Arts and Culture 6

C. Shaw and Nancy K. Smith Artist Series Presents: An Evening with Rhiannon Giddens

On February 26, 2023, Rhiannon Giddens performed in the Duke Family Performance Hall and brought an energy to the stage that all in attendance were lucky to witness. Davidson brought her in as a part of the C. Shaw and Nance K. Smith Artist Series. Giddens, a founding member of the old-time country and blues band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, has won two Grammys, a Macarthur Fellowship, and a BBC Radio 2 Folk award for her mastery of bluegrass music. A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, Giddens grew up surrounded by folk music. She graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and is a Class of 2000 alumna of the Oberlin Conservatory at Oberlin College, where she studied opera. She became an original member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2013 after meeting her future bandmates through time spent at festivals and competitions in the bluegrass circuit. She contributed alongside Elvis Costello, MarcuMumford, Taylor Goldsmith, and Jim James. Giddens’s reputation precedes her, but seeing her perform live is a profound experience in itself.

President Doug Hicks opened the performance by announcing the many awards to her name and presented her with an honorary degree from Davidson College, which she graciously accepted. Referencing the amazing places her profound love for the fiddle has taken her, she said, “I always say, ‘there’s more than one way to pet a cat.’” enjoyed the way she conducted herself casually and naturally onstage while also being incredibly knowledgeable and serious about the historical and cultural work she does.”

Giddens began her performance by sharing her roots in protest music with raw vocals unaccompanied by other instruments. Her voice took hold of the audience, drawing everyone into what would shape up to be a captivating show. Later in the show, she brought out two of her good friends, Justin Robinson and Laurelyn Dossett, who performed a wide range of music alongside Giddens. Throughout the show, Giddens transitioned gracefully between instruments: the fiddle and two banjos (one banjo a more traditional style and the other more modern). Between more upbeat and sadder songs, Giddens, Robinson, and Dossett shared anecdotes from their time playing together at various festivals. They shared a common respect for their mentor, Joe Thompson, who was an American old time fiddle player and one of the last musicians to carry on the black string band tradition.

Her incredible knowledge and solemnity surrounding her work prior to and throughout the Black Lives Matter Movement is incredibly noteworthy. Between pieces, Giddens spoke about the impacts of being a musician in a genre that had its roots in slavery in the U.S. The oral traditions and the four-string banjo originated in Africa and came to the Appalachian region with the enslaved people brought over.

In a striking performance of a song off of her 2017 album, Freedom Highway, Giddens let the lyrics wash over the audience: “You can take my body, you can take my bones, you can take my blood, but not my soul.” Giddens noted that the song was inspired by learning about the common and normalized practice of tearing young children away from their families at the slave markets and selling them separately. Her work and influence for racial justice in not only the bluegrass and folk music genre, but has taken hold of the U.S. as a whole.

At her core, Giddens is a performer. She ended what was already an incredible performance with an encore of “Cornbread and Butterbeans,” a fast paced, nostalgic, and crowd-pleasing song by the Carolina Chocolate Drops. As Giddens, Robinson, and Dos- contributed her vocal and instrumental talent to countless albums, ranging from Talitha MacKenzie’s Indian Voices to a revival album of unpublished Bob Dylan lyrics, to which she

VINCENT

It didn’t take long before Giddens’s shoes came off. With her bare feet on the rug and her hair tied back in pigtails, Giddens evoked feelings of home and comfort during her performance, and creating this relaxed, fun atmosphere strengthened her relationship with the audience. At the same time, Giddens prides herself on not always playing it safe or discussing “comfortable” topics. Madeline Dierauf ‘25, a Davidson student and nationally ranked fiddle player remarked, “I thoroughly sett took their final bows, the audience in the sold-out Duke Family Performance Hall rose in a standing ovation.

At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder, Giddens was quarantined in Iceland, trapped out of the country. She felt stir crazy; she wanted to be in the thick of the action in the U.S. Speaking to the audience, she recalled feeling powerless, especially when she was describing the extreme racial injustices still present in the U.S. to her children. She didn’t know what to do, so she turned to music. Giddens released her 9th album They’re Calling Me Home in 2021. In a collaboration with Fransesco Turrisi, Giddens shared the collection of songs wrestling with homesickness and grappling with past injustices that persist into the present day.

Neve Rauscher ‘26 (she/her) is an undecided major from Salt Lake City, Utah. Neve can be reached for comment at nerauscher@ davidson.edu.

Student Artist Profile: Pice asks “What’s Good??”

quickly turned into something more serious for Pice, who became curious about how far he could take this music career.

In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His poetic song lyrics filled the souls of Americans and find themselves intertwined in the fabric of our colorful culture today. His records became household staples, many of them reaching “Platinum” status. He is the only musician to ever achieve this combination of awards. Patrick Kielb, a Junior at Davidson, told me he’s going to be the next person to win a Nobel Prize—this time for physics—and a Platinum Plaque. I think he’s got a pretty good shot.

At one point during our conversation, deep in the analysis of his production methods and composition process, he noticed a spider, no bigger than a pencil eraser, crawling up his cargo pants. He jumped up from the bench and started swatting down on his legs,trying to brush himself free of what must’ve surely been some quarter inch-long, eight-legged form of the devil.

It is with this same vim that Patrick—you should really call him “Pice”—pursues his passions in music composition and physics. When he’s not toiling away deep in the bowels of Dana, he’s writing music, rap lyrics and accompanying beats to be specific. In his homemade, $500 studio at his friend’s apartment off campus, Pice produces the night away, letting his creativity fly and his technical skills multiply.

Music entered Pice’s life in the fourth grade when he joined the school band. However, it wasn’t until he arrived at Davidson that he began doing his own composing. What began as a nonsensical experiment on GarageBand

After graduating from GarageBand to Logic Pro, Pice started to write his own lyrics and mix them with his beats. The formulaic methods of beat production mimicked those processes in physics he was used to. However, writing lyrics was a whole new area of knowledge. “Writing a new song,” he tells me, “is like turning on a fan in a stale room.” If an effortless simile like that is anything to go by, people and places they encountered on their trip. You’ll see local Athenians dancing along with Pice on the sidewalks and behind counters at souvlaki restaurants. They even managed to film on top of the Acropolis. I imagine Athena was confused by this new form of worship, although she would likely approve of the duo’s courage to film on such a precarious location. he’s sure to produce some profound poetry in his lifetime.

On March 2, 2022, our good friend released his first song, “What’s Good??” For Pice, it was the answer to the questions his peers would ask him about his time writing and producing. The drive and love for his work comes through in the lyrics and melody. The piece makes a strong first impression; this artist means business. A couple months later, Pice released an EP, including s flagship piece, “Call Me Pice!!” This self-indulging, light-hearted song brings out the artist’s natural jubilant, enthusiastic disposition through the up-beat music and lyrics about the life of dreams. Best of all, there’s no explicit content, so you can show it to your mother when you tell her you go to college with an aspiring professional rapper.

With one EP out, Pice, in an effort to produce records more quickly, started to look for beat producers instead of making his own. Not only would this allow him to put more time into lyric writing, which he believes to be more personal and creative, and he could also turn his attention to another new media: video.

Over the summer of 2021, Pice took his music to the next level when he purchased a bare-bones basic setup and started pouring over tutorials. He tried to explain this procedure to me, bless his heart, but my menial brain did not have capacity to comprehend the complex process of turning imaginary sound into a digital track. Typically, professionals go to school to learn how to use all this equipment and software properly, but in true Pice fashion, our trailblazing virtuoso took on the beast solo.

He recorded his first project, a lively version of “Call Me Pice!!” last summer in Chicago with his friend Kris Athey as director. The video set out, he told me, to simply make him look cool, a goal most of us would share if we had the opportunity to put our face on the internet accompanied by a personal theme song. Complete with a Mercedes convertible and the glitzy Chicago riviera, this video’s motifs of uber-luxury, flash, and unapologetic rags-to-riches fame match those of most rappers from the top 40 chart.

For the second video, made for his song “Unstoppable,” Pice and his director, Branner D’Amato, wanted to include all the different

For Pice, the sky is the limit. Since our conversation, he has dropped two new songs and a music video, and he expects to continue to release material with regularity in the future. If we examine the rate at which he has developed his craft in the last couple of years, then we can hold nothing but excitement for Pice and the creative, unique music he will make in the future.

Vincent Scauzzo ‘24 (he/him) is a Classical Languages major and Applied Physics minor. He can be reached for comment at viscauzzo@davidson.edu

Be sure to check out Pice’s new music on Spotify and SoundCloud, and his videos on his YouTube Channel.