Rhiannon Giddens

I'm still black in the eyes of America.

— Rhiannon Giddens

I like Queen Latifah.

— Rhiannon Giddens

History is my biggest teacher.

— Rhiannon Giddens

I couldn't stand the politics in opera.

— Rhiannon Giddens

I think songs can have different lives.

— Rhiannon Giddens

I decided to study music my last year in high school.

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

I'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.

— Rhiannon Giddens

When you are a commercial music artist, your music depends on your popularity.

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

The truth, the real history, is way more interesting and representative of what America actually is.

— Rhiannon Giddens

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant…

— Rhiannon Giddens

I'm discovering so much about how invisible, othered and dismissed the Islamic world is, in terms of the massive effects it had…

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

I wouldn't be out here touring constantly if I didn't hope that my music was going to do something to somebody.

— Rhiannon Giddens

I'm really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found…

— Rhiannon Giddens

At some point you have to take responsibility for who you are and where you are and being able to listen to…

— Rhiannon Giddens

I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the…

— Rhiannon Giddens

I don't consider myself at the kind of stature of somebody who can play five cities on a tour, and that's it.…

— Rhiannon Giddens

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion…

— 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…

— Rhiannon Giddens

In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative…

— Rhiannon Giddens

We're not here as a black band playing white string band music. You know, we play stuff in the Appalachians, we play…

— Rhiannon Giddens

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…

— Rhiannon Giddens

You know, I really feel a responsibility to the music, and I teach workshops in music sometimes. And folks do come to…

— Rhiannon Giddens

Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.

— Rhiannon Giddens

Nobody can know what their legacy is going to be, you know?

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

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

— Rhiannon Giddens

Music affects people in a way that bare facts can't.

— Rhiannon Giddens