RANKY TANKY

NO ONE IN RANKY TANKY SAW IT coming. The glowing press, the uptick of fame, the nonstop touring, the chart-topping debut album, the…expedited service at Target. ¶ “I’m not kidding,” says Quiana Parler, as she digs in to a brunch of sausage and pimento cheese grits at a Charleston, South Carolina, diner. “My son told the pharmacist I was in Ranky Tanky and she was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get your prescriptions right away!’” The thirty-nine-year-old tilts her head, smiles. “That was new.” ¶ Charleston-based Ranky Tanky formed in May 2016, when five musician friends with shared personal and professional history dating back decades—trumpeter Charlton Singleton, drummer Quentin Baxter, guitarist Clay Ross, bassist Kevin Hamilton, and vocalist Parler—got together at Ross’s urging to record their interpretation of Gullah music, songs and spirituals passed on from those descended from enslaved people, primarily along the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, who developed their own language and culture thanks to their relative seclusion. ¶ “When Clay approached us about Ranky Tanky, honestly the first thing I said was ‘Why would we go out and do Gullah?’” Singleton recalls, sitting beside Parler as he tears open a biscuit and slathers it with jam. “‘I can go to church right now and hear folks singing those songs.’” ¶ Singleton, who is forty-eight, could not have predicted how their arrangements of age-old Gullah mainstays would penetrate a cluttered media landscape and resonate with listeners hungry for authenticity and mainlined soul. How the music of his youth and family would quench a thirst he never suspected existed beyond his backyard. “What I learned is that everybody can relate to it somehow,” he says. “In all of our travels, whether it’s us playing in Seattle or Nebraska or Northern