From Blackbirding: A Listener's Guide --

Funded by grants from YoungArts, The Color Me Country Artist Fund and the New York City Women's Fund for Media, Music and Theater  by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts during an artist residency from the National Parks Arts Foundation, and written, arranged and produced by Queen Esther, Blackbirding is a reclamation driven Black country soul album that roams the Gettysburg battlefield to create songs that dismantle myths and assumptions about what happened there -- and to explore the reasons why,  like slavery and The Civil War, blackbirding has never really ended. 

This is much more than an album—it's an act of truth-telling. This music reclaims the Civil War narrative through the lens of a Southern Black feminist, bridging past and present with unflinching honesty.  Blackbirding  -- the lucrative 19th century practice of kidnapping free Black folk to enslave them -- continues today. Like their predecessors in the 1800s who were police officers and detectives whose antics were sanctioned by local, state and federal governments, ICE Agents are 21st century blackbirders. This body of work interrogates that continuity, centering Black voices, bodies, resistance, and grace.

Each song encompasses different aspects of the conflict, churning lost history into music that’s a seamless irresistible blend of country, jazz, soul, R&B and pop, spirituals, and sacred traditions offering a sonic tapestry rooted in Black ancestral memory. Ultimately, what one hears reflects the unbridled chaotic melange of the battlefield – men who literally took up arms against their brothers, uniformed Southern white officers accompanied by enslaved uniformed unarmed Black men, dirt farmers, women in uniform on both sides of the conflict as Les Vivandieres, Irish immigrants, Swedes, Huguenots, Germans, Italians and European mercenary soldiers of every ilk, trained to the hilt by the French military, led to victory by a Spaniard, fought on farmland owned by free Black men -- and all of it drowning in blood and wine.  

Each song pulls itself out of that turmoil and radiates outward—from lost daughters and haunted battlefields to the everyday quiet of surviving in America while Black. 

When you listen, you can hear all of this – and much more.

To read the entire guide, click here.