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 is a singer, banjo player and fiddler from Greensboro, North Carolina. Trained as an opera singer at the Oberlin Conservatory, she came to wider attention as a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band that drew on the Black string-band tradition of the Piedmont region and studied with the fiddler Joe Thompson. She has since worked as a solo artist and collaborator, moving between old-time and early country 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. Alongside recording and touring she has written for stage and screen, worked in opera and collaborated with the Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. She is also known as a broadcaster and public advocate for the roots of American vernacular music.