And then we had fiddle, we had drums and really just song by song, we kind of pieced together what instruments would make sense to serve the song.

Charley Crockett's Walk Through 'The Valley': "That's What Artists Do" | Newport Folk 2019​. This is entirely feasible. Can you tell me about how that came together in the studio with Dan?

I simply can’t imagine living in that type of reality,” says McCalla.

Do you have any dream co-write collaborators out there? I'd like to just practice learning my fretboard, everything. Rhiannon plays a fretless minstrel banjo, I play a five string, gut-string banjo, Leyla plays a tenor banjo, Amythyst plays a steal string.

It was like; 'I have this musical idea, I have this musical idea, I have this phrase that has been turning in my mind,' 'Well, oh, I just came up with something that plays off of that.' And allow me to explore the range of things that I'm into like classic pop music, classic country, classic soul music. DOGGY SLAYCARE: COPS CLAIM K-9S TO BE KILLED IF POLICE REFORM PASSES, EVAN DANDO: LEMONHEADS FRONTMAN WEATHERS PANDEMIC ON VINEYARD, READIES FOR DRIVE-IN SHOW, NO KITCHEN, NO PROBLEM: LOCAL BARS REOPEN BY COLLABORATING WITH FOOD SELLERS. I wrote the essay. “As we got deeper into the project, into the source material, slave narratives, and minstrel history, I kept feeling the parallels to my own life and experience,” she says. If we could build a tour around it and let this be the sort of finale to this part of the tour, it's really amazing. The things that we loved, even the things that we loathed. And so music has a way of disarming people. Festivalgoers had plenty to cheer for at this year’s Newport Folk, but what they didn’t see was the action backstage.

And so we, we felt like we had some things to say. Pulling from and inspired by 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century sources, including slave narratives and early minstrelsy, [Giddens, McCalla, Russell and Kiah] reinterpret and create new works from old ones. There were black banjo players, black fiddlers and once the record executives wanted to market music, they assumed that, 'well only white people are going to listen to string band music,' so black people had to put down their banjos and fiddles and pick up a guitar and play the blues or play jazz if they wanted to make a living making music.

Share or embed this setlist. So we all have different banjos, but we also play other things. But, we play a lot of gigs, and sometimes when I'm not playing gigs, I finally get a day or two off after several weeks on tour.

For all of this coverage and much, much more, including interviews with Amy Ray, Molly Tuttle, Lukas Nelson and many more, visit our exclusive photo gallery and see who else stopped by to say hello and snap some pics in our portrait studio. So to feel the whole community lifting me up in that way was really special, and it was just really meaningful to me to be a woman playing lead guitar. Can you tell us how it was recorded? A lot of musicians depend on things.