Mary Chapin Carpenter opened her set with the timeless “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Some folks may have connected the dots to Mavis Staples, who had just delivered an inspiring set. Dylan and Staples met around the time he wrote that song, and they shared a brief affair.
Mavis Staples
Mary Chapin Carpenter
Headliner Rhiannon Giddens is like a Ken Burns film in real time. She uses music to tell a story, to educate about that which we need to know more. Any article about her needs to acknowledge her bona fides: She is a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award (that’s when you wake up blindly learning you have been given a huge sum of cash to keep doing what you have been doing). In 2017, Giddens became only the fourth musician to perform at both the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals. She has an honorary Doctor of Music from Princeton University. More kudos below.
At Hayden Homes Amphitheater her wonderful performance included a medley celebrating USA 250, which started with a Scots Gaelic piece (in the late 1790s the biggest population thereof outside Europe was in North Carolina, her home state). Her angelic voice soared, nearly A Capella against a single sad low acoustic bowed bass note. She segued into a Congolese lament about slavery and then moved through a plucky two-step. Spoons, fiddle and her banjo added authenticity to the stand-up bass and acoustic guitar.
Shifting gears with a bandmember donning a button accordion, Giddens (who now resides in Limerick, Ireland) led the band through a South Louisiana waltz with French lyrics. Another song tapped gutbucket acoustic blues.
Rhiannon Giddens
Back in the day her early operatic training was put on the back burner as she explored the roots of American music history. Her deep affinity for these interconnected musical forms is evident in her respectful and heartfelt live renditions.
Onstage she described how she came late to songwriting. But that delay clearly gave her a full palette from which to create. (She drew on her roots to compose in 2023 an opera that won her a Pulitzer).
In a nod to the Dylan connection above, it should be noted in 2014, Giddens participated in the T Bone Burnett-produced project titled The New Basement Tapes along with several other musicians, which took a collection of recently discovered Dylan lyrics to newly composed music.
At Hayden, further melding musical strains, Gidens’ banjo player took center stage to alternate rapping and playing rapid banjo licks.
Overall, her set was a magnificently eclectic study in the unifying nature of music. By the end of the evening Rhiannon Giddens reaffirmed the melting pot that has filled our country’s musical heritage.
(photos by Brad Auerbach)
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