Quotes from Rhiannon Giddens

Ibn Said's autobiography is an extraordinary work, and his story is one that's absolutely crucial to tell.

I don't want to go on a talk show and talk about stuff I don't know about.

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.

Each song has its own way that it likes to be done, but it can be more than one way. If you tap into it, you can feel it.

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn't have to do anything.

It's kind of remarkable, everything that's happened to me. It's been such a whirlwind, but in a good way.

The question is not how do we get diversity into bluegrass, but how do we get diversity back into bluegrass?

You have to find the balance of figuring out how can I be effective? How can I use my platform for good, you know, without jeopardizing everything so that I don't have that platform anymore.

I always felt culturally adrift as a child because I'm mixed race. I've had to deal with that since I was little. Who am I? What makeup do I have? What are the black and the white?

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.

There is a black folk music audience. They're just very small.

People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.

My life used to be record, tour, record, tour. You can never say no as a freelance musician. I was on the road 200 days a year.

I like Queen Latifah.

I don't have a genre because I play lots of different music that people would say are different genres.

I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the '90s, especially the women who were so strong, like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. It's a great art form.

For me the bare feet are grounding. I'm connected to the Earth in a way that I cannot be any other way.

I would be thrilled with anybody who cites my work as something that inspired them.

Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.

In the commercial music world, the folk world, we sell records and concert tickets - this is the way I make a living. You go out, you make your art and hopefully people will put their money down for it. But it's getting hard. I have to be on the road so much to keep the lights on.

I kind of have found my identity through the music, through the roots music of North Carolina, and kind of realized that that's my identity as a North Carolinian.

To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.

You know, I really feel a responsibility to the music, and I teach workshops in music sometimes. And folks do come to me and they go, 'How do I make this blues song my own? How do I feel like I'm not an impostor doing this?' And I'm like, 'That's an excellent question.' That's where you should start, where you go, 'How does this speak to me?'

Being mixed in the South, that's a struggle that everybody deals with differently. Some people go careening to one side or the other, and some people try to walk a tightrope between the two. I grew up spending equal time with both sides of my family.