There are cultural commentators who will tell you that Beyoncé is the most important female artist in African-American music since Aretha Franklin. Yet there’s another school of thought which suspects that the accolade might really belong to Rhiannon Giddens.

Singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and keeper of tradition, since we first encountered her a decade and a half ago as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens has abseiled with a thrilling boldness across the face of myriad styles to emerge as a unique figure in Black American music with an eclecticism that defies the parochial partitioning of genre. 

Classically trained as an opera singer, with the Grammy-winning Chocolate Drops she explored the hidden Black heritage of old-time American folk music, banjo tunes and minstrel songs. As a solo artist she has released a series of inspired albums and become a sought-after collaborator. 

With Elvis Costello and Marcus Mumford she recorded Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, an album of unreleased Bob Dylan lyrics set to newly composed tunes. Her folk-soul voice and earthy banjo playing graced Music from the American Epic Sessions alongside the likes of Jack White and Alabama Shakes, and she worked with Kronos Quartet on their Folk Songs set. Then she convened the all-Black, all-female American-roots supergroup Our Native Daughters and wrote the score for the ballet Lucy Negro Redux, which premiered in 2019.

The following year she was appointed the artistic director of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad arts organization and she recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera Omar, described by the Pulitzer Committee as ‘a musical work that respectfully represents African as well as African-American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage.’

Her latest album, You’re the One, the follow-up to They’re Calling Me Home with her Italian partner Francesco Turrisi which won the Grammy for Best Folk Album in 2022, expansively fuses blues, folk, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel and rock.

“I hope that people just hear American music,” Giddens says of her new album. “It’s all there. I like to be where it meets organically. They’re fun songs, and I wanted them to have as much of a chance as they could to reach people who might dig them but don’t know anything about what I do. If they’re introduced to me through this record, they might go listen to other music I’ve made and make some new discoveries.”

Still in her mid-forties and with a talent and a repertoire that span from opera, gospel and bluegrass to blues, folk and funk, her catalogue is a dazzling, multi-faceted body of work which leaves one struggling for comparisons. Think of the great female African-American voices of the 20th century and Giddens seems like the apotheosis of all of them. You can hear the blues of Memphis Minnie, the Black folk traditions of Elizabeth Cotten and Odetta, the soul of Nina Simone and the gospel righteousness of Sister Rosetta Tharpe in her music, and in her voice even the classical purity of Jessye Norman – yet there’s something unique about Giddens that enables her to synthesise all her influences and transcend her spiritual progenitors.

Born in North Carolina in 1977 to a white father and a mother of African-American and Native American descent, she grew up hearing every kind of music and was “always singing or humming from when she was two or three,” according to her mother.

A self-confessed nerd, she dreamed of being an artist or physicist. Then, when she was 16 she started taking vocal lessons – her father had banned lessons prior to this, saying that a bad teacher can do more harm than good to a young voice – and later auditioned for choral camp at a summer school. That’s when she realised she wanted to pursue music. She soon enrolled at the conservatory of music at Oberlin College, Ohio, where she studied to be an opera singer. Upon graduating she was ready for a break from classical music and she returned to North Carolina and joined a Celtic band. Then, at a Black banjo festival in 2005 she met Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson and together they formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Playing old-time string-band music on banjo, fiddle, guitar, harmonica, bones, jug and kazoo, they busked on street corners, moved into the clubs and then on to festival stages. Their fourth album, 2010’s Genuine Negro Jig smashed racial stereotypes by topping the bluegrass chart and won a Grammy Award as Best Traditional Folk Album.

The group has never officially broken up but has not recorded since 2012’s Leaving Eden. They last performed in 2014, by which time Giddens was the only remaining member of the original line-up. More by accident than design, her solo career then took over. After producer T Bone Burnett had worked with her on the New Basement Tapes project, he asked if she had ever thought of making a solo album and offered to produce it. 

She told him she’d been making a list of great songs written and/or performed by women and the result was 2015’s Tomorrow is My Turn, which included folk-based arrangements of songs made famous by Odetta, Dolly Parton, Nina Simone and Elizabeth Cotten among others. 

2017’s Freedom Highway followed, a brilliant set of vivid songs based on true stories from the slavery era, classic blues and civil rights songs from the 1960s. The album won her a Songlines Music Award.

Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019) was a collaborative concept album conceived by Giddens about women in the slavery era, to which she invited three other Black female singer-songwriters, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell, to contribute.

That same year came There is No Other, the first of two albums recorded with her partner, Francesco Turrisi. The pair collaborated again on 2021’s lockdown album They’re Calling Me Home, on which Turrisi’s Mediterranean songs and North African-influenced frame drum rhythms combine seamlessly with Giddens’ American roots.

Giddens, when I spoke to her in 2021, told me that her work is a ‘mission’, hence the projects’ heavy socio-political and historical significance. “But I never want anything I do to feel like it’s a lecture,” she added. “If people can’t engage with my music as art on its own, then I have failed.”

Fortunately, she doesn’t do failure and wherever her mission takes her next, the journey is certain to be fascinating.

Rhiannon Giddens – Best Albums

Carolina Chocolate Drops - Genuine Negro Jig 
(Nonesuch, 2010)

A captivating mix of early 20th-century ‘race’ music, trad folk songs and contemporary compositions in the string-band style. “Tradition is a guide, not a jailer. We play in an older tradition but we are modern musicians,” Giddens insisted. 

Tomorrow is My Turn
(Nonesuch, 2015)

Giddens explores the frontiers of Americana on a sparkling solo debut produced by T Bone Burnett. Restrained but gorgeously sung versions of songs associated with Nina Simone, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elizabeth Cotton delivered in timeless folk style. 

Freedom Highway
(Nonesuch, 2017)

A brilliant set of vivid songs mostly written by Giddens and based on true stories from the slavery era, plus a classic Mississippi John Hurt blues and a cover of the Staple Singers’ civil rights anthem in the title track. 

Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi
They’re Calling Me Home
(Nonesuch, 2021)

Recorded during lockdown in Ireland with Turrisi, Giddens makes over-familiar standards such as ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘I Shall Not Be Moved’ sound like you’re hearing them for the first time, while Turrisi contributes a brace of old songs representing his Italian heritage.

You’re the One
(Nonesuch, 2023)

Accordions, guitars, strings and horns on a dozen joyous songs of life-affirming energy, drawing deep from the well of American folk music with smart blasts of pop and r&b, including an exuberant song written in tribute to Aretha Franklin. 

IF YOU LIKE RHIANNON GIDDENS, THEN TRY…

Taj Mahal
Music Keeps Me Together
(Columbia, 1975)

Before Giddens was born, Taj Mahal had embarked on a mission to join up the dots of Black musical tradition. On Music Keeps Me Together he connected his blues roots with the music of the descendants of slaves in the Caribbean. 

This article originally appeared in the July 2023 (#191) issue of Songlines magazine.

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Rhiannon Giddens will perform at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN, US (March 21-24, 2024)