I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.
Interpretation
Rhiannon Giddens expresses her desire to give voice to untold stories from the Civil War era through her music.
In this quote, Rhiannon Giddens reflects on her creative process of reinterpreting traditional folk songs and composing new pieces that imagine the voices and experiences of marginalized groups during the Civil War. She emphasizes the importance of resurrecting silenced narratives, particularly those of black individuals who were historically overlooked in mainstream music and culture, thereby highlighting the urgent need to acknowledge and celebrate their stories through artistic expression.
In practice
During a lecture on music history, this quote can be used to illustrate how artists reshape narratives.
When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.
I think it's important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.
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.
The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?
One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
Nobody taught me to play bottleneck. I just saw it and taught myself. I got an old bottle and steamed the label off, put it on the wrong finger, I basically did everything wrong until I met some of the Blues legends early in my career who taught me another way. I didn't have anyone to tell me women didn't play bottleneck.
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
With Saint Heron, I really wanted to celebrate and continue to cultivate the community for genre-defying R&B artists.
Rock and roll isn't a career or hobby - it's a life force ... it's just something I have to do.
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?
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