Ranky Tanky

For a decade now, the Charleston quintet Ranky Tanky has not only spread the songs and rhymes of one of the United States’ most isolated and individual communities—the Gullah people of the South’s Lowcountry—but reanimated them with jazz flair and rock gusto. Gullah culture is a living relic of the South’s brutal plantation system, where enslaved people worked and resided on islands separate from the mainland; they developed their own Creole culture there, their links to the traditions they’d imported from Africa intact even centuries after arrival. Folklorists and folk musicians like Bessie Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, and Robert Winslow Gordon all collected recordings from Gullah communities a century ago, attempting to preserve the culture before it disappeared. But it hasn’t vanished, passed from one generation to the next through song and folkways. 

In fact, at some point around 2014, Clay Ross—a white guitarist raised in South Carolina’s Piedmont—asked a few Black jazz musicians with whom he’d long worked if they had heard “That’s Alright.” Drummer Quentin Baxter and trumpeter Charlton Singleton laughed, since they’d heard the song with long Gullah ties since they were toddlers. Ross asked them if they might want to revisit that incredible music together, before recruiting dynamo singer Quiana Parler and bassist Kevin Hamilton. They won their first Grammy in 2020, for the album Good Time, and their second in 2023, for a set recorded at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Ranky Tanky essentially means “get funky” in the Gullah dialect, and that is exactly what the band does, with rhythms informed by ideas from Africa and Latin America and its songs built on calls of perseverance. Their 2026 album, This Village, is an hour of uplift, from the flirtatious bop “Tell Me” to an absolutely kinetic rendition of “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” As Baxter once told PBS, “The music and the message of the culture itself deserves as big of a stage as it can get.” Ranky Tanky is helping to build that stage.