Subject: Rhiannon Giddens - an appreciation
From:
Stilly River Sage
Date: 20 May 23 - 03:16 PM
After listening to a YouTube recording of a singer recommended in a different thread today I got distracted by their recommendations and history. YouTube is good about suggesting past and new performances related to my interests and it is a deep rabbit hole to dive into. I noticed today just how many types of performances I've enjoyed by Rhiannon Giddens. She is certainly a musical polymath. There are a lot of threads here on Mudcat in which she discussed, but I'd like to see all of those different interests pulled into one place.
This from Wikipedia gives you a clue to her range. The first two paragraphs:
Rhiannon Giddens (born February 21, 1977) is an American musician known for her eclectic folk music. She is a founding member of the country, blues, and old-time music band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, where she was the lead singer, fiddle player, and banjo player.
Giddens is a native of Greensboro, North Carolina. In addition to her work with the Grammy-winning[1] Chocolate Drops, Giddens has released two solo albums: Tomorrow Is My Turn (2015) and Freedom Highway (2017). Her 2019 and 2021 albums, There Is No Other and They're Calling Me Home are collaborations with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. She appears in the Smithsonian Folkways collection documenting Mike Seeger's final trip through Appalachia in 2009, Just Around The Bend: Survival and Revival in Southern Banjo Styles – Mike Seeger’s Last Documentary (2019).[2] In 2014, she participated in the T Bone Burnett-produced project titled The New Basement Tapes along with several other musicians, which set a series of recently discovered Bob Dylan lyrics to newly composed music. The resulting album, Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, was a top-40 Billboard album.
In 2023, the opera Omar, co-written by Giddens and Michael Abels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.[3]
She started in opera at Oberlin Conservatory and the same time she participated in Scottish traditional music competitions, and she plays fiddle and banjo. How could she not succeed in so many areas of music?
From her own site RhiannonGiddens.com in the "About" section
As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”
Take a tour down YouTube - she's fearless when it comes to different types of music and partnering with a range of performers.
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sj
