Quotes from Rhiannon Giddens

When I do Gaelic music, I've learned about Gaelic culture; I've tried to learn the language. Whenever I do mouth music and there's Gaelic speakers in the audience, and they come up and go, 'Good job,' I'm always like, 'Phew.'

There is music out there that is commercially driven, whether you like it or not. That's a peculiarly American innovation. We innovated the commercial music business.

Separation in culture and arts does nobody any favors except for the people in power. That's just it... So I feel like I'm in the business of challenging that narrative.

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.

We have been fed so many false narratives, many of them racialized to deliberately feed a racist agenda. It's important to address and dig into that wherever you can.

I love the U.K. folk scene. In the States, nobody knows what to do with me. There's still a very narrow definition of Americana.

My stuff lives in Nashville but I live wherever my children are.

To sit in my concert and be uncomfortable is brave. Because you could always leave, you know?

I couldn't stand the politics in opera.

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.

We have to talk about the negativity, but we have to enjoy the beauty of what this country, culturally, has done.

I'm really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.

I'm a North Carolina native. Grew up in North Carolina.

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

I'm not an urban black person. I'm a country black person.

I stood on people's shoulders, so I want to be there for somebody else to take it even further.

There are people who have incredible stories that we don't talk about. People who did amazing things, men and women who faced incredible odds, and there's nothing wrong with them being heroes for once, you know?

Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.

I mean, my training at Oberlin has been absolutely valuable.

I had this dream like years ago. I had this dream - I wanted to be in an all-black string band.

That was the special thing about the Carolina Chocolate Drops. We didn't want to do music full-time. We weren't looking to get rich, which is good, because we didn't. But we went further than we thought we would go. We started that band to celebrate Joe Thompson and the black string band music. That's not really a recipe for commercial success.

We're not here as a black band playing white string band music. You know, we play stuff in the Appalachians, we play stuff in the white community, but we really highlight the black community's music.

My dad's white, my mom's black, and I've struggled with being mixed race.

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.