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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.
