CONCERT PREVIEW
Rhiannon Giddens. With the New Basement Tapes and Bhi Bhiman. 8 p.m. April 3. $29.50 (advance), $31.50 (day of the show). Buckhead Theatre, 3110 Roswell Road, Atlanta. 1-800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com.
If there’s one word Rhiannon Giddens detests, it’s genres.
Classically trained in opera at Oberlin University, she moved on to a completely different style of music in becoming the leader of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a Grammy-winning old-time string band from North Carolina whose members all happen to be African-American.
Giddens clearly knows a few things about different styles of music, and being classified is something she could live without.
“I hate genres. I know that they’re necessary, but I hate them. Americana, what does that mean? I don’t know. It’s American music, that’s all I know,” she said with a laugh during a recent phone interview. “If people want to call it Americana, that’s fine. What I have learned is that these labels change and what they mean changes. Just like how Celtic has changed. What Caucasian means has changed in the last 150 years. It all changes, so it doesn’t really matter.”
Protestations aside, Giddens may have to grapple with the genre topic quite a bit now that she has been part of T Bone Burnett’s New Basement Tapes project and has released her solo debut album, “Tomorrow Is My Turn.”
She’s supporting the album with a tour that plays the Buckhead Theatre Friday.
The common thread through both projects is producer Burnett, who first saw Giddens perform in 2013 and suggested they work together. What hooked Giddens was when she was asked what her ideal project would be.
“I had this list of things that didn’t really fit into the Carolina Chocolate Drops. I was just setting them aside, thinking about all these incredible women I was inspired by, and it was something that had been hibernating for me,” she recalled. “So, when T Bone asked me what my dream record would be … I already had a project right here, and it would be the perfect project to do with T Bone Burnett.”
The resulting 11-song “Tomorrow Is My Turn” album forms a tribute to a broad range of female singer-songwriters from that dreaded Americana category.
Giddens’ path into American music began after she took up banjo and fiddle and attended an event in November 2005 called the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, N.C. There, she met Dom Flemons and Sule Greg Wilson, and the three soon formed the original lineup of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Touring the country, they were comfortable playing everything from Civil War-era fare to ragtime and all stripes of country blues. Giddens unsurprisingly has carried this open-minded outlook into “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” although she disagrees when people talk about the broad range of music on her new record.
“I love it when people say there are so many different genres on my record, but actually, not really with this specific era of American music,” she said. “That’s also the point of the record, which is to say that all of this came out of the same well.”
