First Listen: Rhiannon Giddens, 'There Is No Other'

Why do people need to be free? It's a facetious question, almost offensive, that can be answered in a million ways. Yet to ponder it is to touch down on the human side of political struggle. Consider one thing freedom makes possible, for example: intimacy. People become themselves through close exchanges with others, from a mother's arms to a lover's, speaking into the ear of a close friend or a sister and hearing themselves in the answers that come., in which sex only becomes a crime when it is joined with love. In music, the voices for freedom that also risk intimacy resonate the most profoundly. Think of finding gospel truth in 's "You've Got a Friend," or turning songwriter Oscar Brown, Jr.'s black pride lullaby "Brown Baby" into a truly revolutionary transmission.