“What happens when strangers meet?” is the driving question of the Silkroad Ensemble, an instrumental group conceived in 1998 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Musicians from around the world connect and communicate through music in response to this question. Lines between East and West, classical and folk blur as musicians work together to give old sounds new life. When musician and historian Rhiannon Giddens became artistic director of Silkroad in 2020, she focused the musical conversation on railroads. What emerged, and is still emerging, is American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation — a multiyear collaborative project including performances, residencies, an album, and a podcast exploring the untold stories of the people who helped lay the tracks connecting the United States.
Starting in the 1800s, railroad construction projects in the United States crossed mountains and valleys, connecting oceans and communities, creating new paths of trade and transportation. History usually calls that “progress” and the beginnings of modern globalization. But with those new rails and positive opportunities came exploitation in the form of convict leasing, deforestation, major displacement of Indigenous communities, and anti-immigration policies like the Chinese Exclusion act.
The voices, stories, and songs of people who built the rails and were the most impacted by it — including Chinese, Japanese, African American, Irish, and Native American peoples — were pushed to the margins or erased from the dominant narrative. The musicians on American Railroad, who come from all around the world, create a sonic experiment bringing those voices and stories together with sounds from the middle east, India, and West Africa. They cast a kind of spell, or, in the language of faith, do redemptive work.
In “Invocation,” the first song, musician and activist Pura Fé blows a conch shell, clearing the air and evoking the distant whistle of a train. Among the earliest and simplest instruments, seashells carry spiritual significance across religions and cultures. It seems appropriate that the conch opens a musical journey that circles the globe, bringing listeners to a place beyond borders where grief turns into dancing.
This fall I saw Silkroad perform live, listened to their album, and began listening to the podcast. Listening to masters of their craft pound drums with the ferocity of sledgehammers and build rhythmic conversations between harp and balafon (West African xylophone), banjo and tabla (hand drums from India), accordion and suona (Chinese woodwind) was just what my soul needed. The force of live music broke through the bedrock of my deep worry and grief for our nation and planet.
Art cannot alter the course of history, undo the sins of the past, or hold back the growing tide of authoritarianism, but it can give us tools to reckon with truth, remember how far we have come, and feel strengthened to face our present and future with courage and beauty.
After “Invocation,” Giddens sang “Swannanoa Tunnel / Steel-Driving Man,” an Appalachian folk song that originated as a hammer song sung by incarcerated Black men as they did the dangerous work of digging a tunnel near Asheville, N.C. Giddens’ slow and mournful version of the song is a memorial to the Black men who died when the tunnel collapsed in 1879. As Giddens sang, percussionists hit drums like steady strikes of a hammer. In the background, images of the incarcerated men who worked on that project stared out from a screen as she sang the refrain, “Somebody died babe, somebody died.”
American Railroad is not “easy listening.” But these are not easy times we are living in. American Railroad reminds us of the cruelty of empire. The podcast serves as a helpful guide to the stories behind the songs and the creative collaboration behind the project. Some of the melodies are mournful and intense. There is a driving rhythm to them, like a train, pushing forward with steam and steel. There are songs of heartache and longing, remembrance and work.
The release of this album, tour, and podcast this fall reminds us that hard times can make us tap into our creativity and resilience. No powers above or below the earth can take those capacities from us.
There is no going back to a fully pre-industrial, pre-colonized time, but we can, through our cultural exchanges, music, and education, use our imaginations to learn how to love one another.
What happens when strangers meet? Maybe they catch a glimpse of the divine.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
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