Top 70 Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

I couldn’t stand the politics in opera.

I stood on people’s shoulders, so I want to be there for somebody else to take it even further.

If I wasn’t touring, I wasn’t making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn’t have to do anything.

People say, ‘I’m tired of thinking about race, it’s a drag.’ Yeah, well, welcome to my life! I don’t care who you are. We have the time and the headspace for this stuff. The least you can do is take a moment.

To sit in my concert and be uncomfortable is brave. Because you could always leave, you know?

I think it’s important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.

At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to other points of view, whichever side of the tracks you’re on.

It’s kind of remarkable, everything that’s happened to me. It’s been such a whirlwind, but in a good way.

People think art comes out of strife. No, art comes out of love, and it comes out of freedom, and it comes out of feeling safe, and it comes out of feeling embraced by the vibe and by the energy. That’s when you can make your best stuff.

I don’t want to go on a talk show and talk about stuff I don’t know about.

The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?

My life used to be record, tour, record, tour. You can never say no as a freelance musician. I was on the road 200 days a year.

When you sit at the feet of an elder, it changes you.

I’ve been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn’t, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.

When you hear composer, you think, like, Beethoven: guy in a powdered wig, at a piano, furiously scribbling on manuscript paper. That’s not the only image that a composer should bring up, you know. But that’s kind of what we’ve said it is.

When I first heard the minstrel banjo – I played a gourd first – I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.

I think that we definitely want to experiment, and if there’s a hip-hop song that we like, we’ll cover it. We don’t want to be one of those bands that’s like, you know, you know – Carolina Chocolate Drops does hip-hop. I mean, just know – you know, if it naturally works itself in, you know, cool.

To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.

I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the ’90s, especially the women who were so strong, like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. It’s a great art form.

I don’t have a genre because I play lots of different music that people would say are different genres.

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

In the commercial music world, the folk world, we sell records and concert tickets – this is the way I make a living. You go out, you make your art and hopefully people will put their money down for it. But it’s getting hard. I have to be on the road so much to keep the lights on.

Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.

We have to talk about the negativity, but we have to enjoy the beauty of what this country, culturally, has done.

I always felt culturally adrift as a child because I’m mixed race. I’ve had to deal with that since I was little. Who am I? What makeup do I have? What are the black and the white?

Being mixed in the South, that’s a struggle that everybody deals with differently. Some people go careening to one side or the other, and some people try to walk a tightrope between the two. I grew up spending equal time with both sides of my family.

I would be thrilled with anybody who cites my work as something that inspired them.

There is a black folk music audience. They’re just very small.

Each song has its own way that it likes to be done, but it can be more than one way. If you tap into it, you can feel it.

I don’t watch ‘Game of Thrones.’ I don’t watch TV. I don’t watch Hulu.

White people are so fragile, God bless ’em. ‘Well, I didn’t own slaves.’ No you didn’t. Nobody is asking you to take personal responsibility for this. But you’re a beneficiary of a system that did. Just own that and move on.

When I got into college, I got into operatic vocalists, like Leontyne Price.

Nobody can know what their legacy is going to be, you know?

It’s not about me, it’s about the music. I don’t do this because I want to be a star. I don’t do this because I want to make a lot of money.

People seem ready for a more in-depth idea of folk music, culture and history.

My dad’s white, my mom’s black, and I’ve struggled with being mixed race.

American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.

I’m discovering so much about how invisible, othered and dismissed the Islamic world is, in terms of the massive effects it had on European music and culture.

I’m really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.

I like Queen Latifah.

You have to find the balance of figuring out how can I be effective? How can I use my platform for good, you know, without jeopardizing everything so that I don’t have that platform anymore.

We’re not here as a black band playing white string band music. You know, we play stuff in the Appalachians, we play stuff in the white community, but we really highlight the black community’s music.

When I do Gaelic music, I’ve learned about Gaelic culture; I’ve tried to learn the language. Whenever I do mouth music and there’s Gaelic speakers in the audience, and they come up and go, ‘Good job,’ I’m always like, ‘Phew.’

We have been fed so many false narratives, many of them racialized to deliberately feed a racist agenda. It’s important to address and dig into that wherever you can.

So my mom’s folks are from one side of Greensboro – and, you know, outside of Greensboro. And my dad’s folks, the white side, is from another very small town outside of Greensboro. So both sides are coming from the country.

The banjo is my chosen instrument – it’s what I write my music on.

I really got into Gaelic music and the whole sound of it, and I got to go to Scotland.

I’m still black in the eyes of America.

There is music out there that is commercially driven, whether you like it or not. That’s a peculiarly American innovation. We innovated the commercial music business.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what’s going on now.

I had this dream like years ago. I had this dream – I wanted to be in an all-black string band.

I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.

I’m really taken with ‘Calling Me Home’ by Alice Gerrard.

Separation in culture and arts does nobody any favors except for the people in power. That’s just it… So I feel like I’m in the business of challenging that narrative.

Black women have historically had the most to lose and have therefore been the fiercest fighters for justice.

The truth, the real history, is way more interesting and representative of what America actually is.

I hate genres. I think they’re just marketing labels.

Ibn Said’s autobiography is an extraordinary work, and his story is one that’s absolutely crucial to tell.

African-American history is American history.

Every song has a heart, and I just go for that.

There are people who have incredible stories that we don’t talk about. People who did amazing things, men and women who faced incredible odds, and there’s nothing wrong with them being heroes for once, you know?

Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music – and then, through that, American history.

I wouldn’t be out here touring constantly if I didn’t hope that my music was going to do something to somebody.

I’m not gonna force something or fake something to try to get more black people at my shows. I’m not gonna do some big hip-hop crossover.

I have to continue to work, and I have to be touring, because that’s how I earn a living.

The best part of a MacArthur is having some pressure taken off from touring relentlessly.

If I want to support my family and my crew, we have to be on the road, and that’s really tiring.