Songs Of Our Native Daughters – New 2019 Release

I am delighted to partner with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings with the airing of some of their most diverse, informative, and celebrated releases over the last handful of years. This spring tune-in, hear, and enjoy them as each will be blended with other world music works from “lands near and far”. What’s more, I predict that this recording will be come a valuable resource for future study related to womanist music making.

Among the recordings I’ll share is, “Songs Of Our Native Daughters”, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2019. I am particularly honored to air this album as a womanist tribute to Women’s Heritage Month. Moreover, it serves as a valuable resource for students of music, enthusiasts, and practitioners of world music.

Songs of Our Native Daughters shines new light on African-American women’s stories of struggle, resistance, and hope. Pulling from and inspired by 17th, 18th, and 19th century sources, including slave narratives and early minstrelsy, kindred banjo players Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell reinterpret and create new works from old ones.

With unflinching, razor-sharp honesty, they confront sanitized views about America’s history of slavery, racism, and misogyny from a powerful, black female perspective. These songs call on the persistent spirits of the daughters, mothers, and grandmothers who have fought for justice – in large, public ways – only now being recognized, and in countless domestic ways that will most likely never be acknowledged. 52 minutes, 36-page booklet with lyrics. -Smithsonian Folkways Recordings SFW CD 40232.
Produced by Rhiannon Giddens and Dirk Powell