A Griot Gathering

The two-day fest We Black Folk returns for its second night at Club Passim on Sunday, 2 February 2025.

Faces old and new, featuring Cliff Notez, Lydia Harrell, Chris Walton, Cinamon, Kemp Harris, Devon Gates, Naomi Westwater, and more.

Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

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Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️

Hump Nights

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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix

〰️

Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️

We Black Folk Fest has rebranded in its second year at the subterranean digs of Club Passim in Harvard Square, adding a subtitle: “Griot Gatherings.”

A “griot” is a poet, a musician, a storyteller, broadly construed, coming out of the West African tradition. So a “griot gathering” is a nice, concise way to summarize what to expect out of the evening. The usual folk sounds you’ve come to love at the club, juiced with some historical context appropriate to the first and second day of Black History Month.

Don’t get too lost in the branding. Club Passim presents Folk Collective presents We Black Folk presents BAMS presents HipStory presents Griot Gatherings… Christ, almighty! It’s a real clusterfuck at the corner of Capitalism & Academia as everyone tries to plant their fork into one piece of pie.

(l-r) Chris Walton, Naomi Westwater, Cinamon

The second night saw a few returning faces from last year’s edition. Highlights among the festival veterans included the withering critique of Kemp Harris’ “Edenton,” Chris Walton’s musical memorial to his father, and Naomi Westwater working the room for some crowd participation.

Among the first timers, it was a treat to hear familiar musicians Lydia Harrell and Devon Gates in unfamiliar ways. Harrell usually moves in the jazz and RnB space, but she wore her folk hat for this one. And more often than not you’ll see Devon Gates with a standup bass. Not this time. She went electric for the tight confines of the stage at Club Passim, all the tighter when you’re sharing it with a half dozen other musicians at the start and close of the set.

Shout out to Cliff Notez for hosting, as well as providing these LeVar Burton-level intros to the recorded live sets at the Club Passim Yootoob. “Butterfly in the sky!”

And here’s a bit of a postscript from my Cambridge Day gig:

The start of Black History Month saw the return of We Black Folk Fest to Club Passim. The two-day festival welcomed new and returning faces into the lineup, celebrating black contributions to the folk music tradition.

Highlights aplenty: Chris Walton’s sparkling fretwork, matched by the melancholy beauty of a song dedicated to his father; Kemp Harris’ “Edenton,” a keyboard-driven ballad about false nostalgia for a childhood hometown in the Civil Rights Era, where “everybody knew their place;” Devon Gates, who switched from the usual standup bass to a electric model slung gamely over her shoulder; and Naomi Westwater’s crowdwork, not forgetting to get the “folk” involved at We Black Folk Fest.

Musician, educator, and local man about town Cliff Notez served as host. There’s a professorial air to his style of presentation, which revealed itself in micro discourses between sets. One such discourse recounted the story of Lesley Riddle, a black musician. Riddle, a “human tape recorder” and finger-picking innovator, traveled the Appalachian Trail in the early 1930s, collecting local folk tunes and sharing them with his fellow traveler A.P. Carter.

The Carter Family went on to find great commercial success as white avatars of the traditional folk and country music collected on those trips, scoring a number of hits with songs originated in black Appalachia and transcribed by Riddle, including "Cannonball Blues," "Hello Stranger," and "Bear Creek Blues." By all accounts, the Carters were the first mega stars in a country music scene that was ready to explode in popularity.

Riddle, on the other hand, fell into obscurity. The black musician who had laid the foundation for the success of white musicians across folk, bluegrass, country, Southern Gospel, pop and rock genres, sold his guitar by 1945. And he had been dead fourteen years by the time releases like Step By Step: Lesley Riddle Meets The Carter Family: Blues, Country & Sacred Songs (1993) began to acknowledge his founding influence on popular music.

Did you get all that? No worries, there’s no quiz at the end of the month. Just an invitation to recognize historical erasures where you see them and to learn more about black history, which, rest assured, is American history, despite what you’re hearing out of Washington, DC these days.

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