Rhiannon Giddens, "Sinners," Beyoncé, and a sparkling moment for Black roots music
Taken together, "Cowboy Carter," "Sinners," and Rhiannon Giddens' new festival feel like a kind of trilogy. They represent a well-earned moment — for the Black South, film, and music.
[Editor's Note: The following has some mild spoilers from the film "Sinners." But it's nothing you wouldn't have gotten from a trailer.]
Rhiannon Giddens is doing something she doesn't normally do.
In the last 20 years, Giddens has done more than perhaps any other artist to revitalize the Black folk and bluegrass tradition, something once thought of as a mostly white genre. But for this performance, she loses all the banjos, "bones", and fiddles to sing a gospel song with her sister, a North Carolina educator named Lalenja Harrington.
The only sound is their voices. Where Giddens' is pure, an arrow that flies straight, Harrington's is deep and rich.
Siblings are born and raised with you, and they usually die around the same time as you too. Somewhere along that path, Giddens and Harrington learned to wrap their voices around each other.
"Just one more day the Lord has kept me," the song goes.
Giddens' music has rarely sounded so vulnerable. It's a song about faith, but stripped of instrumentation, the empty spaces are like the moments when the doubt creeps in. The wolves are at the door, but Giddens and Harrington hold them back with belief.
