If there’s one word Rhiannon Giddens detests, it’s genres. Classically trained in opera at Oberlin University, she moved on to a whole different style of music in becoming the leader of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Grammy-winning old-time string band from North Carolina — whose members all happen to be African- American.
So Giddens clearly knows a few things about different styles of music, and being classified is something she could live without.
“I hate genres. I know that they’re necessary, but I hate them. Americana, what the hell does that mean? I don’t know. It’s American music, that’s all I know,” she said with a laugh during a mid-March phone interview. “If people want to call it Americana, that’s fine. What I have learned is that these labels change and what they mean change. Just like how Celtic has changed. What Caucasian means has changed in the last 150 years. It all changes, so it doesn’t really matter.”
Protestations aside, Giddens may have to grapple with the genre topic quite a bit now that she has been part of T Bone Burnett’s New Basement Tapes project and has released her solo debut album, Tomorrow Is My Turn.
The common thread through both projects is producer Burnett, who first saw Giddens perform in 2013 and started suggesting they work together. What hooked Giddens was when she was asked what her ideal project would be.
“I had this list of things that didn’t really fit into the Carolina Chocolate Drops. I was just setting them aside, thinking about all these incredible women I was inspired by and it was something that had been hibernating for me,” she recalled. “So when T Bone asked me what my dream record would be … I already had a project right here, and it would be the perfect project to do with T Bone Burnett. So I typed all the songs up and sent them over to him and he said we should do all of them — except for the Dolly Parton song [“Gypsy Joe and Me”] I picked. He swapped in another one and it was the absolute right choice.”
The resulting 11 songs on the Tomorrow Is My Turn album form a tribute to a broad range of female singer songwriters from that dreaded Americana category.
Dolly Parton gets her due on “Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind,” which chugs along a loping cadence goosed along by fiddle and Chocolate Drops bandmate Hubby Jenkins’ bones playing.
Elsewhere, Giddens takes Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Up Above My Head” down to the crossroads of gospel and Sun Records twang, while the traditional “Black Is the Color,” which has been covered by the likes of Joan Baez and Nina Simone, is given a contemporary spin thanks to the deployment of Jonathan Batiste’s melodica and beatbox contributions by former Chocolate Drop Adam Matta.
During the time Burnett and Giddens were working on her debut, the producer asked Giddens to participate in his New Basement Tapes project, where she joined Jim James, Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes in setting to music previously unreleased lyrics written by Bob Dylan during the time he was recording what became The Basement Tapes with The Band.
It proved to have its challenges, considering five bandleaders had to agree on how these songs would sound and who played what instrument on what song. But it was an experience Giddens was glad to have.
“It was pretty amazing, but it was also very difficult for me. I had to push through a lot of things for myself personally, but that’s where the best art comes, when you’re striving to overcome something,” she said. “I think it’s one of the best things that I’ve ever done in terms of the output and what I learned and gained. I think I will be processing that for years to come.”
Giddens’ path into American music began after she took up banjo and fiddle and attended an event in November 2005 called the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, N.C. There she met Dom Flemons and Sule Greg Wilson, and the three soon formed the original lineup of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Touring the country, they were comfortable playing everything from Dixie and Civil War-era fare to ragtime and all stripes of country blues. Giddens has unsurprisingly carried this open-minded outlook into Tomorrow Is My Turn, although she disagrees when people talk about the broad range of music on her new record.
“I love it when people say there are so many different genres on my record but actually, not really with this specific era of American music,” she said. “That’s also the point of the record, which is to say that all of this came out of the same well. You had Jimmie Rodgers doing blues and blues artists doing country hollers. It’s all part of the same origin, so let’s try and remember that. This all actually belongs together. If I put electronica or rap on my album, that would be different. To me, all this music is cheek-by-jowl next to each other.”
ON THE BILL: Rhiannon Giddens with Bhi Bhiman. Doors 6:30 p.m., show at 7:30 p.m., Friday, May 1 Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St., Boulder, 303-786-7030. $25 general admission, $30 reserved
