Jeremy Baldwin: Jeremy Baldwin here, and I am very pleased, and it's a real pleasure and a privilege to be sitting here on the campus of the University of Michigan, sitting here with the authors of a brand new book, Kristina Gaddy and Rhiannon Giddens, who have gotten together to write this new book. It's a music book and a historical book called Go Back and Fetch It. So first of all, to the two of you, thanks for coming in and taking some time to talk today, appreciate that. And congratulations on this book. I hope it will be a book that sticks around for a long time and people continue to discover it over the years to come. So, congratulations. I think it's a very cool book that I've enjoyed, and I'm not even a musician, you know, or an amateur musician.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, we're really excited that it's out. People are playing music from it already.
Rhiannon Giddens: It's pretty nice.
Jeremy Baldwin: Well, tell me about the inspiration for writing this book in the first place and how that came about. And maybe along with that, you know, the title of the book, Go Back and Fetch It and what that means.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah, maybe Rihanna wants to start because it was really your idea.
Rhiannon Giddens: Well, yeah, but it was your research. I guess I wanted to make a book for me to use, basically. I've been a fan of Kristina's for a long time. And her book, Well of Souls, which is chronicling the spiritual birth of the banjo in the Caribbean, was a real like game changer in terms of stuff that I felt like I instinctively knew, but to have it written down in the way and researched and cared for in the way that she does in that book. I just like, my goal is to make her embarrassed and blush, but it's very, very true. It is, it is really, it's something I think everyone should read. If they even have thought about a banjo, they should go get that book. I started finding these pieces of early banjo playing and there's pieces on her website. There's a website based at Duke that had like, you know, the Hans Sloan examples that are in this book actually up online. And so, I was doing projects where I was kind of wanting to access some of this material and start engaging with pre-minstrel banjo music. And I kept going back to Kristina's website because she has a lot of them there. And I was like, “hey, Kristina, like, we should put all these like in a book so that I could use it.” Now I was thinking for everyone, but you know, you ultimately kind of want to make, whether you're making a book or an album, you want to make a thing that you are happy to hear and read, right? So I think that was the impetus.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah. And then it was, don't come with to me with an idea because I will like follow through on it.
Rhiannon Giddens: She sure as hell did. I was like, hello, you're like the best partner ever.
Kristina R. Gaddy: So, I have a good friend of mine who is an editor at UNC press and I had just been talking to her about, you know, stuff and I brought this idea up and she's like, oh my gosh, we would absolutely love to do that. Obviously, they're based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. There are strong banjo traditions in North Carolina, of course, Brandon being from North Carolina they just saw this as kind of the perfect fit for them.
Rhiannon Giddens: I'd also been in residence at Chapel Hill researching this.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Right. Yeah. Yes, yes, yes.
Rhiannon Giddens: There's just a lot of connections.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah, the Southern Folklife Collection. And so it just made perfect sense. Then we just started.
Jeremy Baldwin: And how long did it take to put this all together? How many years?
Kristina R. Gaddy: I mean, it was fast.
Rhiannon Giddens: It was fast, yeah.
Kristina R. Gaddy: I think it was like early 2023 was when Brandon was working on the Ken Burns project and I think was like in the middle of that where you were like, wait, I need more.
Rhiannon Giddens: I was literally like, I kept going and like downloading the same crappy JPEG, and I printed out and then I'd lose it and then it'd go back and download the same, you know, crappy Jpeg. That documentary is actually coming out in November. So these things are coming to fruition at the same time. Kristina is such a pro. You know, she's such an amazing writer and she had already done a lot. She can talk more about it. A lot of this is connected to the research that I think a lot of you couldn't fit in.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah, yeah. Some of it. Very much the music, but, and that's the other thing, that was really enjoyable about this was this kind of idea of like performance research, right? Which is like, I can look at this music and yes, I know how to read music. So I can tell you certain things about it. But, Rhiannon's doing this like almost, I don't know. It's like the recreation of it through playing. Putting it on banjo tab, but also singing it or, you know playing it on another instrument. And so being able to hear it and experience it in a different way as musicians. I think is so important in this effort to resurrect the music, to bring it back, to really recover it is to have that. Not just write about it and kind of think about it academically, but actually be like, “Okay, what tuning is the banjo going to be in,” right? And then all of a sudden we can see most of these tunes fit into like two or three different banjo tunings, which is really interesting because banjo players will know there are millions of banjo tunings. And that says something to me. I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but that says something to me. Some of the tunes are just like so obviously great on banjo, even though we don't know the instrument that they were played on. And some of them are so obviously great on fiddle and like not that great on the other instrument. And it's like, okay, now we can start thinking about how these instruments were played in an era before recording, in an area before people made a close study of how people were playing these instruments.
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah, I guess it sort of brings it back to life. Go back and fetch it, I guess. Sort of like, this idea of going back to recover these things that are lost as best you can.
Rhiannon Giddens: Yeah, I mean, it's from a very specific Akan proverb, Sankofa, and that's been something that's been part of my life as a musician ever since my very first band, Sankofa Strings, which was enveloped into the Carolina Chocolate Drops as the years passed, because no one could remember Sankofa Strings. But anyway, the idea of, it's not just enough to go back, it’s you have to grab it and bring it forward. That's what the idea fetching it and bringing it forward and like having it live in the now, while still being very much rooted in the past.
Jeremy Baldwin: And continue to evolve, hopefully. Right, you know, yeah. Well, so you went back and you looked at and tried to find music and recover music from 1687 up through kind of the end of the Civil War and then directly after that, right? And in the first chapter of the book, you write about, that this was kind of a difficult process. First of all, to find it, but then to decide what to use and what not to use, before you even began to transcribe it for modern musicians, right?
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah, so not only are the examples scant, but then there was also these questions of like what to include, what not to include. There are some pieces from the blackface minstrel tradition, and Rhiannon can definitely speak more about this, that you feel like that they have some sort of connection to an older tradition, but we don't know what that is. And so then it was this question of like, well, do we include that with these caveats, or do we do something else?
Rhiannon Giddens: That's book two hopefully.
Kristina R. Gaddy: It's book 2, yeah.
Jeremy Baldwin: Sort of a minstrel side, yeah.
Rhiannon Giddens: Well, the thing is, what people forget is that minstrelsy was a codification and a commercialization of a cultural music language that was already happening. The reason why it was so popular is because people heard what they were hearing already.
Jeremy Baldwin: It was familiar to them.
Rhiannon Giddens: Right, and it was put into a professional sense. And then there's all this stuff that is… it's the merging of musical and dance vocabulary that is happening as a Creolization from these different African and European cultures. And merging of that with the blackface tradition. And then people lose their freaking minds. We have no concept of what this was doing to people. Because of the place it has in our society now, you hear a minstrel tune that's being played when you go get your ice cream. You know what I mean? And not really understanding the depth of, well, you can call it an art form, I guess, and what it has meant for our culture. It's positive and mostly negative from that perspective, but it is something that is…it's just more than a notion to just dip into that.
Jeremy Baldwin: Right, right, and so that may be a future project in some way.
Rhiannon Giddens: There’s no maybe about it.
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah, that's the plan, right? Yeah, that's the plan, right?
Kristina R. Gaddy: Well, and I mean, it just is that. I think that's such a great way of putting it, right, with this, That was a movement of, “we are going to kind of formalize this thing, maybe sanitize this things for certain audiences.” But we feel we know by tunings, by similarities. And I think, that why this book coming first is really important because we can look at it and say, what are the rhythms? What are the techniques? What are the keys? What are the tunings? And then how, if we can kind of develop a sense of what that was, even with these scant examples, then maybe we can move forward. And we even talk about like, some of these rhythms that are printed on the front are from Banya dances in Suriname, South America, but they're the same rhythms that appear in early ragtime and are kind of the ideal ragtime rhythm. And these are things we can't ignore, but we have to like keep figuring out what they mean.
Jeremy Baldwin: And put them in perspective, the best you can, I guess.
Rhiannon Giddens: I mean, what I was doing with the banjo tab was kind of like using the banjo tutors of the 1850s, as sort of a starting point. And my combination basically, my technique comes from 10 years of studying these banjo tutors and letting them live in my fingers with my replica banjo from 1858, right? But then also the apprenticeship that I had with Joe Thompson, who is a living proponent of Black string band music. That's an unbroken line back to slavery. So those two things together equal a technique that is probably not like anybody else's. So I kind of just use that to sort of retrofit onto some of these and just see, okay, like, oh, this technique works here really well, or it doesn't work her. It gave me a place to start that I think is a little closer to where these tunes are coming out of than say modern claw hammer technique, you know? It gave me a way in that I think suits the material, the heart of the material more than it could have, if that makes sense.
Jeremy Baldwin: And the idea being then, if I'm correct, you create these transcriptions, these sort of modern, your version of these things and hope that it's a starting point for other musicians of today and the future to go back to, to continue that, and go on in their own way, right?
Rhiannon Giddens: Yeah, absolutely. And they can go back to the original, look, we have all the originals in here and they can say, well, I would do this, you know. Or I would prefer to do that. But it was really important to have all of that in clean transcription and Western notation, the original and then my tab with all of its caveats and it gives people multiple ways in, to just to you have something.
Jeremy Baldwin: Right,
Kristina R. Gaddy: And that's the thing. I'm also coming from a weird place in banjo playing, which is like, I'm not a claw hammer, down stroke banjo player. That's not what I learned. I've kind of been all over the place. And so, for me, I can look at Rhiannon's tab of these based on 1850s banjo tutors and I can play it, but I think about, you know contemporary old time musicians and it's going to be harder for them to look at this and just be like, “Oh, I got it,” even if they know tab. But what it really is, is it's the skeleton, it's the building block for creating something new, for making your own version. The tab, that is Rhiannon's tab, that is her creativity, knowledge, skill, all of that built into those. And people can definitely replicate that exactly if they want, but they can also take it and say. “Okay, how am I gonna do it?” And for that matter, play it on flute. Play it on mandolin. Like play it. Whatever you want.
Rhiannon Giddens: Yeah This is it. And that's the amazing thing about tab for banjo is that the numbers are really all you need. Like all the rest of it, the notation of whether that's a down stroke or a use of thumb or your forefinger, as long as you have the numbers, you know, like you know where to put your finger on the fretboard and then you can put your right hand however you want to make those notes. So it really is open to anybody who plays the banjo. A five string banjo, right? Let's just be specific. And so that's the thing. And all of the notational stuff for the right hand is theirs to take or to abandon or whatever. Or to say, oh, actually I like that old technique. I'm gonna put that in mine. Or I don't wanna do any of that, but now I know how to find my way through the tune with the left hand.
Jeremy Baldwin: Right, right. Well, and I was saying at the beginning, if you're a non-musician and that's something that you're not doing right now, I think the book is a good read anyway for people because it's full of…you know…If you are interested in American history, if you interested in musical history. I'm a pretty bad musician, but I found it really fascinating and stuff I had no idea about in there. So I think if you listening and you're like, well, you now I'm not a banjo player, or you know I'm not a musician, I think you'll find a lot in there to enjoy and to learn about in there.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah, and that was a big thing that we wanted to do was not just have a music book with the tunes and even just a brief ”This is where it comes from and this is who collected it” or whatever. But to really dive into these, like you said, parts of American history. Why was this piece of music collected? What part of a dance music tradition was it a part of? You know to ask these questions and to really learn about it. So, each piece essentially has a little essay that's about it historically but also does get into some music stuff about how we play these tunes or how, even as an audience member, we would have kind of appreciated these if we'd heard it in 1772, let's say.
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah, and I guess it put me into at least some imagined space of imagining the lives of these people and the places that this was happening, when this music was happening. Which was really interesting. Well, this all kind of comes together with Rhiannon, you're getting ready to kind of wrap up your University of Michigan Artists in Residence, the inaugural person ever to be doing this. How has the year been? Any highlights? Any thoughts in the last month or so of this? Last few weeks maybe of this.
Rhiannon Giddens: I mean, it's been amazing. Anytime I step foot in a stacks, I'm just amazed. You know, I walk away from this being a fierce advocate for library science and for the amount of work that goes into the shepherding, the protection and the classification, the shelving, you know, a book mis-shelved is a book lost forever, right? It's like so important that these people who were so smart and so… they're there because they want to be because that's the way you have to be. You're not there just because you just happen to, you know, stumble across the libraries. No, no, no. You're there cause you love books and you love knowledge. It's a passion and you feel it. And you're like, you know just the experience of like, okay, here's the phone box and like, don't break the spine. And this is how you open it. And this how you handle something that is literally 150 years old. To feel the connection is important. But for me, I was actually like..I feel almost more of an of a kinship with the people who shepherd this material. And the fact that all of that is under attack right now because it's like. If we lose these things, these are the actual tangible things. They cannot be faked. They cannot be rewritten. You know what I mean? Not the way our beautiful system is set up. People don't know. I think that's the problem. They don't what we have in our library systems. They don't know the work that's gone into it. So for me, I feel to be a performer and sort of armchair historian or whatever that I do and to have the experience of like having a research assistant. And going in there and looking through a year's worth of a journal to find two lines. Like that is unbelievable, painstaking work. And it does two things. One is that it makes me appreciate the real quotidian nature of research, which is like the day-to-day grind.
Jeremy Baldwin: It's like archeology in a way, right? You're digging it up.
Rhiannon Giddens: It's cultural archeology, really, right? And you think you have the outline for a house, but you don't know until you hit that cistern and then you're like, “but it took like two years to get there!” Right? So I feel like I really gained and so that I can advocate.As a person in the public eye, I can advocate for that. And the other thing that I get from it is, again, the quotidian nature of life.Back then.We really telescope history. It's like, well, Columbus, 1492 and then Plymouth Rock and then The Civil War. And you're like, “Wait..but wait.There was not only years, but how many minutes, how many hours, how many sick people, how many sales, how may songs, how many broadsides written, you now. So many things have come and gone that we will never know. So many interactions. And our history is built from millions of interactions between people like us, these conversations. And when you flip through a journal, a year's worth of somebody's journal, that's the feeling you get, you know, you get somebody's life and you're like, this person was literally living their life like we are, you know?
Jeremy Baldwin: Yeah, it's hard to remember that sometimes.
Rhiannon Giddens: It's hard to remember that. Again, it's that, “You know, well, if I was alive back then” I'd be like, you'd probably be dying of dysentery, number one, but you'd just be like trying to like, you know cook your chicken or whatever, you know? You'd be living. If you were lucky.
Jeremy Baldwin: Well, you're wrapping up this residency, but I know you're going to be returning to Ann Arbor in April of next year, April 21st, Hill Auditorium, University Musical Society bringing you back. So there's a chance to see you perform. Do you know what you're going to be doing on that tour yet?
Rhiannon Giddens: Yeah, it's with Silk Road Ensemble, the artistic director of Silk Road, which is a multicultural group of master musicians from all these different global traditions. And we are doing a project called Sanctuary. And it's really all about music as it is at its core, which is something that's supposed to heal us. Something that supposed to connect us at our most basic level. And right now, I think we need that more than ever. So, I'm really excited about this project. It is meant to be a sanctuary for all involved.
Jeremy Baldwin: Fantastic, so that's April 21st, Hill Auditorium. And I want to thank you again for coming, but I also want to thank for writing this book. Once again, it's called "Go Back and Fetch It," subtitled "Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo." It's by Kristina R. Gaddy and Rhiannon Giddens. Thanks so much for coming in. Thanks for writing the book.
Rhiannon Giddens: Thanks for having us.
Kristina R. Gaddy: Yeah, thanks for having us.
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