For the past few months, the folk musician Rhiannon Giddens has been in suspended animation, alternating between enjoying and fretting over the distressingly sunny weather in Limerick, Ireland, where she has been self-isolating with her partner and children. “With everything that’s canceled in the future as well, this is the most time I’ve had off, or the most time I’ve spent in one place in probably about 14 years,” she said in a recent phone interview. “Even with my kids! I took them on the road when they were babies.”
One of a small group of people to win both a Grammy and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Giddens has spent decades devoting herself to understanding, preserving, and reinvigorating American folk music, first with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and then through songs like “At the Purchaser’s Option.” Perhaps it’s only fitting that she, like so many others, is spending quarantine reviving the lost art of bread baking. She’s even started up a small-scale barter system with her friends and family in Ireland. “We all take care of each other,” she said. “We’re distanced, so we’re not meeting up, but we’re like, ‘oh you’re making the hummus, I’ll trade you hummus for some wraps, oh I’ll make some biscuits for you, oh I’ll make some Play-Doh for your kid, if you can give me some.’”
She’s happy with the local eggs and flour she’s been baking with, and the pasta tips she’s gotten from her Italian partner, Francesco Turrisi, but the Greensboro, North Carolina native does miss a particular American delicacy. “I’m almost vegetarian, and a lot of people say it’s bacon, but for me it’s barbecue pork from North Carolina that I can’t get anywhere else,” she said, adding that her sister is planning to ship her some after an April trip to the states was understandably canceled.
She’s been playing music less than she had anticipated, though she and multi-instrumentalist Turrisi have done a livestreamed concert from home. The new song she’s releasing is actually an old one. While searching through some of her older files, she found a rendition of “Just the Two of Us” she recorded in a studio back in September 2016. It was just days after Bill Withers died, and amid lockdown, the title had new resonance for her.
“You can look at ‘Just the Two of Us’ as a romantic song, or you can look at it as just me and you, whoever you is, everybody out there, all kind of doing this to protect each other,” she said. “The sentiment of the song, ‘We can make it if we try,’ is just so powerful, and I was so thrilled with the recording. We’d forgotten we’d done it.”
She got the idea for a video, which you can watch below, that would feature footage and images from her friends as they self-isolated across the world.
It was a moment of socially distanced creative kismet. She reached out to Sxip Shirey, whom she recorded the song with, and together they got producer Don Goodwin to find his files and master the song. They donated their time and decided that all proceeds from sales of the single would go to GlobalGiving’s Coronavirus Relief Fund. In typical Giddens form, she turns the song on its head—a sousaphone plays the song’s distinctive bass line and Shirey’s harmonica leads the melody.