I have spent this entire week staggered by the images and reports coming out of Western North Carolina. My empathy instincts generally run a little stronger than is altogether good for my emotional well-being, and the pangs I feel when viewing the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene are yet more pronounced because I have extensive firsthand knowledge of the communities affected. For eight years, I lived and worked in the Asheville area, the region that was perhaps most devastated by the effects of the storm. Specifically, I was honored to be a staff member at Warren Wilson College. That innovative institute of higher learning is located in Swannanoa, the place that inspired the Washington Post headline “‘Completely and entirely erased’: How Helene swallowed one mountain town.”

Rhiannon Giddens announced a new album this week, a recording that captures a collaboration with the Silkroad Ensemble she has been engaged in for the past couple years. According to Giddens, October 1 has been the intended date for this announcement. It is an instance of painful kismet that the scheduled declaration comes when it does and that the first song shared from the album includes a version of the nineteenth century work song “Swannanoa Tunnel.” Although the lyrics are about the fatalities of Black prison laborers forced to dig a passageway through the Blue Ridge Mountains for the railroad, the words take on a heartrending new meaning in the aftermath of Helene: “Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel/ All caved in, baby, all caved in.”

This song was added to Giddens’s repertoire specifically because of people with a current connect to Swannanoa. She has credited Warren Wilson College professors Kevin Kehrberg and Jeff Keith, two people I have worked with and can attest to their generous spirits, and the powerful scholarship about the song with given the work new resonance. This is what Giddens said:

I had never heard anyone except white musicians do “Asheville Junction” or “Swannanoa Tunnel,” and then these intrepid intellectual explorers traced it back to actually a cave-in that affected African American convict laborers of the tunnel that connected North Carolina to Tennessee. And they found a recording, the only known recording of a Black man singing that song. I listened to that recording and it burrowed into my soul and that song became, not our theme song, but a spiritual thread for me. I wanted to mention them because a lot of time the people doing that work don’t get the claps and the flowers, but if they don’t do what they do, I can’t do what I do.

“Burrowed into my soul” is a good description for how I feel about Western North Carolina. Until this week, I didn’t realized just how deeply it had gone into me.

American Railroad, the new album from Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens, is scheduled for release in November.