Freedom Highway by Rhiannon Giddens (review)

Since the release of her first full-length solo album in 2015, Rhiannon Giddens has managed to accomplish more than many artists do over the course of their entire careers. Not only has she recorded and toured with numerous illustrious artists from a wide range of music genres, but she has also held a major recurring role in a television series, won the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass (which, over the last decade, has become one of the most high profile honors in bluegrass and old-time music), begun hosting a podcast for the Metropolitan Opera and WQXR in New York City, delivered the keynote address at the 2017 meeting of the International Bluegrass Music Association, the largest professional organization for bluegrass music, won a MacArthur Fellowship (commonly referred to as the “Genius Grant”), and managed to record her second full-length solo album, Freedom Highway, on major label owned Nonesuch Records. This record reflects many of the journeys that Giddens has taken over these years—the exploration of a wide range of genres while holding on to and celebrating a core of black banjo music and a simultaneously broad and very intentional and thoughtful set of journeys across geographical, political, historical, and aesthetic borders.

Of all the differences in personnel from Giddens’s first album to this, by far the most obvious to the listener is in that of the producer’s chair shifting from T Bone Burnett to a shared credit between Giddens and celebrated Louisiana and Appalachian fiddler Dirk Powell. In the liner notes to Freedom Highway, Giddens notes that Powell’s “shared vision has been an incredibly vital and indispensable foundation of this record,” and this is clear to any listener who is familiar with his work. The clear hallmark sounds of Burnett, the producer of such mainstream representations of traditional music from the American South as the soundtracks to the films Cold Mountain and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the American Epic Sessions are replaced by the much more raw and varied sounds of Powell and of Giddens herself. While Powell may have lent his fiddle talents to Burnett’s Cold Mountain project, his own work, focusing on traditional Cajun music as a founding member of Balfa Toujours, his Appalachian fiddle and banjo solo projects, and his multi-instrumental backing of Joan Baez demonstrate a clear taste for more eclectic, less overtly orchestrated and atmospherically oriented work. It is this more direct style that is clearly featured on this album. From the stripped-down guitar- and vocal folk blues performance of the Mississippi John Hurt classic “The Angels Laid Him Away” (sometimes titled “Louis Collins”) to the equally stripped-down but electric guitar–oriented original composition “We Could Fly” to the banjo instrumental “Following the North Star” to the horn-infused title track, the music on Freedom Highway, while certainly not sounding as if it was recorded on a front porch in North Carolina, also does not have the same Los Angeles studio feel of Giddens’s first record. Even the more lush and complex productions here feel as if they were performed in a live, open setting, with individual voices and instruments adding complementary layers to each track rather than washing each other out. Powell and Giddens deserve quite a bit of credit for recording and mixing an album that sounds so full of both complementary pieces and outstandingly individual performances—a feat hard enough in itself even if it were not so essential for contemporary performances of traditional Appalachian and southern music.

This sense of responsibility to the music and broader cultural issues at hand is another clear feature of this album that sets it very much in the tradition of other releases by Giddens and other similarly minded artists with whom she is affiliated. In his academic journal review of a much earlier recording by Giddens and her former bandmates in an early incarnation of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, 2009’s Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe Thompson, ethnomusicologist and folklorist Thomas Richardson...