Keepsake of the Week: “They’re Calling Me Home” by Rhiannon Giddens

“They’re Calling Me Home” is the fourth full-length album from folk singer/songwriter  Rhiannon Giddens (and her second collaborative album with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi) and is this week’s #KOTW.

In this semi-weekly blog series, we post our favorite new or re-discovered releases in independent music, our Keepsake of the Week, or #KOTW.

Rhiannon Giddens is so versatile that it can be difficult to hear her full range of talents in just one album… until now. “They’re Calling Me Home” is the second collaboration between Giddens and her partner (who is arguably as multi-talented as she is), Francesco Turrisi, and the pair has found a way to showcase so many styles, instruments, and languages that the project feels like the world tour we all wish we had been able to go on this year. The most astounding part of it all is that, despite its diversity, the album remains authentic.

This is likely unsurprising coming from a white Canadian woman, but I was first introduced to Giddens through a TV series. “Nashville” (ABC, 2012-2018) was by no means an incredible show, but the music written for the show was incredible, especially when local Nashville songwriters were written into the script, which is essentially what happened for Giddens. Her character’s story was the show’s first and only major attempt to explore Nashville’s Black community and directly address the slave and Black gospel roots of country and bluegrass music. I’ve followed Giddens since I saw her on television, but I’ve learned more from her music and story than a television show would be willing to teach me. 

Giddens is known for her work as banjo and fiddle player in the bluegrass band Carolina Chocolate Drops. She studied music at Oberlin College and is vocally trained in Gaelic lilting and opera. She speaks Spanish and Italian. She has won a Grammy, the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo & Bluegrass, and the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her accolades are immensurate, but they are worth listing and learning because she is one of a kind. Like Miko Marks, Giddens has had to work exceptionally hard to shatter the stereotypes and limitations placed on Black women who make American music. All of Giddens’ albums have received acclaim, but she has had to re-educate audiences upon each release.

“You know, Henry Ford would hold fiddle competitions and forbid Black people from entering… Folk festivals were thinly-veiled attempts to recast the music as white mountain music, as part of a project to create a white ethnicity,” Giddens told Rolling Stone in an interview last year. She is a folk music historian, perhaps because she has to be, and is the first to remind us that Black musicians created this genre, and that their history was purposefully erased to make country music more palatable for middle American radio stations. Now, Black music and Black stories are present throughout Giddens’ work, but she is finally able to be both experimental and respected.

And so we have “They’re Calling Me Home,” which is about Ireland, Giddens’ and Turrisi’s chosen home, as much as it is about Black America, Turrisi’s birthplace of Italy, or folk homestead Appalachia. It is what has become known as a “lockdown album,” or one that was recorded throughout the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a concept album that explores themes of home and death through both reimagined classics and original works. “Avalon” is a musically joyous anthem about meeting one’s parents on the other side, “Waterbound” is a classic folk song about Giddens’ home state of North Carolina, and “O Death” features a frame drum that creates the effect of a marching song with lyrics that demand one more year of life.

I tend to tell you my favorite track of the record in these blog posts, so I’ll keep that pattern going here. I am surprised to love Giddens’ totally re-imagined version of “When I Was In My Prime,” the folk ballad made most famous by Nina Simone. Giddens bumps the vocals up an octave so that it sounds theatrical, almost operatic. The track begins a cappella until the familiar finger-picking guitar comes in, but the crying bassline of a cello is what ties it all together here.

It would also seem unkind not to alert you to the album’s closing track, a fresh take on “Amazing Grace.” The piece is completely instrumental aside from Giddens’ soft humming, and Turrisi’s frame drum reappears here with gusto. This is the climax of the album’s impressive journey, and it ends with bagpipes, a sound we often associate with the freedom of rolling hills. We may wish we went on that world tour in 2020, but as Giddens and Turrisi remind us, what we look for in exploration is exactly what we were given in lockdown: a call to home.

Stream “They’re Calling Me Home” everywhere now.

Francesco Turrisi and Rhiannon Giddens for The Guardian. Photo by Ebru Yildiz.