Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow: Fiddle and Banjo Music of North Carolina LP

TAS Rated 4.5/5 Music, 5/5 Sonics in the September 2025 Issue of The Absolute Sound!

Rhiannon Giddens reunites with her former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson on What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, an album of North Carolina fiddle and banjo music. Produced by Giddens and Joseph "joebass" DeJarnette, the album features Giddens on banjo and Robinson on fiddle, with the duo playing eighteen of their favorite North Carolina tunes: a mix of instrumentals and tunes with words. Many were learned from their late mentor, the legendary North Carolina Piedmont musician Joe Thompson; one is from another musical hero, the late Etta Baker, from whom they also learned by listening to recordings of her playing. Giddens and Robinson recorded outdoors at Thompson's and Baker's North Carolina homes, as well as the former plantation Mill Prong House. They were 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.

Robinson's bow skids along the fiddle's surface and Giddens' fingerpicking lights across the banjo strings like bounding water droplets, often so synchronized they nearly sound like one instrument. After each song earnestly flies off their fingers, the final track comes to rest on the cicadas, the organic drone that only comes once in a lifetime.