Feminist Sounds: Speculation and Specters in Rhiannon Giddens’ Music
CW: mention of enslavement, anti-Black violence, family separation, sexual assault
“What we listen to is a reflection of who we are as a society.”
Image of Rhiannon Giddens from WBUR.
Rhiannon Giddens asks us to rethink the white-washed history of Country music, folk sounds, and the Banjo instrument. Giddens is a Black folk musician known for singing and playing fiddle and banjo. She was a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops band and now plays as a part of the band Our Native Daughters, alongside her solo work. In 2017, Giddens was a MacArthur Fellow. Her artistic mission is “reclaiming African American contributions to folk and country genres and revealing affinities between a range of musical traditions, from gospel and Celtic to jazz and R&B.” Giddens does this by creating haunting, captivating music that turns historical pain into beautiful reckoning.
Rhiannon Giddens’ music works politically on two levels: (1) she constructs a musical sound from instruments associated with white musical traditions in order to remember the instruments’ Black ancestry, and (2) she uses lyrics to tell reimagined slave narratives and other Black folklore left out of history books. Through this methodology, Giddens’ music speaks back to multiple erasures, appropriations, and traumas in order to recover a musical aesthetic that opens a portal to the past and future. In particular, Giddens centers Black women and motherhood in her exploration of the past. Her song “At the Purchaser’s Option” from her 2017 solo album Freedom Highway tells the speculative history of an enslaved Black mother who fears being separated from her child at the auction block. “At the Purchaser’s Option” demonstrates Giddens’ folk sensibilities and political agenda, touching on issues of reproductive justice and bridging pain from the past to the present.
“At the Purchaser’s Option”: Black Motherhood and Reproductive Justice
Giddens wrote “At the Purchaser’s Option” after coming across an archived newspaper advertisement for an enslaved woman; in small notation was the off-handed comment that the woman had a child with her that could be bought “at the purchaser’s option.” For Giddens, the nonchalant and undeniable evidence of family separation moved her in ways that other historical accounts hadn’t before. And so, “At the Purchaser’s Option” became Giddens’ speculative history sung from the enslaved mother’s point of view. “The song fell out of the banjo," she said.
“I've got a babe but shall I keep him/
'Twill come the day when I'll be weepin'”
The opening lines of the song introduce us to the perspective of the Black mother, forced to consider whether she will be able to keep her child or lose them through the violent transactions of enslavement. In these lines, the tenuous and unstable nature of Black motherhood during enslavement is laid bare.
Many scholars have explored the ways in which U.S. chattel enslavement disrupted reproductive health and justice for Black Americans. In Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks writes about the institutionalized process of “breeding,” which was essential in the perpetuation of enslavement. “Breeding was oppressive to all fertile black slave women. Undernourished, overworked women were rarely in a physical condition that would allow for safe easy childbirth. Repeated pregnancies without proper care resulted in numerous miscarriages and death,” writes hooks (41). Giddens’ song is clearly implicating the system of “breeding” which converted childbirth into the production of capital for white families who enslaved Black people.
“At the Purchaser’s Option” also reflects a scholarly concept called “natal alienation.” Orlando Patterson defines natal alienation in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study as “alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood’” (7) as well as “‘rights’ or claims of birth” (5). Giddens’ archival research and fabulated narrative offer a window into the experience of natal alienation. And while the academic work of scholars such as Patterson and hooks give us insight into the mechanics of systemic violence, Giddens’ lyrics provide a portal that bestows greater subjectivity and emotional ties as compared to an academic research paper.
Through the story of the Black woman listed in the newspaper, Giddens shows how “breeding” and “natal alienation” were institutionalized systems that perpetuated enslavement and disrupted the possibility of reproductive justice. Giddens’ opening lines, “I've got a babe but shall I keep him,” animate these concepts to remind listeners of the pain of the past and our own proximity to it. Further, Giddens tells a story from the perspective of an enslaved Black mother, at once an impossible and essential figure whose own aches and traumas have been ignored in the dominant historicization of the period. “At the Purchaser’s Option” teaches us how our contemporary fights for reproductive justice stem from opposing enslavement.
Image Credit: WUNC
Critical Fabulation and Black Folklore
“At the Purchaser’s Option” demonstrates one of Gidden’s strategies for creating Black folklore and speculative histories in her songs: archival research. The song reminds us that we don’t truly know the love and pain of the real Black woman who was listed in the advertisement with her baby. Yet Giddens is unconcerned with piecing together a factual account. Rather, she is interested in how she can engage her creativity, ancestry, and songwriting to keep this woman’s story alive in new ways. Giddens cannot go back in time, she cannot write an impossible archive, she cannot retrieve an erased history and an unshared account. The Middle Passage and the violences of enslavement have long rendered a Black archive -- a formal or informal collection of documented history -- lost, a cause of generational trauma and cultural estrangement that endures in the wake of U.S. slavery. Thus, her decision to engage in speculation mirrors cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation.
Critical fabulation responds to the impossibility of a Black American archive through the deployment of a critical (political, thoughtful, contextualized) fabulation (storytelling, folklore, speculation). Through this methodology, Hartman argues, scholars can access a different window into the afterlives of slavery, Black subjectivity, and archive. Much like Giddens’ process for “At the Purchaser’s Option,” Hartman practices critical fabulation by finding something in the archive that gestures at a silenced history and then fabulates a story around it herself. Hartman’s 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments contains stories lost or left out of the cultural and academic archive.
Giddens’ body of work resonates with Hartman’s critical fabulation in its emphasis on resurrecting the perspectives of enslaved Black people and enlivening them with speculative storytelling. Animated by instruments with their own racial history, Giddens provides deeply layered storytelling that functions to make musical Black folklore. Thematically, Giddens bridges contemporary Black feminist fights with historical experiences. Through the kinship, music, and stories that she creates in her bands and solo career, Rhiannon Giddens is creating her own feminist niche in the music world.
Our Native Daughters album artwork. Image: NPR.
Carolina Chocolate Drops album artwork. Image: Amazon.