Rhiannon Giddens has been talking for quite some time when she stops to apologize. “Sorry, I had caffeine,” the singer-songwriter, banjoist, and founding member of the soon-to-be reuniting Carolina Chocolate Drops says on a recent Zoom.
The apology comes after Giddens spent an hour sharing pointed critiques, reflective musings, and unfiltered thoughts about all sorts of topics: canceling her upcoming Kennedy Center show, the impending encroachment of AI onto the arts, what it means to be doing cultural and historical work in a hyper-capitalist music industry, the perils of prioritizing collaboration in a society that fetishizes the individual, even the frustrating elements of appearing on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter last year.
“There are so many of us struggling to maintain our humanity in this industry,” Giddens says. “My biggest talent is collaboration. I’m really into sharing and being one of many, and I feel like that’s important, but you can’t be a superstar and do that. You just can’t!”
As per usual, Giddens is juggling a dizzying handful of upcoming projects in various states of development, and she’s buzzing about all of them. There’s a project she can’t yet discuss, which recently brought her to a convent in Vietnam. There’s Biscuits & Banjos, the inaugural festival she’s organized for next month in Durham, North Carolina, which, she surmises, could be one of the largest-ever gatherings of Black string band musicians. And there’s the highly anticipated reunion of the Carolina Chocolate Drops at the aforementioned festival.
There’s also What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Giddens’ forthcoming record (due in April) with fiddler Justin Robinson, one of the original Carolina Chocolate Drops. The album, which Giddens describes as the “anti-AI,” represents a radical return to her roots: Giddens on banjo and Robinson on fiddle running through a series of mostly instrumental fiddle tunes recorded in part outside the North Carolina home of their late mentor, the pioneering Black old-time fiddler Joe Thompson. It is, quite possibly, the least commercial album a major label will release in 2025.
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“There are probably people who are going to be like, ‘This is really fucking boring. Why did she put this out?” says Giddens. “Other people might go, ‘I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.’ It’s not going to get any radio play, but that’s not why we did it.”
Over the past two decades, Giddens’ work has become a foundational influence for a generation of younger Black roots musicians. An enormous cross section of artists — from pop hitmakers like Lil Nas X and Shaboozey to should-be country stars Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer to contemporary roots and indie stalwarts like Adia Victoria, Buffalo Nichols, and Allison Russell— can all partly thank Giddens for their career.
But Giddens herself has often experienced her own career as a lonely, even alienating exercise in trying to carve an industry path that barely previously existed. With time, Giddens now views several of her earlier periods — trying to make a name in Nashville in the mid 2010s, her 2017 masterpiece Freedom Highway — as being several years ahead of the curve.
Speaking about all of this with Rolling Stone, Giddens is reflective, fired up, and deeply critical of some of what she’s experienced in the industry in the past few years, yet even more hopeful about what’s to come. More than anything, she seems eager to get back onstage and start singing.
What was the spark of the idea for your new album?
Justin and I were playing tunes in California. I had invited him to the Ojai Music Festival because we were putting on a smaller version of my opera Omar. Justin and I have a special thing I don’t have with anybody else because he’s the only person who plays fiddle who I play with who also played with Joe Thompson, our mentor. There are a lot of tunes that have never been recorded with us playing them and I just went, “God, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, this is gone.” So I said, “We should record ourselves, just fiddle and banjo, no percussion, no guitar, nobody else.” The whole project descended into my brain: We should do this as a kind of anti-AI. This idea of more and more layers of computers coming into music. I was like, “Let’s just go the other direction.”
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Why did you feel compelled to go in that direction?
I was coming off of my most produced record ever [2023’s You’re the One]. I gave the label and fans something different. It was great, it was an adventure, and I was pretty ready to get back to my roots. They talk about the slow food movement. This is like the slow music movement. The birdsong, I love it. Justin and I were talking about an Etta Baker live recording and you can hear the birds as she’s playing and we were like, “Wouldn’t that be really great?” There’s just not a lot of music being made like that, especially with the kind of reach I have. There’s old-time music being made by old-time people on records that are never going to see the light of day outside of their [communities.] So I was like, “How cool would it be to get a major label to put out literally the most basic old-time record?
Musicians sometimes describe this mentality of, “One for me, one for them” when balancing their own artistic desires with the realities of the industry. Does that attitude resonate with you?
A little bit. I have to say, I have a great label at Nonesuch. They really follow my vision and have been wonderful. After the T Bone [Burnett] record [2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn], I could’ve done many things, but I went with a colleague of mine [Dirk Powell], who is a wonderful producer and not well known, and I made a record that was basically five years ahead of time, Freedom Highway. But that was what I needed to make at the time. My label has really followed me through working with Francesco [Turrisi] and doing completely different things. So You’re the One, it’s all original material, which people love. And we went with a really cool producer. So maybe there was a little bit of that: “You’ve been so good to me. Here’s one that maybe will get some radio play.”
I loved making it, and I was like, “Let’s do a traditional album campaign.” My face was huge on the cover. And I found that all really uncomfortable. I really didn’t like being the focus. I didn’t like people asking me personal questions. I always feel like I’m the least interesting thing about the thing that I do. If I use my personal stories, it’s always in order to illustrate a historical point. So yeah, I found it really not tenable. My team did a fabulous job. They did what I asked them to do. But it told me a lot. It’s not the kind of artist I am.
I do sometimes feel the pressure of the industry. I also want to be a team player. I would never show up to award shows, or half the stuff I have to do. I would never put on makeup. But I do those things so that that doesn’t become a thing. I don’t want people talking about the fact that I’m not wearing makeup. I want them to talk about the fact that I was nominated for a song about somebody who was lynched.
How are you navigating these dynamics during our particularly difficult and scary moment?
Those of us who were already activist artists, part of me gets angry because it’s like, “Why is it always the people who were already doing shit that are being expected to do more shit, rather than the people who have been silent their whole career and have reaped the benefits from it?” Can we not ask them to say something, to go on the record? To put their money where their mouth is? But no, it’s always “Let’s just be critical of the people making decisions they shouldn’t have to make in this system. Let’s put more shit on them and not talk about the people who have literally billions of dollars who are saying nothing.” I’m thinking about all of that.
Is your upcoming record with Justin related to your reunion with the Carolina Chocolate Drops at Biscuits & Banjos? Or were those two parallel paths?
They were parallel. Justin and I have always been in touch. He left music for a while and I left him alone, but we stayed in touch. When he started playing again, I was like, “Hello!” The idea of bringing the Chocolate Drops together for a one time extravaganza, it’s been an open question for a long time. I know I’ve been asked, Dom [Flemons’] been asked, Justin’s been asked. It just seemed like the right time. Obviously, the focus is around the original trio [Giddens, Flemons, and Robinson] but there were a lot of people who’ve been through the Chocolate Drops: Hubby Jenkins, Leyla McCalla, Súle Greg Wilson. It will be an opportunity for us all to come back together and be like, “What an amazing thing,” and for the audience to get to see it one last time. Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I’m just focusing on this one event, to have this celebration.
There’s a real power in the Chocolate Drops getting back together at this moment in time, after the group helped spawn so many new acts in the past decade.
It’s an exciting thought. It’s also a reminder to the industry at large that this is not a competition, and it shouldn’t be. This is also cultural music. That’s what I wanted to do with Blackbird, is remind people that this music came from cultural music. Whatever we’re doing with it today, this idea of making a consumable product, which is what the music industry is right now, the origins of it are cultural. It’s around ceremony and community, and that’s something we need to continue to remind people. We’re actually part of a continuum. That’s why it’s important Taj Mahal is going to be there. It’s about where you are in the continuum. New Dangerfield is taking it into the future. We’re between Taj and New Dangerfield. That’s what Biscuits and Banjos has really been about. Everyone involved is telling the story of our cultural past in a certain way, and that is really important work. It’s, what’s the word, sacred work. We have to do that sacred work within a capitalistic framework, which is draining. Everyone is getting paid. Can I pay them as much as Coachella? No.
What has Biscuits & Banjos taught you about putting on a music festival?
I don’t think people realize how expensive it is to put on one of these things. You want to find money from sources that are not going to put limits on it or expect something. You don’t want shareholders. We have seen what has happened with the whole “being beholden to shareholders” thing…You know the festivals that have them and the ones that don’t. You feel it as a musician. I’m not interested in making money from this, as long as everybody gets paid.
You announced you’d be canceling your Kennedy Center show after Trump took over the institution’s board and moving the show to the Anthem, a nearby venue. What was that process like? Was it a hard decision?
It was really hard. I respect that decision everybody is making. I was like, “Why would it be this year that I have a show there?” [Laughs] I wanted to stay and stick it out. Then, as things unfolded, what I do is already so loud that I thought, “What good is it going to do sticking around? Who am I going to be playing for? Who is actually going to come?” The money is whatever. I could have just cut the show and lost the money. For me, money is never an issue in these kinds of things. It’s really, “What am I trying to say? How am I serving my fans? How am I serving my message?”
I didn’t want to just fold up my tent and go home. But I love when people are thinking I’m protecting my bottom line. I’m actually taking a huge risk by taking my seated Kennedy Center show to a 5,000 standing rock club I’ve never been to. This is not playing it safe. But the Anthem is eight minutes down the street, so I was like, “Well, this is perfect,” because it means I can still serve my D.C. base. People who won’t feel comfortable going to the Kennedy Center can still come to my show.
I was struck by what you said about playing banjo on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” in a recent No Depression interview. You said the whole experience was “difficult,” that it made clear what your “value is to that world, which is not very high.” Can you elaborate?
There’s not much I can say, legally, about specific things. I haven’t seen that No Depression piece yet, so hopefully it is roundabout enough that I don’t get sued.
It’s pretty vague, which is why I was curious to hear more.
For me, that experience really highlighted things I’ve already known. It really highlighted the difference between what I do and what the heights of the industry is doing. It’s a larger example of what I was talking about with You’re the One, right? When I think about my banjo playing, I think of the lineage I have received through Joe Thompson and everyone who taught him, this connection to a very deep piece of my culture. Every time I pull my banjo out, I’m thinking of that. If ever I do something that seems counter to that, there’s a very good reason. There are two examples I could pull out, in my entire 20-year career, where I feel like I had to make a compromise in order for a greater good. This was one of those times. I knew it was going to be difficult. I knew I was releasing my banjo out into this huge world. And there were definitely benefits: I’ve heard from people saying more people are taking banjo classes and dancing to it because of [“Texas Hold ‘Em”]. It also gave me an entrée into the Black community that I’ve never had, to be honest. Because of all the things I’ve been fighting for my whole life, it’s been difficult to be seen as a Black musician, especially since I’m mixed, all this shit. But for the first time, I felt acceptance from the mainstream Black community, which made me weep. Because this is what I’m doing it for, and it’s hard to feel ignored by the culture you’re defending. I’ve come to terms with it, it’s fine. All of us Black people who do these things — who are opera singers or old-time singers — we all have our relationships with this. So that was really beautiful.
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What was hard for me [Giddens pauses] was to feel that gift treated as any other transaction in the music industry. That’s what was really hard. Because I certainly didn’t do it for the money, I can tell you that [Giddens bulges her eyes and stares into the camera]. My eyes are telling you lots of things. I did it for the mission. So, my idea of what the mission is and somebody else’s idea of what the mission is are not going to be the same thing. There’s a reason why I’m not a multi-millionaire. If you are a multi-millionaire, there are reasons why. No shade, whatever. It means you do things in a certain way.
Kendrick Lamar is a very good example of somebody using their platform in an intensely activist way but also in a very mainstream way. I don’t know how he does it, but he did it. He’s unique. Most people aren’t like him. So I can’t expect everybody to be like him, and that’s fine. I’ve been in my little world, meaning mission and history, and that’s not what is valued in that large world, and that’s okay. Like I said, I really try not to yuck somebody else’s yum. I am a weirdo. I’m so focused on this stuff and it is my calling. I don’t do this because I want to look pretty and make a lot of money, and so when I rub up against that world, it’s always hard.
