Some artists come across as restless, but in fact are simply living out their aspirations for a creative life. Rhiannon Giddens is one such individual who “has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable.”

A two-time GRAMMY Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.

Giddens has appeared in MORE TO COME on several occasions, beginning with her 2009 Merlefest show with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and most recently with the release of her newest album, You’re the One. The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend seems an appropriate time to catch up on the career of this artist and musical historian whose most recent ventures have taken her to exploring where American history fits within the global context.

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Pollstar magazine had a recent cover story on The Nerdy Genius of Rhiannon Giddens that is wide-ranging and enlightening.

Rhiannon Giddens is a self-described nerd. She was a high school math nerd at Durham’s North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a music and history nerd at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio, and she says, even still, she’s the nerd at the party who might just corner you to talk about “banjos and slavery.”

The article provides a bit on her history, including this background on the path-breaking Chocolate Drops.

Carolina Chocolate Drops grew out of an ensemble that included Giddens, Dom Flemons, Súle Greg Wilson and others called Sankofa Strings, which performed an amalgam of African American music including country and classic blues, early jazz and “hot music,” string band numbers, African and Caribbean songs, and spoken word pieces. Among the instruments employed by Sankofa Strings were bodhrán, brushes, washboard, bones, tambourine, banjo, banjolin and ukulele.

The trio convened at the first Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, where Giddens studied with African American Piedmont string master Joe Thompson and where, in 2005, Carolina Chocolate Drops, with Flemons and Justin Robinson, was born. Giddens played banjo and fiddle, wrote and sang. The group was the first Black string band to ever perform at the Grand Ole Opry.

This version of Cornbread & Butterbeans reminds us of the talent, energy, and vision of this special band of musicians.

But it is her more recent artistic endeavors that are my interest here.

Giddens was named Artistic Director of Silkroad, a nonprofit established by international cello great Yo-Yo Ma, promoting collaboration among artists and institutions, and multicultural artistic exchange, in 2020. She is the only one to hold the position other than Ma himself.

Silkroad Ensemble is part of the larger Silkroad project, the mission of which is to “[create] music that engages difference, sparking radical cultural collaboration and passion-driven learning for a more hopeful and inclusive world.” The Ensemble is a loose collective of as many as 59 musicians, composers, arrangers, visual artists and storytellers from around the world.

PBS NewsHour had a 2022 report on Giddens’ appointment.

What follows are two past performances by the Ensemble, a powerful arrangement of the traditional O Death recorded live in 2023 as well as a late 2022 performance of Keep On Keepin’ On.

The Silkroad website describes the new project in these words:

After the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, a trip from coast to coast that used to take months was shortened to just under a week, allowing for the transport of goods and ideas across the continent in ways previously inconceivable. Profit-seeking corporations and the American government financed it, but the people who actually built it and who were most affected by it are the focus of this program of music — Indigenous and African Americans as well Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and other immigrant laborers whose contributions have been largely erased from history. Silkroad’s American Railroad seeks to right these past wrongs by highlighting untold stories and amplifying unheard voices from these communities, painting a more accurate picture of the global diasporic origin of the American Empire.

This new program promises to be exciting, and I am looking forward to hearing the music and stories.

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Giddens is nominated for two more Grammy awards in 2024. After the Grammy Awards presentation, she kicks off her upcoming concert tour. Thankfully, that tour will include a show at the Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda on Monday, March 18th (and I plan on attending).

We’ll end by returning to two of my favorite performances by Giddens.

For my money, she has one of the best interpretations of Wayfaring Stranger, performed with the remarkable Phil Cunningham on the accordion, as part of a BBC Northern Ireland program.

And on the Throw the Dice & Place Nice website, writer Kira Grunenberg has this to say about I’m On My Way:

[T]hough Giddens says “Don’t know where I’m going,” it’s a statement made with nothing but confidence that shakes any shred of doubt when she leaves off with the declaration, “But I know what to do.”

“I’m just so proud of her. She’s just such a brilliant, brilliant artist,” Allison Russell told Pollstar. “She is doing consistently brave and unique and necessary work out there. I’m just so grateful for her and her place in this world and, honestly, for the friendship.”

Amen!

More to come . . .

DJB

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Earlier Saturday Soundtrack posts for the MLK Weekend on MORE TO COME:

• Feels like freedom (2023)
• Live, learn, listen, laugh, love (2022)
• I’m on my way (2021)
• Mavis Staples (2020)

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Photo of Rhiannon Giddens by Wondrium courtesy of RhiannonGiddens.com