VIDEO PREMIERE: The Pinkerton Raid Shed Light on Historical Injustice Through Poignant Folk-rocker “Wiggins Special (Freedom Ain’t Free)”

Photo credit: Bram Epstein

The Pinkerton Raid pushes at the borders of folk, Americana, and indie rock to craft a sound for dreamers around a campfire. Critics have heard echoes of disparate influences — from Neil Young and The Band to Wilco, Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Sprouting from the songwriting and vocals of Jesse James DeConto, he’s joined by a rotating cast of musicians from his Durham, North Carolina neighborhood. They’ve shared stages with Illiterate Light, The Ballroom Thieves, Noah Gundersen, Lowland Hum, and The Collection over the years — while the group recently dropped their fifth studio album, The Highway Moves The World, which caught the attention of Rolling Stone, Under The Radar, American Songwriter, and many others.

Today Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the video for their new tune “Wiggins Special (Freedom Ain’t Free),” which finds the band collaborating with animator Bernardo Tirelli to offer a potent visual and musical statement on the historical segregation and exploitation on Black communities. Through their ominous style of folk-rock, the band tells the story of a part of history that is not widely known. We get rich lyricism, slinky guitar, and the subtle yet soulful touch of an organ to make for a song that poignantly captures the injustice of the story it tells.

Jesse James DeConto (vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter of The Pinkerton Raid) explain the inspiration behind the song:

“On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, you can hear the roar of the Indianapolis 500 all over the city. I was thinking about that when I learned about how I-70 had cut through the historically Black Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood back in the ‘50s and how those neighbors live with the roar of the highway every single day. We have the same story in our historic Hayti neighborhood here in Durham, NC, where I live.

In the video for “Wiggins Special (Freedom Ain’t Free)”, animator Bernardo Tirelli used changing color palates to illustrate the joy and the pain of people enduring, surviving and thriving in their own ways through the injustices of segregation, whether it was in highway construction or in the auto-racing industry like it was for our protagonist Charlie Wiggins.”

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