Songs of Our Native Daughters

The Smithsonian Folkways-issued debut album from Carolina Chocolate Drops frontwoman Rhiannon Giddens, former Carolina Chocolate Drops cellist Leyla McCalla, multi-instrumentalist Allison Russell (Po' Girl, Birds of Chicago), and alt-country/blues singer/songwriter Amythyst Kiah, Songs of Our Native Daughters is a bold, brutal, and often beautiful dissertation on racism, hope, misogyny, agency, and slavery told from the perspective of four of modern roots music's most talented women, who also happen to be black. That all four artists are adept banjo players is no fluke, as that distinctly American instrument has been at the forefront of the country's musical evolution since the 1800s, though almost always via the hands of a white male. Looking to the past for inspiration, from Creole culture and minstrelsy to the abolitionist and suffrage movements, the quartet have constructed a set of songs that are grounded in centuries of suffering, yet resolute in their humanity. Steely and soulfu