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For the first time at Festival, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens – a revelatory American artist of recent years – brings her black non-black music to Spoleto, reviving the forgotten history of slavery.
Tracing Gaelic, American, African American, and Native American folk traditions and their influence on European and American music, Giddens pours fire and energy into powerful songs that target discrimination. She is comfortable singing torch songs in a smoky bar, accompanying herself on the banjo or singing opera in a lavish production. Her mix of country, blues, jazz and gospel explores the lives of silenced peoples, from slaves to victims of the civil rights murders of the 1960s or teenagers killed by police on inner-city streets.
“I am mixed,” Giddens says. “My father is white, my mother is black. And I constantly learned to go back and forth between one world and another. And that has made me who I am.”
Giddens was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the late 1970s to a European-American father and an African-American mother, married only three years after the landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling that allowed interracial marriages thanks to the abolition of anti-miscegenation laws. After studying opera singing, she took up Irish music and learned the fiddle from old African-American masters.
With her on the Piazza Duomo stage is Francesco Turrisi, an Italian-born multi-instrumentalist who is also her life partner. Like Giddens, Turrisi comes from diverse backgrounds and is the perfect partner on the assorted tambourines of various origins, piano and accordion, which he plays with an original touch.
Winners of the 2022 Grammys in the Best Folk Album category, the two artists perform a selection from their albums there is no Other and They’re Calling Me Home, in a celebration of shared experiences
production Music Works International
Italian premiere
Duration 75 minutes
Please note that dates and times may be subject to change.
See www.festivaldispoleto.com for updates.