I love singing opera, but the world surrounding it is not me. I want to be barefoot. I want to be in control of my own career. I want to put on a show. In the opera world, you wait for people to call you until you get to a certain level. In the folk world, it's a lot easier to have control from the beginning.
— Rhiannon Giddens
When you sit at the feet of an elder, it changes you.
Music affects people in a way that bare facts can't.
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.
I don't want to go on a talk show and talk about stuff I don't know about.
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.
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.
I have to continue to work, and I have to be touring, because that's how I earn a living.
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.
I've always liked women singers and appreciate a good story being told. That's what country music used to do on the radio.
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?
If I want to support my family and my crew, we have to be on the road, and that's really tiring.
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 don't have a genre because I play lots of different music that people would say are different genres.
African-American history is American history.
To sit in my concert and be uncomfortable is brave. Because you could always leave, you know?
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.
I don't watch 'Game of Thrones.' I don't watch TV. I don't watch Hulu.
Being mixed in the South, that's a struggle that everybody deals with differently. Some people go careening to one side or the other, and some people try to walk a tightrope between the two. I grew up spending equal time with both sides of my family.
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.
When you are a commercial music artist, your music depends on your popularity.
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.
The banjo is my chosen instrument - it's what I write my music on.
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.
Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.
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.
When I got into college, I got into operatic vocalists, like Leontyne Price.
I'm really taken with 'Calling Me Home' by Alice Gerrard.
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.
American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.
I wouldn't be out here touring constantly if I didn't hope that my music was going to do something to somebody.
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?
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.
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.
Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.
I couldn't stand the politics in opera.
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'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.
Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.
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.
I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.
People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.
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.
It's kind of remarkable, everything that's happened to me. It's been such a whirlwind, but in a good way.
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 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 hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.
To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.
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.
Ibn Said's autobiography is an extraordinary work, and his story is one that's absolutely crucial to tell.
