Welcome to my porch, the eclectic singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens announced at the start of American Tunes, a trip through the past and present of American roots music she’d created for the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, June 18
“It’s a little bigger than it usually is,” she said, smiling at the crowd before opening the night with the Elizabeth Cotton folk standard “Freight Train.” “But we’ve been traveling around, bringing our old-time music to as many people as possible.”
And that’s true. Giddens and her Old-Time Revue had worked their way south through California to get to Los Angeles this week. But this show? This was much bigger.
It included a reunion of Our Native Daughters, the quartet that includes Giddens, Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah and Layla McCalla, all of whom are acclaimed modern folk singer-songwriters in their own right.
It also featured banjo player Alison Brown and her bluegrass band, joined Wednesday by actor-comedian Steve Martin on banjo. Actor Ed Helms, another Hollywood banjo player, served as emcee for the show in addition to sitting in at times with Giddens and her band.
All of which added up to night of dazzling beauty and deep truths beneath the summer night sky in Hollywood.
“Tonight, being here under the stars, listening to real music by real people with real instruments, it kind of feels revolutionary honestly,” Helms said early on. “We’re here as a community, hearing the same thing at the same time. It’s medicine, it’s healing.
“Rhiannon is a truthteller,” he added. “She’s brought the deep tangled truth of music into the light.”
Our Native Daughters took the first hour of the night, swapping off lead vocals and instruments as they played through much of their 2019 album “Songs of Our Native Daughters.”
It’s a powerful collection of songs written from the perspective of Black women’s experience with colonialism, slavery, racism and sexism — serious subjects, of course, but shared through music that captures the hope and love and possibility that allow one to still dream.
“Moon Meets Sun” kicked off their set, Giddens, Russell and Kiah sharing verses and harmonies as they sang. “When the day is done, when the moon meets sun, we”ll be dancing. You put the shackles on our feet but we’re dancing.”
Russell, after wishing the crowd “a Happy Juneteenth Eve,” sang her composition “Quasheba, Quasheba,” which uses the name of one of her family’s enslaved ancestors to imagine what her life had encompassed over its arc from Africa to the New World.
The quartet shifted between instruments from song to song, too. Giddens, for whom the banjo is her deepest love, also played fiddle. Russell joined her on banjo for some songs but added clarinet to several as well. McCalla’s main instrument is cello but for her “I Knew I Could Fly” she switched to electric guitar. Kiah stayed with acoustic guitar throughout.
Other highlights of their set included McCalla’s gorgeous cello-based “Sun Without the Heat,” the lyrics of which she drew largely from a quote by the abolitionist Frederick E. Douglass, and Russell’s “You’re Not Alone,” a gentle song of hope and love.
“Black Myself” closed their section of the show with what Kiah described as her attempt “to write 400 years of history in three minutes.” She noted the surrealness of performing it at the Cambridge Folk Festival and seeing “600 white English people singing ‘Black Myself’ back to us — like, what just happened?”
But that’s OK, she added. “I came to realize that no one likes to be oppressed or have a boot on their neck,” she said. “I also think as long as I can sing ‘Coalminer’s Daughter’ you all can sing ‘Black Myself.’”
Banjos had already featured prominently both as musical accompaniment and comedy punchlines. Helms, a self-professed “major banjo nerd,” had warned the audience early on that they were about to experience a whole lot of banjos. “Arguably too many banjos,” he added. “For some people one banjo is too many.”
But the Bowl got even more banjo-crazy with the arrival of Alison Brown, an acclaimed Grammy-winning bluegrass banjoist, and her sideman-for-the-night Steve Martin.
Brown and her band opened with “Girls’ Breakdown,” and then were joined by Martin for his comedic banjo tune “I Can Play the Banjo.” It’s a funny song in which Martin sings about how impressive his chops are before delivering the most basic of banjo solos and getting Brown’s rapid-fire picking.
Martin then took a chair at center stage as Brown and her band retreated to the shadows and delivered more of a standup routine than he typically does these days.
“There are differences between the banjo and the guitar,” he noted. “The banjo has a round pot that projects the sound outward. And the guitar can get you laid.”
Then: “A man once said, ‘To play the banjo is to live forever … alone and in a van.”
And: “Hopeful banjo players come up to me and ask how they can become famous banjo players. I tell them, ‘One, be very creative and never let anyone tell you how to do it, and two, be already famous.’”
The audience laughed and cheered but to be fair, when Martin, Brown, and the band got back to music they ate that up too. Highlights included Martin and Brown’s new single, “Five Days Out and Two Days Back,” with guitarist Robbie Fulks on vocals, and the traditional bluegrass song “Cluck Old Hen” which finished this set with Giddens dancing back on stage to sing along.
She and Helms sang an a cappella close-harmony song together which regretfully we haven’t yet figured out its name, and then Giddens’ current touring band, the Old-Time Revue, joined her Helms, now on banjo, to kick off the third and final hour of the show.
Here the show fully embraced the musical travelogue of its American Tunes theme, starting with “High On a Mountain,” a North Carolina classic by Ola Belle Reed, then shifting to Louisiana for an accordion-and-fiddle-fueled Creole dance tune.
Giddens’ band currently includes fiddle player Justin Robinson, her bandmate in the Carolina Chocolate Drops in the 2000s, and her musical partner on the 2025 duo album “What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow.” But all of the players — multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, guitarist Amelia Powell, bassist Jason Sypher, and Giddens’ cousin the rapper and bones player Demeanor — are fantastic purveyors of each slice of American roots music they served.
Highlights as the Hollywood Bowl curfew loomed included “At the Purchaser’s Option,” a powerful and defiant song of an enslaved woman fighting to own her soul even as all else, including her newborn child, is taken.
Giddens next covered the song that gave the evening its name — Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” which at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 Simon performed with Giddens with the lyrics slightly altered to reflect that some Americans came to this country on slave ships instead of the Mayflower. As her clear voice soared above the simple arrangement, the audience listened in hushed attention.
Then, with everyone who’d performed except for maybe Steve Martin who’d slipped away, 25 or so singers and instrumentalists gathered on stage for a finale of the bluegrass standard “New River Train,” singing, “That same old train that brought me here is carrying me away again.”