In her liner notes to this album, Leyla McCalla says these “songs are manifestos of my life experiences as a Black, Haitian American woman and the daughter of Haitian immigrants, and an homage to the humanity and creative spirit of Langston Hughes….” Hughes, a towering literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the 20s and 30s, had been inspired by the revolutionary history of Haiti. In turn, the Harlem Renaissance, and Hughes himself, were beacons of inspiration to Haiti’s Black intelligentsia, leading to a Creole-based literary movement dubbed noirism (akin to négritude in the French colonies). Taken from a Langston Hughes poem, the title of this album, Vari-Colored Songs, captures the extraordinary confluences that flow through Leyla McCalla’s music as she brings her experiences in New Orleans and her love of traditional Black music-making, to this encounter with Hughes’ poetry and Haiti songs. It is a tribute to her stylistic vision and integrity that the eight poems by Langston Hughes that she has set to music, her five arrangements of Haitian tunes, and her two original songs never show the seams with which they have been stitched together into this sonic quilt.

This album is technically a re-release of McCalla’s first solo album from 2014, released soon after she left the Carolina Chocolate Drops, but the original release was limited, and the re-release has an additional recording and expanded notes. Whether you are, like me, re-experiencing this spell-binding album or encountering it for the first time, I am certain that it will feel fresh, current and relevant. McCalla’s cello, banjo, and guitar are featured prominently, joined by a tasteful and sparing use of bass, pedal steel guitar, bones, tenor banjo, and violin, and with harmonies on one song by McCalla’s collaborator on the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters, Rihannon Giddens.

McCalla sensitively teases out the great musicality of Hughes’ poetic metre, and her arrangements are admirably sparse: note the haunting cello strum with bass and pedal steel on “Heart of Gold”; the addition of a banjo on what becomes a chilling murder ballad, “Girl”; and the solo country-blues guitar on “Song for a Dark Girl,” another account of racial murder. Hughes’ poem on the quest for meaning, “Search,” is underlaid with just solo guitar. “Too Blue” and “Love Again Blues” receive a string-band treatment with comped banjo (evidencing trad jazz influences), and a similar but simpler treatment is accorded “Lonely House.” A very different approach is taken with the new poem/song added to this release, “As I Grew Older / Dreamer”—invited artist, Yah Supreme, speaks the poetry over a scaffolding of arpeggiated cello and violins—this hearkens nostalgically back to Langston Hughes’ own engagement with spoken poetry in his 1950s collaboration with Charles Mingus.

The first of the Haitian tunes is a classic that made its recording debut on the Folkways album from 1953, Haitian Folk Songs, featuring Frantz Casséus (guitar) and Lolita Cuevas (vocals): “Mesi Bondyè,” which is best known from its Harry Belafonte rendition. McCalla’s is a beautiful version accompanied only by banjo. She includes a song, “Kamèn, sa ou fè?,” from the box set I curated, Alan Lomax in Haiti, 1936–1937.Footnote ¹ Although “Kamèn, sa ou fè” is also accompanied only by a banjo, “Latibonit,” “Manman mwen,” and “Rose Marie” all find McCalla and her band rocking the songs very much like a grenn siwèl, a kind of rustic street band from Haiti which often features hard-edged banjo solos like those heard here.

Leyla McCalla’s own “When I Can See the Valley” and “Changing Tide” round out the album, appropriately integrating her own songwriting in the mix. “Valley” brings a deeply traditional cadence and melodic language to the questions of death, faith, and an afterlife, and “Changing Tide” pulls the album to a close in New Orleans of the Katrina era with lines both literal and metaphorical: “The river will flow, release these waters to the sea / Time will tell and wash your river over me.”

This is a must-have album for lovers of American roots music and the Black tradition, and especially for those wanting to explore the diasporic affinity with Haitian music. The presence of Langston Hughes’ poetry highlights the overarching quest for racial justice in this project. Just listen to the subtle questions he embroiders into his poem “Heart of Gold”:

And while you’re at it, don’t neglect McCalla’s subsequent albums or her work with Our Native Daughters alongside Rihannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, and Allison Russell. What you will encounter as you make your way through this trove of solo and group recordings is a handful of the most creative minds in music today exploring some overlooked gullies and rivulets of Black American traditional music and fusing them with contemporary Black women’s voices and creative expression. Much of it is “project”-based, i.e., an idea given musical shape, and always with a researcher’s eye for traditional sources and an activist’s drive to lay to rest the long history of white supremacy in America.