Album Review: Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi – They’re Calling Me Home (Nonesuch)

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi are staking out their own genre. Drawing on music from different places and centuries they have created an album that serves as a guide to making sense and surviving during these times of pandemic and isolation.

As a North American and Italian living in Ireland who were primarily touring musicians they were likely to feel deeply the challenges of a global pandemic. Their response has been to use their large and varied instrument collection to reinterpret the music of their past. This album that draws on different genres including opera, bluegrass, folk and more but always sounds very much of the present.

Giddens exquisite singing is accompanied by instruments such as octave viola, framed drums, as well as the instrument most associated with her, the banjo. With these instruments they create sparse acoustic music and are joined on a number of songs by the Congolese nylon string guitar of Niwil Tsumbu and the Irish wind instruments of Emer Maycock.

The opening bluegrass track, Alice Gerrard’s They’re Calling Me Home, has a slow mournful feel and introduces the recurring themes of home and death. Home is used here as metaphor for death, and as such it refers to the comfort of a good death where friends are seen again.

Avalon, written by the duo with J Robinson, uses a finger patted drum and picked strings to create a sense of moving forward on the journey to a mythical or psychological home. Giddens voice swoops over the music and asserts that “We’ll all be together in Avalon”. Later in the album the traditional bluegrass song Waterbound addresses attempting to journey to a physical home. Whilst the tune and lyrics specifically reference Giddens geographical home of origin in “North Carolina” the sentiments are clearly for everyone who currently “can’t get home.”

Death is addressed directly in the gospel version of “O Death” where Giddens gutsy vocals plead to “be spared over for another year” over the frame drum beats by Turrisi. The quietly powerful I Shall Not Be Moved also resists death. Giddens asks you to join her on a journey to freedom and justice in this world as well as to heaven. Departed loved ones are mourned in Black as Crow where accordion and pipes eerily echo in between verses.

Tsumbu and Maycock each take the lead in one instrumental. On Niwel Goes To Town, showcases Tsumbi’s inventive picking of nylon guitars strings over the rhythmic beat of the frame drum and on the traditional Irish Bully For You the lead instrument is Maycock’s flute which ascends and descends.

Another theme of the album is the pain of heartbreak. When I Was In My Prime, is played in a baroque folk style that is slower than the Pentangle version. In particular Giddens viola emphasises the sadness of the story.  Heartbreak is also the theme in the first of two pieces sung in Italian, this is the melancholic Si Dolce E’l Tormento. Gerrard also sings in Italian on the traditional Italian lullaby, Nenna Nenna. For this Turrisi sings close harmonies with her which enhances the intention of the lyrics to bring calm and a rest.

Instead of singing the lyrics of the final song Amazing Grace Giddens produces a hymn like incantation over a slow drum beat. The intensity of the song is raised as Gidden’s voice is replaced by Maycock playing the pipes before closing gently with just the light finger patting of the drum. This is a stunning reinvention of a such a well known song and fittingly ends an album that meditates on the turbulence of our current times. The listener is left with the feeling that that these present challenges will pass as they have before and grateful that two such talented musicians have shared with us the songs they turned to.

John Bradbury

Click here to watch the 13th Floor MusicTalk interview with Rhiannon Geddens