“If you’ve followed me this far and didn’t know I was a hippie, I don’t know what to tell you,” Rhiannon Giddens told the sold-out audience that gathered for her May 8 Old-Time Revue at Cincinnati, Ohio’s, Memorial Hall OTR.

The music, spanning the 17th to 21st centuries, went further back than the 1960s; though Giddens’ bare feet, long skirt and purple-streaked hair did betray her hippiness. But the music was what put goosebumps on the audience’s multi-colored skin and joy in the hearts pumping their blood, all of it red. 

The eruption during “Old Corn Liquor” was so rapturous, Giddens – for the first time in her career – broke the fifth string on her banjo and was temporarily paralyzed as the song ended. 

“You all are bringing it,” she said upon regaining her composure. “I was having fun.” 

The moment came 50 minutes into the show, which featured a partial Carolina Chocolate Drops reunion, as Giddens coaxed band co-founder Justin Robinson – with whom she recently recorded What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow – out of retirement for his first tour in 14 years. 

In addition to Giddens (banjo, fiddle, viola) and Robinson (fiddle, banjo); the band included Dirk Powell on acoustic guitar, accordion, banjo and fiddle; double bassist Jason Sypher, rocking the bottom end and a Staple Singers T; guitarist/percussionist Amelia Powell (Dirk’s daughter); and Giddens’ nephew Demeanor, who rapped, sang and played banjo, electric guitar, rhythm bones and triangle. 

Across 1.75 hours, the sextet traversed Nigeria, the Congo, North Carolina, Louisiana and Kentucky. And though Giddens is often known as a purveyor of Black string music, she stressed the Revue’s repertoire was music of the oppressed and the poor; it’s class-based and regional, rather than race, music. 

Giddens exuded pure joy. She danced like no one was watching, though everyone was. She clapped out beats. And when Giddens wasn’t singing operatic leads, she ceded the spotlight to Amelia Powell on Merle Haggard’s “Something Between;” Dirk Powell on the traditional “Dimanche Après-Mid” and the original “Red Bird Road;” and Robinson on the Drops’ arrangement of “Georgia Buck” and the Congolese “Pipi Danga.”

Giddens and Dirk Powell began the Revue following a three-song opening set from Demeanor and Amelia Powell that mixed acoustic folk music with piped-in beats and raps. But Demeanor said it was all folk, which he defined as “the music we have to make as a people.”

Auntie Rhiannon and Poppa Dirk responded with Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” before bringing the rest the group on stage one song at a time. The result had the audience toggling between loud ecstasy and listening so silently a siren in the Cincinnati night provided a unique backdrop to the music. 

Amazed giddiness notwithstanding, the Old-Time Revue was serious business, as Giddens pointed out before the full band performed “At the Purchaser’s Option,” an original inspired by a 19th-century newspaper ad for a slave sale. 

“It’s is not the evil that was done to you but how you get through the evil that was done to you,” Giddens said. “And that is through all of human history.”

After a raucous standing ovation and group bow, Giddens returned to the stage alone to render “Pretty Saro” a cappella to absolute quiet from an audience that only moments earlier had been boisterous in the extreme.