Songs of Longing

LEYLA MCCALLA wrote the title track of her latest album A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey while imagining the experience of the Haitian boat people—political asylum seekers who packed into sailboats headed for the U.S. only to get intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard mid-journey and sent back to the politically volatile and violent land from which they fled. In the early 1990s, the U.S. repatriated more than 34,000 of these Haitians before hearing their asylum cases and listening to their stories.

McCalla sings their stories now—in French, Haitian Creole, and English. The album’s title is a Haitian proverb that McCalla came across in an excerpt of Gage Averill’s book of the same name: A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey. McCalla explained to NPR that the phrase captures the spirit of her Haitian ancestors, who overcame slavery only to fall in and out of political turmoil, but that the proverb also points to a universal experience: “It made me think of the roles that we all play throughout our lifetimes, how we are all trying to navigate our way through this world where sometimes it feels as though we are the hunter, and sometimes we are the prey.”

McCalla can make us feel like we’ve gone back in time through songs written years ago about people fleeing another time’s violence. But McCalla’s voice also pushes us to consider today’s Syrian boat people, intercepted by white waters, delayed by white fear. And she urges us to consider this historically systemic turmoil alongside our own feelings of personal displacement and victory. The album’s inspiration is as timeless as McCalla’s voice.

Only three of the tracks on A Day for the Hunter are Leyla McCalla originals. All the others she arranges and bolsters with vocals from former Carolina Chocolate Drops band mate Rhiannon Giddens, the jazz guitar of Marc Ribot, and the fiddle of Louis Michot. McCalla incorporates the talents of all these musicians without crowding the sound of her songs. The instruments and voices almost take turns, giving A Day for the Hunter an uncluttered, focused, and conversational feel.

The conversation unofficially revolves around the post-colonial experience of the African diaspora. McCalla uses her midrange voice and percussive cello bow to amplify the musical cultures and histories often quieted by the powers that stole their sovereignty. As a classically trained cellist and a first-generation Haitian American, no one is more qualified for the task. Not that anyone else is taking it on.

This isn’t the first time McCalla has used her album space to sing someone else’s poetry. In her debut album, Vari-Colored Songs, she amplified and accentuated the poetry of Langston Hughes by singing his words to African-American string-band beats.

In A Day for the Hunter, McCalla’s voice is raw, beautiful, and full of historic and present longings: A mother longing for her missing daughter (“Salangadou”), a love-stricken soldier longing for honorable discharge from Vietnam (“Vietnam”), and a universal narrator longing for ancestral prayers (“A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey”), for bravery to fall like the leaves (“Let It Fall”), and for home (all throughout). Amid wide bow strokes, smooth female harmonies, and flowing finger picking, a theme of movement emerges. Movement is the thread that lyrically holds the 12 tracks together, making the album dedication all the more poignant: “to the human spirit, ever in search of freedom, love, safe harbor, and a sense of home.”

In “Les Plats Sont Tous Mis Sur la Table,” a song originally written by the great Creole fiddle player Canray Fontenot, McCalla asks in French, “Where will I go to find a place where the table is fully set?” Her bow slides across the strings while a triangle tings the beat. The mood feels light but the question resonates all the way through to track four—a child’s lullaby called “Little Sparrow” originally performed by Chicago African-American folk artist Ella Jenkins. It’s the saddest track on the album—a ballad for a tiny bird searching for home in the snow after missing her flight south for the winter.

But McCalla stays true to her album’s proverbial namesake, saving room for songs fitting for the day the prey becomes the hunter. Try not to dance to “Fey-O.” Try not to imagine rosin and spirits rising in her arrangement of Bebe Carriere’s “Bluerunner.”

In the album’s cover art, McCalla sits in a white boat in the middle of what appears to be a Louisiana bayou, cello between her legs, subtle smile across her face. As precarious a position as this may be for McCalla and for her potentially buoyant but surely delicate cello, she looks perfectly at peace, perfectly at home. She looks quite a bit like a hunter—on the search for idyllic scenes, for the underplayed histories of her ancestors, and for really beautiful music.