Fresh Air - Rhiannon Giddens traces the banjo from her ancestors to Beyoncé

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

A self-described "folkie to the bone," Giddens talks with Terry Gross about channeling her ancestors through her instrument, playing on Beyoncé’s country single “Texas Hold ‘Em,” and a connection between Irish folk music and Dolly Parton. Giddens also sings and plays banjo and fiddle throughout the interview. Her latest album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, takes its name from an Emily Dickinson poem.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. There are many ways you may know my guest, singer, banjo player, fiddler, and songwriter Rianan Giddens. Early in her career, she co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Trops, which played music from the black string band tradition dating back to slave times. She since recorded several solo albums. On one of them, she recorded and wrote several songs based on slave narratives, and one song based on an ad from a slaveholder looking to sell a young enslaved woman, offering the buyer the option of buying the woman's nine-month-old baby. Giddens studied opera singing in college and won a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing the opera Omar about a Muslim scholar from Senegal who was sold into slavery in the U.S.

She also was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. She's now the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble, which was founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and is dedicated to playing with musicians from around the world, drawing on their musical traditions. If all that isn't enough to spark your interest, it's time to bring in the name Beyonce. It's Giddens playing banjo on Texas Hold'am, the hit track on Beyonce's country music album, Cowboy Carter. We'll talk about that a little later. Rianan Giddens has a new album called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. The title track is the title of an Emily Dickinson poem that Giddens has set to music.

She's brought her banjo and fiddle, and we'll play and sing a little later in the show. Let's start with a track from the new album. This is Step Away Blues, which she co-wrote. Step away, step away. I've got my soul in my hand. You better get my name out your mouth. You'll never understand. Taking off my skin

So you can see my heart Reanne and Giddens, Welcome back to Fresh Hair. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Such a pleasure to have you back. Step Away Blue is what you co-wrote. You write in the liner notes that you think it definitely feels like a song

for your Crone ears. And Crone is in a kind of archaic word for people who don't know the definition. It's basically a condescending and contemptful word for an old woman who typically is ugly if the word crone is used. So when you say your crone years, what do you mean and why is that a song for your crone years? You know, there's words that have dictionary definitions. There's words that have connotations that were generations ago. And then there's words that are being reclaimed. And I feel like Crohn is one of those words because women who have gone through menopause tend to disappear

in societies, including ours. And I think we are all looking for ways to reclaim that time because it actually is the time of great power, which is why, of course, it's been under attack for all of patriarchal history, you know. So for me, that's the way I use Crone is actually in a more of a reclamatory, is that a word, a reclamation sense of, you know, it just means I'm in this period of my life. And so that's kind of the spirit of me using that word, is not in a denigration to myself, but more of a reclamation kind of spirit, if that makes sense.

So in what way is that song, a defining song for your Crohn years? Well, I'm entering in that time. I'm 49 years old, you know, and so I'm just kind of entering in this space of this chapter where I just don't care anymore. You know what I mean? Like I just want to say what I have to say and, you know, it will be taken the way it's taken. I mean, obviously within reason, but I need to step into that a little bit because I've spent a lot of my career sort of, you know, being the peacemaker, being the mediator, sort of trying to represent things in a way that's not too offensive, but that, you know, really sits in an emotionally hard space. And that's a very difficult thing to carry and I've been carrying it for a long time. And I definitely am feeling like I need to. let some of that go. And, you know, if I, if I, if I come out with something a little, a little stronger, if not now, then when, you know, so that's, I'm feeling that coming on.

And that song kind of represents that for me. So in Step Away Blues, part of the lyric is, I'm tired of taking off my skin so you can see my heart. Yeah. Where were you in your life when you wrote that, that you thought about that line? It's been a, It's been challenging. The work that I do, you know, I'm really lucky to get to do what I do, and I feel really so blessed, right? So let's get that out of the way. Like, I have privilege. I have a great team, everything.

However, the work that I do is very culturally difficult because what I'm doing is, in a large part, I'm talking about very difficult things in our history to mostly white audiences, you know. So every night I'm sort of just bearing everything, you know, so that people can have an emotional connection to some really, really difficult history. I shouldn't have to do that, you know. And so I'm happy to do it, but it wears on you. It wears on you. And the years pass and you continue to perform blackness for people in a way that is palatable, right? in a way that keeps everybody there and not walking out the door. And that is only something I can do for so long, you know.

And so it kind of combines with this age thing where I'm kind of hitting this time where I'm like, do I want to keep doing this? I don't know. So part of the ability of engaging in art, engaging in art, making songs, making visual art, whatever you're doing, dancing, is a way to get out some of the emotions that you're feeling about things in a way that maybe other people can draw strength from. Well, you're in an interesting spot because, like, you represent just as a person a lot of different traditions mixed into one human being. So it just seems to parallel, you know, the music that you play and the traditions that you draw on. But drawing on so many black traditions as part of your music, you've felt uncomfortable performing mostly for white audiences and frustrated that black audiences often don't seem interested in the music and assume that it's not really. Black. And you've said that the first times you felt really accepted by black audiences was when you performed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. And when you were on Beyonce's country album, Cowboy Carter. So can we talk about Sing Sing for a moment? Yeah. And just to be really specific, that's just the blackest audience I'd ever had. You know, is the audience, the fullest of black people, which, of course, is like so overwhelming. You know, all of the, the, the audience. The fullest of black people, which of course is, like, so overwhelming. You know, all of the,

layers that that represents, you know, that I'm in a prison and then, you know, looking at the carcule system is so messed up and is so overrepresented by black and brown people. And I mean, that's a whole history, right? But then the cultural response that I got on that night, I'd never really gotten before because I'd never had a majority black audience, you know. And so it's just so many layers. I've had black people at my shows always. And there's all, I always know all of them. I see them all. I kind of count them. You know what I mean? And like I've said, many times. Like, I love my audiences no matter what. Like, um, my thing has been I want to get, I wanted to get more, I wanted the black. See, it's like, it's so complicated because it's

like there's black people who know my work, right? So when you're talking about black mainstream media, like, okay, is that really, how much do I need to worry about that? So I've kind of like struggled with that. Like, um, and that's why the, the, doing the Beyonce song, doing centers, like being a consultant on centers and having a song on that soundtrack, those are mainstream things, you know, that were then also connected to, you know, in centers in the Beyonce song, black culture in a way that I couldn't cross into just doing my folk circuit and doing what I do. So those things were really strategically, like I was like, I just want anybody who's in the mainstream black community who may not, you know, come over to the band room in the fiddle world because

of the story that's told around it, because of the assumption that it is white music. I wanted it to be there so that it's another way in. I just want people within the black community to know this is also an option for you. And you can do it in a way that doesn't feel like you're asking permission. Like, I had to go through that. But there's so many people in the black community who are starting to realize this is this is something that is for them as well and it's part of their history and they're picking up you know, uh, gourd banjos and fretless banjos and it's small, but it's growing. So that's really wonderful. And like that's why I do those things. They're very difficult to do. Like existing, dealing with anything in the pop world is hard. You know, because I'm a, I'm a

fulky to the, to the bone. Since I've brought up Beyonce and Texas Hold'am, did she tell you what she wanted you to play? Does she have something in mind or did she just say, like, do what you think is best that makes sense for the song? Because you open the recording. I wrote that lick. You're the first thing we hear. I wrote that lick and I wrote the viola that's also on there. So that is something that I came up with. So let's hear a little bit of it. This is Texas Hold'em with Riannon Giddens on banjo and viola if we got that far into the recording. So there's Riannon Giddens on Van Gogh on Beyonce's Texas Holden from her country album, Cowboy Carter. I love that track.

And I think it sounds great with you on it. So, like, how did that change your life, if at all? Because you're not used to being part of, like, the mass media mainstream. I mean, when that album came out, everybody was talking about it. So did that, like, change your life? any way or change your perception of what it's like to be in the center of like the pop music world and the black pop music world? It didn't change my life because I wasn't in the center of it. You know, my sound, that sound was and that was wonderful for me. It's all I ever wanted.

I didn't want any more than that. It was there to be discovered. It's there to be discovered. I watched all the line dances to it on Instagram and TikTok. And I was just like, that was really exciting for me. And that's all I wanted from it. I continued to do the work that I've always done. I did a lot of free emotional labor during that time advocating for anyone's right to this music from the black community because of the history of it. And I have receipts. So I wrote, you know, opinion articles for The Guardian and I did interviews and I was constantly asked about this. And to my ability, you know, given legalities, what I did is I used it as an opportunity to advocate for the true history, the true cross-cultural history of country. And that's what I always try to do.

Anything that I do, it is for that purpose. It is for the mission of uplifting voices that have not been previously really uplifted and to try to burst the mythology that has been set up around this music, which is, you know, white. supremacist and nationalistic, you know, and it's very clear that these narratives are there to do damage. So I'm always trying to try to correct that. I'm not interested in it from my own, you know, my own gain, not interested. I really am there to tell the story. And that's what I did over and over and over again when Cowboy Carter came out. So it gave me that opportunity to have that platform. Myself, you know, I may be gained a few more followers or whatever. And also cachet. I got cachet in the black community for that. That to me was priceless. Like if I talked to a black person

and I'm like, and they're like, what do you do? And I'm like, you know, I play the banjo. And then I'm like, you know, you know, Texas Hold'em. You know, that was me. And then they go, oh, you know what I mean? And that's like, that's amazing. So as a black banjo player who has, you know, been trying to advocate within our own culture for this, that was a huge. That's a huge card for me to be able to play. And it gives you a chance to tell more people. that the banjo has African origins. And that, you know, it's not a white mountain instrument. It comes from black tradition.

And then white people picked it up too. And, but that's how music is. It travels through all these different cultures and circles and things mix. And it just keeps growing. That's exactly it. And the thing is the banjo is all of those things also. It is and also. Because other marginalized groups, you know,

when you think about people who, settled in the Appalachian Mountains. They were poor. You know what I mean? And they were under attack by the, you know, by people who wanted the resources of the mountains. And they, they adopt this instrument so thoroughly that it becomes their own as well. So everybody played the banjo. You know, it starts as an African diasporic instrument invented in the Caribbean under duress in a time of unimaginable, like slavery in the Caribbean. We think slavery is bad. Whatever we think is worse when it comes to the Caribbean, right? And it's a crucible where a lot of actually

what we think of as American creolization happens in the Caribbean first and it comes up with enslaved people who are brought from there. So the banjo is coming up as a part of that and it becomes the fabric, part of the fabric of the new emergent American culture. Well, since we're talking about banjo, can I ask you to pick up yours?

And a song that you can do from the new album that translates to banjo, even though it's guitar. on the album is a song that's known as an Elizabeth Cotton song. It said that she wrote it when she was 12. But there's also two male songwriters who, I suppose, added lyrics. But why don't you sing the song? And then we can talk about more, more about its origins. Run so fast, freight train, freight train And so fast, please don't tell what train I'm on,

They won't know what route I'm gone Place the stones at my head and feet, tell them all So I can hear as she at the street, place the stones That's don't tell them all. Ray train runs so fast. Freight train, what train? I just don't tell. That sounded great.

Thanks for doing it. So Elizabeth Cotton, who wrote Freight Train, she became, like, popular during the folk revival period in the U.S. And she was still performing then, as I recall. So she's not exactly contemporary, but it's not like she's from, 1800s or turn of the century. Well, she represents an older style of playing because, you know, she stopped playing for a long time. She was a domestic, and she ended up working for the Seeger family, which is the best family to work for.

Oh, is that how she was rediscovered? They discovered her. And so then they were like, here's a guitar, get out there and play. And then she was discovered by a lot of people in the folk revival movement because she was, but she was, there's this big scoop in the middle of her life. So she's playing an old style, you know, because she, she, she's, she's. she wasn't playing. So when she picked it back up, you know, obviously in her left-handed upside-down fashion, she was playing a style that hadn't really been heard that much. So that's why so many people are inspired by her. My guest is banjo player, fiddler, singer and songwriter Rianan

Giddens. Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. She's also the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble and started her career playing music from the black string band tradition dating back to slave times with the Carolina chocolate drops, which she co-founded. Also, if you like our show and listen to our podcast, please subscribe to Fresh Air on Apple or Spotify. It helps a lot. Thank you. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. all. So I went to Niem and Marcus on a shop and spria. And on the way, grab Sole and Mia. And as the cash box rang, I threw it buckwild. Just go back and hit him up style. Get your hands on his cash and spin. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with singer, banjo player, fiddler, and songwriter Rianan and Giddens. Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. She's also the artistic director of the Silk Roald.

Road Ensemble, which was founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and started her career playing music from the black string band tradition dating back to slave times with a band she co-founded called the Carolina Chocolate Drops. She studied opera singing at Oberlin and won a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing the opera Omar, which was commissioned by the Spiletto Festival based on a memoir by a Muslim scholar from Senegal who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the U.S. You may also know Giddens as the banjo player on Beyonce's hit record, Texas Holden, from Beyonce's country album, Cowboy Carter. Let's talk about your music background and your background. You grew up in North Carolina. You spent a lot of your life in North Carolina, although you're still living in Ireland as far as I know.

Yes. Yes. Your mother is black. Your father is white. They married like three years after the Supreme Court made illegal any laws that banned interracial marriage. But they split up, I think, when you were very young, and you spent most of the first eight years of your life living in the country with your grandparents. What was country life like for you when you were very young? Yeah. You know, the older I get, the more grateful I am for that. Because? Because there was nothing to do. You know, I mean, it was, it was wild because it was just, it was a very slow pace. And it was an experience. that I realize how much it has shaped me the older I get, you know.

And, you know, you're kind of like, why am I into this music? Well, there's a reason, because it was actually both sides of my family or in the country. You know, my dad's side, the white side was also in a town, you know, not that far away. And it was all rural. It was all agrarian, you know. And my uncle and my grandmother worked at a tobacco factory. And, you know, it was just a very southern childhood. What kind of music were you exposed to by your person? by your grandparents.

I mean, I would have heard, you know, like, blues and jazz records and, like, R&B stuff from my grandparents, but also he-ha. You know, my grandmother loved the banjo player on that. I can't remember his name now. So were you exposed to jazz at all when you were young? A little bit, like, just what I would have heard in my grandmother's records. I didn't really, I didn't really get into it, though. I just had, I kind of have her vocal.

quality in my ear, like, because she would sing along with stuff, you know. It's a very oldy kind of 20s, 30s kind of style. So my, my 20s voice really comes from my grandmother's voice, like hearing her sing and thinking about, you know, and having this. So it's part of my kind of oral DNA, if that makes sense. So I want to play a song that is the closest you've come to jazz that I have heard of your recordings. And it's called, Who Are You Dreaming of? And it's really beautiful. And your voice is always beautiful, but it's a different form of beauty because it's a different kind of singing. And I just fell in love with it. So would you say something about writing the song and this style of singing for you and why you wanted to do it? Yeah, I wrote this with my longtime

songwriting partner, Dirk Powell, who I also produced my latest record with. It was for a project, and they wanted something that was straddling the 20s to the 30s. So it's kind of got elements of both in there. And so it was such a joy to write that song and to be able to inhabit that voice, which may be in another lifetime or if I hadn't found banjo music, maybe that's a road that I would have gone down because, you know, I really can sing that stuff. But it was an opportunity to really kind of settle into it and just let it let it fly. Okay, why don't we hear it? That's Riannon Giddens from her album, You're the One, which was recorded in 2003. She has a new album called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. That is so lovely, Rian.

I'm so glad you recorded it. Me too. I love, love, love crawling into styles and just living in them. Like I was listening to it, remembering the feel of that song in my mouth. I just love it so much, you know. So, that was cool. My guest is Riannon Giddens. Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Rianan and Giddens. Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. She's also the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble and started her career playing music from the black string band tradition, dating back to slave times, with the Carolina Chocolate Trops, which she co-founded. You decided to go to Oberlin College and study opera singing there, which you never really pursued because you found the black string band tradition.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's not a usual path from opera to the banjo. There's nothing about you that is usual. That's true. As far as I can tell. Yeah. Okay. So you don't sing opera, but you do the black string band tradition. And since you have the fiddle with you, can you talk about what is the black string band tradition?

You studied with somebody or your mentor in that tradition was Joe Thompson who played music from that tradition and lived not far from you and grew up in the same town as your maternal grandmother. Yes. So there was an immediate connection there when you met him, I think, at like a music conference. The black band you're gathering, yeah. He was 86 and he was the last of his family to play this music. And they were the Thompson family band. So it was him and his brother first and then him and his cousin. And then it was just him when we met him.

And it had been passed down as this sort of family tradition. And it can be traced back to the time of slavery. And the black string band tradition used to be enormous everybody. There were black string bands everywhere. I kind of called them like the jukebox of the pre-recording era America. but the basic thing is that the black string band was a big thing. And you cannot take it out of the history of American music. Everything collapses like a souffle.

So the ability that we had to go study his music to be his apprentices because this is the old style of apprenticeship, you just go play with the other person. You know, like we would sit with him on Thursday nights and we would just play his tunes over and over again. So it is a part of everything that I do is that. And I know how privileged I am, the older I get, that I had a living link, an elder, somebody that I'm related to in the family tree. It's so rare in this kind of music in the black community because we were erased so much.

And because people who were watching it and recording it weren't interested in what we were doing. You know, so to have that is a real, real gift. So, yeah, I do play fiddle. Like, I played banjo with Joe, but there's an old-time tune on the new record. But I can play, I'll play a Joe tune because I think that's more useful. This is called Black Annie. Oh, it's great. So that's Black Annie.

And like, I learned that from playing with Joe. And there's so many aspects of that that feels like his music, his family's music, you know. And but the fact is that he's playing tunes that also other people in the region play. You know, white musicians played. Like, music really was regional. And we tend to divide it into racial categories because of the commercial music industry. That's really when that starts. Because like back in the day, you just played the music that you played.

And you heard what somebody down the street was playing. And you know what I mean? So again, that commercialism has really messed with us, you know, in so many ways. You know that kind of like double-time Boeing that you did? Is that something you learned from Joe? Yeah, it's like, um, and, you know, Justin Robinson is really the, the, the, the main proponent for his, his fiddle style, like, these days, but, um, um, you know, this, this, you know, this, there's, um, his Boeing was very particular and it was really beautiful. I can only do an approximation of it, but things like, you know, He did this pushing up thing, you know, Justin calls it the barking puppy.

Yeah, I feel like there's times and I feel like I'm falling into his vibe, you know? And it's like, that's the other important thing about this music is that it is really ancestral. And that's for everybody. Like, you know, this music has such a history and that's why it's so important to keep alive. It's such a history. And there's times when I'm playing it, there's times when I'm playing the banjo. And I just like feel like I feel the ancestors. Like I feel the spirits come through.

And it's like that's the only thing that's kept me going in this industry is knowing that I'm connected in that way to the people who came before. And that like my nephew is 27 and he was five when he met Joe and he plays banjo and he plays bones. And like when I hear him, I'm like when I'm dead, you know what I mean? It's again that it can't stop with you. It's got to keep going. So you've been living in Ireland for how many years? Maybe since my son was two, so I guess 10, 11 years. And what brought you there?

Well, my ex-husband is Irish. He's from Limerick. And we got together and got married and then had two kids. And I wanted them to also be able to speak Irish. Well, they say Gaelic here, but in Ireland they say Irish. And I wanted them to be able to speak that. I said to my ex- Mike, who's my very dear friend. now. You know, I don't know what my ancestors spoke, but you do. You know what I mean? He'd grown up,

you know, learning it in school. And I said, what, what an opportunity to give them. And so they've been there, you know, most of their lives and they speak Irish, which I'm so happy about. And so that was really the reason. So I'm just like, I'm here for my kids and I'm here for myself. Because actually, I'm now, you know, finally after years and years of being mom and just, you know, doing the dishes and making biscuits when I was there. I'm finally able to, now that they're 13 and 17, to start making some baby steps into Irish music, and I've picked up the concertina, and I've started, I have a teacher there, and I love it so much, you know, and so I'm slowly but surely kind of now having my own life in Ireland, which is really beautiful. Do you do Gaelic songs?

I do, I do Scots Gaelic songs, so that's the language spoken to Highlands and Islands of Scotland. It's very closely related to Irish Gaelic, but that was sort of what I, I, I I knew some of those things before I went to Ireland. So it takes me a long time to do songs in a different language because I want to make sure they're as perfect as I can get them. But now I'm like, okay, it's time to start learning some Irish songs and get in there. Could you sing a few bars of a song that you would not have known had you not moved to Ireland? Oh, yeah, yeah.

This is when I sing with my daughter. I can sing a little bit of it because I don't have much of it memorized. But we'll sing this together, which I love. When we were in Italy, and I was visiting a traditional Italian singer, and she was singing these beautiful songs, and my daughter was there, and I was like, we're going to sing you a little song in Irish, and this is what we did. Shentry, enoch, mich shenak, mich shenry, like, mich shi, shenry, like, me shish, and like me, she's a very funny, it's a really funny story.

But I just love, I love singing that with her, because it's like one little connection. that we have from being in Ireland together. How does that translate? It's like a jealous woman song, basically. It's a great pity that I'm not, Paul Jean's wife, and the woman, it's a great pity that I'm not, and the woman that he has to be dead. I wish she was dead, basically.

You know, may your legs be broken, Paul Jean's wife, may your legs be broken. Here, I'll sing the chorus and that verse. I mean, like, missin, like, mish, like, mish, chanthewan, ben faw chin, shentry, not, mish,

savanna, that a, khaqa, come ristu do chos, do hos, gop-dhose, been potchin, come-rissu do chast, do, do ch'nava.

Shentryan-rion, like, michi-chiban-chiban-chian-chis-venet, chan-a-hik, a heck a caulchalchew. It has other verses, but It sounds, it's such, it's such a cheerful song, I was going to say, it's so.

I know, I know, it sounds kind of Cheerful, not like I wish her legs were broken. But you know what? Direct line to Dolly Parton. How so? Dolly Parton has this song, like, from one of her first records, and it's called, I don't want to throw rice. And it's one she wrote. She was like, I don't want to throw rice.

I want to throw rocks at her. I mean, it's just like, totally, like, it's the same kind of feeling. I'm like, there you go. Like, these folk songs, like, anyway, it's a whole not. conversation and also like where she was from and you know who knows but the but the vibe is the same well let's hear a little bit of dolly parton singing that song that was dolly parton singing a song that she co-wrote with buck owens ryanna giddens what did dolly parton mean to you you recorded one of her songs.

Dolly was a singular person. She wasn't, you know, I'm very uneasy with lionization and I'm very uneasy with putting people on pedestals, you know, especially if they're great musicians and we're doing it because they're great musicians. I don't think we deserve anything more than anybody else. You know, you get good at something, you get to do that something that's great. But, you know, people who are living life the way that she did do deserve to. be held up for a second because like, you know, she took her power and she did a lot of really beautiful things with it. So there's a lot to be admired about her in her life just the way that she walked through. So I think about what I want to do, what I want to leave behind, how I want to

walk through the rest of my career, if I'm blessed enough to live a fraction of how long as she lived, you know. And so it's good to have people that you admire, especially in a time where a lot of folks who have the kind of platform that she had aren't advocating for people who don't have a lot. You know, some are and some aren't. And the people who do, you know, it's good to call that out. Like, she was amazing singer and a great songwriter, but she was an even better human being. My guest is Rianne and Giddens. Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Rianan and Giddens.

Her new solo album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. She's a singer, songwriter, banjo player, and fiddler. She's also the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble and started her career playing music from the black string band tradition dating back to slave times with the Carolina Chocolate Trops, which she co-founded. You were on the Henry Lewis Gates Show finding your roots. Did you learn more about parts of your ancestry that you had no idea about that were, that changed your idea of who you are and where you're from. It didn't change it. It just like confirmed some things, you know. It kind of confirmed for me. I'm southern to the bone, you know what I mean? There was no going back across the ocean.

It's just like my folks have been here for a long time and they've been poor for a really long time. The white people, the black people, everybody was pole, you know? And I think that's really important. I embrace that not because I romanticize it because their lives were very hard. But it's really important to understand how many people were living in poverty and are still living in poverty. Let's not forget. There's still people who are poor. There's still people who are enslaved all around the world. These people who are being killed. Right. This is not a special country. But it's important, especially the music that I play and the stories that I tell, it's like, this is my job because my ancestors didn't have nothing. You know, so I'm here with this immense

privilege, so I need to tell their stories. Because the thing is about poor people is that what we have of them, and this is what I also remind people, no matter what color you are, when your relatives didn't have very much, it's hard to find out things about them, and most of the records are negative. Court cases, runaway ads, right? These are negative sources, so you have to figure out how do you find the positive in that? So for me, I'm like, these people survived on next to nothing so that I can sit here and have this amazing conversation with you with all this technology, you know? It's like somebody said to me, like, how do you have hope? And I'm like, how can I not have hope? It's an absolute privilege to sit here. What right do I

have to not have hope when I don't have to worry about this being bombed on my head, right? I don't have to worry about starving. I don't have to yet, right? We're situated in this, we're situated in this place, but it makes us more responsible to carry the hope for people who can't right now because they're so busy trying to survive, you know? So what right do we have not to have hope? That's, I'm not saying I'm a polyana because I don't have a lot of faith in humanity, but I have a faith in humans. You know, it's different. So, yes. Sorry, I'm just really like, it's really hard to know how to live right now. Like, it feels like the world is burning down around us.

Like, how do we, how do we carry that? And how do we carry that to make change? And, you know, that's the question, right? And so art is supposed to do something, you know, so that people want to create change that can help people, you know? So that's all I'm trying to do. Well, I think this is the moment to hear your song, Hope is the thing with Feathers, which is the title track of your new album. It's an Emily Dickinson poem that you set to music.

Can I assume that the reason why you set this to music is everything that you just said? But the necessity of having hope in a time when it's difficult to have hope? Yeah. I mean, it is obviously one of her most famous poems. You know, it's got a history. People have said it. I'm a classical singer by training, so I'm used to poems being set by different people. So, you know, Alice Randall wrote a song with the first line as the inspiration.

So I'm in good company. But I just, I didn't want to write a song. I just wanted to set her words because they're perfect, you know. Well, let's hear it. This is Rianne Giddens, the title track of her new album, Hope is the Thing with Feathers. Hope is the thing with feathers, perches in the soul, sings the tune without the woods, and never stops it all. It never stops at all.

That sweetest in the gay lizard It's all must be the storm They could have bashed the little bird They kept so many warm They kept so many warm Hope is the thing with feathers Perches in the soul sings the tune without the words

It never stops at all That never stops at all That's the title track of Riennan Giddens' new album Hope is the Thing with Feathers Rianan and Giddens, it has been such a pleasure to have you back on our show and to hear you sing. I love your voice so much. And you're playing to you.

But you are one of a kind. Thanks for having me. It was really, really nice talking to you. Rianan and Giddens' new album is called Hope is the Thing with Feathers. High on the mountain blowing free. Thinking about the days that used to be. and staying wondering where the years of my life have flow. Tomorrow when fresh air, cyber scams.

Andy Greenberg from Wired Magazine will tell us about a cyber crime operation in Southeast Asia that traps computer engineers into participating in schemes that defraud victims around the world of billions of dollars. We'll also talk about cyber attacks on American infrastructure. and a scam involving our show. I hope you'll join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Rebo Donato,

Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yucundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorok directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. As my memory turns out of the days that used to be here.