Tribute albums frequently betray their subject, but not this homage to Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears, the country giant’s 1964 salute to Native Americans. A concept album about a discomfiting cause – the US’s treatment of its indigenous people – Tears was a radical statement resisted, to Cash’s fury, by the Nashville establishment. For its 50th anniversary, producer Joe Henry gathers a stellar house band that takes turns to lead. Gillian Welch delivers an entrancing As Long As the Grass Shall Grow; Emmylou does likewise with Apache Tears. Steve Earle drawls: “I ain’t no fan of Custer” and instrumentals evoke North America’s haunted plains. Very fine.

Rhiannon Giddens’ You’re the One is the Grammy - and MacArthur - winning singer, composer, and instrumentalist’s third solo studio album and her first of all original songs; her last solo album was 2017’s critically acclaimed Freedom Highway. This collection of 12 songs written over the course of Giddens’ career bursts with life-affirming energy, drawing from the folk music that she knows so deeply, as well as its pop descendants. The album was produced by Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Alicia Keys, Valerie June, Tank and the Bangas) and recorded at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami with a band composed of Giddens’s closest musical collaborators from the past decade alongside musicians from Splash’s own Rolodex, topped off with a horn section, making an impressive ten to twelve-person ensemble.

Rhiannon Giddens’ new album, They're Calling Me Home, recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, will be released April 9 (vinyl June 11) on Nonesuch Records. Giddens and Turrisi, who both live in Ireland when they aren’t on tour, have been there since March 2020 due to the pandemic. The two expats found themselves drawn to the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland during lockdown. Exploring the emotions brought up by the moment, Giddens and Turrisi decamped to Hellfire, a small studio on a working farm outside of Dublin, to record these songs over six days. The result is They're Calling Me Home, a twelve-track album that speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical "call home" of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis.