There’s an urgency to the songs on Freedom Highway, Rhiannon Giddens’ blazing new solo album, that will make you want to take to the streets and march. Whether you follow that urge or not, take it as a sign that Giddens is on a journey from folk singer to folk firebrand. As a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens created lovely, grinning old-time music; her solo debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn, emboldened her gorgeous, soulful voice. Wonderfully woozy, front-porch touches—a washboard and a muted trumpet on “Hey Bébé,” for example—are lighthearted nods to Giddens’ earlier work, but Freedom Highway is on a new plane. Giddens wrote nine of the album’s 12 tracks, adding in civil rights era tunes “Birmingham Sunday” and “Freedom Highway” to her smoky brew. Inspired by an 1850s “slave for sale” ad, the mesmerizing “At the Purchaser’s Option” lets acoustic strings waltz together before Giddens’ intensity rises. Cool and calm, she sings, “I got a body, dark and strong. I was young, but not for long. You took me to bed a little girl, left me in a woman’s world. You can take my body; you can take my bones. You can take my blood, but not my soul.” Freedom Highway was recorded in Louisiana, largely in pre-Civil War rooms; Giddens sought to connect to her painful American roots through these tracks. These are hushed, fingerpicked, achingly fiddled story songs that bring the ghosts of the past to confront the problems of the present. The results are astounding.