Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

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I don't have a genre because I play lots of different music that people would say are different genres.

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.

I don't consider myself at the kind of stature of somebody who can play five cities on a tour, and that's it. I go where I'm wanted, and I've always had the rural areas of the country. We've always gone there, since the Carolina Chocolate Drops. There's a fan base that's there, and if I can afford to do it, I do it.

I think it's important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.

I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the '90s, especially the women who were so strong, like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. It's a great art form.

If I want to support my family and my crew, we have to be on the road, and that's really tiring.

That was the special thing about the Carolina Chocolate Drops. We didn't want to do music full-time. We weren't looking to get rich, which is good, because we didn't. But we went further than we thought we would go. We started that band to celebrate Joe Thompson and the black string band music. That's not really a recipe for commercial success.

I'm really taken with 'Calling Me Home' by Alice Gerrard.

I always felt culturally adrift as a child because I'm mixed race. I've had to deal with that since I was little. Who am I? What makeup do I have? What are the black and the white?

It's kind of remarkable, everything that's happened to me. It's been such a whirlwind, but in a good way.

When I got into college, I got into operatic vocalists, like Leontyne Price.

I've always liked women singers and appreciate a good story being told. That's what country music used to do on the radio.

The first band I was in out of college was a Celtic band, and I had to learn to sing with a microphone, because I'd never done that before. At Oberlin, I never used a mic for any kind of singing.

I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.

I'm really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.

People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.

Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.

I have to continue to work, and I have to be touring, because that's how I earn a living.

I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn't have to do anything.

My life used to be record, tour, record, tour. You can never say no as a freelance musician. I was on the road 200 days a year.

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

The banjo is my chosen instrument - it's what I write my music on.

I play a replica of a banjo from the 1950s. It was the first commercial-style banjo in the United States so it's the first one that white people played.

Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.

I'm discovering so much about how invisible, othered and dismissed the Islamic world is, in terms of the massive effects it had on European music and culture.

I don't want to go on a talk show and talk about stuff I don't know about.

I'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.

When you are a commercial music artist, your music depends on your popularity.

There is music out there that is commercially driven, whether you like it or not. That's a peculiarly American innovation. We innovated the commercial music business.

In the commercial music world, the folk world, we sell records and concert tickets - this is the way I make a living. You go out, you make your art and hopefully people will put their money down for it. But it's getting hard. I have to be on the road so much to keep the lights on.

I love being on the road and I love my band, but also need to be with my kids more and I need to be creating more.

Music affects people in a way that bare facts can't.

People say, 'I'm tired of thinking about race, it's a drag.' Yeah, well, welcome to my life! I don't care who you are. We have the time and the headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.

My stuff lives in Nashville but I live wherever my children are.

White people are so fragile, God bless 'em. 'Well, I didn't own slaves.' No you didn't. Nobody is asking you to take personal responsibility for this. But you're a beneficiary of a system that did. Just own that and move on.

I love the U.K. folk scene. In the States, nobody knows what to do with me. There's still a very narrow definition of Americana.

When I first got into string-band music I felt like such an interloper. It was like I was sneaking into this music that wasn't my own... I constantly felt the awkwardness of being the raisin in the oatmeal.

I remember so vividly the first time I saw one of Marshall Wyatt's superb compilations called 'Folks He Sure Do Pull Some Bow' and seeing a picture of a black fiddler and freaking out. I had stumbled upon the hidden legacy of the black string band and I wanted to know more.

Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.

When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.

Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument, you know?

So my mom's folks are from one side of Greensboro - and, you know, outside of Greensboro. And my dad's folks, the white side, is from another very small town outside of Greensboro. So both sides are coming from the country.

I decided to study music my last year in high school.

History is my biggest teacher.

Black women have historically had the most to lose and have therefore been the fiercest fighters for justice.

I had this dream like years ago. I had this dream - I wanted to be in an all-black string band.

I think that we definitely want to experiment, and if there's a hip-hop song that we like, we'll cover it. We don't want to be one of those bands that's like, you know, you know - Carolina Chocolate Drops does hip-hop. I mean, just know - you know, if it naturally works itself in, you know, cool.

There is a black folk music audience. They're just very small.

We're not here as a black band playing white string band music. You know, we play stuff in the Appalachians, we play stuff in the white community, but we really highlight the black community's music.

I really got into Gaelic music and the whole sound of it, and I got to go to Scotland.

I mean, my training at Oberlin has been absolutely valuable.

When I do Gaelic music, I've learned about Gaelic culture; I've tried to learn the language. Whenever I do mouth music and there's Gaelic speakers in the audience, and they come up and go, 'Good job,' I'm always like, 'Phew.'

You know, I really feel a responsibility to the music, and I teach workshops in music sometimes. And folks do come to me and they go, 'How do I make this blues song my own? How do I feel like I'm not an impostor doing this?' And I'm like, 'That's an excellent question.' That's where you should start, where you go, 'How does this speak to me?'

You have to find the balance of figuring out how can I be effective? How can I use my platform for good, you know, without jeopardizing everything so that I don't have that platform anymore.

At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to other points of view, whichever side of the tracks you're on.

I'm a North Carolina native. Grew up in North Carolina.

Each song has its own way that it likes to be done, but it can be more than one way. If you tap into it, you can feel it.

I think songs can have different lives.

Every song has a heart, and I just go for that.

I used to subscribe to Nintendo Power. The first issue had 'Mario 2,' and it had all the characters rendered in clay. So I started making all of these characters out of clay.

I like Queen Latifah.

I'm not gonna force something or fake something to try to get more black people at my shows. I'm not gonna do some big hip-hop crossover.

I'm not an urban black person. I'm a country black person.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

I'm still black in the eyes of America.

We have to talk about the negativity, but we have to enjoy the beauty of what this country, culturally, has done.

It's not about me, it's about the music. I don't do this because I want to be a star. I don't do this because I want to make a lot of money.

What's really interesting to me is to have a connection to what was going on in the past, but to make it a living thing.

I'm so interested in the feminism of women in American music. These ladies, going out on the road, way before the opportunities and advantages that I have - it was absolutely rough out there. The fact that they were still able to get their art out there and do what they're doing is really impressive to me.

In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative we've inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scotch-Irish tradition with influences from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures.

The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?

Nobody can know what their legacy is going to be, you know?

I would be thrilled with anybody who cites my work as something that inspired them.

The best part of a MacArthur is having some pressure taken off from touring relentlessly.

I stood on people's shoulders, so I want to be there for somebody else to take it even further.

I'm not good at planning ahead because it's just too much. I plan, set it up and then don't think about it again until it's almost time. That's just how it goes.

We have been fed so many false narratives, many of them racialized to deliberately feed a racist agenda. It's important to address and dig into that wherever you can.

The truth, the real history, is way more interesting and representative of what America actually is.

People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.

My dad's white, my mom's black, and I've struggled with being mixed race.

I kind of have found my identity through the music, through the roots music of North Carolina, and kind of realized that that's my identity as a North Carolinian.

For me the bare feet are grounding. I'm connected to the Earth in a way that I cannot be any other way.

When you hear composer, you think, like, Beethoven: guy in a powdered wig, at a piano, furiously scribbling on manuscript paper. That's not the only image that a composer should bring up, you know. But that's kind of what we've said it is.

Separation in culture and arts does nobody any favors except for the people in power. That's just it... So I feel like I'm in the business of challenging that narrative.

Ibn Said's autobiography is an extraordinary work, and his story is one that's absolutely crucial to tell.

It's really funny how I've come round to classical music around the back door with my banjo in my hand, and I love it.

To sit in my concert and be uncomfortable is brave. Because you could always leave, you know?

People think art comes out of strife. No, art comes out of love, and it comes out of freedom, and it comes out of feeling safe, and it comes out of feeling embraced by the vibe and by the energy. That's when you can make your best stuff.

There are people who have incredible stories that we don't talk about. People who did amazing things, men and women who faced incredible odds, and there's nothing wrong with them being heroes for once, you know?

African-American history is American history.

To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.

I wouldn't be out here touring constantly if I didn't hope that my music was going to do something to somebody.

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