Queen Esther: Blackbirding Album Release

Funded by a grant from the New York City Women's Fund for Media, Blackbirding is a reclamation driven Black country soul album that roams the Gettysburg battlefield to create songs that dismantle myths and assumptions about what happened there -- and to explore the reasons why, like slavery, The Civil War has never really ended.

Blackbirding -- the lucrative 19th century practice of kidnapping free Black folk to enslave them -- has never ended, either. Like their predecessors who were police officers and detectives, ICE Agents are blackbirders.

This album centers Queen Esther's Black feminist perspective as it encompasses different aspects of the conflict, churning lost history into music that’s a seamless irresistable blend of country, jazz, soul, R&B and pop, reflecting the unbridled chaotic melange of the battlefield – women in uniform on both sides of the conflict as Les Vivandieres, Irish immigrants, Huguenots and Europeans of every ilk, trained to the hilt by the French military, led to victory by a Spaniard, fought on farmland owned by free Black men -- and all of it drowning in blood and wine. 

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Photo credit: Nina Galicheva