Charleston, South Carolina’s Ranky Tanky has taken Gullah music to the world stage. Drawing from spirituals, songs, and traditions passed down from enslaved populations and their descendants along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, the band has tapped into an audience that has surprised even its own members. “Everybody can relate to it somehow,” trumpeter Charlton Singleton told G&G in our feature on the band earlier this year. “In all of our travels, whether it’s us playing in Seattle or Nebraska or Northern Canada, everybody’s got some sort of turmoil that they’ve been through. And this music, coming from this community and those enslaved Africans, everybody can feel a piece of Ranky Tanky.”
Just out today is the band’s new album, Good Time, the hotly anticipated follow-up to their chart-topping 2017 debut. We’re thrilled to exclusively premiere the video for the album’s title track, and if it doesn’t get you moving, you might want to check your heartbeat. Shot in Charleston, the video follows the band as they pick up each member at a number of institutions in Charleston’s Gullah community—Dave’s Carry-Out, Knight’s Quickstop, Mr. B’s—before ending with a live performance at the Commodore jazz club that is an embodiment of pure joy.
Watch the video below, and get your copy of Good Time here.
