Celebrate Black History Month with These 15 Artists

American roots music wouldn’t exist if not for the voices, stories, and musical traditions of Black Americans. Full stop. Celebrating the Black forebears of Americana, bluegrass, country, and string band music, pointing out their importance and their essential contributions to these genres we all know and love today needs to happen year-round, not just February. 

The BGS editorial team believes strongly in this idea, and though readers will be able to find several Black History Month features and articles in the coming weeks, we encourage you all to also take a dive back into our archives for stories that highlight Black creators and artists from all points across the last year. 

Mavis Staples on Live From Here

Ceaselessly relevant, Mavis Staples recently gave a keynote presentation at Folk Alliance International in New Orleans where she once again gleefully assured the audience she wouldn’t be done singing ‘til she didn’t have anything else to say. And she has plenty left to say! Watch Mavis Staples on Live From Here with Chris Thile. 


Yola’s Year of Debuts

Yola’s debut album, Walk Through Fire, landed on our BGS Class of 2019 lists for Top Albums and Top Songs — and nearly every other year-end list across the industry, too. Naturally she popped up a few times in our pages: In our in-depth interview, when she made her Opry debut, and when she dropped an blazing Elton John cover.


Liz Vice on The Show On The Road

Liz Vice is a Portland born, Brooklyn-based gospel/folk firebrand who is bringing her own vision of social justice and the powerful, playful bounce of soul back to modern religious music. She is following a rich tradition that goes back generations to powerful advocates like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, the Staples Singers, the Ward Sisters, Aretha Franklin, and especially Mahalia Jackson, who was the soundtrack to the civil rights movement. Listen to the Liz Vice episode of The Show On The Road.


Brittany Howard, Artist of the Month and More

Our November 2019 Artist of the Month stunned in a stripped down duet with Alicia Keys at the Grammy Awards last weekend, her well-earned musical stardom solidified by her debut solo album, Jaime. Our Artist of the Month interview anchored our coverage of Howard’s new music, but her Tiny Desk Concert really captured readers’ attention!


Steep Canyon Rangers with Boyz II Men

Yes, you read that correctly. A combination none of us knew we needed that now we can never go without. The Asheville Symphony backs up the two groups collaboration on “Be Still Moses,” a moment transcending different musical worlds and genre designations. You can watch that performance here.


Rhiannon Giddens: Booked, Busy, and Blessed

How much can an artist really accomplish in a year? A quick scroll through the BGS halls shows a Grammy-nominated album, being named Artist of the Month, scoring a ballet, playing the Tiny Desk, debuting a supergroup, and oh so much more. We are more than happy trying to keep up with Rhiannon Giddens’ prolificacy.


Ashleigh Shanti on The Shift List

The Shift List is a podcast about chefs, their kitchens, their food, and the music that powers all of it. On an episode from September we interviewed Chef Ashleigh Shanti of Benne on Eagle, an Appalachian soul food restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina. Her Shift List includes Kendrick Lamar, Nina Simone, and more.


Grammy Winners, Ranky Tanky! 

 

We spoke to Ranky Tanky about their album Good Time in August, less than six months before it would win the Grammy for Best Regional Roots Album. If you aren’t familiar with Gullah music, our interview will help you out.


Americana’s Sweethearts, The War and Treaty

Rapidly-rising folk/soul duo of  husband and wife Michael and Tanya Trotter, The War and Treaty have had a year chocked full of smashing successes. Of course the best way to catch up with them was on the road, so Z. Lupetin set up the mics for an episode of The Show On The Road.


Tui’s Old-time Tunes

Jake Blount, one half of old-time duo Tui with fiddler Libby Weitnauer, is a scholar of Black, Indigenous, and otherwise forgotten, erased, or marginalized American fiddlers in old-time and string band music. His work specifically spotlights the source musicians whenever possible, undoing generations of revisionist history in roots music. Tui’s recording of “Cookhouse Joe” was featured in Tunesday Tuesday.


A Sitch Session with Birds of Chicago

A song with a message well-timed for almost any era, “Try a Little Harder” seems especially perfect for this very moment. Birds of Chicago do an excellent job bringing that message to the world. A suitably stunning Sitch Session.


Dom Flemons Talks Black Cowboys

If you haven’t heard Dom Flemons talk about his album, Black Cowboys, and the narratives and traditions that inspired it, this episode of The Show On The Road is essential. The music is captivating on its own, a perfect demonstration of Flemons’ uncanny ability to capture timelessness and raw authenticity, but with his scholarly takes and his depth of knowledge the songs take on even more meaning and power. It’s worth a deep dive — check out our print interview, too.


Gangstagrass Set the Standard

When you read Gangstagrass’s Mixtape of standard setters the parallels that emerge between foundational bluegrass and hip-hop are certainly surprising, but they also make perfect sense. It speaks to the longevity of this boundary-pushing, genre-defying group — that has been setting their own standard as they go.


Jontavious Willis Goes Back to the Country

“Take Me to the Country” is Willis’ paean to his homeland: “No matter where I go in the world, I can’t wait to go back to the country,” He told BGS in April of last year. “For me, that special place is a rural southern town in Georgia where I grew up. It’s such a quiet and calm place, and somewhere I crave when I’m far from it.” You can hear that truth woven into the music.


Octogenarian Bluesman, Bobby Rush

At 85 years old, Bobby Rush has been playing his brand of lovably raunchy, acoustically crunchy, and soulfully rowdy blues for over six decades. After winning his first Grammy at the humble age of 83, he has no plans of slowing down. We caught up with Rush on The Show On The Road.


Photo of Yola: Daniel Jackson 

Rhiannon Giddens Prepares for ‘Lucy Negro Redux’ Ballet Premiere

Rhiannon Giddens will reach a new milestone in her ever-diversifying career as the Nashville Ballet hosts a world premiere of Lucy Negro Redux on Friday, February 8. According to press materials, the production explores the mysterious love life of William Shakespeare through the perspective of the “Dark Lady” for whom many of his famed sonnets were written.

Giddens collaborated with jazz musician Francesco Turrisi on the score. The narrative is based on a book by Caroline Randall Williams, a Nashville-based poet who also contributes spoken word during the performance. Paul Vasterling serves as Artistic Director.

In the video below, Giddens explains, “I said yes to the ballet because it’s a really interesting story and it fits very neatly with my mission of highlighting interesting and overlooked possible connections in history, and this is a very, very intriguing one.”

She adds, “I just hope audiences will take away that you can do things in a lot of different ways. And there are so many different ways to collaborate and there are so many different ways to make a statement. I think this ballet, this collaboration, has a really great opportunity to do that – to show audiences that ballet can be this, as well as Swan Lake and some of the other things that you see. In my world, that banjos and folk music can be partnered with really a high-art dance form and it works. So, it’s like, hopefully we bring the two sides together to see each other and go, ‘Hey, you’re not that different from me actually.'”


Photo of Francesco Turrisi and Rhiannon Giddens by Karen Cox

Artist of the Month: Rhiannon Giddens

Our February AOTM is Rhiannon Giddens: singer, multi-instrumentalist, actor, writer, song collector, activist, and composer.  Giddens has been developing her multi-hyphenated legacy of cross-cultural creativity for over twenty years, from being a founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, to multiple solo albums, to her roles on Broadway and TV’s Nashville, to high-profile collaborations like The New Basement Tapes, and as a creator of new boundary-breaking artistic projects around the world.

Throughout the month, we’ll be bringing you several stories about Rhiannon’s resounding legacy as one of the strongest voices in American roots music today, including a preview of her new collaborative album Song of Our Native Daughters with Leyla McCalla, Amythyst Kiah, and Allison Russell; an in-depth interview about her latest project with the Nashville Ballet and writer Caroline Randall Williams, Lucy Negro Redux; and a recap of her powerful keynote address from the recent Americana Music Association – UK.

“Nobody owns an instrument; no culture gets to put the lockdown on anything.”
-Rhiannon Giddens at AMA-UK, January 2019

For now, get primed for the month ahead with a collection of some of her best work in our new Essential Rhiannon Giddens playlist on Spotify.

 

For our regular readers, you’ll notice a slightly different structure to our AOTM feature.  Starting this month, we’ll be kicking things off with an introduction to the artist and a preview of the month of coverage ahead.