Each year, the International Folk Music Awards — a program of Folk Alliance International — gives the People’s Voice Award to a community member who “unabashedly embraces social and political commentary in their creative work and public careers.” This year’s recipient, announced at a Feb. 1 ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., is Leyla McCalla, a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter known both for her solo work and for being part of boundary-pushing roots ensembles The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters. Her work, grounded in storytelling and historic preservation, certainly meets those criteria, making it an especially meaningful win for McCalla.
“I’ve been attending Folk Alliance for years, and have definitely been a part of the community,” McCalla tells the Scene. “I think a lot of people have gotten to know my music through the showcasing and participation that I’ve done over the years. I described it as life-affirming — and validating — to receive some recognition.”
Last year, McCalla released Breaking the Thermometer, a genre-defying collection of original and traditional songs that also incorporates archival recordings, and celebrates and preserves the history of Radio Haiti. From the late 1960s through the early 2000s, the Haitian independent radio station broadcast news and spoke out against oppressive regimes in Haitian Creole, the primary language spoken by most citizens despite the longstanding post-colonial use of French for most official business. McCalla, who is Haitian American, first made the music on the album in collaboration with Duke University as part of a multidisciplinary theater piece called Breaking the Thermometer to Hide the Fever, which premiered in early 2020. She has toured the album — organically funky, with an athletic rhythm section, a variety of stringed instruments and many lyrics in Haitian Creole — intermittently since it was released in May, finding catharsis each time she is able to revisit the music in a live setting.
“It’s been very liberating,” McCalla says. “I feel like it’s connected me with the stories that I want to continue telling and the things that really matter to me. It’s made me more curious about the way forward for us all. And, you know, I haven’t toured it in a super conventional way. I’m a single mom with three kids, so I don’t go on ginormous tours in the way that some people do with their album releases. That’s made every performance more urgent and really special.”
Part of the urgency McCalla feels stems from her commitment to unearthing and preserving musical history and traditions that otherwise might be lost to time and systemic erasure. She sees marginalized stories as being especially vulnerable to that erasure, and music as a vehicle not just for preservation but for education. And as red states continue to ban books and other media that present uncomfortable truths about history, finding alternate means for sharing marginalized perspectives is more vital than ever.
“If we can’t access the truth, how are we supposed to know how to navigate our lives?” she asks. “I feel like it is also very much my generation putting the pieces together — like, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t we know about this? Why didn’t we learn about slavery when we were growing up? And why didn’t we learn about the Haitian Revolution?’ My parents were human rights activists, working on human rights activism issues in Haiti and in the diaspora, and I didn’t learn about the Haitian Revolution until I was, like, 25.”
McCalla will bring the music and stories of Breaking the Thermometer to Analog at the Hutton Hotel on Thursday, her first headlining performance in Nashville with her band. She and the group appeared at AmericanaFest in September and returned to open one of Jason Isbell’s Ryman residency shows in October; a few months earlier, she appeared in collaboration with contemporary classical ensemble chatterbird for a reimagining of her 2014 album, a tribute to Langston Hughes called Vari-Colored Songs. While McCalla doesn’t call Nashville home, she has a rich community of friends and collaborators in town, and looks forward to celebrating Breaking the Thermometer as a complete work of art.
When McCalla was recognized at the International Folk Music Awards ceremony, she also performed with Josh White Jr., in a tribute to his father. The Folk Alliance honored Josh White, who died in 1969, with a Lifetime Achievement Legacy Award. White was a trailblazing multihyphenate musician, actor and activist who spent the final years of his prolific career and astonishing life blacklisted from the American folk music community due to McCarthyist anti-communism. McCalla views both the award and her performance alongside White Jr. as another form of preservation.
“[White] is not an artist that I knew a lot about. They made a really beautiful video that was about his life, and it just made me realize the power of music — what it means to be able to preserve our stories and to share our lives with people, to share what we’re processing and thinking. That feels very much in line with what my work is about.”
