Spotlight On: RHIANNON GIDDENS 2024

ABOUT this week’s podcast guest + radio hour featured interview:

SHEROES Radio launched four years ago on November 17th, 2020 and our very first featured guest was Rhiannon Giddens. A year ago we celebrated our third anniversary with a new interview with Rhiannon, so to celebrate our SHERO-versary, we’re excited to revisit that conversation from last November. For those unfamiliar with Rhiannon Giddens, she is perhaps best known as a banjo player, singer, and songwriter but she is also a musical activist, a multi-disciplinary, multi-genre artist, who has truly carved her own path of both honoring and celebrating lineage, and creating a new one for generations to come. Now nearly two decades into her career, Rhiannon Giddens has become one of the most awe-inspiring and influential artists of our time. The journey she has been on - from an opera student at Oberlin College to becoming a 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera composer - is far from a linear one, and encompasses a multitude of artistic achievements, accolades, awards, and honors that have been accumulating since the early 2000’s when Rhiannon shifted her attention from opera to the fiddle and banjo, playing in a Celtic band, and reclaiming the banjo and the roots of American folk music with her Grammy-winning black string band, Carolina Chocolate Drops. After five albums with Carolina Chocolate Drops, Rhiannon went solo, and subsequently released three multi-Grammy nominated, and Americana Award-winning albums, along with a ton more awards and critical acclaim too long to list here. In 2015, she put out her debut EP, Factory Girl, and full length debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn, which paid tribute to several of her SHEROES. Next came 2017’s Freedom Highway, and that same year, Rhiannon was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant. The next few years saw a meteoric rise in projects and expansion into every medium imaginable. She performed with orchestras, and founded a supergroup of black women string players with Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Amythyst Kiah called Our Native Daughters and co-produced their 2019 album, Songs of Our Native Daughters, for the Smithsonian Folkways label. She composed for ballet and film. Rhiannon also put out two albums with Francesco Turrisi - There Is No Other in 2019, and the Grammy-winning 2021 album They’re Calling Me Home. She appeared on the ABC hit drama Nashville and throughout Ken Burns’ Country Music series. She hosts her own show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, as well as a podcast with the Metropolitan Opera called Aria Code. And that’s not even a comprehensive list. But as you’ll hear today, extraordinary accomplishments are not what drives Rhiannon Giddens. From the beginning, it has been her mission to uplift and amplify those whose contributions to American musical history have been muted or erased. Her most recent project is an album with Silkroad Ensemble called American Railroad. She had served as their artistic director for the past five years. The musical project seeks to uncover and uplift stories and songs of the communities who built the railroads and the bedrock of our nation, but whose contributions were largely erased from history.