Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens has delved into folk traditions both independently and through her role in the Carolina Chocolate Drops, focusing on the ways older songs and structures continue to connect with contemporary audiences. Her approach treats the existing folk repertoire as material for both reflection and extension. That perspective lent the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ pair of early-2010s Nonesuch releases an unexpected edge, though she stepped away from the group not long after Leaving Eden appeared in 2012. On her 2015 debut Tomorrow Is My Turn, Giddens interpreted twentieth-century standards, signaling the exploratory path her solo work would follow. She quickly followed with the 2017 album Freedom Highway, built mostly around her own songs, and the 2019 collaboration There Is No Other with Francesco Turrisi, which clarified her core conviction that music erases boundaries between cultures. The same expansive outlook shaped her Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar as well as its 2023 counterpart You’re the One.

Giddens grew up in Piedmont, North Carolina, trained in opera at the Oberlin Conservatory, and later returned to the area to absorb its rural musical heritage. An encounter at the 2005 Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, with Justin Robinson and Dom Flemons led to the creation of Sankofa Strings. The project began as a vehicle for early African-American styles including blues, country, hot string jazz, and Caribbean forms, yet the members drew much of their initial material from veteran old-time fiddler Joe Thompson. Under the name the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the group issued four varied and critically regarded albums before moving to Nonesuch Records for the widely embraced 2010 release Genuine Negro Jig.

After that breakthrough, the Carolina Chocolate Drops maintained an active touring and recording schedule with a shifting roster that continued to revolve around Giddens’ commanding voice and her fiddle and banjo work. Producer T-Bone Burnett invited her to perform alone at the 2013 Another Day, Another Time concert in New York, tied to the film Inside Llewyn Davis; her rendering of the Odetta standard “Waterboy” stood out as the evening’s peak moment. Early the following year she joined Burnett again for the New Basement Tapes project, alongside Elvis Costello, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, all setting newly uncovered Bob Dylan lyrics to music.

Her first solo album under Burnett’s direction, Tomorrow Is My Turn, reached listeners in February 2015. Later that year she issued the EP Factory Girl drawn from the same sessions; its title track earned a 2017 Grammy nomination for Best American Roots Performance, and the EP itself was nominated for Best Folk Album. February 2017 brought her second solo effort, Freedom Highway, which she co-produced with Dirk Powell. That October she received a MacArthur Genius Fellowship.

With Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, Giddens assembled the collective Our Native Daughters, whose album Songs of Our Native Daughters appeared in February 2019. The same year she partnered with Italian jazz musician Francesco Turrisi on There Is No Other, an effort meant to highlight cross-cultural links; the track “I’m on My Way” received a Grammy nomination. Giddens and Turrisi reconvened for the 2021 release They’re Calling Me Home, another Grammy-nominated set shaped by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

Her subsequent large-scale undertaking was the opera Omar, drawn from the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim cleric enslaved in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1800s. The work, which premiered in 2022, featured a libretto by Giddens and songs co-written with Michael Abels; it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2023. Later that year Giddens returned with You’re the One. Produced by Jack Splash and including a duet with Jason Isbell, the album marked her first collection devoted entirely to original material.