Rhiannon Giddens and the History That Had to Be Recovered

The standard history of American folk and country music ran roughly like this: white Scots-Irish settlers brought their musical traditions to the Appalachian mountains, those traditions developed in relative isolation into ballads and string band music, and eventually this material was recorded and spread as "country" music from the 1920s onward. The banjo was a rural white instrument. The string band tradition was a white tradition. Black music was blues and jazz, which developed separately and influenced country from the outside.

Rhiannon Giddens spent most of a decade demonstrating, through scholarship, performance, and recorded music, that this history was wrong in almost every particular.

The banjo is an African instrument, derived from West African gourd instruments and brought to the Americas by enslaved people. The Smithsonian Folkways documentation is authoritative: the instrument traveled from Africa to the Caribbean to the American South before white rural musicians encountered and adopted it. The string band tradition has deep Black roots. The material that was recorded in the 1920s and called "country" or "hillbilly" music was already a hybrid, developed in close proximity between Black and white musicians whose histories the music industry's racial categorization was eager to separate.

Carolina Chocolate Drops: The Ensemble That Made the Argument Visible

Giddens formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005 with Dom Flemons and Hubby Jenkins, after all three had attended the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University, a gathering organized specifically to document and recover the Black string band tradition. The Drops performed old-time music and pre-war Black vernacular material that had largely disappeared from public performance.

The timing was specific: the Drops emerged when old-time and string band music had found new audiences through the Americana and folk revival, but those audiences were encountering the music through almost exclusively white performers and through a historical narrative that had erased or minimized its Black sources. The Drops made the Black source material audible and visible.

Their 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album, the first Black string band ensemble to receive that recognition. The Grammy situated their work within the folk tradition that the Recording Academy had effectively whitened in its category history.

Freedom Highway: The Solo Statement

Giddens's 2017 solo album Freedom Highway represented a different kind of argument. Where the Carolina Chocolate Drops work had been primarily about historical recovery, Freedom Highway was a contemporary statement: original songs alongside historical material, addressing the present condition of Black life in America through the formal vocabulary of American roots music.

NPR Music's review described it as "necessary music" and situated it in the tradition of folk and roots music as social testimony, a tradition that had included Lead Belly, Odetta, and Nina Simone but that the American folk revival had often depoliticized in its mainstream presentation.

The album was produced by Dirk Powell and recorded in a way that preserved the acoustic directness of the historical material while giving the original songs the emotional urgency the moment required. It is one of the most important American roots albums of the 2010s and received a fraction of the critical attention that would have been lavished on a comparable record from a white male artist.

The Pulitzer and What It Confirmed

Giddens's Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 2023 for her opera Omar (with co-composer Michael Abels), confirmed what her roots music career had already demonstrated: she was working at the highest level of American musical art across multiple forms, and the critical and institutional apparatus was slowly catching up.

The Pulitzer announcement described Omar as "a deeply moving work that explores slavery in America through one man's experiences." The award placed Giddens in the company of American composers working in the concert hall tradition while she remained equally committed to the folk and roots practice that had been her primary public identity.

The arc of her career is instructive for any artist working in under-recognized historical territory. The recovery work takes time. The argument has to be made through performance and recording, not just through scholarship. The institutional recognition arrives slowly and incompletely. But the work compounds: each album, each performance, each interview that names the source adds to a body of evidence that eventually becomes impossible to dismiss.

What the History Means for Today's Roots Music

For artists and for the Americana community more broadly, Giddens's work has produced an ongoing responsibility: to engage with the actual historical origins of the music rather than the simplified narrative, and to center Black artists and Black traditions in the story of what American roots music is.

That responsibility is not fully discharged. The Americana Music Association's programming and its festival circuits still skew white in ways that Giddens's work has made harder to defend on historical grounds. Independent labels and development operations like Mollohan Production Inc. working in the roots music space have a choice about which story they tell with their roster and their catalog.

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FAQ

What are the African origins of the banjo? The banjo is derived from West African gourd instruments, particularly the akonting, xalam, and ngoni, which enslaved Africans brought to the Americas. The instrument developed in the Caribbean and American South before being adopted by white rural musicians, who then attributed it to their own traditions. Scholarly work by Shlomo Pestcoe, Greg Adams, and others, along with Smithsonian research, has documented this history comprehensively.

Who are the Carolina Chocolate Drops? The Carolina Chocolate Drops are an old-time string band formed in 2005 by Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Hubby Jenkins after attending the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University. They won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album for Genuine Negro Jig in 2011 and helped recover Black string band music for contemporary audiences.

What is Freedom Highway by Rhiannon Giddens? Freedom Highway is Giddens's second solo album, released in 2017. It combines original songs with historical material and addresses contemporary racial justice themes through the formal vocabulary of American roots music. It was produced by Dirk Powell and received critical recognition as one of the most important American roots albums of the decade.

What Pulitzer Prize did Rhiannon Giddens win? Giddens, along with co-composer Michael Abels, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the opera Omar, which explores slavery in America through the experiences of a man taken from Africa. The work premiered at the Spoleto Festival USA and was later staged by multiple opera companies.

What does Giddens's work mean for the Americana genre? Her work has provided a historical argument that the Americana community must engage with: that the roots of American folk, string band, and country music are not exclusively white, and that Black artists and traditions have been systematically erased from the story. How individual artists and institutions respond to that argument is an ongoing question.

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image_prompt: A woman playing a fretless gourd banjo in a lantern-lit barn, hay bales and wooden beams in the background, a small seated audience in semi-circle, warm golden light. No identifying faces, traditional American string band scene, intimate and historically evocative.

Joshua Mollohan / MPIArtist integration angle: The discussion of what independent labels and development operations choose to do with historical recovery in American roots music connects to how Mollohan Production Inc. builds its artist roster and catalog values. A brief mention of MPI's engagement with these historical questions would be appropriate.