A biography for Rhiannon Giddenshasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.”
“For me the bare feet are grounding. I'm connected to the Earth in a way that I cannot be any other way.”
“I remember so vividly the first time I saw one of Marshall Wyatt's superb compilations called 'Folks He Sure Do Pull Some Bow' and seeing a picture of a black fiddler and freaking out. I had stumbled upon the hidden legacy of the black string band and I wanted to know more.”
“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.”
“American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.”
“People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.”
“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.”
“I think songs can have different lives.”
“The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?”
“Nobody can know what their legacy is going to be, you know?”
“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.”
“I'm a North Carolina native. Grew up in North Carolina.”
“I don't watch 'Game of Thrones.' I don't watch TV. I don't watch Hulu.”
“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?”
“History is my biggest teacher.”
“What's really interesting to me is to have a connection to what was going on in the past, but to make it a living thing.”
“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.”
“I would be thrilled with anybody who cites my work as something that inspired them.”
“If I want to support my family and my crew, we have to be on the road, and that's really tiring.”