Rhiannon Giddens

She was born on 21 February 1977 in Greensboro, graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham in 1995, and took a bachelor of music at the Oberlin Conservatory in 2000, where she studied singing with Marlene Rosen and trained as an opera singer. Back in North Carolina she returned to contra dancing, which she had found by accident at Oberlin, and the banjo she heard at the dances led her to learn the instrument; the fiddle followed. She also called contra dances, sang with a Celtic band called Gaelwynd and entered Scottish competitions in Gaelic mouth music. Her interest in the African roots of the banjo took her to the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in Boone in April 2005, where she met Dom Flemons; with the percussionist Súle Greg Wilson the two played as Sankofa Strings.

In November 2005 Giddens, Flemons and the Gastonia fiddler Justin Robinson formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops in Durham, and every Thursday night they drove to Joe Thompson’s home in Mebane to learn his music. Giddens was the band’s lead singer and played fiddle and banjo. Their first album, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind, came out on Music Maker in 2006, and they recorded music for the film The Great Debaters (2007). Genuine Negro Jig (Nonesuch, 2010), produced by Joe Henry, won the Grammy; Leaving Eden (2012), produced by Buddy Miller, included her song “Country Girl” and the band’s version of Cousin Emmy’s “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” and was nominated for Best Folk Album. When Flemons left in November 2013 she was the last original member, and the band stopped performing regularly in 2014.

Her solo career began with a concert. In the fall of 2013 she sang at Another Day, Another Time, the Town Hall concert in New York that T Bone Burnett curated around the music of the film Inside Llewyn Davis, and Burnett asked backstage to produce a record with her. She first sang on his Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes (2014), setting newly found Bob Dylan lyrics with Elvis Costello, Taylor Goldsmith, Jim James and Marcus Mumford. Her solo debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn (Nonesuch, 10 February 2015), was recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville with players including Gabe Witcher and Paul Kowert of Punch Brothers, the Motown percussionist Jack Ashford and her Chocolate Drops bandmates Hubby Jenkins and Adam Matta. Nearly every song was written or made famous by a woman: Nina Simone’s title song, Dolly Parton’s “Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind,” Hank Cochran’s “She’s Got You” from Patsy Cline, Jean Ritchie’s “O Love Is Teasin’” and Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree.” The Factory Girl EP, from the same sessions, followed on 27 November 2015, and its title song was nominated for the Grammy for Best American Roots Performance. In April 2016 she was named Folk Singer of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, the first American to win it, and that September she received the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass, the first woman among its winners.

Freedom Highway (Nonesuch, 24 February 2017) was mostly her own writing: nine songs she wrote or co-wrote on tour, drawing on slave narratives, the civil-rights years and recent events, with a traditional song, “Birmingham Sunday” and the Staple Singers’ “Freedom Highway.” She co-produced it with Dirk Powell at his studio in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, in wooden rooms built before the Civil War, in eight days. On 26 September 2017 she gave the keynote address at the IBMA Business Conference in Raleigh, a call to bring diversity back to bluegrass by recognizing its African and Native American sources, and days later she was named a MacArthur Fellow, cited for reclaiming African American contributions to folk and country music. In these years she also sang with Eric Church on “Kill a Word” and had a recurring role in the television drama Nashville.

She wrote “Mountain Hymn” with Daniel Lanois for the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), hosted the opera podcast Aria Code for WQXR for three seasons from December 2018, and composed the music for the Nashville Ballet’s Lucy Negro, Redux, which premiered in February 2019. That month Smithsonian Folkways released Songs of Our Native Daughters, a project she conceived and co-produced with Powell, recorded in ten days at his studio outside Lafayette with Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell; its songs take on slavery, racism and sexism in the history of Black women. there is no Other (Nonesuch, 3 May 2019), recorded in five days in Dublin with the Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi and produced by Joe Henry, traced the movement of music from Africa and the Arab world into Europe and America, from Ola Belle Reed’s “I’m Gonna Write Me a Letter” to the Italian “Pizzica di San Vito”; “I’m on My Way” was nominated for Best American Roots Performance.

In July 2020 she became artistic director of Silkroad, the ensemble Yo-Yo Ma had led from 2000 to 2017. During the 2020 lockdown in Ireland she and Turrisi recorded They’re Calling Me Home (Nonesuch, 9 April 2021) in six days at a small studio on a farm outside Dublin. It returned to some of the first old-time songs she ever learned, among them “I Shall Not Be Moved,” “Black As Crow” and “Waterbound,” with Alice Gerrard’s “Calling Me Home” and her own “Avalon,” and it won the Grammy for Best Folk Album in 2022, when “Avalon” was also nominated for Best American Roots Song.

Omar, commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA for 2020 and postponed twice by the pandemic, had its premiere in Charleston on 27 May 2022. Giddens wrote the libretto and the score with the composer Michael Abels, and the opera tells the story of Omar Ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar enslaved and brought to Charleston in 1807. LA Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Carolina Performing Arts and Boston Lyric Opera staged it within a year, and on 8 May 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize in Music. She was music director of the 2023 Ojai Festival and began hosting the PBS series My Music with Rhiannon Giddens. You’re the One (Nonesuch, 18 August 2023), her first album of all original songs, was produced by Jack Splash at Criteria Recording Studios in Miami, with Jason Isbell on “Yet to Be,” and was nominated for Best Americana Album.

In 2024 she played banjo and viola on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em.” American Railroad (Nonesuch, November 2024), recorded live with the Silkroad Ensemble in California on its 2023 tour and co-produced by Giddens, Kaoru Watanabe and Jody Elff, told the stories of the people who built the transcontinental railroad. In April 2025 she created the Biscuits & Banjos festival in Durham to mark twenty years since the Black Banjo Gathering, and on 26 April the original Carolina Chocolate Drops played together there for the first time in a decade. That month she and Justin Robinson released What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, eighteen North Carolina fiddle-and-banjo pieces, many learned from Joe Thompson and one from Etta Baker, recorded outdoors at Thompson’s and Baker’s homes and at the Mill Prong House; it was nominated for the Grammy for Best Folk Album. She was a music consultant on the 2025 film Sinners and wrote Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo with Kristina R. Gaddy (2025). Her seventh studio album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers (Nonesuch, 18 September 2026), was recorded live at the Cypress House in Breaux Bridge between tours in 2024 and 2025 and co-produced with Powell, with Turrisi, Robinson, the bassist Jason Sypher and the Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, and it includes Ola Belle Reed’s “High on a Mountain,” Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” and “Cluck Old Hen.” As of 2026 she remains Silkroad’s artistic director, and that year she turned the festival into the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation.

• 2011: Grammy, Best Traditional Folk Album, Genuine Negro Jig (Carolina Chocolate Drops)
• 2016: Folk Singer of the Year, BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards
• 2016: Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass
• 2016: North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, with the Carolina Chocolate Drops
• 2017: MacArthur Fellowship
• 2022: Grammy, Best Folk Album, They’re Calling Me Home (with Francesco Turrisi)
• 2023: Pulitzer Prize in Music, Omar (with Michael Abels)