and Amythyst Kiah
OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS SING MODERN DAY BLACK RESISTANCE
Our Native Daughters combine four experienced musical talents joining on a timely, forceful album about Black women’s history
Well sung and smartly written, their first album, Songs of Our Native Daughters, –released yesterday– features original songs “…pulling from and inspired by 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century sources, including slave narratives and early minstrelsy, “ says the Smithsonian Folkways website which issued the release.
Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell sing with both joy and gravitas in these varied tunes.
Vancouver audiences will know Russell as a member of local band Po’ Girl – active between 2003 and 2010. She performed at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival (VFMF) with her current group Birds of Chicago in 2017.
Giddens, the guiding spirit and impetus behind the Native Daughters collaboration, is a Grammy-award-winning musician familiar to VFMF audiences for her performances as part of the Carolina Chocolate Drops plus a solo appearance a few years ago.
A review of the new collection from National Public Radio says this about her:
“Giddens has done as much as any contemporary musician — or historian, for that matter — to demonstrate how reviving and riffing on traditional styles and repertoires can, and should, go hand in hand with unflinching, informed acknowledgement of the shameful realities that shaped them.”
Here are two more in depth looks at the album in Rolling Stone and The Guardian.
Pitchfork ran this short bio of Rhiannon Giddens a couple of years ago.
PLAYLISTS
The following links take you to the full album as well as a sampling of work by each of the artists.
Youtube Artist Playlists
YouTube
Spotify
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Stay tuned,
MAY 2019
