The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, on Cultivating the Black Roots of Country Music

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

By the standards of any musician, Rhiannon Giddens has taken a twisting and complex path. She was trained as an operatic soprano at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and then fell almost by chance into the study of American folk music and took up the banjo. With like-minded musicians, she founded the influential Carolina Chocolate Drops, which focussed on reviving the repertoire of Black Southern string bands. Giddens plays on Beyoncé’s new country album, which boldly asserts the Black presence in country music. But her view of Black music is unbounded by genre: “There’s been Black people singing opera and writing classical music forever.” Giddens shared a Pulitzer Prize for the opera “Omar” in 2023, and as a solo artist, she has moved through the Black diaspora and beyond it. David Remnick talked with Giddens when her album “There Is No Other,” recorded in Dublin, had just come out, and she performed in the studio with her collaborator, Francesco Turrisi. This segment originally aired May 3, 2019. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This ain't Texas. Ain't no Hold'em. The number one country song in America for more than five weeks is Texas Hold'em by Beyonce. It's from a new album of country songs and accompanying her on banjo and viola is Riannon Giddens, who's been thinking for a long time about the Black of country music. Giddens, who I just saw on stage at the Beacon Theater here in New York,

became a star in the Americana world, working first with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and then as a solo artist. But Giddens is not a fan of genre, the categories we love to stuff music into. She's incredibly expansive. All in all, she's received Grammy Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and last year, Gidens shared a Pulitzer Prize for the opera called Omar. We spoke a few years back when her album, There Is No Other, had just come out. Her collaborator, Francesco Tureci, joined us as well on percussion and accordion.

And they started off with the folk song called Wayfaring Stranger. Can I have you, see? Isn't it in the banjo tuned to the accordion, the beginning of a joke, some sort. Rian, and the banjo is at the heart of your work, and there's a whole tradition that you help bring to our attention, bring back to our attention.

And I think if you had asked almost anyone about the banjo, anyone who wasn't an expert or a musicologist, they would have said the banjo is something played by white people, hillbillies to use the old term. What were we missing there? Well, you know, the string band

and the black string band in particular, you know, it really is at the heart of so many, so here we go with genres again, the genres of American music. And it was a widespread phenomenon, you know, that goes back to the time of slavery when black people were seen as natural musicians. They were encouraged to pick up instruments and then play for white people's dances and frolics and parties. And so you have the combination of, you know, native rhythms and modes from West Africa from all over where people were coming from and instruments that were coming over like the banjo, which grew out of West African loot type instruments. I mean...

How much of this do we have recorded? Not any. That's the problem. So how are you excavating the music in a way? With dots. And does that give you enough? That must give you a very wide berth on how to play it. Well, the thing is, is like, there's a lot of scholarship that's been done on these early banjo tutors. They were very, very clear in how to play, you know, this instrument.

You keep saying this instrument, we have one on the floor here. Can you describe what this is? Because it's obviously not the kind of thing you'd see Earl Scrugg's play or... Yeah, the banjo that I have is a replica of, well, it's kind of a composite of some banjos from the late 1850s. It's a wooden banjo. See, the early menstrual style banjos were all fretless. People were always surprised by this because it's fretless and they were gutstring. And that's because they were that one step removed from the homemade gourd instruments that black folk would have been making on plantations or wherever.

And that was the banjo first. And so they were all playing these kind of instruments, which are wooden hoop, wooden fretboard, fretless, you know, and it's just a deeper, more resonant sort of round, warm sound. Renan, you went to Oberlin. You studied you had formal training there. Yeah. Doing a lot of opera. How did you become you? How did you kind of create yourself and your sense of direction and where you would go in music coming out of a place like Oberlin where you had this formal training? Um, well, I...

Did you think you were going to be singing less somnambula or as, or being an opera singer? We all do, coming out of conservatory. We're going to be the next big soprano, you know? What happened? Um, well, I discovered folk music and I discovered the banjo. And I also, you know, I'm very interested in doing something that is A of service and B, that not everybody else is doing. So I was like, gosh, there's like a million sopranos in the world who can sing as good or much better than I can. who can do these things and want to devote their life to opera,

where I'm seeing this other thing, and I'm like, this is something I think I can make a difference in, you know? And it touches me, and it speaks to me. And so it just, for me, it goes to show that you have to find the thing that you were meant to do, you know, and you don't know what it is always, but if you follow the thing that's speaking to you, you just don't know where it's going to lead you. Well, I hate to pound on this notion of categories,

but what you just sang, is that classical music in a sense? No. I mean, but then what, I mean... That's what I mean. You know, what is classical music, you know? I mean, we do on the album two arias, you know, but we do them in vernacular voice and with sort of improv accompaniment, and it's like they live in a different realm and they touch people in a different way, but they're, you know, does it still mean that they're not an aria

anymore? I mean, you know, I mean, that's kind of also the point of the record is, you know, who cares? What the, and this is not just smashing stuff together. We're layering things on top of each other and finding where the peaks, the peaks peak, because there's all these similarities between all of these different things. And it leads us to, you know, what music is doing for us as humanity. You know, because somebody was saying, well, you know, our diversity is also our strength. You're saying that we're all the same.

I'm like, well, in our differences we're the same. That's the point is that, you know, we express ourselves in different ways, but it's all. coming, coming back to these universal truths as humans. And the more that we can reject that idea that you are over there and you sound different to me so that we're different people and embrace that actually what I do in my culture and what you do in your culture is coming from the same heart. And therefore, they should be able to work together. You know, that's more of what we're trying to say.

How does that relate to the next song that I think you're going to do? And you're going to have to help me with the pronunciation to get exactly right. Yes. Pizzi-Cadis-San Vito. That's pretty good. and means... Pizzica is a type of dance from Puglia, which is a...

In southern Italy. So it's a type of Tarantella, which is a very lively, I'm sure you're all familiar with the idea of that. But the particular thing about this music that a lot of people don't know about is that it was music to cure the bite of a spider. And it was...

No, this is a very serious thing, actually. The idea with the Pizzica is that you got bitten... They believed in the bite of the spider, tarantula, that's why it's called Tarantella. And you would fall into a state of depression, and the only way to get rid of this was trans dance, which could go on sometimes for weeks. You know, the musicians would come to your house.

So it's pre-antiobiotics. Definitely pre-antibiotic. Mind you, this was the last time observed in its full power in the 1960s. 1960s was still happening in Puglia. Incredible. How is that tuned? How is it tuned? See, well, right now it's in modal.

But I have like three different tunings. I use it. Nunjureda daveni, nonchre daveni, Oh, no journey to come and I'mo Sonny's spiritu, Solis spiritu, Solis spiritu, Mano chima

Amazing. Amazing. I'm talking with Rianan and Giddens, and we'll continue in a moment. Who do you think of as your audience for music like this? this? Or do you not think of it? Is it not worth thinking about? I mean, you just can't. You can't think about audiences. You know, you just, I mean, that's... Who do you see in the seats? Well, you know, it's, it depends on who knows about it. I mean, this is the, this is the sort of push me, pull you

of being a professional musician is that if they don't hear about it, they're not going to come, you know? Like, I mean, part of my mission has been trying to get the music that I play to more of the black community, for example, which is what people always ask me. So why are there only white people at your shows. Number one, there aren't only white people at my shows. There are always people of color who come. It's just a very small percentage of the overall whole. And the other thing is that the gatekeepers of like black culture are not interested in what I'm doing. And this is a, this is a complaint I've heard from many, many people of color who do music that's not considered black. That's not, you know, whether. And what does that mean?

What is considered black now and who are the gatekeepers that we're talking about? Like, you know, Like hip hop, R&B, blues, I mean, people know it's black, but like, you know, and there's black people who play it, but it's become... It's a largely white audience. You know, white audience and white players, you know, as well. And jazz is one of those kind of like, you know, in that kind of halfway house world. You know, and then opera, you know, there's like been, you know, there's been black people singing opera and doing classic, writing classic music forever, you know?

And it's like, we're seen as sort of interlopers. And so it's very hard. I've talked to other people who have the same thing. I mean, I was talking to Tavis Smiley. It was on his show because Freedom Highway, I started that tour at Sing Sing Prison. And it was the largest black audience I've ever had. And that just, like, broke me in several pieces.

What was that like? Tell me about that concert. I mean, it was very intense, you know, to get like a cultural response that I'm not used to. This is at Sing Sing Prison in, in Austin, New York, just north of the city. With the Carnegie Hall does this amazing program going in. And we worked with one of the prisoners on one of his songs about domestic violence. I mean, it was really intense.

They were beautiful. And you just kind of... So it wasn't just a performance. You were there for a while. We did work. Yeah, we were there the whole day, you know. And you just look out that sea of brown faces and you know, and you think about,

what does that mean for, you know, when you talk about the incarceration of black men and men of color and, you know, how the broken the system is. But then from a purely performance point of view, I was just like, the way that they responded to the music was it different than when I have, you know, a majority white.

How so? I mean, it's kind of hard to explain, like, just the energy that was given back, and I didn't know the personal stories of any of them, didn't want to know, because it's just like, that's not, that wasn't the purpose of the visit, you know. What did you play for them? We played at full concert. I brought them a full band, and we played a lot of stuff from Freedom Highway, and so it's just like the, I feel very strongly, like I'm starting to work with my nephew,

who's a 21-year-old rapper, who plays the band Joe, right? I taught how... That's an unusual combination. It is an unusual combination. And he, you know, he's a heavy rapper. Like, this is, he knows hip-hop. He knows that world. And this is the way he chooses to express himself. You're going to record with him? Yeah. Yeah, we're going to record. What's his name?

His name's Justin Harrington. Demeanor is his handle. But it's just like when you start crossing over into that generation and he sees, he's like, man, when I'm playing this stuff for my friends, they're like, what is that? That's amazing. I'm like, exactly. It's like, when people are exposed to this stuff, they're like, that's. so cool, but getting there is the hurdle. Rihanna and Francesco, thank you so much for coming.

Thanks for having us. Rianne Giddens. We spoke in 2019. Giddens appears on Cowboy Carter, the record by Beyonce that just came out. It explores the black roots of country music. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.