Rhiannon Giddens was studying opera at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2005 when she attended a Black banjo gathering in Boone, North Carolina, and encountered a tradition she had not known existed.
The banjo is a West African instrument. Its immediate ancestors are the akonting of the Jola people of West Africa and similar gourd-lute instruments that survived the Middle Passage and were developed into what became the banjo by enslaved Black Americans in the colonial period. By the time the instrument entered the popular consciousness, it had been re-attributed. Minstrelsy made it a white comic prop. Appalachian folk revivalism put it in a white cultural frame. The Black origins were not hidden, they were documented in historical sources that went unread.
Giddens has spent twenty years reading those sources and playing what she found there.
The Carolina Chocolate Drops
She cofounded the Carolina Chocolate Drops in Greensboro, North Carolina, with Dom Flemons and Leyla McCalla, a string band built on the tradition of Black Piedmont musicians that had been documented but not widely performed. The Chocolate Drops recorded and toured and won a Grammy and introduced an audience to music they had not known to look for.
The project was archaeological in the serious sense: finding what was actually there, documenting where it came from, playing it in front of audiences who needed to know. Not a heritage performance of a finished tradition. A recovery project for a living one.
Giddens's background as a classically trained mezzo-soprano is part of what makes the recovery work. She can place what she is hearing in a larger musical-historical context. She hears the relationship between the West African gourd-lute and the nineteenth-century banjo and the contemporary folk revival as a continuous line, not separate traditions. The classical training is not incidental to the folk work. It is what allows her to do the folk work with the rigor the work requires.
Freedom Highway
Freedom Highway (2017) is the album to start with. It is her first solo album of original material, and it takes the historical recovery project and pushes it forward: songs about slavery, about the civil rights movement, about the specific ways the South has been carried in bodies and voices and musical instruments.
The title track is based on a 1963 Charles Curry song about the Birmingham church bombings. It is the kind of song that knows exactly what it is doing and does it without flinching.
Tomorrow Is My Turn (2015) is a covers album, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, a range of American popular music that puts her voice in conversation with the tradition across its racial categories. The argument of the album is structural: these traditions were never as separate as the industry told you.
They're Calling Me Home (2021), recorded during the pandemic with Francesco Turrisi, is her quietest record and possibly her best. It is about grief and longing for place, a pandemic album made by someone who could not go home to North Carolina. It is in conversation with traditional songs from Ireland, Scotland, and North Africa, which are in the DNA of the Appalachian tradition whether the Appalachian revival acknowledged that or not.
The MacArthur
In 2017, the MacArthur Foundation named Giddens a Fellow, the "Genius Grant." The recognition came for the work of recovery and documentation, not only for the musicianship. The Foundation was recognizing that what she is doing is scholarship in the form of music.
She is also the artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, Yo-Yo Ma's cross-cultural music organization. She went from an Oberlin opera student to a MacArthur Fellow running one of the most prestigious musical institutions in the world, all while playing banjo and fiddle music that the mainstream folk establishment had assigned to a white tradition.
She is from Greensboro, North Carolina.
Why This Matters to Southern Legends
The version of Southern identity that gets exported most often is a white one, white Appalachian folk music, white country music, white literary tradition, white evangelical faith. That version is partial in both senses of the word: it is incomplete and it has an obvious interest in what it includes and excludes.
Giddens is doing the same work that Jesmyn Ward does in fiction and that Ryan Coogler does in film: insisting on the full accounting, which is not a subtraction from Southern identity but an addition to it. The banjo is not less Southern because it is West African. It is more Southern because of where it came from and what it survived.
The music she plays is from here. It has always been from here.
See also: What Sinners and Jason Isbell Know About Alabama That Alabama Won't Admit, on the same project in film and in Alabama music. And Dolly Parton Is a Theologian, on the Pentecostal Appalachian roots of the tradition Giddens recovered.
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