Celebrate Black Music Appreciation Month with singer, composer, and artistic director of Silkroad Rhiannon Giddens

We’re celebrating Black Music Appreciation Month by revisiting my 2021 interview with MacArthur Fellow and artistic director of Silkroad Rhiannon Giddens.  A classically-trained singer,  banjo and fiddle-player, and composer, Rhiannon excavates the past to bring forgotten stories and music, particularly of African-Americans, into the present.  Giddens is a co-founder of the Grammy Award winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, which insisted reclaiming for Black musicians  a central and historically-accurate place in old-time music. She then went on to create solo albums of haunting beauty and power born of African-American struggles past and present. Giddens is, first and foremost, an artist determined to be of service which drives her commitment to unearth musical roots and put that knowledge of different musical traditions to good use.  In this podcast, Rhiannon talks about uncovering the Black roots in old-time music, the importance of National Heritage Fellow fiddler Joe Thompson to her musical lineage, the path to creating her opera Omar, the centrality of history on the margins to her music, and her plans to have Silkroad explore the multiplicity of musical worlds within the US.

 Keywords: Rhiannon Giddens, Silkroad, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Joe Thompson, Omar