Review: American Railroad
Art is often seen as some degree of aesthetic sigh in between strokes of paint or notes in a song. It is more than that. Expression holds memory and history; it is both a record and a resistance through time and space.
If you know what to look for in a painting, it can tell you a lot about the past. It will tell you about the fashion of the time, what material was available, and what people thought was important to show off. A deeper look with the right guide will also tell you about values, fascinating symbols, and perhaps even more. Why was something so important to someone, that they would take the time and money to record it permanently?
Paintings are one thing, but we have a problem with records by way of sound. What happens when we lose the connection between song and context? Recording sound is new, and oral tradition often plays a game of telephone down the centuries.
This is just one of the many questions tackled in the podcast American Railroad from Silkroad and PRX. When this podcast was announced, I was giddy with excitement. Host Rhiannon Giddens is one of my favorite artists, not just because she’s a phenomenal musician, but because of her profound and poignant attitudes towards art and humanity. I first encountered her being interviewed for Dolly Parton’s America. I want to mention that since that podcast, Giddens has played banjo with Beyonce and also won a Pulitzer Prize for music. Recently she has made headlines for cancelling her show at the Kennedy Center.
In Dolly Parton’s America, Giddens challenged listeners with the question: "Where does music come from?”
This idea is explored in my favorite episode of Dolly Paron's America, “Neon Moss”, and has stuck with me since.
RHIANNON GIDDENS: But you're right, there is this connection to where did it come from? And my whole thing is, just as within America there are these connections that we have simplified and erased to our detriment, you know? Connecting an Appalachian ballad that was begun as an English ballad, but then what happened – where did the English ballad come from? You know what I mean? Where did that style of melismatic singing come from, if you're talking about Celtic singing. You know, where did the modes come from, you know, of trance, say. If you've ever listen to somebody sing 14 verses of an Appalachian ballad, that's trance. You hear an Iranian daf, that is a trance instrument that is used for sufi, it's used for folk. There are these moments that remind us that we actually all come from the same source.
It is my belief that the two most connective things in the world are food and music. Every culture has a dumpling, and when you break down music, it always feels familiar. As Giddens stated, there are connections through the United States of America, through its art, culture, and history, that are simplified. By way of this simplification, it is erased. American Railroad, season one, is five episodes exploring this basic idea through the history of the American railroad, who built it, and very importantly, music that was woven through this history.
A podcast for music and history lovers and this should be required listening for American study. Each 40-minute episode is a concentrated dip into a subject with so many potential threads to follow. I found myself wanting to dig deeper and deeper in directions that this train did not take me on. The academic in me sang in harmony with the intense amount of research, while the artist in me marveled at how this team brought history to the now through these performances.
Giddeons and the production team deftly manage to tightrope walk through a spiderweb of possibility, using their power of art to examine this history and how it reaches out beyond the years. Starting in Appalachia, rolling out to California, and ending up in Boston, this is an educationally toned podcast. The writing is clear but leans towards the academic in a way that listeners may find tiring. The through line to the music and performance is the reward for the instruction. It is heavy but important. It is drawing back the curtain on a history that hasn’t been told often, or considered important enough to remember.
A profound moment is when they discuss how archeologists study railroad lines. There is a lot of history on the East Coast that was able to be recorded, but on the West Coast a lot of these stories were passed down through oral tradition - and further through a language barrier. The idea that there are archeologists studying American soil for information on the 1800s was a profound, and sad realization for me. Who, and what have we forgotten because of the dehumanization of people? Listening to American Railroad was a journey that was more than worth it, and gave me pause to think a lot more on the history of my country.
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