Music

Rhiannon Giddens

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

five stars

THERE is a guilty pleasure in hearing Rhiannon Giddens singing Richard Farina’s Birmingham Sunday and Pops Staples’ Freedom Highway. These songs were written to document the civil rights struggle in America during the 1960s. They should be artefacts of a bygone era, yet events since have kept them all too current.

Giddens sings them, as she later does Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Up Above My Head and her own songs drawn from historical accounts, with a power, passion, dignity and authenticity that suggest future generations might discover her with the same sense of striking musical gold that baby boomers felt on hearing Tharpe, Odetta and Nina Simone.

She’s a wonderful singer, capable of making the hairs on the back of your neck rise with a scat chorus on the intoxicating shuffle of The Love We Almost Had or her expert conducting of her band’s punctuations while extemporising glorious melismatic phrases on the field holler-esque Water Boy.

In what was essentially a compact roots music festival, where Cajun, gospel and an almost defiant Gaelic peurt-a-beul that brought the house down sat easily alongside old-time fiddle and banjo tunes, Giddens underlined her own musical resourcefulness and that of her musicians, including her co-writer and co-producer, Dirk Powell and Hubby Jenkins, both making "multi-instrumentalist" the most elastic of terms.

Her singing of Hank Cochran’s She’s Got You captured the title of the song’s parent album, Hits from the Heart and then some with its wit, pathos and soul-bearing bereftness. What a treat it must have been for young Stirling-based accordionist and Powell protégé, Neil Sutcliffe, to be invited to join her band and play his part in a great occasion.