Artists’ conception of Rhiannon Giddens performing liberation songs, presented by OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters
Sunday morning in Milwaukee, the world’s weight in heavy notes from the deep interstices of Black Lutherans slayed me. Pain in the soul, alcohol on the breath, volcanoes and oceans blasting from the eyes coaxed out my voice with an en-spiritism I could not ignore.
A few days later, in Michigan at the Hiawatha Music Festival, I encountered Rhiannon Giddens and liberation songs. They were like the songs in Milwaukee, but older and they stayed with me.
In Milwaukee, I added my voice, a hummingbird with bears in a finely tuned rhythm born of Africa’s drums marking earthly consistency in the steps of Sunday morning’s God-time.
“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.”
What I’d give to sing just one song in hope-filled voice like Rhiannon Giddens and the music of liberation. I’d heard her in Michigan when I sat on the ground; right, there, ten, feet, away — watching and listening — my mouth agape, ears drunk with the power blasting from her body, her banjo, and her SOUL as the Carolina Chocolate Drops put rhythm in the ground. Rolling Stone magazine called it, “dirt-floor dance electricity.”
I’m familiar with pain but not pain like that. I’m familiar with hope but not hope born of a dark and bitter past. I was learning though, and the stories in that music leveled me like an agate beat up in a rock tumbler.
In the new album by Giddens and Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, sparkling strings of violin and banjo lift every voice to a higher stratosphere. And up there, where birds talk, Giddens was listening as they told her that rain cannot stop the singing, and no ethical code can justify wasting water in the desert. Each drop is precious whether Carolina or not.
The blackbird invited all birds to lift their throats in song; Robinson and Giddens do so in their album’s feather-rich song titles: “Marching Jailbird,” “Duck’s Eyeball,” “Rain Crow,” and “Fly Away My Pretty Little Miss.”
My hummingbird was welcome in the higher levels of hope – and in that Milwaukee church – where blackbirds and crows sang back and forth in rhyme, and where I joined my brothers and sisters as the flock lifted every voice.
“We will march on till victory is won.”
Rhiannon Giddens and liberation Songs
These songs of liberation happen not just in Carolina, Michigan, or Milwaukee, but wherever our shoulders, perched in the pew, let it rip in a birdsong to multiply hope, bathed in liberation and the blues.
This combination scares Anglos: the blues, the wine-blood-liberation of Jesus, the body and banjo in time. But I was not afraid. I wanted to be in that choir. I still do.
And I want to sing with Rhiannon, to stand with bears and fly with birds. I want to be there when the blackbird talks to the crow. I want to emerge and unfold in splendid wing, marching en-spirited and un-closed un-till victory is won.
Gregory Ormson was Midwest born and raised and now lives in Arizona. He’s traveled far in mind, body, and spirit, and learned from a wide variety of people in places from sketch to Shinola. His life goals have been to jettison all defensiveness, and to sing, teach, breathe, and move with grace. Like everyone else he’s a bit stardust, a touch of shadow and light, and a drop of golden matter and mind wrapped in billion-year-old carbon. Pretty simple.
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