Rhiannon Giddens presents American Tunes: Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing

Rhiannon Gidden

Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art. 

As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.” 

Mary Chapin Carpenter

One of life’s most satisfying sensations is the click of a realization. Something blurry coming into sharp focus.   

Mary Chapin Carpenter can vividly recall just such an epiphany. “A novel that I’ve loved for years is My Name is Lucy Barton, written by Elizabeth Strout,” says the singer-songwriter. “There’s this moment where the main character is taking a creative writing course, and her teacher says to her, ‘You will only have one story. You will write your one story in many ways.’ I remember reading that line and taking an audible breath. In that moment, I said out loud to no one, ‘Oh, that’s what the songs are.’”   

Carpenter has been writing that story for nearly 40 years, enjoying commercial success through numerous hit singles and 17 million albums sold, universal critical acclaim, a bounty of awards — including five Grammy wins from 18 nominations — and the respect of multiple generations of her songwriting peers, earning herself a place as one of 22 women in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Her most recent album, “One Night Lonely” from 2021, received a Grammy nod exactly 30 years after her very first nomination.   In “Personal History”, her 17th album, she presents a set of songs more autobiographical than any collection that has come before, offering songs as memoir, when the wisdom that comes from growing older becomes a north star, whether one is celebrating life’s joys or navigating life’s inevitable losses.  The title is taken from the album’s opener, “What Did You Miss.” The music is both buoyant and wistful, as she sings in her rich alto, “I’ve been walking in circles for so long/Unwinding the mystery/I’ve been writing it down song by song/As a personal history.”   

The track’s blend of pandemic musings with more joyful distant memories — of steamed-up dive bar windows and late-night porch sessions — suggests what will follow, with memory, time and place guiding the narrative from a young girl’s love affair with songwriting to a woman at peace with her choices and where they have led her.  “It’s not necessarily chronological,” however, she says of the album. “The sequencing traces life backwards and forwards. But every song is connected to something deeply personal.”   

Mavis Staples

Grim days call for fierce love. And Mavis Staples, one of the most enduring figures in American music, is laying it down. Sad and Beautiful World is the fifteenth solo album from a national treasure and multigenerational talent. On her new record, Mavis stands side by side with us in the face of dangers she knows all too well, at a time when more and more people have reason to wonder who and what could be lost.   

Now 86, Mavis has been performing since the age of eight. After starting out with her father Roebuck “Pops” Staples, sisters Cleotha and Yvonne, and brother Pervis in the Staple Singers more than seventy years ago, she’s the lone surviving member of the group, still carrying her family’s gifts and knowledge with her as a living heritage.   

Inducted into several halls of fame (blues, rock, and gospel), a Kennedy Center Honoree, a winner of multiple Grammys (including a Lifetime Achievement award), Mavis is our musical history. She’s collaborated with nearly every major figure of her era(s), from Dylan to Prince, Aretha, and Willie — not to mention countless stars from subsequent generations.  

Sad and Beautiful World includes cameos by artists who have become part of Mavis’ world, many of whom are legends in their own right. Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt, Jeff Tweedy, Derek Trucks, Katie Crutchfield, MJ Lenderman, Justin Vernon, and others shine a light on her, while Mavis does what only she can do. Embracing vulnerability, she sings close and deep here, drawing the listener into a circle filled with her unforgettable presence.   

Hurray for the Riff Raff

Alynda Segarra is 36, or a little less than halfway through the average American lifespan. In that comparatively brief time, though, the Hurray for the Riff Raff founder has been something of a modern Huck Finn, an itinerant traveler whose adventures prompt art that reminds us there are always other ways to live. 

Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, as their father navigated Vietnam trauma and their mother neglected them to work for the likes of Rudy Giuliani. They were radicalized before they were a teenager, baptized in the anti-war movement and galvanized in New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces. At 17, Segarra split, becoming the kid in a communal squat before shuttling to California, where they began crisscrossing the country by hopping trains. They eventually found home—spiritual, emotional, physical—in New Orleans, forming a hobo band and realizing that music was not only a way to share what they’d learned and seen but to learn and see more. Hurray for the Riff Raff steadily rose from house shows to a major label, where Segarra became a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement. But that yoke became a burden, prompting Segarra to make the probing and poignant electronic opus, 2022’s Life on Earth, their Nonesuch debut. Catch your breath, OK? We’re back to 36, back to now. 

On The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra finally tells the story themselves, speckling stirring reflections on love, loss, and the end or evolution of the United States with foundational scenes from their own life. “It felt like a trust fall, or a letting go of this idea of proving something to the music industry—how I can be more digestible, modifiable, sellable,” Segarra says. “I feel like I’m closer to what I actually have to share.”