What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow) by Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson
'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow' by Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson
Without background knowledge of the players, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow initially comes across as bucolically modest: 18 decidedly old-time songs played on banjo and fiddle and captured, along with chirping birds and outdoor breezes, with the simplicity of a field recording.
Yet listeners unfamiliar with banjo player Rhiannon Giddens and fiddler Justin Robinson—former bandmates in Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group that, from about 2005 to 2014, regularly infused oxygen into the blood of Black string music—won’t need long to hear their intimate familiarity with each tune and with how to play it.
“How” requires a balance, especially when traditional folk songs like “John Henry” and “Little Brown Jug” go back to well before anyone had the technology to record them in even the most rudimentary way. The temptations to vamp, to take endless solos, to jam from sunup to sundown, might seem irresistible.
Giddens and Robinson resist those temptations anyway, although they fortunately also resist the temptation to treat the material as archaeologists might treat ancient papyrus likely to crumble when touched. Whoever first passed some codified version of these songs down to the next generation understood the durability of the things, and so does this duo.
They can work over “Walkin’ in the Parlor” with tussling friskiness just as much as, both playing banjos, they can tenderly coax more of the melodic beauty from “Marching Jaybird.”
Robinson and Giddens handle most of the arrangements, but they aren’t entirely without help: her nephew, Justin “Demeanor” Harrington, provides sharp rhythm bones on some tracks, and Joseph DeJarnette co-produces alongside Giddens with an ear toward crispness that wasn’t possible in Alan Lomax’s heyday.
Like the best of Lomax’s recordings, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow could serve as an encyclopedic introduction to, or a refresher course in, a musical history that still moves us, and moves among us.
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