Thursday, March 16, 2023

Rhiannon Giddens - Women's History Month -16

Rhiannon Giddens

I first saw Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops in a free outdoor concert at Lake Tomahawk back around 2017 or so. I loved her talent and the many ways she expressed it through different instruments, as well as her opera-trained voice.

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The following comes from her own web page as well as Wikipedia.

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The acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present.

She is a founding member of the country, blues and old-time music band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, where she is the lead singer, fiddle player, and banjo player.

A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient,.[...] she recently won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for They're Calling Me Home, which she made with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. Giddens is now a two-time winner and eight-time Grammy nominee for her work as a soloist and collaborator. The MacArthur Genius Grant said "Giddens's drive to understand and convey the nuances, complexities, and interrelationships between musical traditions is enhancing our musical present with a wealth of sounds and textures from the past.

Giddens’ lifelong mission is to lift up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins..,,,

Smithsonian Magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black.”

Giddens was featured in Ken Burns’s Country Music series, which aired on PBS, where she spoke about the African American origins of country music.

Giddens is of multiracial ancestry. Her father, David Giddens, is European-American. Her mother, Deborah Jamieson, is a descendant of African Americans and Native American tribes including the Lumbee, Occaneechi, and Seminole.

Giddens is an alumna of the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics,^[8] and a 2000 graduate of Oberlin Conservatory at Oberlin College, where she studied opera. Giddens earned an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for her lasting impact on the UNCG community and work in music. She sang "Calling me Home" by Alice Gerrard at a virtual commencement after accepting the degree in December 2020.^[

For the 2020 Spoleto Festival USA, Rhiannon Giddens was commissioned to create an opera based on the Arabic language autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a highly literate and cultured Torodbe (Muslim cleric) from the Fula people of modern Senegal, who was enslaved in an intertribal war against the Imamate of Futa Toro and brought aboard a slave ship to Charleston, South Carolina in 1807.^[44] Giddens wrote the libretto and served as lead composer with help from co-composer Michael Abels. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world premiere of Omar was postponed until 2022. in 2023 she wond the Society of Composers & Lyricists Award for Omar.

In July 2020, Giddens was named Artistic Director of the cross-cultural music organization Silkroad (arts organization). The position had been vacant since 2017 when Silkroad's founder, Yo-Yo Ma, stepped down.

Here she sings "I'm on my Way."