They’re Calling Me Home

Rhiannon Giddens is incapable of producing an album that is not simultaneously a fascinating musical education and deeply enjoyable listening experience. Essentially a product of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dozen tracks on They’re Calling Me Home were recorded by Giddens and Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi at Hellfire, a small studio situated on a farm outside of Dublin, where the couple have been socially distancing since March 2020.

Drawing on songs with American, Italian and Irish roots, the duo explore themes evocative of the current global crisis. In Giddens and Turrisi’s hands, the track ‘Calling Me Home’, which is a riveting meditation on dying, achieves a spiritual resonance only partially realised by Alice Gerrard in her original 2002 recording of the song. Similarly, the couple’s rendering of ‘O Death’ wrings every possible divine inflection from the anonymously attributed American folk classic. Giddens’ incomparable vocals enrich the material, which includes songs she hasn’t performed since the Carolina Chocolate Drops days and even earlier, with fathomless emotional depth. While Giddens’ cello banjo, minstrel banjo and accordion and Turrisi’s frame drums and viola form the core instrumental foundation, the couple are accompanied on select songs by Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu (‘Waterbound’) and Irish traditional musician Emer Mayock on flute, whistle and pipes (‘Amazing Grace’).