Songs of Our Native Daughters

A super-group of inspiring black female roots performers, Our Native Daughters are Rhiannon Giddens and former Carolina Chocolate Drops partner Leyla McCalla, blues singer Amythyst Kiah and Allison Russell, formerly of Po’ Girl and now Birds of Chicago. The brainchild of Giddens, the project expands on the themes of black history explored on her brilliant 2017 album Freedom Highway. Drawing on slave narratives, early minstrelsy and the quartet's own ancestral history, the 13 songs portray the struggle, resistance and resilience of black women down the centuries.

The opener ‘Black Myself’ is a bluesy showcase for Kiah's defiant voice. Giddens' ‘Mama's Cryin' Long’ is an a capella rendering of a real-life account of a slave lynching and ‘Slave Driver’ is an earthy, folk-noir rearrangement of Bob Marley's song. Even more powerful is Russell's ‘Quasheba, Quasheba’, on which she sings of an African ancestor: ‘Raped and beaten/Every baby taken/Starved and sold and sold again/But ain't you a woman/Of love deservin' /Ain't it somethin' you survived.’ Yet there are uplifting moments, too, including ‘I Knew I Could Fly’, a lovely banjo and guitar tribute to the Piedmont blues guitarist Etta Baker, and ‘Lavi Difisil’, a Creole dance tune inspired by the Haitian singer Althiery Dorival.

Harrowing, empowering, heart-breaking and redemptive by turn, it's a staggering achievement and a Grammy Award surely awaits.