New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Rhiannon Giddens has joined with music writer Kristina R. Gaddy to create Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early
Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo, a songbook featuring twenty examples of early
Black Atlantic music. The collaboration, due in
September 2025 from the University of North Carolina Press, makes the songs accessible and playable for today's musicians, music enthusiasts, and historians. Presenting music from 1687 through the 1850s in modern treble clef and banjo tablature, along with the stories behind each song, Gaddy and Giddens take readers on a journey from the Caribbean across the Americas. Go Back and Fetch It is available to pre-order here at 30% off using discount code 01SOCIAL30 at checkout.
Created for amateurs and professionals alike, Go Back and Fetch It explains the significance of early
Black Atlantic music and how the patterns of tunings, melodic lines, and lyrics shed light on the impact that
Black American music has had on nineteenth-century popular music, early country, old time, and bluegrass. Each tune pairs with an essay on its historical background and how the tune transformed over time, as well as information about the collector.
Rhiannon Giddens reunites with her former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson on a new album, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, out April 18 on Nonesuch Records and available to pre-order here. Produced by Giddens and Joseph "joebass" DeJarnette, the album features Giddens on banjo and Robinson on fiddle, playing eighteen of their favorite North Carolina tunes. Many were learned from their late mentor, legendary North Carolina Piedmont musician Joe Thompson; one is from another musical hero, the late Etta Baker. Giddens and Robinson recorded outdoors at Thompson's and Baker's North Carolina homes, as well as the former plantation Mill Prong House, accompanied by the sounds of nature, including two different broods of cicadas, which had not emerged simultaneously since 1803, creating a true once-in-a-lifetime soundscape.
