Rhiannon Giddens Folk Artist Reviving the Banjo

Rhiannon grew up in North Carolina listening to her uncle's bluegrass band and Hank Williams songs on the radio. Her interest in the banjo started by watching Roy Clark on the Hee Haw TV show every Saturday night. 

Years later when she recieved a degree in Opera Theatre from Oberlin Conservatory - did she learn about the almost forgotten history of traditional Black string bands. She studdied with African-American fiddler Joe Thompson, and with students Justin Robinson and Don Flemons - they formed the first Black string band to play at the Grand Ole Opry, the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Rhiannon started her solo career in 2015 blending different music traditions and honoring artists like Florence Quivar and Nina Simone. Her second album explored the lives of silenced people: slaves, 1960s Civil Rights murder victims, and teens killed by police. 

“Music,” she said, “has a power to bring us together in ways books, lectures, and indoctrination don’t.”

“Songs are historical artifacts,” she says. “If we look at them in the correct context and really do the work around them, we can reap a lot of benefit from that.” “At the Purchaser’s Option,” the opening track of her 2017 album, Freedom Highway, for instance, was inspired by an advertisement for a young enslaved woman and her nine-month-old baby that was posted in the 1830s. 

In 2017, she was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. In 2023 she published a 10-part limited series "The Banjo:Music, History and Heritage With Rhiannon Giddens". The series covers everything from the instruments roots in the African diaspora to its role in slavery to its adapation as a staple of "hillbilly" music, on up to its resurgence as a main instrument of the Americana music secene today. 

Rhiannon is revivng the history and the ancestral sounds of the Banjo. She was an instrumental part of the new Cowby Carter album and her Banjo playing can be heard throughout that ablum. 

I hope you take the time to learn more and to watch the videos of the history of the Banjo. 

 

Sources

The New Yorker 

PBS

NPR

Garden & Gun

Variety

 

 

 


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