Leyla McCalla

Leyla McCalla is a Haitian-American musician, singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist known for work rooted in folk, blues, Afro-diasporic traditions, Haitian Creole, and social history. She is a founding member of Our Native Daughters, a former member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and a solo artist whose albums include “Breaking the Thermometer” and “Sun Without the Heat.”

American Song Carries National Contradictions Through Migration and Reinvention

Pianist Lara Downes frames “Hold These Truths,” an Aspen Ideas Festival performance marking America’s 250th anniversary, as a search for America through song rather than a patriotic retrospective. With Leyla McCalla, Valerie June, Nathaniel Rateliff, Joshua Redman and Wyatt Ellis, she argues that American music carries the country’s contradictions by changing as people migrate, borrow, adapt and reinterpret. The program treats spirituals, Creole songs, ragtime, jazz, bluegrass, contemporary songwriting and “Amazing Grace” as evidence that inherited songs stay alive not by remaining fixed, but by being remade.

The Aspen InstituteJun 30, 202616 min read