PAPERBOAT MEDIA / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Rhiannon
Giddens.
The music remembers.
And in her hands, it keeps becoming.
By Rob Urban
History can erase a person without losing the sound they helped create.
A rhythm survives. An instrument changes hands. A melody enters the national imagination. The labor, migration and cultural collision that shaped it become footnotes, if they remain visible at all.
Rhiannon Giddens keeps following the sound back to the people. A singer, banjo player, composer and founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she has made that curiosity into an unusually expansive artistic life.
What I admire is how much room there is in it. Scholarship can lead to a formidable opera, a fiddle tune played outdoors with an old friend, or an ensemble asking whose labor built a railway. The scale changes. Her attention to the people inside the music remains.
There is pleasure in that kind of attention. Learning more can give us more to love.
NORTH CAROLINA / FIDDLE & BANJO
A place in
the music.
For What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, released in 2025, Giddens reunited with fellow Carolina Chocolate Drops founder Justin Robinson. She played banjo; he played fiddle. Many of the North Carolina tunes came from their late mentor Joe Thompson. They also drew on Etta Baker’s recorded playing.
They recorded outdoors at Thompson’s and Baker’s homes and at Mill Prong House, a former plantation. The release notes describe the natural sounds that accompanied them, including cicadas. Place was allowed into the recording.
I find something lovely in the choice to return. Recognition had given Giddens access to celebrated stages. Here, the work led her back toward the people from whom she had learned. An accomplished artist can still be someone’s grateful student.
That gratitude has a practical form. Play the tunes. Name the teachers. Let another listener discover them. The relationship continues through something a person can hear, enjoy and pass along.
Follow the railway.
Hear the people.
Giddens conceived American Railroad as Silkroad’s artistic director. The project follows the communities behind North America’s railways, including African American, Chinese, Irish and Japanese workers, alongside the displacement of Indigenous communities.
Research included visits to Standing Rock, New York City and San Francisco. Workshops brought musicians together with local scholars. That process matters because a railway map can make places look like points on one line; local knowledge makes their differences harder to overlook.
I like the ambition of bringing those differences into the same ensemble. It asks the audience to hear connection without losing the particular people involved. A shared history becomes more interesting when we can distinguish its voices.
A program note can tell us who has been omitted from a familiar story. The harder artistic question is what that knowledge changes in the music itself: the instruments placed together, the words a singer carries, the person whose perspective organizes a piece.
These choices affect how an audience enters a history. An unfamiliar instrument can prompt curiosity before anyone explains its place in the program. A familiar tune can invite recognition, then complicate it. The listener has something to return to when the historical context becomes clearer.
AMERICAN RAILROAD / THE RECORDING
Every name
opens a door.
The Nonesuch album notes and credits make several of those differences concrete. Wu Man’s Rainy Day combines pipa, banjo and voice around Chinese families separated by railroad work. Haruka Fujii’s Tamping Song addresses Japanese immigrant labor. Maeve Gilchrist’s Far Down Far examines divisions among Irish workers. Each takes a different route into the railway’s history.
Giddens’s arrangement joins Swannanoa Tunnel with Steel-Driving Man. Silkroad connects the first song with coerced Black labor in North Carolina and the second with the folk figure John Henry. Placing them together makes a familiar heroic story answer to the circumstances of work.
Composition and performance also have separate credits. Cécile McLorin Salvant wrote Have You Seen My Man?; the album’s personnel list credits voices on that track to Giddens, Pura Fé, Karen Ouzounian and Mazz Swift. Naming a composer alone does not tell the listener who is giving the work its sound.
That distinction is especially useful in a project concerned with missing names. The credits give listeners a way to follow individual artists beyond the ensemble and hear what each brings to the collaboration.
OMAR / WITH MICHAEL ABELS
A life large enough
for an opera.
With composer Michael Abels, Giddens created Omar, the opera awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music. It draws on the 1831 autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar who was enslaved in the United States.
The existence of that autobiography changes the invitation to an audience. Here is a person who studied, believed, remembered and wrote. He left an account. His interior life deserves the full resources of an art form capable of giving a thought breath, duration and a human voice.
That is an artistic commitment I admire. Giddens and Abels made space for the fullness of a life that a historical category can make painfully easy to abbreviate. The form asks us to spend time with a person.
The next person
to pick up
the tune.
The word traditional can sound neutral, as if songs simply arrive from the past intact.
Traditions are choices made repeatedly. Somebody preserves a verse, changes a tempo, renames a tune, markets an instrument or decides which performer represents authenticity. Power participates in that selection even when the finished music is described as timeless.
A tune can remain worth singing while the account attached to it changes. Affection for the music and curiosity about its history can strengthen each other.
Giddens carries that curiosity into the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation. Its stated work connects the African diaspora’s contributions to American culture with concerts, education, gatherings and support for the communities sustaining those traditions.
That connection matters. Once we know where something we love comes from, we can become more thoughtful about how it continues. Who gets to teach? Who has the time and resources to keep playing? Where can a young person encounter the music as a living possibility?
Admiration becomes more useful when it makes us curious about those conditions. Giddens gives that curiosity somewhere to go.
Listen. Follow a name.
Listen again.
I like moving between the music and its history: hear a piece, find the account behind it, then return to the performance. The research has something audible to attach to. The music has acquired another layer of meaning.
A useful place to begin is with one title that catches your attention. Read who wrote or arranged it, then look at who performs it. Follow the historical connection before treating the whole album as a single statement about America. Its individual accounts deserve that room.
American Railroad offers a particularly rich way to do that. The project’s podcast and booklet let a listener move between the music and the histories behind it. With the Giddens and Robinson recording, the trail leads toward teachers, places and the pleasure of playing together.
That range is part of why she matters to me. She can make a difficult history worth staying with, and a familiar tune worth hearing again. There is intellectual courage in revising an inherited account. There is generosity in making the discovery something other people can enter.
A rhythm survives. Someone learns its name, finds its makers and brings a friend over to listen. The story has more people in it now.
A few things to know
Who is Rhiannon Giddens?
Rhiannon Giddens is a singer, banjo player, composer and educator. She co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops and serves as artistic director of Silkroad. Her work explores the people and traditions that have shaped American music.
What is American Railroad?
American Railroad is a Silkroad project conceived by Rhiannon Giddens. Through music, research and educational material, it explores the communities whose labor built North America’s railways and the Indigenous displacement connected with that expansion.
Who created the opera Omar?
Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels created Omar, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The opera draws on the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar enslaved in the United States.
KEEP EXPLORING
Sources: Giddens’s official biography; Silkroad’s American Railroad account; the album notes and credits; and the linked Nonesuch, Pulitzer and Biscuits & Banjos accounts above.
More people.
More possibility.
I’m Rob Urban. I write about the people and ideas that reward a closer look. You can find more of my thinking here, along with a way to talk about writing or consulting.