singer/songwriter

Rhiannon Giddens

2 festivals played ↓

Grammy- and Pulitzer-winning banjo and fiddle scholar — she traces old-time music back to its Black roots and plays it like news, not history.

Rhiannon Giddens, born February 21, 1977, is a singer, banjo player and fiddler from Greensboro, North Carolina, of mixed European-American, African-American and Native American ancestry. She attended the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics before training as an opera singer at Oberlin Conservatory, graduating in 2000. She came to wider attention as a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a Grammy-winning string band drawing on the Black string-band tradition of the Piedmont region.

The Chocolate Drops grew out of Sankofa Strings, formed after Giddens attended the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, in 2005 and met Dom Flemons and Súle Greg Wilson; she studied with the Piedmont fiddler Joe Thompson during this period. Around the same time she performed Scottish traditional and Gaelic mouth-music and called contra dances.

She has since worked as a solo artist and collaborator, releasing Tomorrow Is My Turn (2015) and Freedom Highway (2017), followed by two collaborations with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, There Is No Other and They're Calling Me Home (both 2021), and You're the One (2023), moving between old-time repertoire, ballads, gospel, minstrel-era banjo tunes and her own songwriting.

Her work often foregrounds the historical record: songs built around slavery, migration and the erasure of Black musicians from the history of the banjo and the fiddle. In 2014 she took part in T Bone Burnett's New Basement Tapes project, setting newly found Bob Dylan lyrics to music on the Billboard-charting Lost on the River, and later contributed the song "Mountain Hymn" to the video game Red Dead Redemption 2.

Alongside recording and touring she has written for stage and screen and worked in opera; her opera Omar, co-written with composer Michael Abels, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music. She is also known as a broadcaster and public advocate for the roots of American vernacular music.

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singer/songwriter