Rhiannon Giddens & The Legendary Ingramettes Playbill 10/01/23

MODLIN ARTS PRESENTS

RHIANNON GIDDENS with THE LEGENDARY INGRAMETTES

October 1, 2023 | 7:00 PM

Camp Concert Hall

UNIVERSITY of RICHMOND

MODLIN CENTER FOR THE ARTS

msical

PHOTO CREDIT: EBRU YILDIZ

Thank You

THIS ENGAGEMENT OF RHIANNON GIDDENS with THE LEGENDARY INGRAMETTES IS MADE POSSIBLE IN PART BY THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF

Louis S. Booth Arts Fund

E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter

Foundation Dewitt Fund for the Arts

Virginia B. Modlin Endowment

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Cultural Affairs Committee

A. Dale Mayo Fund

Department of Music, University of Richmond

H. Gerald Quigg Arts Endowment

Clinton Webb Fund

Norman and Gay Leahy

William and Pamela O’Connor

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2023/24 Calendar

FALL

 P Ticketed: Paid

 F Free: Tickets/Registration Required

 F Free: No Tickets/Registration Required

 Modlin Arts Presents

 Department of Theatre and Dance

 Department of Music

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 Tucker Boatwright Festival

AUGUST 2023

Queer Pioneers: LGBTQ+ History Through the

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

JANUARY 2024

2023/24 Calendar

SPRING

MARCH

MODLIN CENTER FOR THE ARTS presents

RHIANNON GIDDENS with THE LEGENDARY INGRAMETTES

Tonight’s program will be announced from the stage. The performance will run approximately 2 hours with a brief break between sets. The Legendary Ingramettes open with a 30 minute set, and Rhiannon Giddens will perform a 90 minute set.

ARTIST BIOS

RHIANNON GIDDENS

Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant

recipient, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art. As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”

For her highly anticipated third solo studio album, You’re The One, out August 18 on Nonesuch Records, she recruited producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Alicia Keys, Valerie June, Tank and the Bangas) to help her bring this collection of songs that she’d written over the course of her career—her first album of all originals—to life at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami last November. Together with a band composed of Giddens’s closest musical collaborators from the past decade alongside Miami-based musicians from Splash’s own Rolodex, and topped off with a horn section making an impressive ten- to twelve-person ensemble, they drew from the folk music that Giddens knows so deeply and its pop descendants.

You’re the One features electric and upright bass, conga, Cajun and piano accordions, guitars, a Western string section, and Miami horns, among other instruments. “I hope that people just hear American music,” Giddens says. “Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock—it’s all there. I like to be where it meets organically.”

The album is in line with her previous work, as she explains, because it’s yet another kind of project she’s never done before. “I just wanted to expand my sound palette,” Giddens says. “I feel like I’ve done lots in the acoustic realm, and I certainly will again. But these songs really needed a larger field.”

Her song-writing range is audible on You’re The One, from the groovy funk of “Hen In The Fox house” to the vintage AM radio-ready ballad “Who Are You Dreaming Of” and the string-band dance music of “Way Over Yonder”— likely the most familiar sound to Giddens’ fans. Her voice, though, is instantly recognizable throughout, even as the sounds around Giddens shift; she owns all of it with ease.

The album opens with “Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad,” an R&B blast (complete with background “shoops” and a horn section) that takes a titan for inspiration. “I listened to a bunch of Aretha Franklin, and then turned to fellow Aretha-nut Dirk Powell and said, ‘Let’s write a song she might have

Giddens recalls. Her danceable, vivacious tribute to Franklin’s sound is a vocal showcase, spotlighting her soaring high notes and nearly-growling low ones. Another of the album’s highlights, “If You Don’t Know How Sweet It Is,” intentionally puts an edgier spin on the sass of Dolly Parton’s early work, which Giddens channeled in the midst of some real life frustration. “I was like, ‘I’m giving you everything, why are you leaving?’” she recalls of writing the song, which started as a poem.

Jason Isbell joins Giddens on “Yet To Be” as her duet partner and the album’s only featured artist. “He’s been such an ally in the industry to black women,” Giddens says. “He’s a great singer, and he’s uncompromisingly himself— also just a really good person.” “Yet To Be,” the story of a black woman and an Irish man falling in love in America, is meant to channel some of the optimistic flip side of the brutal, real, and undertold history that Giddens has so effectively brought to the forefront with her work. “Here’s a place, with all its warts, where you and I could meet from different parts of the world and start a family, which is the true future,” Giddens explains. “I think so much about all of the terrible things in our past and present—but things are better than they have been in a lot of ways, and this is a song thinking about that.”

One of the album’s more sentimental songs, “You’re The One,” was inspired by a moment Giddens had with her son not long after he was born (he’s now ten years old, and she has a fourteen-year-old daughter as well). “Your life has changed forever, and you don’t know it until you’re in the middle of it and it hits you,” Giddens says. “I held his little cheek up to my face, and was just reminded, ‘Oh my God, my children—they have every bit of my heart.’”

“You Louisiana Man” blends Giddens’ banjo acumen with accordion, organ, and fiddle to create a Zydeco-funk classic. About a feeling that Giddens “turned up to eleven” during the songwriting process, the song shows the power of framing a record around banjo instead of guitar: “It just gives you a bit of a different vibe,” as she puts it.

Perhaps most potent is the song “Another Wasted Life,” Giddens’ composition inspired by Kalief Browder, the New York man who was incarcerated without trial on Rikers Island for three years. “People are making so much money off prison systems,” Giddens, who has performed for incarcerated people, says. “They just don’t want anyone to remember that that’s happening.” Inspired sonically by another musical icon—Nina Simone—the forceful, anthemic song channels Giddens’ rage at the broken system. “Doesn’t matter what the crime, if indeed there was this time,” she sings. “It’s a torture of the soul.”

The album teems with Giddens’ breadth of knowledge of, curiosity about,

and experience with American vernacular musics. Though it might be filtered through a slightly more familiar blend of sounds, You’re The One never forsakes depth and groundedness for its listenability.

“They’re fun songs, and I wanted them to have as much of a chance as they could to reach people who might dig them but don’t know anything about, you know, what I do,” Giddens says. “If they’re introduced to me through this record, they might go listen to other music I’ve made with a different set of ears.”

Giddens also is exploring other mediums and creative possibilities just as actively as she has American musical history. With 1858 replica minstrel banjo in hand, she wrote the opera Omar with film composer Michael Abels (Get Out, Us, Nope) and, with her partner Francesco Turrisi, she wrote and performed the music for Black Lucy and the Bard, which was recorded for PBS’ Great Performances; she has appeared on the ABC hit drama Nashville and throughout Ken Burns’ Country Music series, also on PBS. Giddens has published children’s books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She sang for the Obamas at the White House; is a three-time NPR Tiny Desk Concert alum; and hosts her own show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, as well as the Aria Code podcast, which is produced by New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR.

“I’ve been able to create a lot of different things around stories that are difficult to tell, and managed to get them done in a way that’s gotten noticed,” as Giddens puts it. “I know who to collaborate with, and it has gotten me into all sorts of corners that I would have never expected when I started doing this.”

PHOTO CREDIT: EBRU YILDIZ

THE LEGENDARY INGRAMETTES

Six decades of music, sixty-five years of song, generations tied together through the force of will of a matriarchy of powerful women. This is the story of African-American gospel quintet The Legendary Ingramettes, founded by Maggie Ingram (who passed away in 2015) as a way to keep her family together through hardship, and taken up by her daughter Almeta Ingram-Miller as a way to continue Maggie’s legacy. Inspired by the black gospel male quartets of the 1940s and 50s, The Legendary Ingramettes bring roof raising harmonies and explosively powerful vocals, all driven by the voices of women. Based for many years out of Richmond, Virginia, they were led by the indomitable will of the woman they all called “Mama,” but now that Mama is gone, Take A Look in the Book is the group’s first efforts with Almeta at the head. The album showcases Almeta’s bold new vision and towering vocal abilities, drawing songs from new Appalachian sources like Ola Belle Reed and Bill Withers, and reworking family favorites, some of which date back to old spirituals. Produced by state folklorist Jon Lohman as part of the Virginia Folklife Program at Virginia Humanities, Take A Look in the Book was recorded over just three days in Richmond, with most songs being cut in one take to keep the power of the group’s incendiary live performances. A live show from The Legendary Ingramettes is a house-rocking affair, with audiences literally whipped to a gospel fervor, and the recording seeks to capture the electrifying nature of the group’s performances.

Throughout the album, Mama’s legacy is strong, but the South casts a longer shadow. “When we came up, the times just weren’t what they are now,” says Almeta. With all the memories of national acclaim and mighty performances, there are memories too of the whites-only gas stations they stopped at in the South when Almeta was a kid. Or that one day, seared in her memory, that Almeta’s grandmother wouldn’t let her play outside her rural home in Douglas, Georgia because there was a black body swinging in the tree in her front yard. “You can’t experience something like that and not be changed by it,” she says. “For us, it showed us we had a wonderful God who watched over and protected us. I must have hundreds of stories where we knew that there is a purpose for us still here. You take all of that, and you put it into the music.”

Maggie Ingram created The Legendary Ingramettes to spread the gospel, but she also created the group to save her family. After her husband abruptly left, she raised her kids on her own and turned to music to provide for the family. Without any childcare options, each kid had to sing no matter the age in order to tour with the family. “When other kids were outside playing

and having fun and being kids, we were sitting in a circle at the house and she was beating a stick in time and teaching us to sing,” Almeta says. Raised in song and showcased on the stage, African-American gospel music was all around the children. “The gospel greats like the Soul Stirrers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, The Mighty Clouds of Joy, these are people we got a chance to meet and know and who developed a lifetime of friendships and relationships with us,” Almeta says. “We grew up singing on programs with them.”

Moving to Richmond, Virginia in the early 1960s, the family found themselves at the center of the civil rights movement. Maggie Ingram worked as a housekeeper for Oliver Hill, the civil rights lawyer who helped end the doctrine of ‘separate but equal.’ The family even got to meet Dr. Martin Luther King when he toured through Richmond! But the family also realized that Richmond was the capital of the confederacy during the Civil War, a hard legacy. Though everyone “knew their place” in Virginia in that era, “that wasn’t Mama’s way,” says Almeta. “I don’t think she even understood that just by trying to do the right thing, it thrust her in the middle of a lot of social justice issues.” The Legendary Ingramettes have built their home base in Richmond for the many years that followed, to the point that Almeta, now an ordained reverend, is a founding member of her home church, and lovingly shepherds The Legendary Ingramettes as her own congregation. Throughout, The Legendary Ingramettes have used music to tell their family’s story, but also to connect to others going through similar stories of hardship and triumph. “It’s hard to connect with people if you’re not sharing

some of yourself,” says Almeta. “And that was always important to Mama. It wasn’t about the money. It was about knowing that we’ve done some good. That something that we’ve said made a difference, and when someone leaves our concert, their heart is lifted and their life is better for having spent time with us.”

Now that she’s taken on the mantle of matriarch for The Legendary Ingramettes, Almeta Ingram-Miller found herself looking back more and more while making Take A Look In The Book. “The legacy my mother left us was an incredible and inherent faith that wasn’t complacent. Who could have imagined what we’ve gone on to do with this music? I will absolutely continue the good work that God began with Mama, but I want to take this even further,” Almeta says. “That’s what this album represents.” Along with family classics and favorites like “When Jesus Comes,” which Almeta’s been singing since she was a child, and opening song “The Family Prayer,” she’s also brought in new songs from her travels.

“A lot of the album came from experiences The Legendary Ingramettes had through the Virginia Folklife Program at Virginia Humanities,” says producer Jon Lohman. “We think that music is a way to build bridges and something that the world needs now. Arts show the best of ourselves to one another.”

Meeting the Whitetop Mountain Band in Galax, Virginia, Almeta heard the haunting song “I’ve Endured,” written by Appalachian mountain musician Ola Belle Reed. “The story of that song so parallels my mom’s life,” says Almeta, who went on to transform an Appalachian classic into a nearly eight minute spiritual masterpiece. Thinking back to her grandmother on the porch of her rural shack in Georgia with a shotgun on her lap, Bill Withers’

classic “Grandma’s Hands” takes on new meaning for Almeta. Inspired, she wrote a new final verse to the song about her own grandmother and her experience picking cotton until her fingers bled. “You take all of that, and you put it in the music,” as she says.

“When I sing, I’m singing out of the experience that I have. Out of my total experience. I still see that young girl sitting in the car, and Mama’s about to pull into a service station in South Carolina. Knowing at eight years old what ‘whites only’ means. When I sing, it’s from that place. That hasn’t been the experience with all of my group members because they’re younger than I am. They are the generations that have joined me on this incredible journey. They haven’t experienced what I’ve experienced. That’s the legacy that Mama has left for us. Never forget.” •

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