Rhiannon at the Rialto

           Click on the link for video.  https://youtu.be/W3rXipubv14?si=UGq9jItSYgq_0d3G 

Freight train, freight train, run so fast

Freight train, freight train, run so fast

Please don't tell what train I'm on

And they won't know what route I'm going

Accompanied by Dirk Powell's gentle finger picking on Elizabeth Cotton's classic folk song, Rhiannon Giddens opened a sold-out concert at Tucson's Rialto Theatre Friday with a voice as pure as a bell, as free as a bird, as powerful as a locomotive, as lonesome as midnight.

Two hours later, she concluded the concert triumphantly with a joyful jig, riding a crest of artistry and energy that had shaken the historic theater to its rafters.

You'd think being an awesome artist would be enough. But for the 48-year-old native of Greensboro, North Carolina, it's only the beginning.

She's more a force of nature, a barefoot prodigy, a virtuoso on banjo and fiddle with an operatically trained voice. Daughter of a black mother and white father, she makes American music unlike anyone else's from the broadest repertoire imaginable. At the same time she's the artistic director of the global classic Silk Road Ensemble, a role she inherited from Yo-Yo Ma.

Her recent collaborations include Beyoncé's groundbreaking “Cowboy Carter” album and the soundtrack of this summer's smash hit “Sinners.” Giddens was undoubtedly the only member of either project to have a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant along with the Grammys in her resume.

The Pulitzer came for writing the music and libretto for the opera “Omar,” taken from the autobiography of an African Muslim man enslaved on a North Carolina cotton plantation in the early 1800s.

Her current tour, titled the Old Time Revue, returns her to her musical roots, this time for the happier sounds of black square dance string bands and Zydeco waltzes, along with blues, Merle Haggard, some new compositions and the soulful history lesson that ties them all together.

With down-home earthiness masking her stately grace, and disarming humor softening the fury of her political passions, she and her fellow musicians turned the Rialto stage into a back porch, bringing an endless supply of energy and dazzling musicianship to the appreciate audience.

A music store's worth of stringed instruments provided the backdrop, as she shared the stage with Justin Robinson on fiddle and banjo; Dirk Powell on guitar, banjo, accordion and fiddle; Amelia Powell on guitar; Justin Harrington, aka Demeanor on banjo, bones and rapping; and Jason Sypher on bass.

As much as a band, the multi-instrumental Revue players are family. Literally. Amelia Powell is Dirk Powell's daughter. Demeanor is Giddens' nephew. Robinson co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops with Giddens at the very beginning of their careers. The group went on to win a Grammy. Despite her early pledge to never play with a bassist, the superb Sypher has been backing her since she launched her solo career.

The pure exuberance of so many selections on the song list didn't come for free. As much as she was in the moment when she made music, she didn't let the audience forget where the songs came from. She was a frequent visitor to the White House and other official Washington functions during the Obama years. Now, as the pendulum swings back in an idiotic attempt to whitewash history, the echoes and aftermath of slavery can't be erased, no matter how many books are taken from library shelves.

They still haunt her. And us.

She turned the refrain of her own composition “At the Purchaser's Option” into an anthem that had the Realto pulsing to its powerful heartbeat.

You can take my body

You can take my bones

You can take my blood

But not my soul.

In his 1997 essay “Cool Like Me,” Donnell Alexander extolled “cool” as black culture's major contribution to American society. “Cool” was the ability of make something of nothing, to make a dollar out of 15 cents, to take “cast-off Civil War marching band instruments” and turn them into jazz.

Rhiannon Giddens isn't about cool. While she celebrates the virtues of resourcefulness and resilience, she embodies a different sort of dignity and power.

Rather than a mere banjo picker, she has been a one-woman crusader for a much more noble place for the instrument in our history and culture. Before the high lonesome sound of white hillbillies making bluegrass music, before the blackface stereotypes of minstrel shows, the predecessor of the banjo had a different role. Its sound, bursting with energy and life itself, was a connection to the African empires known to a powerful race of human beings before they were enslaved.

Every note Rhiannon Giddens plays echoes back to the source.

The history lesson she shares is full of inconvenient truths and tragedies beyond number.

But also with the joy of surviving them, and forging this survival like metal, into strength.

It's a strength Rhiannon Giddens possesses. One of many.