These days we’re afflicted with not a scarcity but a glut of biographical information about musicians. 2015 alone has seen documentaries on Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Nina Simone, in addition to tell-all memoirs by Kim Gordon, John Lydon, Carrie Brownstein, and many others. There’s some great writing in these books, but some unfortunate lily-gilding as well: “With those opening lines, ‘I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist,’” Lydon tells us of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” that “I wasn’t trying to set myself up as some kind of bogeyman.”

The present avalanche of documentaries and memoirs seems to insinuate that the music isn’t enough, that our encounters with songs aren’t complete until we know what the musician was thinking the night they cut the track. But biographical details, especially sources that seduce us into thinking we’re getting the true story of somebody’s inner life, aren’t necessarily the best way to hear a song or the history it carries in the present. The most powerful experiences we have with music often happen when we come into direct contact with the music itself, when the individual performer seems to fade into the background and we find ourselves confronted with a note or a feeling or a hiccup in the rhythm that knocks us over; when what we hear isn’t just one artist’s story that we can identify with or not, or pity or envy or disdain, but something broader and deeper; when the music’s core, its durable form, comes sharply into focus.

When Giddens reaches the line “All the way to the jail,” history floods in, strong and wide. In the 1920s version of “Water Boy,” the line was “Back to the jail,” a clear explanation about convicts toiling on a roadside for the day. A young, Alabama-born singer who’d trained as a classical vocalist before joining the San Francisco folk circuit, Odetta first recorded the song in 1953 and ’54, as the Supreme Court was starting to consider Brown v. Board of Education; when she sang that line as “All the way to the jail” in 1960, listeners might have thought about the students being dragged away from Greensboro lunch counters. These days, as Giddens sings the line, she reels back into a hushed vibrato, and her magnetic hauteur crumples for a moment. What’s stunning about her singing in 2015 is not how different it might have sounded to a listener half a century ago, but how it might sound nearly the same.