Terry Gross interviewed Rhiannon Giddens in 2017 and it was repeated on June 19, 2020.

Today's first guest is singer and songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, who has devoted much of her career to finding and interpreting music from the African American tradition. She grew up in the South in North Carolina. Her mother is African American. Her father is white. He sang classical music. Giddens studied opera at Oberlin, but she found her musical identity after graduation, when she started playing string-band music from the African-American tradition, songs from the 1920s and '30s. She co-founded the band The Carolina Chocolate Drops and also released several solo albums.

Her latest album, "There Is No Other," is a collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. It was released last year. Her solo album before that, "Freedom Highway," included songs she wrote based on slave narratives. That album from 2017 also included a song called "Better Get It Right The First Time," which sadly couldn't be more timely. She wrote it in respones to police shootings of young black men who weren't committing crimes.

Terry Gross interviewed Rhiannon Giddens when that album was released, and Giddens brought her banjo to the studio to accompany herself while singing some songs. But before we revisit their conversation, let's hear a track from "Freedom Highway." The song is called "Come Love Come" and was inspired by slave narratives.

I think it was in this interview that she discussed no longer using the term "slave," but instead using "enslaved persons."