Many have spent the pandemic hunting for music that buoys their spirits: disco playlists, early Motown hits or escapist modern pop. Rhiannon Giddens found solace in songs about death.
A singer-songwriter, musical historian and winner of both a Grammy and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Giddens found herself in her adopted home of Ireland and off the road for the longest stretch in at least a decade due to the pandemic. She made use of the time digging into old folk songs about death, home and the connection between the two for new album “They’re Calling Me Home.”
“The main themes are death and home, and each of those terms can be thought of in a lot of different ways,” Giddens told the Herald. “Death can also be a transition, a moving on to the next thing. In the tarot deck, the card of death, when it comes up, means transformation. … And home has a lot of meanings. Is it where you were born, is it with you, is it physical, is it metaphysical, is it emotional? There are a lot of different shades of both these things.”
Giddens finds light and darkness in the subjects. She sings American folk standard ‘O Death’ with defiance, full of gospel might, over a relentless percussion thump. She pulls the album title from her lonely and sparse version of “Calling Me Home,” written by American folk music icon Alice Gerrard.
“‘Calling Me Home’ has that idea of death being a part of life, of feeling like you’ve reached the time when you are ready to move on, a really healthy way to die,” she said. “It’s opposed to ‘O Death,’ which is more about running from it and not being ready.”
Forced to stay put and surrounded, like we all were, by a deadly virus, Giddens found herself thinking about songs she hadn’t thought about in years. Turning them over in her mind, arranging them with partner and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, and putting them down on tape gave Giddens a feeling of comfort..
“I think that the way we deal with death is maybe not the healthiest thing,” she said. “For me, thinking about how we are no different from anyone else who has come down the pike, I think that’s beautiful. That actually makes me feel surrounded by generations of people who have dealt with (death). To think that these are songs that come out of that experience, that says something really important.”
What Giddens has done on “They’re Calling Me Home” reflects one of her missions: finding truth and wisdom in music from the past that remains relevant across generations. Being in Ireland and away from where she grew up in North Carolina, collaborating on the record with other expatriots far from home such as the Italian Turrisi and Congo-born, Ireland-based guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, and reimagined songs from a half a dozen different traditions made the album modern and classic. It’s a product of this pandemic that reaches back centuries with some of the song choices.
One song Giddens points to is her and Turrisi’s version of “Si Dolce È’l Tormento.”
“It’s basically like a 17th century pop song by Claudio Monteverdi,” she said. “It just shows that some of this stuff is universal. It’s something Francesco has done a million times with Renaissance groups on the harpsichord but had never done this way. Again, it’s a translation of something that spoke to people halfway across the world and hundreds of years ago and it still speaks to us.”
Another would be “Amazing Grace.” Giddens and her collaborators use the 1700s spiritual to close the album with Giddens only humming the melody over percussion and Celtic pipes. She has remade a definitive song of death and comfort echoing her adopted home, her first home and the global sense of loss we have felt.
Find more on Rhiannon Giddens at rhiannongiddens.com.
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April 11, 2021 at 04:51PM
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Songs of light & darkness call Rhiannon Giddens ‘Home’ - Boston Herald
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