‘Places research can’t go’

Rhiannon Giddens’s historical work, from amplification to critical fabulation

Authors

  • Elsa Grassy Université de Strasbourg Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.27674

Keywords:

Rhiannon Giddens, revisionism, critical fabulation, practical past, reparations, slavery, minstrelsy, old-time, banjo

Abstract

This article explores the historiographical dimension of the work of singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Beginning with her revivalist endeavors with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens’s musical practice has evolved from popularizing significance- and value-driven revisions of the historical narrative to crafting a musical equivalent of Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation in an effort to recover the voices of enslaved women from lacunary archives. Her reclamation of minstrel music and her use of historical artefacts to imagine non-existent musical records of the past—as a solo artist and in Our Native Daughters—can be understood as Afrofuturist and chronopolitical as they evidence the temporal entanglement which best characterizes the afterlife of slavery. From this point of view, there is ground for considering Giddens’s historical practice as pertaining to the philosophy of history, as her Sankofic look backwards complements historians’ work with a practical past which circumvents the epistemological and emotional limitations of the archive. Being firmly rooted in an understanding of US music and history as always already creolized, Giddens’s revisionist approach and the emancipated futures it conjures up can ultimately be construed as reparational.

Author Biography

  • Elsa Grassy, Université de Strasbourg

    Elsa Grassy is Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université de Strasbourg, France. Her work has explored the geographical imagination of popular music in the United States and its role in the poetics of place. Since 2020, she has focused on the chronopolitical dimension of music and its link to reparations, especially in contemporary reassessments of the Black past and Black citizenship in jazz, folk, and old-time. Her recent publications and talks include analyses of the historiographical practices of Rhiannon Giddens, Jon Batiste, Jake Blount, and Angeline Morrison.

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Discography

Carolina Chocolate Drops. 2006. Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind. Music Maker.

Carolina Chocolate Drops. 2010. Genuine Negro Jig. Nonesuch.

Giddens, Rhiannon. 2015. Tomorrow Is My Turn. Nonesuch.

Giddens, Rhiannon. 2017. Freedom Highway. Nonesuch.

Morrison, Angeline. 2022. The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience. Topic.

Our Native Daughters. 2019. Songs of Our Native Daughters. Smithsonian Folkways.

Published

2025-03-05

How to Cite

Grassy, E. (2025). ‘Places research can’t go’: Rhiannon Giddens’s historical work, from amplification to critical fabulation. Popular Music History, 16(1-2), 138–159. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.27674