They’re Calling Me Home cover

They’re Calling Me Home

Rhiannon Giddens

Album · 2021 · Nonesuch

They’re Calling Me Home is the second album Rhiannon Giddens made with the Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. Nonesuch released it on 9 April 2021. Both musicians had been living in Ireland and had stayed there since March 2020 because of the pandemic, and the twelve songs on the album came from the music each had been playing during lockdown: Giddens’s North Carolina songs and Turrisi’s Italian lullabies, in the words of their engineer, Ben Rawlins.

They recorded in six days in October 2020 at Hellfire, a studio in a small old stone barn on a working farm in the mountains outside Dublin. Rawlins seated the two facing each other with their instruments on the floor around them. Giddens brought a fretless banjo, a gourd banjo, a fiddle and an octave viola made for her; Turrisi brought drums and accordion, and a cello banjo about a hundred years old that had belonged to Mike Seeger. The aim, Rawlins said, was a darker tone than bright steel-string banjos and fiddles would give. Apart from a couple of vocal overdubs, the album was tracked live. Niwel Tsumbu, a Congolese guitarist living in Ireland, plays nylon-string guitar on three tracks, and the Irish musician Emer Mayock plays flute on two songs and uilleann pipes on the closing “Amazing Grace.”

The program mixes traditional songs with new ones. “I Shall Not Be Moved,” “Black as Crow” and “Waterbound” are among the first old-time pieces Giddens learned. She wrote “Avalon”; the title track is by the folk singer Alice Gerrard; “Nenna Nenna” is an Italian lullaby that Turrisi sang to his infant daughter; and the set also includes “O Death,” “Amazing Grace” and Monteverdi’s “Si dolce è’l tormento.” The album won the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album at the 2022 ceremony.

Tracklist

  1. 1 Calling Me Home (with Francesco Turrisi) 3:50
  2. 2 Avalon (with Francesco Turrisi) 3:55
  3. 3 Si Dolce è'l Tormento (with Francesco Turrisi) 3:57
  4. 4 I Shall Not Be Moved alt version 4:58
  5. 5 Black as Crow (with Francesco Turrisi) 5:23
  6. 6 O Death (with Francesco Turrisi) 3:14
  7. 7 Niwel Goes to Town (with Francesco Turrisi) 3:23
  8. 8 When I Was in My Prime (with Francesco Turrisi) 4:06
  9. 9 Waterbound Source Recording Traditional · key C · 87 bpm 3:57
  10. 10 Bully for You (with Francesco Turrisi) 2:40
  11. 11 Nenna Nenna (with Francesco Turrisi) 2:38
  12. 12 Amazing Grace alt version 2:57

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