Rhiannon Giddens traces the banjo from her ancestors to Beyoncé

Terry Gross (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. There are many ways you may know my guest, singer, banjo player, fiddler and songwriter Rhiannon Giddens. Early in her career, she co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops, which played music from the black string band tradition dating back to slave times. She since recorded several solo albums. On one of them, she recorded and wrote several songs based on slave narratives, and one song based on an aunt from a slave holder looking to sell a young enslaved woman, offering the buyer the option of buying the woman's nine-month-old baby.

Giddens studied opera singing in college and won a Pulitzer Prize for co-writing the opera Omar about a Muslim scholar from Senegal who was sold into slavery in the US.

She also was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. She's now the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble, which was founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and is dedicated to playing with musicians from around the world, drawing on their musical traditions. If all that isn't enough to spark your interest, it's time to bring in the name Beyoncé. It's Giddens playing banjo on Texas Hold'Em, the hit track on Beyoncé's country music album, Cowboy Carter. We'll talk about that a little later. Rhiannon Giddens has a new album called Hope Is the Thing with Feathers. The title track is the title of an Emily Dickinson poem that Giddens has set to music. She's brought her banjo and fiddle and will play and sing a little later in the show. Let's start with a track from the new album. This is Step Away Blues, which she co-wrote.

Rhiannon Giddens, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Rhiannon Giddens (2:21)

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Terry Gross (2:22)

Such a pleasure to have you back.

Step Away Blues, which you co-wrote, you write in the liner notes that you think it definitely feels like a song for your crone ears. And crone isn't a kind of archaic word for people who don't know the definition. It's basically a condescending and contemptible word for an old woman who typically is ugly if the word crone is used. So when you say you're crone ears, what do you mean and why is that a song for your crone ears?

Rhiannon Giddens (2:55)

You know, there's words that have dictionary definitions. There's words that have connotations that were generations ago. And then there's words that are being reclaimed. And I feel like crone is one of those words because women who have gone through menopause tend to disappear in societies, including ours. And I think we are all looking for ways to reclaim that time because it actually is the time of great power, which is why, of course, we've been under attack for all of patriarchal history, you know?

So for me, that's the way I use crone is actually in more of a reclamatory, is that a word? A reclamation sense of, you know, it just means I'm in this period of my life. And so that's kind of the spirit of me using that word. It's not an adenogation to myself, but more of a reclamation kind of spirit, if that makes sense.

Terry Gross (3:47)

So in what way is that song, a defining song for your Crohn years?

Rhiannon Giddens (3:52)

Well, I'm entering in that time. I'm 49 years old, you know, and so I'm just kind of entering in this space of this chapter where I just don't care anymore.

You know what I mean? Like, I just want to say what I have to say, and, you know, it will be taken the way it's taken. I mean, obviously within reason, but I need to step into that a little bit because I've spent a lot of my career sort of, you know, being the peacemaker, being the mediator, sort of trying to represent things in a way that's not too offensive, but that, you know, really sits in an emotionally hard space. And that's a very difficult thing to carry, and I've been carrying it for a long time. And I definitely am feeling like I need to let some of that go. And, you know, if I come out with something a little stronger, if not now, then when, you know? So that's, I'm feeling that coming on, and that song kind of represents that for me.

Terry Gross (4:48)

So in Step Away Blues, part of the lyric is, I'm tired of taking off my skin so you can see my heart.

Rhiannon Giddens (4:56)

Yeah.

Terry Gross (4:57)

Where were you in your life when you wrote that, that you thought about that line?

Rhiannon Giddens (5:04)

It's been a, it's been challenging.