautiful.
35:23
Speaker 1
This brings me to two of the songs in your album that you did. And I'm wondering how those traditions filtered down. And the first one is Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotton. Now, you should tell the story of Elizabeth Cotton because anybody who plays the guitar had to play Freight Train at some point.
35:40
Speaker 2
Yeah, isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? Like she's left-handed. She played the guitar upside down and backwards, backwards to us, right? Right for her.
35:49
Speaker 3
Right.
35:49
Speaker 2
But the, the thing, the strings are swapped, you know, so nobody, you can't really play like her exactly.
35:57
Speaker 1
You know, I have no idea how she played. Yeah.
35:59
Speaker 2
She's amazing. You know, she played guitar. I think she also played banjo when she was younger, but I do know that she went into domestic service and ended up, you know, working for the Seeger family, which is like, If you're going to go into domestic service as a priceless treasure of folk guitar, go to the singers because then they'll immediately say, please go play the guitar and stop working for us, which is what they did, Mike and Peggy in particular. I'm very grateful for that while also acknowledging that it's what a terrible thing that she had to go into service and not play guitar because so many women played in the home, but there was no outlet for them professionally. So she kind of galvanized so many guitarists during the folk revival, like just with her style. And she's so North Carolina, rooted in North Carolina and her playing. And also, I think because she hadn't played for a while, it's an older style of playing that I think people hadn't really been exposed to. I mean, this is just me kind of thinking about it. You know, I'm not a scholar of Elizabeth Cotton. And to think that that tune made the round, that's why I never sang it. Because I'm like, everybody does freight train, like we don't need to do freight train. I did Shake Sugary, you know, when I recorded one of her tunes. I've done Oh Baby, It Ain't No Lie. But it just kind of was like, well, maybe it's time. And, you know, Dirk is an amazing guitarist, and he has such an affinity and feel for that style. And what was really interesting is last night we actually performed it with Michelle Dorrance, who's from Chapel Hill, and she has lineage of, like, you know, John D. Holman and that kind of, percussive dance that's very rooted in, in the Piedmont of North Carolina. And we actually did it all together last night. It was really special. Like talk about rooting it in place, you know, here, here we are in New York, but like there's, you know, I mean, Dirk's very rooted in these traditions and I'm obviously, you know, both of us from North Carolina, me and Michelle and rooted in, in the, the dance and the music of that area. And it really makes me think about how little we do that. You know, it's like, I don't need to play the old time music. of the country. I play North Carolina music, you know, and like, that's what we used to do. Like people didn't move all the time, you know, so they would be in one community and they would learn those tunes and they would just play those tunes over and over and over again, you know, because there was no constant influx. There was, there was influx, but it wasn't anywhere near to the volume as it is now. So for me, this record is really about planting a flag again, as I keep planting a flag in North Carolina and going, I'm very content to stay here. You know, obviously I play with different people. I've got Silk Road. But it's still I'm representing North Carolina within the context of those frameworks. So when I think about what am I here for, I don't need to do all the things. I just need to do the things that make me feel like I'm offering something that is rooted, you know, in place. Even though I don't live in North Carolina anymore, I– am of North Carolina.
39:06
Speaker 1
What I love about your version, and maybe it's Dirk's playing, is how syncopated it is. Now hers is too. When I went back and listened to it, I thought, you know, I never really heard it that way. And I thought, this is embarrassing. I've never heard any of her other songs. So I started listening to her. She made a live album. She did an album that the Seegers helped her make. And her playing is so much more eccentric and so much more syncopated.
39:34
Speaker 4
Yes.
39:34
Speaker 1
It has a completely different feel. Is that the Piedmont tradition? Is that her? Where does that come from?
39:42
Speaker 2
I mean, I think so. Again, it's not my area of expertise, you know. but that's what I've heard. You know, Piedmont style blues is, you know, it's hard to know sometimes what somebody's just called something, something, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? So I can't really speak to the guitar too much. But, you know, when you think about Etta Baker, who was in Morganton, which is like right next to the Piedmont, you know, that style is very much that's syncopated, which itself is like, I think, very probably banjo influenced. You know, this is just me talking now. Don't quote me on this, but You know, like Scott Joplin's parents played the banjo. He played the banjo as well. Like those early rags were almost like I think some of the early rags were recorded on banjo, you know. So it's like the banjo has a fifth string. It is naturally a syncopated instrument. Like it has to be, you know. But Libba Cotton is, I think, such an influence on people. And it's really interesting, your experience, because I think it's kind of taken for granted at this point. And you kind of went back and listened to it with kind of fresh ears. Like, what is it that she's doing? And then you can hear why people were freaking out about what she was playing because it's just like that's something that eventually kind of will get cleaned up and sort of regulated and sort of turned into a style. And how much of it is because she hadn't been playing, so she was kind of in amber of how she used to play before or whatever. It doesn't really matter. But it is a really special thing. So Dirk has a very idiomatic and very kind of dynamic style, which I think, you know, represents it while still being his own playing.
41:24
Speaker 1
Mm-hmm. Another song you play is the Ola Belle Reed, who you describe as this great, great songwriter from North Carolina. So tell me about that.
41:34
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, she's just cool. Like, I did her Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man? I think that's the Ola Belle Reed song.
41:41
Speaker 3
Mm-hmm.
41:42
Speaker 2
And she just had this knack of making these songs that sound like they've been around forever. Her and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerard, these women just rooted in the community, the life, the music, and who can just make these incredible songs. So yeah, it was just a great opportunity. I had the guys to do it, to make a version that kind of pulls on that high lonesome sound. My dad's side of the My family are obviously white and from the Piedmont area. Piedmont means foot of the hill or foot of the mountain. So we're right next to Appalachia. So there's a lot of overlap. And the sounds, I always kind of was like, why does that sound draw me? I've done a lot of Sheila K. Adams' family's songs. She's a friend of mine and a wonderful ballad carrier. But that high lonesome sound is something that's never been hard for me to get, you know? I mean, I've heard a lot of, like, old country and bluegrass and stuff. My uncle was in a bluegrass band. So it's been a part of my cultural upbringing. But also it's like, oh, like, you know, I was just on Finding Your Roots. Like, so many folks from, like, you know, that frame of mind, you know what I mean? So it's just kind of like. It's just great to just lean into it and go, I am a product of all of these things, you know, and I'm not going to apologize for it.
43:09
Speaker 1
They're a great song. And another one, you go back to listen to her album, she's like, she's such a character on her song. Yeah. The way she introduces them.
43:17
Speaker 2
Yeah.
43:18
Speaker 1
She's very funny. She's always talking to the audience. It's very, I think both those experiences for me were really sort of disarming.
43:27
Speaker 3
Oh, I love that. Yeah.
43:28
Speaker 2
Cool.
43:29
Speaker 1
It was wonderful.
43:29
Speaker 2
Glad I can help.
43:31
Speaker 1
So I want to talk about some of the other songs you did. You duet with your sister. You do Chuck Old Hen. You do a classic. And it just becomes a great, I don't know if you'd call it bluegrass or porch music. I don't know what you'd call it.
43:44
Speaker 2
Porch music works.
43:45
Speaker 3
Yeah.
43:45
Speaker 2
You know, I mean, I always say, like, we would call that old time.
43:50
Speaker 1
Yeah.
43:51
Speaker 2
You know, it's Climber Banjo. I mean, I hate to get too label-y, but. Because everything is called bluegrass these days, I kind of just say bluegrass is a commercial art form that came about in the 1940s and 50s, and it is based on older forms of music. And it has solos, and it's a performance music. It doesn't mean you can't dance to it, but it's really meant for performing, whereas old time is a community music, and that's different. You make the music together. It's trance music. It's not really meant to be put on performance stages. Now, the Chocolate Drops figured out ways to do that, you know, because we were doing, we were, we had a mission, but, you know, Cluck Old Hen is a dance tune. And so that's why, you know, we included all the kind of chatter, you know, because it's like, that's how it was. We just like got, we just sat down and we're like, all right, let's rip one out. Like, you know.
44:40
Speaker 1
It sounded like fun.
44:41
Speaker 2
It was super fun, you know.
44:42
Speaker 1
So tell me a little bit about writing, first of all, Carolina Rain, which is, which is I guess as close as you get to what would I call a pop tune. It's got drums.
44:52
Speaker 2
It's got drums. Yeah. It's a fun song. It's one that Dirk and I wrote some years ago. And it's a kind of reminder for me that you can inhabit different kinds of songs, you know, and it doesn't mean that that's all I'm going to do. you know, for my next record, right? It's just, I can visit. I can visit and then go back to my corner, you know?
45:17
Speaker 1
You've never, I mean, you did, you know, you played on the Beyonce record. It's not tempting to say, what would that look like if I did something that was closer to the pop direction?
45:29
Speaker 2
No.
45:30
Speaker 3
No?
45:31
Speaker 2
I mean, we did You're the One, which is kind of the closest I've ever been. You know, I worked with a producer who's much more in that world, lovely guy. and it was still, you know, rooted in what I do, but I don't know. I just think there's so many people in the world making songs. So many people making pop songs. Does anybody need me to do that? I don't think so. You know what I mean? Like, I just, I'm not interested. So I don't really write personal songs very much because I'm just like, I am not interesting. What I do is interesting. My life is not interesting, you know? And it's, There's people who write songs that are personal, that people draw great comfort from. And it's not to say that I don't think that should happen. I don't need to do it. I've enjoyed my share of pop music. But like I said, I don't think that's my strength. So I just don't want to waste any time chasing something. For what reason? Like if I really wanted to make a pop song, I would do it just because I wanted to make it. But I don't need to try to find more followers and more fans by... appealing to a more mainstream, whatever that is, since I just want to stick to what I'm doing.
46:44
Speaker 1
That's an interesting question. You know, you talk about people draw a lot from certain kinds of, you know, pop songs or opera or anything else you've explored. What do you think people draw from your music?
46:59
Speaker 2
Yeah, I don't know.
47:00
Speaker 3
I think a sense of connection, because I'm always connecting to like what came before thinking about what's coming.
47:10
Speaker 2
I try to present an emotional conduit for folks. I feel like that is really what we're for, artists. And if we're performers, I feel like it is that way to help people touch their own sense of the infinite. And then they can take that away and maybe they want to do something with that. Because it shouldn't just be a one-time thing. It should be something that makes people makes us want to do something. Like when I'm touched, when I watch somebody play, I'm inspired to go do more, you know? And that's what I want for people. I want people to pick up the banjo. I want them to pick up... Even somebody was like, I'm going to get a concertina. I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing. You know what I mean? That's what I want people to sing. I want them to go get a book and read up on something. I'm not interested in being the end terminus, you know? I want it to be the beginning.
48:03
Speaker 3
So....
48:04
Speaker 2
I just, you know, follow my muse or follow what I think I'm supposed to do. And whoever is touched by that comes along for the ride. It's not going to be for everybody. And that's okay.
48:18
Speaker 1
Because you talk about being a conduit for things in the past. And that's a tricky thing to do. You're smiling. You know, I'm thinking particularly you did the opera, Omar, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Well-deserved.
48:35
Speaker 2
Thank you.
48:36
Speaker 1
A lot like this book, you were pulling from very fragmentary sources. In the case, Omar, now, he had written his life story. He had a narrative written in Arabic.
48:44
Speaker 2
Right. Yeah, which has many layers to that, but yes.
48:49
Speaker 1
But you had to fill in things around it, which is a tricky situation to be in because Omar, who was an enslaved Muslim from … Senegal. He was from Senegal. That's not a story that's been accurately told throughout history. And so you have this story you want to tell. You want to tell it accurately, but you want to tell it imaginatively as well, which means sometimes, as you head to in this book, filling in some of the gaps.
49:22
Speaker 2
The thing is, like, history is a creative endeavor always because we were not there. So it's always a creative endeavor, and the people who I respect and trust the most are the ones who admit that. These are the facts as we know them. Everything else is supposition. You know what I mean?
49:40
Speaker 3
Right.
49:41
Speaker 2
And even the facts can be.
49:42
Speaker 1
Incorrect, right?
49:44
Speaker 3
Yeah.
49:45
Speaker 2
What portrait is this from the Elizabethan area? Like even stuff like that where you'd go, of course it's this person, but we find out it's actually somebody completely different like hundreds of years after the fact, right? So for me, like something like Omar, which already is so layered, Islam itself is a colonizer religion that would have replaced the native religions that were in the area. to begin with, right? So Omar is learning Arabic to read the Quran. That is not his cultural language. His cultural language would have been, I don't know, Fula or Wolof or whatever, right? Some variation, he probably would have had three or four languages that he knew, which most people do in that area. So even the words that he wrote, he didn't learn Arabic to write an autobiography. He learned Arabic to read the Quran. So when you read what he wrote, so that's Number one is going through that lens. Number two, he's got his enslavers looking over his shoulder. They can't read it, but somebody will, right? Somebody will translate it. So what does he feel like he can say? You know what I mean? So there's all of these layers that go into it even before I set eyes on it and decide to turn it into something. And, you know, shout out to the Spoleto Festival for, you know, commissioning me, and I brought Michael Ables into it. absolute priceless collaborator. It was, like, the best thing I've done in my career. Just bringing it in. But thinking about whenever I ran into a wall of, like, what am I doing? Like, I'm just, like, I'm this American woman, like, who's non-denominational. Like, why am I telling this story? I kept going back to his words and his choice of Quranic verses. His choice of verses actually became the way that he was talking to me.
51:35
Speaker 3
Hmm.
51:35
Speaker 2
Because he was very deliberate in his choice of what he quoted because he was in a very dangerous position. He had to be seen to convert. He was like 50 years. He's doing this walk. It's insane not being able to connect back to his community. So what does he choose to hold on to? That's how he talks to us. And any time I got lost or frustrated, I just went back to that. and thought about what is it that's going to allow what I feel like, what I've gained from his writings. It was a very spiritual, intense process that I don't still understand to this day. There's some stuff I like read it, like, because I wrote the libretto. There's some stuff that I read and I'm like, I don't even know how I wrote that. I'm so steeped in the history, of course, you know, But still, it was just like, wow. And that's the kind of stuff that gives me hope, you know, because I'm like, I'm so honored to have brought that into the world and to have found the right collaborators and all of that. That is when I'm reminded of this is not about me and it's never about me. And for me, the best stuff has nothing to do with me.
52:57
Speaker 1
OK, well, hope is the thing with feathers is some of your best stuff. Thank you so much for coming in. Everybody should listen to your album. Everybody should buy your book. And then they should go out and buy a concertina.
53:09
Speaker 2
Yeah.
53:10
Speaker 1
Thank you so much for coming in.
53:12
Speaker 2
Thanks for having me.
53:13
Speaker 1
It was wonderful.
53:16
Speaker 4
Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Talladay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for $ 4. 99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast Subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.
The Hosts
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is co-founder of Pushkin Industries and host of the hit podcast Revisionist History. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping…
Justin Richmond
Justin Richmond is producer and co-host of the music podcast Broken Record with writer Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times editor Bruce Headlam, and music producer—and Def Jam co-founder—Rick Rubin. Justin…
Bruce Headlam
Bruce Headlam is one of the co-creators of the music podcast Broken Record. He worked at The New York Times for 19 years, including two years running the 50-person Video…
Leah Rose
Leah Rose is a senior producer and hosts episodes of Broken Record. A former music editor at XXL Magazine, she also served as an on-air personality for Eminem’s SiriusXM channel, Shade 45.…
