Musician Rhiannon Giddens is a modern-day Renaissance woman who trained as an opera singer before veering into folk music. She's an award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist. But she is first and foremost a dedicated banjo player who has been researching and teaching the instrument's African heritage. The World’s Carolyn Beeler speaks with Giddens about the origins of the banjo. The post Rhiannon Giddens discusses the history of the banjo and its African roots appeared first on The World from PRX.
Musician Rhiannon Giddens is a Renaissance woman whose work shines across a variety of genres. She is a talented singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist; she has won two Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for her work.
Giddens was trained at a conservatory where she studied opera, but decided to pursue a career as a versatile folk instrumentalist.
More than anything else, Giddens is committed to the banjo — playing it, researching it and teaching its African heritage. She is also the founder of Biscuits & Banjos Foundation, which celebrates the African diaspora’s role in shaping American identity.
For Juneteenth, Rhiannon Giddens joined The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler to talk about her work and the influence of the African diaspora on American folk music.
Carolyn Beeler: You wrote a song for Juneteenth back in 2020 called “Build a House,” with you on banjo and vocals, and Yo-Yo Ma on cello. Rhiannon, why was this the song that you wanted to write for Juneteenth?
Rhiannon Giddens: So, I mean, “Build a House” just stands for, you know, in my eyes, African American history. A man’s brought over to build a house. He builds the house, he builds the gardens and then he’s told to go. He tries to build his own house; it’s burned down. He finally finds a place to live. And so, at the end, he says, “You brought me here to build a house, but I’m not gonna be moved. I’m here. I’m stayin’.”
And you said that the main character in the song was brought over. Presumably, you mean he was enslaved and brought to the US to be enslaved.
I mean, yeah, it’s a ballad that got turned into a kids’ book. So, I mean, if that’s the intention — if you place that history upon that character, you know. It is a very broad idea, “You brought me here to build your house,” but that’s basically, you know, when you think about how much slave labor built the United States, and the very manor houses that these plantation owners were living in. So, it’s the knowledge of how to grow rice, the knowledge of all of the stuff that goes into building the edifice of the nation-state of the United States. So much of that is slave labor, slave knowledge and slave wisdom.
I want to talk about the banjo now. I love that you are called, or call yourself, “Banjo Auntie” on Facebook. You are very well known for your banjo work. And from the beginning of your career, you’ve been educating your listeners about the roots that American music has in the African diaspora, with the banjo as a prime example. You say it may never have existed if it weren’t for enslaved West Africans and Caribbean people. Can you tell me a little bit about the banjo’s history and its roots in Africa?
Well, I think it’s pretty certain that you don’t have the banjo without the transatlantic slave trade, because that is literally the reason why they have Africans in the New World. And I think it’s pretty safe to say in our timeline, the banjo comes about because of enslaved people being brought from Africa to the Caribbean and creating sort of Creole cultures there.
Obviously, Africa is an enormous continent, and so people are being brought from different areas, put together, maybe not a common language, maybe not a common religion, but there were aspects of music and dance that started to coalesce around instruments that became known as the banjo. That’s the latest research. And it makes a lot of sense to me that it is a Creole instrument when it begins in the Caribbean, because the Caribbean was also the way station for so many enslaved people through which they ended up in the United States or down in South America.
A majority of them came through the Caribbean, so it makes sense that that instrument ended up in the United States as sort of an indelible emblem of enslaved life; and then later on after Emancipation, the character of the African American, the banjo was known as a cultural artifact of Black culture. It was just so overwhelmingly known that the fact that it’s so overwhelmingly known in the opposite direction now is just such a fascinating thing.
Obviously, Africa is an enormous continent, and so people are being brought from different areas, put together, maybe not a common language, maybe not a common religion, but there were aspects of music and dance that started to coalesce around instruments that became known as the banjo. That’s the latest research. And it makes a lot of sense to me that it is a Creole instrument when it begins in the Caribbean, because the Caribbean was also the way station for so many enslaved people through which they ended up in the United States or down in South America.
A majority of them came through the Caribbean, so it makes sense that that instrument ended up in the United States as sort of an indelible emblem of enslaved life; and then later on after Emancipation, the character of the African American, the banjo was known as a cultural artifact of Black culture. It was just so overwhelmingly known that the fact that it’s so overwhelmingly known in the opposite direction now is just such a fascinating thing.
And by that, you mean that people think of the banjo as a white instrument?
Yeah, or even a white creation, like it was invented in the Appalachian Mountains by the Scotch-Irish. I mean, I’ve heard everything that you can imagine. And for me, I don’t get down on people for believing that, if that’s what they were told. But what it shows is how dangerous the transmission of knowledge can be if we don’t raise our level of discourse. We don’t have much nuance in how we talk about American culture, and American culture is endlessly complicated. There are so many layers; there are so many different people from all over the world … and that’s what makes it so beautiful.
I want to get a little bit more into the history of the banjo and its roots. You learned about one of the precursors to the banjo when you were in the Gambia two decades ago. I want to play a clip of a friend of yours, Daniel Djata, from Senegal, playing that instrument, and then have you tell us all about it and what you learned. What are we hearing there?
Well, you’re hearing akonting. Akonting is one of the numerous lute-like instruments that are all over West Africa and other parts of Africa. And there are so many. There’s the buchundu, the ngoni, the guembri … there are a lot of different instruments. And I think it’s really irresponsible to say that there’s one banjo ancestor. I think that’s impossible. I think we’ll never know exactly how we got the banjo in the Caribbean, but all of these instruments, if they’re not direct ancestors, they are kin. And that’s all I care about. Now, the akonting was my entryway in, because it is one of the few of these lute-type instruments that are all, kind of, from a class of instruments brought over by Arab traders, and it [itself] came from China. So, it’s like this huge mass movement of instruments from East to West. And you see these stringed lutes all over the place, and they all have different names, not just in Africa and Europe.
And the banjo — there’s only a few of these kinds of instruments that’s played with the back of the forefinger. The nail on the forefinger, and the thumb … that is how Daniel is playing. So, one of the old styles of playing the banjo — which we now call clawhammer — but which is called lots of different stuff, and that’s how I play, is played the same way that Daniel is playing that akonting. And I saw that when I met him at the Black Banjo Gathering in 2006. I saw that and heard it, and I was like, “Whoa.” And so, I went to the Gambia to study that for two weeks. The left hand was, you know, there’s a whole different ballgame because it’s a different scale, all this kind of stuff. But the right hand was exactly the same, and it was like, whoa. So, that was a real entryway for me. And there are only a few other instruments that I’ve come to know are played with the same right-hand technique, and they’re all in Africa. So, for me, it’s the style of play that’s even more of an ancestor. That for me is very powerful.
And the banjo — there’s only a few of these kinds of instruments that’s played with the back of the forefinger. The nail on the forefinger, and the thumb … that is how Daniel is playing. So, one of the old styles of playing the banjo — which we now call clawhammer — but which is called lots of different stuff, and that’s how I play, is played the same way that Daniel is playing that akonting. And I saw that when I met him at the Black Banjo Gathering in 2006. I saw that and heard it, and I was like, “Whoa.” And so, I went to the Gambia to study that for two weeks. The left hand was, you know, there’s a whole different ballgame because it’s a different scale, all this kind of stuff. But the right hand was exactly the same, and it was like, whoa. So, that was a real entryway for me. And there are only a few other instruments that I’ve come to know are played with the same right-hand technique, and they’re all in Africa. So, for me, it’s the style of play that’s even more of an ancestor. That for me is very powerful.
So, why was that so striking to you? Was it kind of like you saw this window into the past or something?
I mean, yeah! I mean, like, c’mon, we don’t get a lot of that as African Americans. There’s a very common sort of wall that hits you when you try to do your ancestry, you know? It’s like, if your ancestor was brought over and labeled as “Female, 15,” that’s it. You have no idea where she came from, you know what I mean? So, to have an embodied piece of connection like that, for me, was really, really powerful. That’s why it’s important to reach out to these musicians and go back across the ocean. But then they also want to connect back in the other direction. So that, for me, has been the work of recent years. It kind of started with Daniel in the Gambia, and that’s been really powerful.
You were originally trained as an opera singer, but since you picked up the banjo, you have played in many groups. You’re the artistic director of the global musicians collective, Silk Road Ensemble, founded by Yo-Yo Ma. You were a founding member of the folk band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and you also founded Our Native Daughters, which is a group of four Black female banjo players. And I want to talk about one of the songs from that group, “Better Git Yer Learnin’,” as it’s about the struggle for education for newly freed slaves.
This was an actual tune from the 1850s, and I threw the words away. In the grand tradition of this music, the words constantly were updated and changed and used politically and all this kind of stuff. So, I wrote what it would be if a Black person could actually say what was on his mind in one of these songs. And that’s partly why I’ve really investigated the music from that era, because there’s so much casual cruelty, there’s so much casual racism. That’s why that song sounds very sunny, but it’s —
I was gonna ask you about that. I mean, I understand that the tune was inspired by one performed at minstrel shows. They were white performers, often in blackface. Did you put these lyrics to such a cheery tune on purpose, or where did the inspiration come from there?
You know, I’m so far in it. I read about this stuff all the time. These words were terrible. The words to these songs were terrible, and they were casually terrible. So, I wanted to make this casually serious. I wanted to learn from Cousin Nick, but ah, well, he got strung up. You know what I mean? Because this was the life for people.
So, you’re saying that’s what the minstrel shows were — you know, they played on these terrible, offensive racist tropes — and you’re saying those were terrible lyrics, and so this is going to be a casually terrible telling of the truth.
Yeah, it punches you in the face before you’ve known it. Because you’re like, “Doo doo doo doo doo, oh, okay.” You know? And that’s kind of how I like to do it, because that’s kind of the tradition, you know? Like, “Oh Susanna,” the verse that nobody does has the N-word in it. And it’s just like, you turn around, you’re like, “Oh, oh, oh, okay. Great. That’s really nice.” I thought it was important to not shy away from that. I mean, it’s not gonna be a Top 40 hit. Nobody knows that song. But a lot of the work that I do, really engaging in a historical sense, is used by teachers, and it’s used by folks who are educating, and that makes me happy. I’m actually working on a project that uses all the tunes from this time, liberating them. I’m working with a musician from Congo who’s writing new songs on top of these tunes, and it’s just been incredible. So, that’s really my endgame. People don’t understand how racist this stuff was. I mean, people like to talk about blackface, but when you think about how long it was popular, how far it reached around the globe, how much it has affected and still affects our culture through things that we don’t even think about. There’s reams to be written on it, but I’m just doing what I can.
Rhiannon, the history of enslaved people is central to so much of your work. You wrote an opera called “Omar” with composer Michael Abels, which premiered in 2022. It is based on the life of a real enslaved man, a West African Muslim scholar. Just briefly tell us how you came across his story and what you learned about him.
Well, it was the marvelous folks at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina who actually approached me about it. I mean, they asked me if I knew his story, and I was like, “What? Who?” I grew up in North Carolina. This is the sad thing. This is a story that every schoolchild in North Carolina should know, and I’d never heard of Omar Ibn Said. So, when they offered me the chance to write an opera on it, I just grabbed it. I figured this has to happen because he’s such an incredible figure, and we’re just so lucky to know about him.
Was he the only enslaved man in the United States to write a biography or history in Arabic?
As far as I know, he was also the only enslaved person who we know of to have written their autobiography while they were still enslaved. He was never freed. And so, that is a remarkable thing. Also, he’s not the only man to write in Arabic, but his was the only autobiography. And just the amount that he could remember from the Quran, the choice of verse that he quoted … he was really saying a lot of things in the only way that he was allowed.
I’m going to make a hard turn here and ask you, because I have to, about Beyoncé. You played banjo and viola on “Texas Holdup,” which was on her 2024 album, “Cowboy Carter.” That whole album really amplified or started, in some circles, a conversation about the role of Black performers in shaping American country music historically. And you were asked to be on that album. How did it feel to be part of that?
I’m a banjo player, and when I’m asked to play the banjo, I’m going play it. I’ve never met Beyoncé, you know what I mean? For me, it was an opportunity to have greater exposure in the Black community, because [with the] mainstream Black community, there was not a lot of interest in what I’ve been doing, which is fine, neither in mainstream culture nor in general. So, I’m always trying to find the folks like me who want to come into this music. I just want to be available to them. So that, for me, it was an opportunity to reach out of where I have been sort of sequestered in my NPR world, you know. And I did that. I did it for the mission.
You have said that the history of the banjo you teach is an inclusionary history. It is not exclusionary. Why is that a point that you feel needs to be made?
Because we — you know what we do: “Oh, are you saying we can’t have that? Are you saying it’s not ours anymore?” And I’m just like, “No, actually, the actual history is really interesting.” It’s actually more inclusive, because I always say the banjo is everybody’s instrument. The banjo belongs to everyone because everybody played the banjo. The banjo didn’t just exist in the Appalachian Mountains. The banjo was everywhere. The banjo was being played in the cities. It was being played in military bands. It was being played in Ivy League banjo orchestras. It was being played on the streets; it was being played in the mountains; it was being played in Australia; in people’s parlors; out in the fields; by the river. Some of the early ragtime music was played on banjo first, you know. Scott Joplin’s mother was a banjo player. The banjo is everywhere. It is how people who had nothing — Black, white, brown, whatever — could make a culture.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The post Rhiannon Giddens discusses the history of the banjo and its African roots appeared first on The World from PRX.
