Civil War albums are all too common in roots music, bluegrass, country, and Americana. Usually, these concept projects romanticize and valorize one of the darkest periods in our nation’s history, while cheerfully and cartoonishly detached from reality and untethered from the nuances of this horrifying and violent period of tumult in the U.S. Revisionism and imperialism are enacted by fiddles and banjos in loose, contrived musical period garb.
Audiences seem to devour this kind of idyllic reimagination of the Civil War and the issues that gave rise to it. Though chattel slavery and its foundational role in our economy were central to the conflict, Civil War concept albums rarely interrogate those facts, instead leaning on listeners’ love for story songs and cursory understanding of “brothers against brothers” narrative paradigms to sell records and tickets. The sketchiness of this practice is overlooked across the board, perhaps due to the sheer ubiquity of such efforts.
On February 6, artist, musician, songwriter, actor, and playwright Queen Esther released a very different sort of Civil War album, Blackbirding. Enabled by a grant from The National Parks Arts Foundation, Queen Esther worked and lived in residence at Gettysburg National Military Park in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a month in 2020. During that time, she communed with the land, the place, and the losses and griefs seeped into the blood-soaked soil, plumbing stories, myths, memory, and feelings to craft her 12-song reckoning with the Civil War. Original songs, songs from that time period, and fascinating covers combine into a work of roots music and theater, dramatization and storytelling interwoven with knowledge-bearing and memory-keeping.
Queen Esther being a Southern Black feminist multi-hyphenate creative is exactly why Blackbirding stands out among its peers in the curséd Civil War concept album space. There is no idealization or revisionism happening in Queen Esther’s songs. Instead, there’s a tangible humanity and an awe-inspiring alchemy of grief, loss, and crimes against humanity into beautiful, redemptive music.
Queen Esther first brought Blackbirding into the world as a piece of performance art with a staged reading in 2024. Even now, in its LP form, these songs lean forward, doing narrative work perceptible whether on stage or off, and coaxing listeners to abandon passive listening and – as all theater asks – inhabit a third, artistic, creative space together in our interaction with these compositions.
The central point of the album is made over and over again across the 12 tracks and throughout our lengthy and in-depth BGS conversation. “Blackbirding,” the 19th-century practice of kidnapping free Black folks and selling them into slavery or back into slavery, never really went away. The Civil War was not won. Reconstruction failed. Slavery itself was not abolished, but rebranded. As such, Blackbirding, whether from the perspective of its content or its genre aesthetics, isn’t a throwback or time capsule album. This is music made in the present, for the present, about the present, and it calls on all of us – again, in the present – to reckon with and consider how we each contribute to or act in defiance of the continuation of racial apartheid and imperialism in the United States.
Do not fear, though, because Queen Esther’s approach to such musicmaking is remarkably joyous, grounded, and compassionate. It’s clear she’s not only ready to engage in the conversations this music evokes, but that is exactly her purpose. And the ultimate culmination of her many talents. In this way, she yet again distinguishes herself from other such concept albums in Americana.
I’ve been a fan of yours for a few years, ever since we discovered your TED Talk. When I first watched it, it was so revelatory. It felt like you supplied vocabulary – and knowledge and expertise – that I wish I would’ve had my whole life to help describe the multi-ethnic origins of roots music and bluegrass and country. If all of this came from “Scotch-Irish tradition,” then why does bluegrass sound like bluegrass? Why does country sound like country? Why doesn’t it sound like Irish music or Scots music or music from the British Isles? It sounds different.
I just wanted to start by saying thank you for that talk – and thank you for all of the insight, feeling, and emotion that you bring to these intellectual topics that people tend to forget are about real humans, real experiences, and real music.
Queen Esther: Absolutely. I really appreciate you saying that. I think more often than not, Black people have these conversations amongst ourselves. We wait until the door is closed and then we talk. I think we should have more conversations with everyone in the room. As long as they’re willing to listen. That’s a tall order. Much more so than you would think.
I’m really happy about this album, especially because people are starting to have conversations around the songs, topics, and everything that I’m bringing up. The fact is that slavery has never ended. It was just modified. The Civil War has never ended. It just evolved. “Blackbirding” has never ended. It just got a lot more inclusive.
Those three things are standing in the way of America being America. There is the America that is on paper – the one that is in the brochure with the Statue of Liberty, the flag behind it, and mom, and apple pie, and all of this stuff. And none of it is true. It’s all a marketing ploy. The actual America that really exists, that’s the one that Black people have had to endure and survive for hundreds of years. That’s the America that turned its back on us.
You know as well as I do that there are so many Civil War albums in bluegrass, folk, string band music, and Americana. So many are built upon the revisionist history that you’re talking about. The manicured, sanitized “picket fence and 2.5 kids” version of the “American Dream.” So, normally when I get a pitch about an album like this, it just goes straight to my email archive. Knowing you and knowing your work – and especially the way that you bring theater and all of your multi-hyphenate titles into crafting and creating – I was so excited to have a chance to talk about approaching the Civil War and approaching Gettysburg as an inspiration for music.
Blackbirding is set in the present. You’re talking about how slavery never went away, how reconstruction failed, and how the Civil War was not won. You’re contextualizing this art in the present sonically, as well. Because, like you’re saying, the Civil War never ended, slavery never ended, blackbirding never ended. Can you talk a little bit about placing all of this discourse in the present and not just in period garb, as it were?
I have to say perspective is a powerful thing. As a Black woman, as a Southerner, as someone that’s two generations removed from slavery, as a creative, I never heard any of this told from a Black perspective. It was always “the lost cause”: “These Yankees came and they just attacked us from out of nowhere. We were living this beautiful life and they just ruined everything.” When nothing could be further from the truth.
They literally terrorized Black people. They tore us apart, they raped our children. They did all manner of evil constantly, under the guise of Christianity. And it was even uglier than anyone would dare to imagine. Which is why they’re struggling to hide Black history, to hide lost history, to make sure that it stays lost. To not have anyone like me turn over the rock to see what’s underneath.
At the same time, these songs from minstrelsy, these songs from not that long ago, they’re important songs. They should be rediscovered. The problem that I’ve always had is that once you have that technical prowess as a musician and once you plumb the depths with that music, no one was bringing that music forward into the present. Not unless they were … putting it in a historical context, and that’s important, but to bring it into the now [is just as important]. …
Having a sense of intellectual curiosity, it’s really important. It doesn’t matter that you’re not the smartest, but that you are curious intellectually and that you are brave enough to explore that curiosity is way more important. That’s really my bedrock. That’s where I’m coming from now.
I’m a generative performing artist. … We are the ones who generate our work and we perform that work. Some people don’t necessarily perform their work. They just write it or they create it and they’re looking for other people to do the work, to perform the work, so that they can get their work out there. Lots of songwriters like that. Lots of lyricists are like that. That’s beautiful. That’s great. …
The songs would come to me, they would just float up in my head. It’s like a patchwork quilt. You take all these different kinds of fabric and all these bits and pieces. But you’re making this mosaic that turns into this overall image that is bigger than whatever bits and pieces you brought to it in the first place.
Talking about that mosaic, it makes me think that of course we would end up at this point, with a project like this, with a conversation like this, and with a body of work that couldn’t have been made if you had tried to step outside of yourself or your own identity to make it.
Exactly. All of that fueled me. I was reaching out in different genres, not just musically, but in the world. I was doing a lot of alternative theater, I was doing cabaret. I was doing performance art, I was doing solo performance. I was doing storytelling. I’d get up on stage and I would do just about anything. That was a world in and of itself.
Now, after a certain point, when you’re a generative performing artist, you’re looking for grants so that you can develop the work in general. It takes seven to nine years to develop a musical. It takes five to seven years to develop a play. When you see someone go, “Oh yeah, my new play, it’s up.” They put in a heavy grind! That’s five years of rewrites and workshops and readings. Some theater taking them on with their theater company and developing that work until it was ready for a test audience, not even necessarily ready [to open]. It’s just a lot of hard work and a lot of heavy lifting. There are certain grants that make that possible, where you just have to go away and you have to write and create.
I found a grant that would let me do that with this album through the National Park Service. The National Parks Arts Foundation has grants to at least a dozen National Parks. You can go to the park, you can live on the park, and they will pay you.
This project is also a work of theater. What jumped out to me first and foremost in that regard is what you’re talking about – the residency, the grant, being on location. Bluegrass, roots music, country music, they all ask us to be in a place together, but not in the same way that theater does. Theater is very much created so the audience are not passive participants. It actively invites listeners and collaborators and bystanders into a space and into a place.
You are doing that with this body of work – and with your residency at Gettysburg. I thought that was one of the most fascinating things about this project. Using theater, with a capital T, to help do that work of transporting all of us to the battlefield, to Gettysburg, to the geographical place that you are evoking with these songs.
I’ve been doing theater ever since I could stand up straight. Think about the cavemen, just standing in front of their brethren and telling a story about what happened to them that day. If my grandmother were here right now and in on this conversation, she’d tell you that I was telling stories ever since I could talk. I would just make things up. She would be sitting there washing dishes and I would try to distract her by making up something wild or crazy or imaginative. I don’t know, I just gotta say something to make her drop that dishcloth or at least laugh or something. [Laughs]
What is fantastic realism? Fantastic realism is when you have ordinary circumstances and then something extraordinary just pops right in. … So the idea of theatricalizing whatever was happening around me as a little kid, [that’s fantastic realism]. If we were sitting here at a table talking, for example, and then an elephant came along and took the hat off your head – that kind of a thing. Just the outrageous Southern tall tale. Bombastic storytelling is always floating just beyond your reach, I think, as a Southerner. It’s just how we do.
And of course, like everything in the South, this is an African tradition. This is an oral tradition handed down from West Africa. West African traditions [are] something else that people have a really hard time saying out loud and acknowledging. It’s not that other cultures didn’t tell stories, but our influence as Africans, as enslaved Africans, of our African ancestors on the South and on America, is seismic. It’s time for people to make the shift however small, however great, and center that and acknowledge it. They can’t even acknowledge it. …
I’m going to tell you a story. I almost always start [performances] with, “You wanna hear a story? I got a story to tell you.” Sometimes I’ll sing it, sometimes I’ll say it with music happening around me or behind me. But this is a story that you’re gonna want to hear. And every single song on [Blackbirding] is wrapped up in a story. There’s a story that’s around it that’s historical. There’s a story that resonates into the now, and there’s a story that I bring to you as an audience when I’m performing the song itself.
I’m thinking about how there’s so much music made in these genre spaces that is also putting on a costume, or telling a story, or doing theater, but that often isn’t grounded in reality at all. It’s all construction. So where some people might interface with your art and think, “Oh, this is a musical, this is theater, this is going to be a play, this is going to be ‘make believe.’” It’s actually so much further from that.
Oh no, it’s reality!
Exactly. And to me, that’s the whole story here. The thing I wanted to talk about most about Blackbirding is the point that you made right at the top – and that you’ve made throughout this conversation. You’re not talking about something that was happening a while ago and isn’t happening today.
Look, the 13th Amendment said slavery’s over “except.” Except? That’s a gigantic loophole. Except for what? Except for incarceration. That means if you’re incarcerated, you’re a slave. What if someone said to you, “You’re fired except on Tuesdays”? Then I’m not fired. You have to come in on Tuesday for four hours. Other than that you’re fired. You don’t work here. How much sense does that make? No one would hear an employer say that and go, “Am I fired or not?” Am I free or not?
You are free. Except they had to make that exception. They had to. Why? Because when the Civil War ended, this country was in absolute shambles. And because Black people were the actual currency. There were 4 million of us and we were basically worth trillions in today’s money.
We went off and we started our own little hamlets and towns, and we started working for ourselves. Suddenly there was this massive tilt. Black people were the money and had all of these resources, energy, and power. And just by sheer force of will, we started building for ourselves, which is why they started tearing us down. Showing up to each and every single community and just murdering people, burning people [alive] in their homes. Coming up with all of these lies built on pseudoscience to justify all of the things that they did. …
But it never ended. Pulling Black people over on the road, out in the middle of nowhere for no reason whatsoever. Beating them up. Maiming them, murdering them in some instances. This has always been the way. This has always been the case.
I’m imagining you on site at Gettysburg. How do you take that sort of emotional devastation or the intrinsic triggering and challenging nature of these topics and turn them into something beautiful? Do you see them as beautiful to begin with? I’m trying to imagine how you take care of yourself emotionally and psychically as you’re doing this important work. Because I think there must be an emotional toll to it, but you clearly are built for it as well. This feels like your wheelhouse – and the way you talk about it and the comfortability you have in having these conversations.
Simple. I am not an atheist. I am not an agnostic. I believe in God. I believe in Jesus. I’m a Christian, and I know that God is with me. I feel God’s presence upon me. I feel God hovering over me, protecting me divinely. I feel that I’m walking in divine purpose and in divine order. I know that I am divinely protected, that the blood of Jesus covers me everywhere I go. …
There’s this point at which inspiration takes over. There’s a point at which you are no longer there, and inspiration is there instead. An actor prepares– the idea is that you have technique, right? Your technique is there whether you’re playing an instrument or singing or washing the dishes or driving the car.
Let’s say driving the car. I don’t know how to drive. So, every time I get behind the wheel and the car is moving, even if it’s moving slightly, I’m screaming like a banshee. I’m so excited. But when I get in a car [with my partner], he just does what he’s been doing. He doesn’t think about it. He adjusts the window here and he readjusts this here, he puts the key in, and he does all of these dozen or more motions. He just does it automatically.
That’s the idea. When you make art, when you’re on stage, when you’re performing, when you’re creating, there has to be something that takes over. Inspiration takes over. Once you’ve got the technique, set the technique, learning how to drive the car, what do you do? Something else takes over. And I’m telling you, that’s something else for me, personally, is not my ego. For me, that’s the Holy Spirit.
I remember when I got to the house [at Gettysburg], everything was explained to me, and they gave me the keys. I’m sitting there in the parlor, I’m arranging everything, and it’s still light outside. I thought, “You know what? Why not?” I took my camera and I walked to Devil’s Den. The first song that I wrote was “The Devil May Care (But Jesus Knows).” I came back and I wrote that down like I was writing someone a letter. It just poured right out of me.
I can’t even begin to explain the process. I wrote it down and I wrote down the chords. I shaped it around everything that I did and I thought, “This is a complete song.” What is that song about? It’s about Devil’s Den, the Valley of Death, which is what they called that area in between Devil’s Den and Little Round Top. These soldiers would climb into Devil’s Den, which is these hulking, gigantic rocks. There was this big snake that lived there. It was huge. They called it the devil. It was so huge, it was as big around in the middle as a grown man’s waist. There were children that liked to play around that rock, so the townspeople got up the courage and killed it.
They would climb inside of that perfect coverage for a sniper and they would shoot Yankee soldiers that they could [see] from Little Round Top and they would fall into the Valley of Death. That was a run, Plum Creek – a run is a creek – and it was so filled with blood they just called it a bloody run. From where the creek started, all the way past the house that I lived in, all the way through that valley of death, was just nothing but human blood.
To be a soldier caught in [Devil’s Den] meant that you could not be saved. Someone would have to come and get you if you were wounded. More often than not, those soldiers died, not because they were shot and they fell down and they died. They died because no one came to get them. They died because they were wounded and the wounds got infected and they just bled out or [succumbed].
That Valley of Death comes for you, not just at the end of your life. It comes for you at any given moment, at any crisis that you have. Over and over and over again.
Can you talk a little bit about how you approached genre on these songs? Because I really love that you didn’t make a “time capsule” record that’s trying to sound like it came from the 1800s. At the same time, you’re collapsing time musically and creatively so that you can draw on those textures and on those sort of old-timey elements to do that storytelling for you, sonically. How did the production process actually look or feel as you were putting this collection together?
I think that when you have a kid or when you give birth to a kid, you just let that kid be the kid. You’re not sitting there going, “I want this kid to be this,” or “I want this kid to be that.”
That’s a really good metaphor. Just let them be themselves.
And what you’re doing, really, is sitting back and waiting to see what that kid turns into. You have no idea how they got so great at math. This kid is a mathematician. You can’t balance your checkbook. This kid is just explosively running in this whole other direction that you can’t even fathom. You have no idea what your children will do, what they will become. And none of it really has anything to do with you.
It’s the same thing. These songs came to me and when they came to me, sometimes fully formed, I literally wrote down what I heard in my head. And that really is it. Each song is its own world. I just let the song be what it is, whatever it is. However it came to me, I just let it be what it is.
I consider myself to be a transcriber of the song. I’m sitting there. The song is in my head and I’m just writing it down as quickly as possible. I’m someone with a butterfly net chasing the butterfly through the jungle. I’m running after the butterfly and I’m hoping that it doesn’t get away. It’s fluttering. It’s right above my head. Sometimes I capture it, sometimes I don’t. My job as a producer is to make sure that song sounds exactly the way it did in my head.
Even the cover songs, the Olivia Newton John song, “Magic.” When Olivia Newton John is singing that, it’s one way. It’s interesting. But I’m a Black woman and I’m singing that about my ancestors, and my family, and all of us in community. It turns into a completely different song.
You have to believe that we’re magic. Nothing can stand in our way. You have to believe that because, ultimately really, Black people never thought we were supposed to survive any of this.
Toni Morrison says that in an infamous speech that she gave, we were not just supposed to survive any of it. …
When the song comes, it comes as it comes. I knew that I had the goods as a producer, because the song sounded in the room the way they did in my head. That’s the best feeling. But moreover, more than anything else, you have to develop your own aesthetic. You have to know what’s good, what’s not good, and why. You have to know your own mind. You have to know your own aesthetic. And you have to have the courage and the willpower to stand on it.
Photo Credit: Whitney Browne
