Culture That Made Me: Limerick-based musician Rhiannon Giddens selects her touchstones
Rhiannon Giddens grew up in North Carolina, but has lived in Limerick for a number of years.
Limerick-based musician Rhiannon Giddens, 44, grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. She co-founded the Grammy Award-winning “old time” string band, Carolina Chocolate Drops, and has been nominated for six additional Grammys. She has also acted in two seasons of the hit TV drama series Nashville. This week, she will curate and host two evenings at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, including her own performance with her partner Francesco Turrisi (Thursday, Oct 7); and one with Denise Chaila, Emer Mayock, and Niwel Tsumbu (Sunday, Oct 10). See www.nch.ie
Music was always there growing up. My dad played guitar and he sang a lot. My sister and I sang together. I see with my kids – and the devices they have – and wonder could it have been different for me. Technology has altered the way we make and listen to music. People put on CDs or Spotify.
When I was young, there was loads of time in the car with nothing but a book or there was talk radio on in the front so you made up stuff in the back because you were bored. So music for me was something that you made. I was always singing. I didn't even know I was humming sometimes. It drove my mom nuts. She used to say, “It's like living in a freaking musical” – half irritated, half 'at least they’re kooky and fun'.
Stephen Sondheim’s stuff makes me levitate – I love it so much. His words are so smart and deeply rooted in the human experience. His musical Sunday in the Park with George, for example, is about the artist Georges Seurat. It’s a beautiful meditation on art and, what does it mean to be an artist?
Seurat’s love interest realises that his first love will always be his painting – that there's no room for her if she stays around. They're talking about this, and she says, “I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on.” It's kind of become a philosophy for me. Even if it's wrong, you have to make a decision. You have to do something. You have to move forward.
Plácido Domingo was my favourite singer for a very long time. I loved his voice and his vibe. He has a baritone shimmer to his voice, this beautiful timbre, which is why I liked his voice so much. I'm not a huge fan of super high, very nasal tenor sounds. He has this low burnish to his voice. I love rich voices and rich instruments. It’s why I love cello and viola. I don't listen to violinists, really. It’s the same for singers.
Yo-Yo Ma has a beautiful tone. He would have been the instrumentalist that I listened to a lot when I was younger. I had several of his records. He was playing for American presidents when he was seven years old [1962, President John F Kennedy]. These days he's an “artivist”, playing on reservations and all around the world with different people, showing how art can bring us together. I admire him now for that more than his playing, even though he's still a beautiful player.
I really loved seeing Peggy Seeger. She was one of my favourite live shows because she's so clever and such a great performer. She thinks of everything. All the pattern between the songs is so beautifully done. When she's on the banjo or on the piano, whether it’s playing a funny song or a sad song, it's so real. There’s a beautiful shape to her performances. She’s somebody who, as a musician, I went, “I'd love to be able to do a show like her.” I appreciated the showmanship and the craft.
I’m a big fan of the book Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It’s genius. The way it skewers so much of modern life and the contradictions that we have to live with. It’s is a brave thing to do – to skewer our hypocrisy around war, especially in America where there's so much patriotism wrapped up with war. The way he shows how ridiculous it is. It feels like there's insider knowledge there. It feels so right. I've never been in a battle. I've never been in a war, but when I read that book he makes it become so clear. It's a classic.
A lot of what I'm doing [including writing books about African-American folklore] pulls from very difficult, very violent history. I find I cannot watch violence on TV anymore. I cannot watch people being hurt. But I love when I can find a series like After Life with Ricky Gervais. Episodes are short, like 25 minutes each. His character has lost his wife. He’s trying to figure out how to live. It's beautiful. I'm drawn to stuff like that – things that are gentle and connected to deep, human emotion. They are gorgeous ruminations.
There's a Canadian history teacher, Sebastian Major, that has a podcast called Our Fake History. The episodes aren’t hyperbolic; they’re full of critical thinking: “This is the evidence that we have. We can't claim X, Y or Z, but we can say chances are this is what happened. You can draw your own conclusions.”
One of my favourite episodes was about what happened on Easter Island, close to South America. There's this this idea that the islanders brought about their own demise because they cut down all the trees. He digs in there and finds out how much the Europeans had to do with the decline of Rapa Nui. Which is a lot. He talks about who's presenting what myth and why. It’s brilliant.
Peter Jackson did this amazing thing with his documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. He got all this footage from the First World War, which is black and white. It’s choppy. There’s missing frames between actions. It looks kind of weird. He digitally filled in the gaps, colourised it and slowed it down so that it looks like normal people. Then he gathered all these first-hand accounts from soldiers who went to the war, and he had actors read them. There's no talking heads. It’s heart-breaking what happened to these young men.
It’s an excellent example of what we can do with film. You don't walk away from that film going, “Oh, war is cool.” You get a feel for how terrible it is. Everyone should see it.
