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Los Angeles Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Rhiannon Giddens is ready to meet a major moment of revival in Black music history, with banjo in hand
Rhiannon Giddens is down at the river, carrying a flame of heritage, and she's inviting anyone who wants to join her to come down and light their own wicks. Rivers are traditionally sites of salvation, as well as play. Last summer, Giddens was making her new album of traditional banjo and fiddle tunes with Justin Robinson, 'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow,' and they were recording a few songs at Mill Prong House in Red Springs, N.C. Stepping inside the house, built on a plantation in 1795, Giddens recoiled at the intensity she felt. 'I knew who was working these fields,' she says. 'I knew who was serving in this house — and it was people who looked like me. And then seeing up on the wall, like, a reunion photo of these old white dudes who went to Chapel Hill, at the end of the Civil War, and one of them had my Black family's last name from Mebane [N.C.] ... I was just like: I can't right now. I had to run out to the river.' In a moment captured by a photographer, she was crouching by the water just before it started to rain, 'and I'm thinking: how many people have come down to this river for respite? How many people in the history of this plantation — turned manor house, turned private property — have come to exactly this spot, distressed over whatever reason?' Giddens carries the weight of this on her shoulders — of the distress, but also of the joyful culture and music-making of her ancestors — and she extends an open invitation to audiences to share and learn their stories and their culture. She did so at her inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival in her native North Carolina, and she's doing it in her current Old-Time Revue tour — which will make a special blockbuster stop at the Hollywood Bowl [on June 18]. The program will feature Giddens playing with Hollywood banjoists Steve Martin and Ed Helms, along with a reunion of the all-female banjo supergroup Our Native Daughters. 'So many banjos,' she says. 'This evening is going to be amazing. I wanted to call it a 'Banjo Jamboree,' but they wouldn't let me,' she laughs, speaking to The Times via Zoom. Balancing laughter and sorrow seems to come easily to Giddens, 48, who has been on a serious mission to rekindle the legacy of the banjo and string band traditions as authentically Black creations ever since she met fiddle player Joe Thompson in 2004 and became a disciple. She's referred to as an 'elder' in the 'Blackbird' liner notes, which doesn't bother her: 'To an 18-year-old, I am an elder,' she says. 'I'm almost 50, and we are the half generation. We're the point five, because our parents didn't pick this up.' From the Carolina Chocolate Drops to her solo music, from composing the Pulitzer-winning opera 'Omar' to helming the Silkroad Ensemble, Giddens is at the fore of a movement of Black artists — including Beyoncé, whose country album 'Cowboy Carter' features Giddens on banjo — reclaiming their cultural heritage and making it sing again. A river (of sorts) played a role in another piece of Black Southern iconography this year — in the climax of 'Sinners.' Giddens was a musical consultant on Ryan Coogler's blockbuster film and contributed her banjo to the song 'Old Corn Liquor' on its soundtrack. She was also meant to appear onscreen in the central juke joint — her Chocolate Drops bandmate, Justin Robinson, does — but she couldn't make it work with her busy schedule. She admittedly hasn't seen the film ('I don't like horror movies, so I actually don't want to see it') but she's still a fan. 'I think what they've opened up with the whole conceit behind it is super important,' Giddens says. In a way, 'Sinners' is a vampiric, IMAX-sized version of her own project, in that it's about how so much of our popular musical culture was invented by Black folks in the South and co-opted by white performers (whether Elvis, the Rolling Stones or the country and folk music industries) — but also about how music can be a time machine, a way to seance with people up the river of history. 'Beyoncé, 'Sinners,' and then, in its own small way, Biscuits & Banjos is like this little triangle of a cultural movement,' Giddens says, 'which I didn't see coming, and I'm just super grateful. Because it's been a desert. ... We're all toiling in our corners, on our own, and it kind of feels like we're carrying all of this on our own.' Her Durham festival, which took place in April, drew musical legends — Taj Mahal, Christian McBride, the Legendary Ingramettes — and basically 'most of my favorite people making music right now,' says Giddens. She also judged a biscuit competition and participated in contra dances, which is what got her into this music in the first place. 'People were just really ready,' she says, 'ready to come and feel good, and to celebrate our humanity together.' For Giddens, the stakes couldn't be higher. She and Robinson learned their tunes and their art directly from Thompson, who died in 2012; they were playing his music together in Ojai recently 'when it just hit me how important it was what we were doing,' she says, 'like how complete the sound was together. I said: 'If one of us gets hit by a bus, this tradition is dead.' ' That's why she wanted to record the tunes they inherited from Thompson, as well as from Etta Baker and other North Carolina string band players — hence the 'Blackbird' album. But she also insists that the only way to truly pass the flame is through playing together in person. 'I know that learning from Joe forms the center of my character as a musician,' she says. 'I learned stuff off of recordings, fine, but I have something to go back to that was a living transmission. And I just think you should have something of that, especially in this day and age.' Giddens has passed her tradition down to many students in the past 20 years, including her nephew Justin 'Demeanor' Harrington — who plays banjo and the bones, and also raps, and who is traveling with her Old-Time Revue. This will be Giddens' first time at the Bowl; likewise for Amythyst Kiah, a banjo player from Johnson City, Tenn., and one of Our Native Daughters. That project began in 2019 as a one-off album recorded in a small Louisiana studio, of songs inspired by the transatlantic slave trade and the suffering and often unheard voices of Black women. 'Music has a way of disarming,' says Kiah, 'so it allows for people to be able to engage with the subject matter in an easier way than just talking about it.' The fierce foursome — which also includes Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla — toured with their songs before the pandemic, and later brought their banjos to Carnegie Hall in 2022. 'Now we're playing in a stadium,' says Kiah, 'which is insane.' The star-studded Bowl show is 'not what I usually do,' says Giddens. 'It's stepping out a little bit for me, not to mention the size of the place, which is kind of freaking me out.' But really it's just another river — or rather, the same river Giddens has been inviting folks to join her at for the last 20 years.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
They Came to See a Band Reunion. And Eat Biscuits.
Not long ago, Rhiannon Giddens knew every Black string musician. The dedicated few were largely collaborators and colleagues, many of whom met a generation ago at the landmark Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, N.C. Giddens, the folk musician and recipient of all the accolades (Grammys, a Pulitzer, a MacArthur), no longer knows everyone who followed her path. That expansion, she figured, was reason to celebrate. She did so the last weekend of April at her inaugural Biscuits & Banjos Festival in Durham, N.C., a jamboree featuring twangy banjos, groovy basses, clickety bones and, yes, the devouring of many flaky, buttery biscuits. The festival culminated in a reunion by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Black string band led by Giddens, Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson. The group met at the Boone gathering, taking apprenticeship under the old-time fiddle player Joe Thompson. The Grammy-winning band resuscitated styles like Piedmont string music, presenting them to a broader audience. 'It was just time to come back together and to say, 'Hey, we did a thing,'' Giddens said. 'Let's celebrate being a part of a chain, because when we came out, there was a lot of weight on us.' She added: 'Now we're a link in the chain. We're not the end of the chain.' The idea for the festival's titular pairing came during the pandemic. Giddens was locked down at home in Ireland, where she has lived since 2018. She did not have easy access to comfort food like when she made her routine trips back to the United States. She studied cooking, watching series like 'High on the Hog.' 'That was so instrumental in breaking open the idea of what soul food is and what Southern food is, and how integral the African American experience is to it,' Giddens said. 'It felt very similar to the work that I was doing with the banjo and country music and old-time music — this idea of culture being expressed through something that people do every day.' Several local restaurants submitted entries for the festival's golden biscuit award. Melanie Wilkerson, the executive chef at the Counting House Restaurant, won with her 'angel' biscuit, consisting of a yeast and brioche base. She learned how to make them from her grandmother. 'Biscuits are understated, but understood depending on where you come from,' said Wilkerson, a Durham native. The festival's lineup was cross-generational. The influential blues singer Taj Mahal, an octogenarian, performed with Leyla McCalla, a former cellist for the Chocolate Drops. 'It's nice to see the children of blues,' Mahal said. 'It's nice to be called a child still,' answered McCalla, who's 39. 'When you get to be this age, 65 or 70 is a child,' Mahal retorted. The bassist Christian McBride performed with the North Carolina Central University Jazz Ensemble 1. 'For the lineup to be so melanated, it feels groundbreaking,' said Lillian Werbin, the co-owner of Lansing's Elderly Instruments, who traveled to Durham with her staff and about 20 banjos for sale. 'She's saying that she's the middle of the link, but this is a starting point. This is like the beginning of what could be even bigger and more established and it can go for generations.' 'I've never seen that many Black people on the stage together playing this music, and it's just really exciting to see this music, the resurgence, the renewal, the rebirth of it,' said Dr. Angela M. Wellman, the founder of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music in California, after she finished watching the reunion concert. Giddens has gone on to other projects post-Chocolate Drops. In just the past year or so, she was featured on Beyoncé's 'Texas Hold 'Em,' the lead single from 'Cowboy Carter,' and on the soundtrack to Ryan Coogler's movie 'Sinners.' She recently moved her show away from the Kennedy Center in May because of the new administration's upheaval. 'I feel like the most important thing to get out of that is that we need to support each other as long as you think about what you're doing and you have an intentionality,' she said. Giddens was omnipresent throughout the weekend. She was a judge in the biscuit competition. She played banjo during a Friday night square dance, packed with people with wide smiles, before hopping off the stage, barefoot, to participate in the line dance. 'This is the idea of cultural renaissance,' Giddens said. 'This is cultural excavation. It just happens some people are doing it with music. Some people with food. Some people are doing it in literature. It's a way so that we could all kind of draw strength from each other.'
Miami Herald
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Rhiannon Giddens & the Old-Time Revue bring American Roots to the bandshell
When a musician of Rhiannon Giddens' stature comes to perform in your town for the first time, a celebration is in order. So, hey, Miami, how about a good, old-fashioned porch party? The MacArthur 'genius grant-,' Pulitzer Prize-, Grammy-winning Giddens proposes just that with her Friday concert at the Miami Beach Bandshell. Rhiannon Giddens & the Old-Time Revue will play the kind of foot-stomping, hand-clapping, heart-lifting music that first brought her to prominence nearly two decades ago as a founding member of the Black string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. A North Carolina native, Giddens began her career as an opera singer, studying at the Oberlin College and Conservatory. Degree in hand and back in her home state, her musical path took a 90-degree turn when she met 86-year-old Joe Thompson, one of the last living repositories of Carolina Piedmont music. He became her mentor. It wasn't long before Giddens and fellow Thompson acolytes Justin Robinson and Dom Flemons had formed the Chocolate Drops, and a whole genre of American music that had been on life support was revived. In 2011, their second album 'Genuine Negro Jig,' garnered the group a Grammy, and the accolades for Giddens' gifts have not stopped since. If Giddens' musical journey has been full of twists and turns, it may be because her artistic boldness is only matched by her curiosity. The kind of person that says 'yes' first then thinks about it later, every time she has a creative itch, it seems like she can't help but scratch it. For years Giddens has made her home in Ireland, and in the current season of the PBS series 'My Music with Rhiannon Giddens,' she explores the melodies and rhythms of the island, singing in Gaelic on some of the tunes. And although she hasn't taken a single class in composition, a few years back she decided that she would try her hand at composing an opera. Giddens and Michael Abel cowrote 'Omar' about a Muslim African scholar who was enslaved in North Carolina. It garnered its two creators a Pulitzer. She was chosen to succeed Yo-Yo Ma as a director of the Silkroad Ensemble. Under her tutelage, they put out an album in 2024 highlighting the music of the Native American and immigrant groups who built the Transcontinental Railroad. With as many musical miles beneath her feet as those lines of railroad track, Giddens reveals in a telephone interview what brought her back around to her roots in the folk music of the Carolinas. 'Well, I guess kind of thinking back, it's coming on the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Black banjo gathering that kind of brought us together and, you know, I'm thinking about how that's how everything started for me and wanting to kind of pay respect to that,' she says. The style of music Giddens and her band will be playing at the Miami Beach Bandshell emerged from people living through hard times and coming together to create connections, to forge community. If they could do it, Giddens seems to say, so might we. 'It's a very AI world right now and this music, this old-time music, made by people—poor people, you know—and made in community, is kind of like, for me, like anti-AI. I mean it's just about as real as you want to get. So, I thought, 'Man, it'd be really nice to have a tour kind of really leaning into that.'' For the musician, it just felt like time, she says. 'You know, 'Let's give the drums a rest for a second and the electric instruments, let's just let them go and sit down for a second and really just focus on a string band.' ' This tour is her way of sharing a piece of our history that could have been forgotten, and it is that idea, not of grandstanding, but of coming together through music to strengthen the ties that bind us—no matter our ethnicity. Giddens may beguile listeners with her astonishing voice, but she isn't one to hog the limelight. 'I love backing up people,' she says, adding that the banjo is great for that. 'I just, I really love supporting someone else who's like killing it,' she says. She gets to do that with Robinson. 'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow?,' the pair's first album since recording with the Chocolate Drops, came out on Friday, April 18. Fittingly, it was recorded outdoors, with birdsong included. Giddens is grateful to be once again touring and sharing a stage with a man she calls 'just a pure musician.' 'He's not doing any of it for fame or, you know, any of that stuff. Applause? He does not care,' she says. 'There's something about me and Justin starting our journey together in our 20s, you know, 20 years ago… Playing fiddle and banjo together, it just feels really great,' she says. 'He and I play together like we don't play together with anybody else.' As with Robinson, her ties with the other musicians in the Old-Time Revue—multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, his daughter, guitarist Amelia Powell, bassist Jason Sypher, and Giddens' nephew, bones player and rapper Demeanor—have developed over years of playing together. 'These are blood family and chosen family, and it felt really important to tour this music with that kind of group…. I feel like we represent a lot of where American music came from,' says Giddens. The tunes they will play in concert honor the diversity of their heritages: Cajun and Creole, Blues, four-part harmony and, of course, old-time Carolina string music. 'Oh, it's going to be all the things,' she says. 'It'll be like working class acoustic music, basically… That's what we're going to be playing.' If you go: WHAT: Rhiannon Giddens & the Old-Time Revue, presented by the Rhythm Foundation. Opening set by Quiana Major. WHERE: Miami Beach Bandshell, 7275 Collins Ave., Miami Beach WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday; doors open at 7 p.m. COST: $53.46, general admission; $496.46, club level (includes up to 6 tickets) INFORMATION: is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don't miss a story at
The Independent
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Singer-musician Rhiannon Giddens calls off Kennedy Center show, citing Trump takeover
Award-winning singer-musician Rhiannon Giddens has become the latest artist to call off an appearance at the Kennedy Center, which has been in upheaval since President Donald Trump forced out the center's leadership and was elected chair of the board of trustees. Trump's takeover of the center is part of his broad campaign against 'woke' culture. 'I have decided to cancel my show at The Kennedy Center on May 11, 2025 and move it to The Anthem,' she wrote on social media, referring to a separate Washington, D.C. venue. 'The Kennedy Center show was booked long before the current administration decided to take over this previously non-political institution.' Giddens is an eclectic roots music performer known for co-founding the Carolina Chocolate Drops and for such collaborations with Francesco Turrisi as the Grammy winning 'They're Calling Me Home.' In 2022, she helped write the Pulitzer Prize winning opera 'Omar.' She is also a recipient of a MacArthur 'Genius' grant. Actor Issa Rae, author Louise Penny and the rock band Low Cut Connie also have canceled scheduled Kennedy Center events. Singer-songwriter Victoria Clark went ahead with her Feb. 15 show, but on stage wore a T-shirt reading 'ANTI TRUMP AF.' Supported by government money and private donations and attracting millions of visitors each year, the Kennedy Center is a 100-foot high complex featuring a concert hall, opera house and theater, along with a lecture hall, meeting spaces and a 'Millennium Stage' that has been the site for free shows. Until Trump in his first term, presidents have routinely attended the honors ceremony, even in the presence of artists who disagreed with them politically.
Associated Press
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Singer-musician Rhiannon Giddens calls off Kennedy Center show, citing Trump takeover
NEW YORK (AP) — Award-winning singer-musician Rhiannon Giddens has become the latest artist to call off an appearance at the Kennedy Center, which has been in upheaval since President Donald Trump forced out the center's leadership and was elected chair of the board of trustees. Trump's takeover of the center is part of his broad campaign against 'woke' culture. 'I have decided to cancel my show at The Kennedy Center on May 11, 2025 and move it to The Anthem,' she wrote on social media, referring to a separate Washington, D.C. venue. 'The Kennedy Center show was booked long before the current administration decided to take over this previously non-political institution.' Giddens is an eclectic roots music performer known for co-founding the Carolina Chocolate Drops and for such collaborations with Francesco Turrisi as the Grammy winning 'They're Calling Me Home.' In 2022, she helped write the Pulitzer Prize winning opera 'Omar.' She is also a recipient of a MacArthur 'Genius' grant. Actor Issa Rae, author Louise Penny and the rock band Low Cut Connie also have canceled scheduled Kennedy Center events. Singer-songwriter Victoria Clark went ahead with her Feb. 15 show, but on stage wore a T-shirt reading 'ANTI TRUMP AF.' Supported by government money and private donations and attracting millions of visitors each year, the Kennedy Center is a 100-foot high complex featuring a concert hall, opera house and theater, along with a lecture hall, meeting spaces and a 'Millennium Stage' that has been the site for free shows.
