“YOU DON'T HEAR COLOR; YOU HEAR MUSIC": RHIANNON GIDDENS AND THE STRINGS OF HISTORY
Every October, tens of thousands of people descend on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. The 2022 iteration saw the triumphant return of Rhiannon Giddens after a 12-year hiatus. One could hardly think of a more appropriate representative of the free festival’s inclusive ethos. Accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, Giddens seamlessly wove together songs by artists as diverse as country singer and songwriter Hank Cochran, gospel trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Paul Simon, who began his career on the folk scene.
As these selections suggest, Giddens contains multitudes. She’s a classically trained singer who rose to prominence in folk music, a Black woman succeeding in a “white” milieu, a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant for work whose roots lie far from the academy, a champion of American music who lives in Ireland.
But Giddens is far more than “a raisin in the oatmeal,” as she described herself in a keynote address to the 2017 International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Business Conference; she is the culmination of centuries of musical tradition, and she wants the world to know that she is not an exception—bluegrass, she points out, is rooted in Black music.
Giddens was born to a white father and Black and Native American mother outside Greensboro, N.C. Her upbringing was marked by such staples of white American culture as The Lawrence Welk Show and Hee-Haw, but after her parents’ divorced, she found herself split between the white and Black parts of town. Despite the schism, she discovered that the two worlds were not so different. As she posited in the New Yorker, “It’s the South, isn’t it? The point is that they are different, but the same.”
Giddens received a degree in opera theater from the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory before returning to her home state, where she renewed her interest in folk music and took up banjo and fiddle.
In 2005 she attended the Black Banjo Then & Now Gathering in Boone, N.C. While taking in a performance by folk hero Joe Thompson, who’d inspired Giddens to pick up a banjo in the first place, she met musicians Dom Flemons and Sule Greg Wilson. She also befriended Thompson, subsequently learning his methods and repertoire.
Giddens, Flemons and Wilson went on to form the old-time string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, which garnered critical acclaim and won the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for their album Genuine Negro Jig.
By 2013, however, Giddens, then the only remaining original member of the Drops, decided to focus on a solo career. The following year she participated in the “Another Day, Another Time” concert inspired by Joel and Ethan Coen’s folk-themed film Inside Llewyn Davis. Mounted at New York’s storied Town Hall and organized by acclaimed producer T Bone Burnett, the event was a triumph, and Giddens’ performance of folk legend Odetta’s “Waterboy” was widely praised as one of the evening’s highlights. Perhaps even more stunning was her reading of the Gaelic standard “S’iomadh Rid (The Dhith Om/Ciamar a Ni Mi),” which she delivered as though she’d just stepped out of the Scottish Highlands. (Speaking of the British Isles, in Welsh mythology, Rhiannon was the goddess of the moon and fertility.)
The following year, Burnett recruited her to join Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford, Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes and Jim James of My Morning Jacket in The New Basement Tapes, wherein each artist created songs from lyrics written by Bob Dylan but never set to music. The resulting album, Lost in the Flood, hit #2 on both folk and independent-album charts, raising Giddens’ profile considerably.
Her Burnett-produced 2015 solo debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn (Nonesuch), firmly established her as a singular interpreter of song. She appeared utterly at ease with the album’s multiple roots currents, including country, gospel, folk and blues, in arrangements that ranged from the intimate to the symphonic. Standouts “She’s Got You,” made famous by Patsy Cline, and “Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind” by Dolly Parton, ostensibly white repertoire, was given new context via its positioning beside Black spirituals and work songs.
Follow-up Freedom Highway (2017), which took its title from a civil-rights barnburner by Pops Staples, demonstrated Giddens’ burgeoning gifts as a songwriter. “The album’s beauty and gravitas,” wrote Pitchfork’s Jonathan Bernstein, “come from how Giddens collapses the last two centuries of American history, juxtaposing songs about antebellum slave plantations with 1960s civil-rights anthems and narratives of 21st-century state violence.” The banjos and fiddles caressing these tunes, full of blood and anguish but also devotion and hope, make history breathe.
In collaboration with Turrisi, Giddens continued to delve into traditional musical forms and find timeless resonance. There Is No Other (2019) boasts, for example, a stirring version of the oft-covered “Wayfaring Stranger.” On the 2021 set They’re Calling Me Home, she unearths fresh nuance in such familiar material as “O Death” and “Amazing Grace.” Home won the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album.
In “Community and Connection,” her IBMA Business Conference keynote, Giddens further illuminated a form we think we know, venturing, “The question shouldn’t be how do we get diversity into bluegrass but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?” The genesis of the Carolina Chocolate Drops was, in fact, predicated on the Black roots of bluegrass, dating back to African banjo players and enslaved fiddlers. She has described her work as “Black non-Black music,” explaining, “I’m not an urban Black person; I’m a country Black person.”
She continues to use her own musical development to help reimagine the culture as we know it. Recalling how “hillbilly” and Dixieland bandleader Forest “Boots” Faught responded when confronted about having fiddler Arnold Shultz, the son of a formerly enslaved man, in his otherwise all-white band, she said, “You don’t hear color. You hear music.”
In July 2020 it was announced that Giddens would become the artistic director of Silkroad, the ensemble founded by Yo-Yo Ma to “create music that engages difference, sparking radical cultural collaboration and passion-driven learning for a more hopeful and inclusive world.” Her first major project would be The American Silkroad, a multiformat endeavor centered on the 19th-century building of the transcontinental railroad.
Giddens’ creative inclinations were on full display in May 2022 with the premiere of Omar, the opera she created with film composer Michael Abels (known for his work with Jordan Peele) and for which she wrote the libretto. It tells the story of Muslim scholar Omar Ibn Said, who in 1807 was abducted during a military conflict from what is now Senegal and repatriated to the U.S., where he was enslaved in the Carolinas. He remained so for the rest of his life, nonetheless managing to write a series of manuscripts in Arabic on history and theology, as well as an autobiography.
A New York Times feature on Omar noted: “If writing about Senegal was a stretch for [Giddens], several of the scenes were familiar territory. When Omar arrives at a North Carolina plantation, there’s a frolic, complete with a caller telling the dancers when to promenade. It’s like a corn-shucking, a barn dance—an earlier iteration of the tradition Giddens learned from [Joe] Thompson.” Quoting Abels as saying, “It pulls on so many diverse genres of music,” the writer specifies “of the Muslim diaspora, spirituals, bluegrass, Wagner and that other opera set in Charleston, ‘Porgy [and Bess].’”
A Los Angeles Times review of Omar observes: “The earthiness of the work is given an ethereal lift… This is painful material but also triumphant, despite the impossibility of a happy ending. Omar lives again, thanks to the unconquerable power of his words, now borne aloft by the music of history.”
On a warm Sunday afternoon last October, the sun cast a golden glow over Golden Gate Park as Giddens joined Costello and Mumford for a surprise Hardly Strictly Bluegrass mini-reunion of The New Basement Tapes players. It speaks to the power of the music Giddens has devoted her life to recontextualizing that the band’s rendition of Dylan and Mumford’s “Kansas City” united the crowd in the refrain, “I love you, dear/ But just how long/ Can I be singing the same old song?”
That New York Times piece also quoted Giddens’ mission: “uncovering and highlighting parts of our history that have been suppressed to tell a false narrative that is tearing us apart.” If she has her way, then, the old songs, the music of history, will be sung in perpetuity―and continue to inform the new.
