Get the latest gossip
Silkroad Ensemble With Rhiannon Giddens: American Railroad review – homage to a forgotten army of workers
The collective and their artistic director’s classy multimedia project highlights the lives lost and land snatched away in building the US transcontinental railroad
Ever since her days with folk revivalists Carolina Chocolate Drops, Rhiannon Giddens has championed the marginalised or suppressed elements of American musical tradition. Now artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, a multi-ethnic, 13-strong troupe founded in 2000, Giddens has overseen a history of America’s coast-to-coast railroad, or more particularly the army of workers who built it. Giddens, with her opera-trained voice, grabs the glory with renditions of Swannanoa Tunnel, an Appalachian ballad about a route that cost an estimated 300 lives, and Steel-Driving Man, about the fabled John Henry.
Or read this on The Guardian
