Leyla McCalla | |
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 Leyla McCalla in concert with the Carolina Chocolate Drops in September 2012 | |
| Born | Leyla Sarah McCalla October 3, 1985 New York City, United States |
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| Website | leylamccalla |
Leyla Sarah McCalla [1] (born October 3, [2] 1985) [3] is an American classical and folk musician. [4] She was a cellist with the Grammy Award-winning [5] string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, [6] but left to focus on her solo career. [7]
Both of McCalla's parents were born in Haiti. [6] Her father Jocelyn McCalla [8] was the Executive Director of the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights [9] from 1988 to 2006 [10] and is credited as translator on her album Vari-Colored Songs. [11] Her mother Régine Dupuy arrived in the United States at age 5, and is the daughter of Ben Dupuy who ran Haïti Progrès, a New York-based Haitian socialist newspaper. [9] McCalla's mother went on to found Dwa Fanm, an anti-domestic violence human rights organization. [9] McCalla's younger sister, Sabine McCalla, is also a musician in New Orleans. [12] [13]
McCalla was born in Queens, New York City, and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey, [14] where she attended Columbia High School. [15] [9] She lived in Accra, Ghana for two years as a teen. After a year at Smith College, she transferred to New York University to study cello performance and chamber music. In 2010 she then moved to New Orleans [9] where she honed her craft playing music on the streets of the French Quarter. In addition to cello, she also plays banjo and guitar. [15]
From 2011 to 2013, McCalla was a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. [16] As of 2019 she is a member of Our Native Daughters.
As of 2017, McCalla was touring with her New Orleans-based trio, which also included Québécois Daniel Tremblay on guitar, banjo, and iron triangle (ti fer); and Free Feral on vocals and guitar. [16]
In 2019–20, McCalla toured with her Leyla McCalla Quartet, which included New Orleans musicians Dave Hammer (electric guitar), Shawn Myers (drums/percussion), and Pete Olynciw (electric and acoustic bass). [17] [18]
McCalla's critically acclaimed album Vari-Colored Songs is a tribute to Langston Hughes, which included adaptations of his poems, Haitian folk songs sung in Haitian Creole, [4] and original compositions. [6] McCalla says the first song she wrote for the album was "Heart of Gold" because it provided "a window into Hughes' thinking". [19] McCalla chose to dedicate this work to Hughes because she says "reading his work made me want to be an artist." [6] McCalla started working on the album 5 years prior to its release. [6] Commentators have noted the influence of Louisiana musical traditions such as old Cajun fiddle melodies and trad-jazz banjo on the album. [5] Members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops appear on the album. [5] The album was financed at least in part through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter which exceeded its goal of $5,000 to raise $20,000. [15]
McCalla lives in the New Orleans area and has three children. [9] [16] [20] [21]
The U.S. state of North Carolina is known particularly for its history of old-time music. Many recordings were made in the early 20th century by folk song collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Influential North Carolina country musicians like the North Carolina Ramblers and Al Hopkins helped solidify the sound of country music in the late 1920s, while influential bluegrass musicians such as Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson came from North Carolina. Arthur Smith had the first nationally syndicated television program which featured country music. He composed "Guitar Boogie", the all-time best selling guitar instrumental, and "Dueling Banjos", the all-time best selling banjo composition. Country artist Eric Church from the Hickory area, has had multiple No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, including Chief in 2011. Both North and South Carolina are a hotbed for traditional country blues, especially the style known as the Piedmont blues. Elizabeth Cotten, from Chapel Hill, was active in the American folk music revival.
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was an influential American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking". NPR stated "her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music."
Abigail Washburn is an American clawhammer banjo player and singer. She performs and records as a soloist, as well as with the old-time bands Uncle Earl and Sparrow Quartet, experimental group The Wu Force, and as a duo with her husband Béla Fleck.
Music Maker Relief Foundation is an American non-profit, based in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Music Maker Relief Foundation was founded in 1994 by Tim and Denise Duffy to "help the true pioneers and forgotten heroes of Southern music gain recognition and meet their day-to-day needs. Music Maker presents these musical traditions to the world so American culture will flourish and be preserved for future generations."
The Carolina Chocolate Drops were an old-time string band from Durham, North Carolina. Their 2010 album, Genuine Negro Jig, won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards, and was number 9 in fRoots magazine's top 10 albums of 2010.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Genuine Negro Jig is the third studio album of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, one of the few African-American string bands playing today. Its label debut was released on February 16, 2010, while its vinyl version, which included the album on 140-gram vinyl and CD, was released on July 13. This is the first album the band has recorded for Nonesuch Records. It was highly successful, reaching the top ten on the Billboard Folk chart and the top of the Bluegrass chart. It was also the last CCD recording to include collaborator and Sankofa Strings co-founder, Sule Greg Wilson.
Leaving Eden is the fourth studio album by the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Rhiannon Giddens is an American musician known for her eclectic folk music. She is a founding member of the country, blues, and old-time music band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, where she was the lead singer, fiddle player, and banjo player.
Leah Song is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumental musician, storyteller, poet, artist, and activist known for her role as one of the two frontsisters of Rising Appalachia — with younger sister Chloe Smith — incorporating sultry vocals, rhythm, banjo, guitar, ballads, dance, spoken-word and storytelling into her work. Her music is based in the traditions of Southern soul and international roots music.
Luke Winslow-King Balzuweit is an American guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, and lyricist based out of [Calatayud, Aragón], Spain, who plays vintage blues and jazz music and is known for his slide guitar work. He is a music traditionalist, playing a mixture of "people's music" and improvisational jazz based in collective improvisation, with influences from New Orleans, where he was based for 15 years, that include jazz, Delta blues, ragtime, and pre-war American folk, with influences from diverse sources like Béla Bartók and Antonín Dvořák's String Quartet No. 12 and Woody Guthrie.
Tomorrow Is My Turn is the first studio album by Rhiannon Giddens. Nonesuch Records released the album on February 10, 2015. She worked with T Bone Burnett in the production of this album. The album was nominated for Best Folk Album at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards. The title song is Nina Simone's English version of Charles Aznavour's 1962 hit "L'Amour, c'est comme un jour".
Freedom Highway is the second solo studio album of Folk/Americana musician and Carolina Chocolate Drops front woman Rhiannon Giddens. It was released via Nonesuch Records on February 24, 2017. Freedom Highway was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2017 Americana Music Honors & Awards. The title track "Freedom Highway" is a 1965 civil rights protest song written by Roebuck Staples and title track of The Staple Singers' album of the same name.
Birds of Chicago is an Americana/folk band founded in March 2012 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The band is led by husband and wife, JT Nero and Allison Russell. Russell is formerly of the Canadian roots act Po' Girl. The duo-fronted band refers to their music as "secular gospel".
Carolina Mercer Langston was an American writer and actress. She was the mother of poet, playwright and social activist Langston Hughes.
Dominique Flemons is an American old-time music, Piedmont blues, and neotraditional country multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter. He is a proficient player of the banjo, fife, guitar, harmonica, percussion, quills, and rhythm bones. He is known as "The American Songster" as his repertoire of music spans nearly a century of American folklore, ballads, and tunes. He has performed with Mike Seeger, Joe Thompson, Martin Simpson, Boo Hanks, Taj Mahal, Old Crow Medicine Show, Guy Davis, and The Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band.
Affrilachia is a term that focuses on the cultural contributions of African-American artists, writers, and musicians in the Appalachian region of the United States. The term "Affrilachia" is attributed to Kentucky-based writer Frank X Walker, who began using it in the 1990s as a way to negate the stereotype of Appalachian culture, which portrays Appalachians as predominantly white and living in small mountain communities. Walker could be said to have made this word global. The term Affrilachian stands for an African American who is a native or resident in the Appalachian region. Affrilachia is also the title of Walker's 2000 book of poetry, published by Old Cove Press.
Songs of Our Native Daughters is the debut Americana/folk album by four North American singer-songwriters collaborating as Our Native Daughters. The group includes Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell. The album was released on the Smithsonian Folkways label in early 2019.
Amythyst Kiah is an American singer-songwriter. Kiah is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee and currently lives in Johnson City. She plays guitar and banjo.
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