Piedmont blues: A search for salvation

A testament to race and resilience in America – the blues.

Piedmont Blues: A Search for Salvation is a live mixed-media concert that delves into the history, artistry, and enduring impact of the Piedmont blues. Conceived and led by acclaimed jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader Gerald Clayton, and directed by Christopher McElroen, the work features The Assembly — a nine-piece band under Clayton’s direction with GRAMMY-nominated vocalist René Marie.

On stage, music intertwines with projected film, archival and contemporary photography, and oral folklore, evoking the cultural landscape of the Piedmont region. Among the images and footage are rare performances by some of the last tradition-bearers of the Piedmont style: NEA National Heritage Fellow John Dee Holeman, as well as Algia Mae Hintonand Boo Hanks.

Drawing on songs, lyrics, and imagery born from the Jim Crow South, Piedmont Blues bears witness to the struggles of African American life in the Southeast while illuminating the blues as both a salve for suffering and a testament of survival.

Artist statement

Piedmont Blues: A Search for Salvation was created to explore race in the American South in a moment when the nation is once again reckoning with who belongs, who is heard, and who bears the weight of history. The Piedmont blues, born from African American life under Jim Crow, carries within it the struggle of a people forced to endure, yet determined to transform suffering into rhythm, pain into poetry, and survival into song.

This work insists that the blues is not backdrop but foreground: a living record of resilience, a cultural inheritance forged when freedom itself was denied. In its syncopation and sly wit are lessons about resistance; in its melodies, a salve for wounds both visible and invisible.

Through live music, projected film, photography, and folklore, Piedmont Blues creates an encounter with this tradition as both history and living legacy. It brings into view the artists who sustained the form, from John Dee Holeman to Algia Mae Hinton and Boo Hanks, while connecting their voices to the questions America continues to ask of itself today.

The work is not only concert but civic meditation — a space to sit with complexity, with memory, and with possibility. It calls on us to listen more deeply, to acknowledge the burdens of the past, and to recognize in the blues a continuing search for dignity, belonging, and salvation.

Press Quotes

• “The concert is like a novel based on the life of a character in another novel. We see an imaginative investiture of something established, its life opened up and renewed.” - Oxford American

• “Musical decadents” - The Washington Post

• “A massive multimedia undertaking that combines tap dance, photos, and video with music led by renowned jazz pianist Gerald Clayton.” - Indy Week

• “An ambitious musical flashback” - Richmond Magazine

• “An original composition informed by a past that’s fundamentally contemporary.” - Boomer Magazine