The opening paragraph of Rhiannon Giddens website biography perfectly describes the range and force that this unique composer, musician, and historian brings to her every artistic endeavor.

Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.

With You’re the One, Giddens has released her first album of all original material since she began her post-Carolina Chocolate Drops solo career in the 2010s. The album goes into new territory for Giddens, which is the one constant in the career of this opera-trained, black string band founder, children’s book author, and banjo playing folk music icon. Through all her work comes a deeply American sensibility that aims to recognize people and music that are often forgotten but very important to our country’s story.

You’re The One features electric and upright bass, conga, Cajun and piano accordions, guitars, a Western string section, and Miami horns, among other instruments. “I hope that people just hear American music,” Giddens says. “Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock — it’s all there. I like to be where it meets organically.”

Way Over Yonder is the one song on the new album that most long-time fans will recognize as coming from her early Chocolate Drops days. It’s a song about “a little bitty joint just out of town; got the best fried chicken for miles around .”

The band is tight they can really play / Would have been famous back in the day / The food is good but the liquor is better / The time flies by in the best night ever / You look at the clock and you make for the door / You should have been at work three hours ago.

Singer/songwriter Jason Isbell joins Giddens in the album’s only duet.

“Yet To Be,” the story of a black woman and an Irish man falling in love in America, is meant to channel some of the optimistic flip side of the brutal, real, and undertold history that Giddens has so effectively brought to the forefront with her work. “Here’s a place, with all its warts, where you and I could meet from different parts of the world and start a family, which is the true future,” Giddens explains. “I think so much about all of the terrible things in our past and present—but things are better than they have been in a lot of ways, and this is a song thinking about that.”

Both the video and the words grab your heart.

She was mopping the floor / He was working the bar / It was a divine collision of the human heart / It was east of her and west of him / They were wishing on the same bright star / And then the baby was a brand new start. 

In the hollow of his hand / The road is rising up to meet them

Hen in the Foxhouse changes the vibe to a feisty, funky tune where Gidden shows she’s not to be trifled with even as a woman in a man’s world. She also channels a bit of Ella Fitzgerald about midway through the song.

I’m just a hen in the foxhouse  / A pigeon set amongst the cats  / I’m just a hen in the foxhouse  / A pigeon set amongst the cats  / A sheep in wolf’s clothing  / And there ain’t no changing that. 

I met a man last Sunday / Thought he had me at hello / And wasn’t he surprised  / When I looked at him and said no  / He kept on coming at me  / The answer to his every wish / Wasn’t he surprised / when he walked into my fist. 

Here’s a live version recorded just a few days ago.

You’re The One, Giddens’ third studio solo album, was released on August 18 on Nonesuch Records. As she launched the album, she appeared on CBS Saturday Morning where she performed two songs.

Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad opens the album. This “R&B blast . . . takes a titan for inspiration.” She had listened to a bunch of Aretha Franklin, “and then turned to fellow Aretha-nut Dirk Powell and said, ‘Let’s write a song she might have sung!'”

The album’s title track was written about her children. As she notes on her website, the song was “inspired by a moment Giddens had with her son not long after he was born (he’s now ten years old, and she has a fourteen-year-old daughter as well).”

“Your life has changed forever, and you don’t know it until you’re in the middle of it and it hits you,” Giddens says. “I held his little cheek up to my face, and was just reminded, ‘Oh my God, my children—they have every bit of my heart.'”

This is a terrific new album by an artist who has proven that she’s willing to break boundaries in order to explore the past and future together. As The Bluegrass Situation notes, You’re the One is “further establishing — and complicating — her unique and indelible voice and once again highlighting the diverse and representative lineages that gave rise to all American roots music forms, with joy and love centered in every note.”

Enjoy!

More to come …

DJB

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For other posts on Rhiannon Giddens on More to Come, check out:

• Rhiannon Giddens: Reclaiming the racially heterogeneous lineages of American roots music (February 1, 2020)
• I’m on my way: Music for the MLK weekend (January 16, 2021)
• I’m just going over home (November 20, 2021)

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Photo of Rhiannon Giddens by Wondrium courtesy of RhiannonGiddens.com