Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, on Cultivating the Black Roots of Country Music
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This ain't Texas, ain't no Hold'em.

The number one country song in America for more than five weeks is Texas Hold'em by Beyonce. It's from a new album of country songs, and accompanying her on banjo and viola is Rhiannon Giddens, who's been thinking for a long time about the black roots of country music. Giddens, who I just saw on stage at the Beacon Theater here in New York, became a star in the Americana world, working first with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and then as a solo artist. You made it!

But Giddens is not a fan of genre, the categories we love to stuff music into. She's incredibly expansive. All in all, she's received Grammy Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and last year, Giddens shared a Pulitzer Prize for the opera called Omar.

We spoke a few years back when her album There Is No Other had just come out. Her collaborator Francesco Turisi joined us as well on percussion and accordion. And they started off with the folk song called Wayfaring Stranger. Can I have your C? Isn't and the banjo tuned to the accordion in the beginning of a joke? Some sort of...

I am a poor wayfaring stranger Traveling through this world alone There is no sickness, toil, nor danger In that fair land to which I go I'm going home to meet my mother

I'm going home. I'm just going over Jordan. I'm just going over home. Rianne, the banjo is at the heart of your work, and there's a whole tradition that you help bring to our attention, bring back to our attention.

And I think if you had asked almost anyone about the banjo, anyone who wasn't an expert or a musicologist, they would have said that banjo is something played by white people, hillbillies to use the old term. What were we missing there? Well, you know, the string band and the black string band in particular, you know, it really is at the heart of so many...

Here we go with genres again, the genres of American music. And it was a widespread phenomenon, you know, that goes back to the time of slavery when black people were seen as natural musicians. They were encouraged to pick up instruments and then play for white people's dances and frolics and parties.

And so you have the combination of, you know, native rhythms and modes from West Africa, from all over where people were coming from, and instruments that were coming over, like the banjo, which grew out of West African lute-type instruments. How much of this do we have recorded? Not any. That's the problem. So how are you excavating the music in a way? With dots. Yeah.

And does that give you enough? That must give you a very wide berth on how to play it. Well, the thing is, there's a lot of scholarship that's been done on these early banjo tutors.

They were very, very clear in how to play this instrument. You keep saying this instrument. We have one on the floor here. Can you describe what this is? Because it's obviously not the kind of thing that you'd see Earl Scruggs play. Yeah, the banjo that I have is a replica of, well, it's kind of a composite of some banjos from the late 1850s.

It's a wooden banjo. See, the early minstrel style banjos were all fretless. People are always surprised by this because it's fretless and they were gut string. And that's because they were that one step removed from the homemade gourd instruments that black folk would have been making on plantations or wherever. And that was the banjo first.

And so they would all be playing these kind of instruments, which are wooden hoop, wooden fretboard, fretless, and it's just a deeper, more resonant sort of round, warm sound. Renan, you went to Oberlin, you studied, you had formal training there, doing a lot of opera. How did you become you? How did you kind of create yourself?

Your self and your sense of direction and where you would go in music coming out of a place like Oberlin where you had this formal training?

Did you think you were going to be singing less somnambula or being an opera singer? We all do, coming out of conservatory. We're going to be the next big soprano, you know? What happened? Well, I discovered folk music, and I discovered the banjo, and I also, you know, I'm very interested in doing something that is A, of service, and B, that not everybody else is doing. So...

I was like, gosh, there's like a million sopranos in the world who can sing as good or much better than I can, who can do these things and want to devote their life to opera, where I'm seeing this other thing and I'm like, this is something I think I can make a difference in, you know? And it touches me and it speaks to me. And so it just, for me, it goes to show that you have to find the thing that you were meant to do, you know? And you don't know what it is always, but if you follow...

the thing that's speaking to you, you just don't know where it's going to lead you. Well, I hate to pound on this notion of categories, but what you just sang, is that classical music in a sense? No. I mean, but then what, I mean... That's what I mean. You know, what is classical music, you know? I mean, we do on the album two arias, you know, but we do them in vernacular voice and with sort of improv accompaniment. And

It's like they live in a different realm and they touch people in a different way. But, you know, does it still mean that they're not an aria anymore? I mean, you know, I mean, that's kind of also the point of the record is, you know, who cares what what the. And this is not just smashing stuff together. We're layering things on top of each other and finding where the peaks are.

the peak's peak because there's all these similarities between all these different things. And it leads us to, you know, what music is doing for us as humanity. You know, because somebody was saying, well, you know, our diversity is also our strength. You're saying that we're all the same. I'm like, well...

In our differences, we're the same. That's the point is that, you know, we express ourselves in different ways, but it's all coming back to these universal truths as humans. And the more that we can reject that idea that you are over there and you sound different to me so that we're different people and embrace that actually what I do in my culture and what you do in your culture is coming from the same heart.

and therefore they should be able to work together, you know, that's more of what we're trying to say. How does that relate to the next song that I think you're going to do, and you're going to have to help me with the pronunciation to get it exactly right. Pizzica di San Vito. That's pretty good. And means? Pizzica is a type of dance from Puglia, which is a Puglian region, you know.

So it's a type of tarantella, which is a very lively, I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of that. But the particular thing about this music that a lot of people don't know about is that it was music to cure the bite of a spider. And it was not, this is a very serious thing, actually. The idea with the pizzica is that you got bitten, they believed in the bite of the spider, tarantula, that's why it's called tarantella.

And you would fall into a state of depression. And the only way to get rid of this was trance dance, which could go on sometimes for weeks. You know, the musicians would come to your house. So it's pre-antibiotics. Definitely pre-antibiotics. Mind you, this was the last time observed in its full power in the 1960s. 1960s was still happening in Puglia. Incredible. How is that tuned? How is it tuned? See, well, right now it's in modal. Mm-hmm.

But I have like three different tunings.

♪

Amazing.

I'm talking with Rhiannon Giddens, and we'll continue in a moment. Who do you think of as your audience for music like this? Or do you not think of it? Is it not worth thinking about? I mean, you just can't. You can't think about audiences. You know, you just, I mean, that's... Who do you see in the seats?

Well, you know, it depends on who knows about it. I mean, this is the sort of push-me-pull-you of being a professional musician is that if they don't hear about it, they're not going to come. You know, like, I mean, part of my mission has been trying to get the music that I play to more of the Black community, for example, which is what people always ask me. So why are there only white people at your shows? Number one, there aren't only white people at my shows. There are always people of color who come. It's just a very small percentage of the overall whole. And

And the other thing is that the gatekeepers of black culture are not interested in what I'm doing. And this is a complaint I've heard from many, many people of color who do music that's not considered black.

black. That's not, you know, whether... And what does that mean? What is considered black now and who are the gatekeepers that we're talking about? Like, you know, like hip-hop, R&B, blues, I mean, people know it's black, but like, you know, and there's black people who play it, but it's become... It's a largely white audience. You know, white audience and white players, you know, as well. And jazz is one of those kind of like, you know, in that kind of halfway house world.

And then opera. There's been black people singing opera and writing classical music forever. And it's like we're seen as sort of interlopers. And so it's very hard. I've talked to other people who have the same thing. I mean, I was talking to Tavis Smiley. I was on his show because Freedom Highway, I started that tour at Sing Sing Prison.

And it was the largest black audience I've ever had. And that just like broke me in several pieces. What was that like? Tell me about that concert. I mean, it was very intense, you know, to get like a cultural response that I'm not used to. This is at Sing Sing Prison in Austin, New York. Yeah. Just north of the city. With the Carnegie, you know, the Carnegie Hall does this amazing program going in. And we worked with one of the prisoners on one of his songs about domestic violence. I mean, it was really intense. They were beautiful people.

So it wasn't just a performance. You were there for a while. We did work. Yeah, we were there the whole day, you know. And you just look out that sea of brown faces and you think about what does that mean for, you know, you talk about the incarceration of black men and men of color and, you know, how broken the system is. But then from a purely performance point of view, I was just like...

the way that they responded to the music was different than when I have, you know, a majority white. How so? I mean, it's kind of hard to explain, like, just the energy that was given back and I didn't know the personal stories of any of them, didn't want to know, because it's just like, that's not, that wasn't the purpose of the visit, you know? What did you play for them? We played a full concert. I brought my full band and we played a lot of stuff from Freedom Highway and,

And so it's just like the, I'm, I feel very strongly, like I'm, I'm starting to work with my nephew who's a 21 year old rapper who plays the banjo, right? I taught him. It's an unusual combination. It is an unusual combination. And he, you know, he's a heavy rapper. Like this is, he knows hip hop. He knows that world. And this is the way he chooses to express himself. You're going to record with him? Yeah. Yeah. We're going to record. What's his name? His name is Justin Harrington.

demeanor is his handle. But it's just like when you start crossing over into that generation and he sees, he's like, man, when I'm playing this stuff for my friends, they're like, what is that? That's amazing. I'm like, exactly. It's like when people are exposed to this stuff, they're like, that's so cool. But getting there is the hurdle. Rianne and Francesca, thank you so much for coming. Thanks for having us. Rianne and Giddens.

We spoke in 2019. Giddens appears on Cowboy Carter, the record by Beyonce that just came out. It explores the black roots of country music. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of TuneArts. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kala Leah, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

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