Freedom Highway

The ‘freedom highway’ holds an iconic place in African-American folklore. It described the escape route for 19th-century slaves out of the Deep South and, 100 years after abolition, it was the title of one of the Staple Singers’ most celebrated songs, written to commemorate Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery. The second solo album from the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ singer and banjo player includes the Staples’ classic, sung by Giddens as an impassioned duet with the American-Asian singer Bhi Bhiman – but it's merely the closing triumph to a wonderful set of mostly acoustic songs that musically and spiritually join the dots from slavery through the Civil Rights era and on to the Black Lives Matter movement today, a heritage that she describes as ‘tangled, difficult, complicated’ with an equal capacity to horrify and inspire. Nine of the dozen songs are originals, several of them based on slave narratives, as Giddens invests their moving oral history with vibrant new life. Her soulful voice sounds like a female Taj Mahal, singing over a scratchy banjo the captive's ultimate cry of defiance: ‘You can take my body, you can take my bones, you can take my blood, but not my soul.’