Rhiannon Giddens

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

“Music affects people in a way that bare facts can't.”

“My stuff lives in Nashville but I live wherever my children are.”

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

“I mean, my training at Oberlin has been absolutely valuable.”

“I'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.”

“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.”

“In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative we've inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scotch-Irish tradition with influences from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The first band I was in out of college was a Celtic band, and I had to learn to sing with a microphone, because I'd never done that before. At Oberlin, I never used a mic for any kind of singing.”

“I'm not an urban black person. I'm a country black person.”

“That was the special thing about the Carolina Chocolate Drops. We didn't want to do music full-time. We weren't looking to get rich, which is good, because we didn't. But we went further than we thought we would go. We started that band to celebrate Joe Thompson and the black string band music. That's not really a recipe for commercial success.”

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

“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?”

“It's really funny how I've come round to classical music around the back door with my banjo in my hand, and I love it.”

“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.”

“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.”