For me the bare feet are grounding. I'm connected to the Earth in a way that I cannot be any other way.
Rhiannon Giddens
Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.
When you sit at the feet of an elder, it changes you.
I'm really taken with 'Calling Me Home' by Alice Gerrard.
My dad's white, my mom's black, and I've struggled with being mixed race.
Black women have historically had the most to lose and have therefore been the fiercest fighters for justice.
Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument, you know?
People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.
I used to subscribe to Nintendo Power. The first issue had 'Mario 2,' and it had all the characters rendered in clay. So I started making all of these characters out of clay.
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.
Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.
There is a black folk music audience. They're just very small.
If I want to support my family and my crew, we have to be on the road, and that's really tiring.
To sit in my concert and be uncomfortable is brave. Because you could always leave, you know?
I think songs can have different lives.
I wouldn't be out here touring constantly if I didn't hope that my music was going to do something to somebody.
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.
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?
I stood on people's shoulders, so I want to be there for somebody else to take it even further.
I'm not good at planning ahead because it's just too much. I plan, set it up and then don't think about it again until it's almost time. That's just how it goes.
You have to find the balance of figuring out how can I be effective? How can I use my platform for good, you know, without jeopardizing everything so that I don't have that platform anymore.
My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.
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.
I'm so interested in the feminism of women in American music. These ladies, going out on the road, way before the opportunities and advantages that I have - it was absolutely rough out there. The fact that they were still able to get their art out there and do what they're doing is really impressive to me.
When I do Gaelic music, I've learned about Gaelic culture; I've tried to learn the language. Whenever I do mouth music and there's Gaelic speakers in the audience, and they come up and go, 'Good job,' I'm always like, 'Phew.'
I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.
In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative we've inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scotch-Irish tradition with influences from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures.
My stuff lives in Nashville but I live wherever my children are.
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.
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.
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'm a North Carolina native. Grew up in North Carolina.
American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.
People say, 'I'm tired of thinking about race, it's a drag.' Yeah, well, welcome to my life! I don't care who you are. We have the time and the headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.
White people are so fragile, God bless 'em. 'Well, I didn't own slaves.' No you didn't. Nobody is asking you to take personal responsibility for this. But you're a beneficiary of a system that did. Just own that and move on.
We have been fed so many false narratives, many of them racialized to deliberately feed a racist agenda. It's important to address and dig into that wherever you can.
I don't want to go on a talk show and talk about stuff I don't know about.
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'm not an urban black person. I'm a country black person.
I decided to study music my last year in high school.
When I first got into string-band music I felt like such an interloper. It was like I was sneaking into this music that wasn't my own... I constantly felt the awkwardness of being the raisin in the oatmeal.
I'm not gonna force something or fake something to try to get more black people at my shows. I'm not gonna do some big hip-hop crossover.
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.
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.
I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.
I love the U.K. folk scene. In the States, nobody knows what to do with me. There's still a very narrow definition of Americana.
I remember so vividly the first time I saw one of Marshall Wyatt's superb compilations called 'Folks He Sure Do Pull Some Bow' and seeing a picture of a black fiddler and freaking out. I had stumbled upon the hidden legacy of the black string band and I wanted to know more.
Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.
When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.
So my mom's folks are from one side of Greensboro - and, you know, outside of Greensboro. And my dad's folks, the white side, is from another very small town outside of Greensboro. So both sides are coming from the country.
