Tunes for a Monday Morning

This week's music is from Rhiannon Giddens,  a wonderful singer, bluegrass banjo picker and fiddle player from Greensboro, North Carolina. Giddens began her career playing with a postmodern string band (Sankofa Strings) and a Celtic band (Gaelwynd), but she's best known as a founding member of the country, blues, & bluegrass band Carolina Chocolate Drops.  She's released seven albums with the latter group, and one solo album (Tomorrow is My Turn), all highly recommended.

Above: "Julie," a song by Giddens, with lyrics based on a slave memoir. The video was filmed in North Carolina last year.

Below: Giddens and her band perform "Last Kind Words" on the American program A Prairie Home Companion (2015).

Above, Gidden sings "Black is the Color (Of My True Love's Hair)" for WFUV Radio in New York (2015). This old Scots/Irish folk song is also a staple of Appalachian folk music in America.

Below, Giddens performs "Mouth Music," in Gaelic, at Celtic Connections in Glasgow, Scotland (2016).

The final video is an old one: "Sowden's Jig," performed by Danny Barberin, Giddens, and two fellow-members of Carolina Chocolate Drops in an alley in Fresno, California (2010).

For more Carolina Chocolate Drops, go here for their video of "Country Girl" (a charming send-up of stereotypical country music videos, complete with babes in pickup trucks), and here for a fine selection of bluegrass tunes recorded for Liveset.