The latest in the Nashville singer’s projects with an international collective of musicians interprets traditional creates new folk songs, themed the tough history of the US rail frontier that was mostly built by Irish, African American, Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Mixing instrumentals with vocal pieces, it moves with a broad brush of styles and sound with the 13 performers, using mostly banjo, guitar, cello and fiddle, but well as Japanese flutes, accordion, pipa, suona and, slightly strangely for an American landscape album - tabla. Musically then it’s something of a melting pot of history’s iron pathway across that vast continent, and is certainly evocative of many different cultures. Giddens though, takes the frontline with her powerful vocal performances, not least on Swannanoia Tunnel, an Appalachian ballad about a route that when built tragically cost an estimated 300 lives, and Steel-Driving Man, about the fabled muscle-bound railworker African-American figure John Henry, who, with his hammer, fought a race against a steam-powered rock drill. Other standouts with a mix of frontier cultures include Rainy Day (with Wu Man), Far Down Far, Tramping Song (with Haruka Fujii) Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu’s piece Milimo, and on the vocal front, powerful melancholy by Native American activist Pura Fé, who voices on the dark, old, yet exotically bluesy, Have You Seen My Man?, and the collective gospel finish of O Shout! Out on Nonesuch Records.
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