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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Rhiannon Giddens’ “Freedom Highway”

Although 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn was her first solo release, Rhiannon Giddens has quickly established her identity independent of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the old-time string band she helped form in 2005. She was the lone female voice in the New Basement Tapes project with Elvis Costello, Jim James and others; she’s guested with luminaries as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma and Allen Toussaint, and she’s started an acting sideline in Nashville. Giddens has always had a historical bent, whether as a fiddler and banjo player who mined old songs or as a commanding, earthy singer—Tomorrow was almost all covers of female songwriters. Freedom Highway offers nine of her own confident compositions plus three covers, including the Staples Singers’ famous civil-rights anthem as the title track. It’s still a cornucopia of trad African-American styles, flavored with New Orleans jazz, field holler blues, gospel and protest-style folk. But it’s also modern enough that the rap that drops into “Better Get It Right The First Time” sounds only a little out of place.

—Steve Klinge