Fresh off of her well-deserved GRAMMY nominations for Best American Roots Performance (“You Louisiana Man”) and Best Americana Album (You’re the One), Rhiannon Giddens has returned with her powerful rendition of “The Ballad of Sally Anne,” the latest offering from the forthcoming compilation My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall. Set to arrive April 12th courtesy of Oh Boy Records, the collection honors the songwriting influence and legacy of the accomplished songwriter Alice Randall, and more broadly, celebrates the Black female experience in country, roots and folk music.
The album’s arrival will coincide with the April 9th release of My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future, Randall’s “lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music” according to its accompanying Simon & Schuster-issued press release. An acclaimed author, professor, and songwriter, Randall has written and contributed to songs for the likes of Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Radney Foster and Trisha Yearwood, with whom she cowrote “XXX's and OOO's (An American Girl) in 1994, becoming the first African-American woman to write a #1 country hit single.
Originally written by Randall for inclusion on Mark O’Connor’s 1991 album The New Nashville Cats, “The Ballad of Sally Anne” acknowledges the American South’s traumatic legacy of lynching through a narrative punctuated by sentiments of love, pain and loss. Nowhere is this conveyed more starkly than in the song’s second verse, with Giddens singing, “Johnny got married in his one good suit / But the ride from church it bore strange fruit / Down by the road you can hear her cry / As he hung from a tree, she watched him die.”
“After looking at the lyrics of this modern ballad, I did the folk thing,” Giddens explains. “Brought it into my time, space, emotions—so it morphed, swirled, & suddenly Sally Anne came through my banjo. Grateful to be part of Alice Randall’s black girl magic reclamation.”
In addition to Giddens’ recording, My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall features notable contributions by Valerie June, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, among other artists. "I had songs recorded in the 80s, in the 90s, in the 2000s, and 2010s, but I never once had the joy of hearing one of the songs that I wrote from the perspective of a Black woman recorded by a Black woman,” Randall confides in an official statement. “With this project...I hope to change that."
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