Episode 6: The Soul of Music: Rhiannon Giddens excavates the past

This episode is part one of The Soul of Music—Overheard’s four-part series focusing on music, exploration, and Black history. Our guest this week is two-time Grammy Award winner Rhiannon Giddens, a singer, songwriter, and banjo and fiddle player. A self-described “armchair historian,” Rhiannon chats with Nat Geo Explorer and spoken-word poet Alyea Pierce about the origins of the banjo, her new opera Omar, and how she finds inspiration through history.

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TRANSCRIPT

KHARI DOUGLAS (HOST): Hey there, I’m Khari Douglas. I’m a producer here at Overheard and today we’ve got something special for you: part one of our four-part series focusing on music, exploration, and Black history. It’s called The Soul of Music, and National Geographic Explorers will be sitting down with some of our favorite musicians to discuss how history and the natural world inspires their art and adventures.

Today, singer and songwriter Rhiannon Giddens chats with Explorer Alyea Pierce. Rhiannon is a co-founder of the old-time string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. She’s a two-time Grammy Award winner—in 2022 she won Best Folk Album for They're Calling Me Home—and she’s a banjo and fiddle player.

RHIANNON GIDDENS (MUSICIAN): My name is Rhiannon Giddens, and I am a musician and kind of a performing historian, sort of an armchair historian, I suppose.

DOUGLAS: Nowadays Rhiannon lives in Ireland, but she was born and raised in North Carolina. And growing up she was surrounded by the sounds of bluegrass, folk, and country music—genres that all prominently feature the banjo in their sound. It sounds like this—that backing track you’re hearing right now—and it sort of looks like a guitar but with a circular, drum-like body.

For a host of reasons that we’ll get into, these genres and subsequently the banjo, have stereotypically been considered “white people music.”

Rhiannon is biracial. Her dad is white, and her mom is Black, so she says she sometimes felt like an outsider in folk and bluegrass music. But when she started researching the history of the banjo, she found herself more firmly connected with her roots.

GIDDENS: Being a musician from North Carolina that was investigating the music of North Carolina, gave me a place as a mixed person that I hadn’t really felt like I had.

DOUGLAS: See, the banjo has a complicated history. It’s descended from gourd-based instruments that were brought over to the Americas by enslaved Africans.

GIDDENS: It’s created in the Caribbean and it travels up to the United States with enslaved people and becomes a staple of life.

DOUGLAS: This week, Rhiannon sits down with National Geographic Explorer and spoken-word poet Alyea Pierce to discuss the origins of the banjo and how history inspires Rhiannon’s music. Alyea was a contributor to the award–winning National Geographic podcast Into the Depths, which followed Explorer Tara Roberts and other Black scuba divers across the world as they searched for buried shipwrecks from the transatlantic slave trade.

When they sat down to talk, Alyea told Rhiannon she had written a poem inspired by her music and the banjo.

ALYEA PIERCE (EXPLORER/POET): I’m a poet; music is a big key influence for my writing. And so I actually wrote a piece inspired by the banjo, and I dedicate this poem to the work that you do, because I was actually listening to a lot of your music as I was writing this. So this is called, “They’re Calling Me Home.”

They’re calling me home

to sawmill tune history

Conjure

ancestral spirits to strum

soul sounds to help folks remember

this body of music

how our bodies are muuuuu-sic

How our hearts cultivated the rich soil of country

How the centuries of blues were also a blessing

How the pickin’ of the five strings reaches…hallelujah high vibrations

They’re calling me home

to bridge the truth

and

transform

the tone of what Black revolution and global connection

means to banjo

GIDDENS: Woo. Love it. So good.

PIERCE: Thank you.

GIDDENS: Oh my God. It’s so good.

PIERCE: So I hope I got some of that language right.

GIDDENS: Hallelujah. (Laughs.)

DOUGLAS: This is Overheard at National Geographic, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world.

More with Rhiannon and Alyea after the break.

But first, fuel your curiosity with a free one-month trial subscription to Nat Geo Digital. You’ll have unlimited access on any device, anywhere, ad-free with our app that lets you download stories to read offline. Explore every page ever published with a century of digital archives at your fingertips. Check it all out for free at natgeo.com/exploremore.

PIERCE: All right, Rhiannon, I want to kind of get into the conversation of the banjo a bit. The banjo has such an interesting history. Could you tell me just a little bit about that?

GIDDENS: So the banjo’s true origins are, you know, recently becoming more and more sort of center stage when you talk about the history of American music. And that’s great because for a very long time there was this assumption that the banjo was about the whitest instrument that you could possibly imagine, you know, and that it was invented in the holler and played by hillbillies, you know, which in and of itself is a stereotype. And in actuality, it is actually an instrument created by the African diaspora. It is important to say that it’s not African. It is actually an instrument of the African diaspora. If you want to say African-American in terms of the broadness of South America all the way up to North America and the Caribbean in between– But it is created by people from Africa in the new world. And so it really is an American, a Caribbean, an Afro-Caribbean, you know, a diasporic, African diasporic instrument.

And there are ancestors to the banjo that exist all over Africa, particularly West Africa. And there’s not one that can say it is the one ancestor. There’s loads of instruments and they’re all in the DNA of all the different banjos that were sort of invented in the Caribbean in the like, what, 15-, 1600s? And so it was known as a Black instrument solely for a long time.

And it wasn’t until the 1800s, the early 1800s, that it really starts to crossover in a way that we know about. And obviously there’s a million different interactions of people over hundreds of years, and there could be a white person who picked up a banjo at some point that we never knew in 1701; we don’t know. But we do know in the early 1800s, that’s when it really starts to migrate. And Joel Sweeney is the first white guy that we know of to really to really be a banjo player, a white banjo player. But before this, it was really mostly known as a Black instrument.

PIERCE: Where did this associating with whiteness come in? Because as a Black artist, as a Black woman artist, I feel like this disservice, like I haven’t known the truth. So where did this associating with whiteness happen?

GIDDENS: Yeah. I mean, this is the same feeling I had when I found out. I was like, What? And then immediately on the heels of that, it was like, Oh, what else don’t I know? What else haven’t they told me? You know? And it really kind of opened my eyes to the idea of history as a reflection of the time that it’s written in and not necessarily a reflection of what actually happened.

It’s a long history—like the idea of history and who’s writing it and what angle are they writing it from? So the history of the banjo really becomes part of this mythical white cultural identity that was really heavily rooted in Anglo-Saxon ballads and also some Celtic stuff, too. I mean, that becomes part of the picture, particularly later. But in the beginning it was really this idea of pushing back against what was seen as like the jungle music of like blues and jazz.

People like Cecil Sharp come over, who was an ethnomusicologist from England, to collect these ballads that they had found still surviving in the mountains. And these ballads were versions of ballads that had been sung in England hundreds of years before. So they’re all like, freaking out, like, Oh, my gosh. This culture has been unadulterated, isolated in the mountains for hundreds—Yeah, right. You know there’s no isolation, right? There’s no isolation. There are Black people living in the Appalachian Mountains, right? Particularly up until the Great Migration.

There’s just all this mixing going on, but the narrative is that it’s this like pure white identity and the banjo becomes part of that. The story of it being in Black hands is basically erased. Black string bands are not recorded during the beginning of the recording industry. There was also this concerted effort in the early folk festivals and like fiddle conventions. This is considering that Black people had been playing fiddle and banjo for a long time and were really, really good at it and were well known to be like some of the best musicians in the area, but they weren’t allowed to enter. They weren’t highlighted in these festivals. And so when you go back to the beginning of the folk festival movement, where are the Black people? You know, they weren’t invited.

PIERCE: So I want to jump to, kind of, the mechanics of the banjo for a second. I understand that a five-string banjo has what’s called, like, a drone string. What is a drone string, if you could kind of tell us?

GIDDENS: So the idea of a drone—and it’s in lots of different kinds of music systems all over the world like right now—this idea that if you sing a melody and there’s a drone that’s going on, it stays in the same key and it’s a real linear melody. It’s not necessarily thinking of stacking notes and creating chords. It’s like there’s this underlying,

(Sings): Mmmm, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da, mmmm.

You can just hear that, right? So, like, just in general, that’s what a drone is. And so the banjo has this short string that you cannot fret.

So when you make a note on a string instrument, you hold your finger down on it and it changes the pitch, right? And that’s how you make all the different sounds. But a drone string on the banjo doesn’t—you can’t do that. It just stays the same note. So if you want to change it, you actually have to tune it, which means you have to stop playing to do that. So you can’t do that in the middle of a song. So that means you really have to play in one key, which is very much as you want in a lot of different, particularly, like, Middle Eastern music, African music.

European music is very much based on chords, where you stack two or three or four notes and then you move. The motion is very top to bottom rather than left to right. And so the banjo doesn’t really fit in that chordal system. It’s very much connected to those other styles in [the] Middle East and West Africa, because it’s connected to this vast line of instruments that goes all the way back to China through the Middle East, through Africa.

The other thing that the fifth string does is that it creates syncopation—

PIERCE: OK.

GIDDENS: —because you have five strings. Especially in the very old style, which is called stroke style, clawhammer, frailing, or whatever. It goes all the way back to like some playing styles in West Africa. You know, it’s very much the thumb is on the fifth string and you’re striking single strings with your index finger and it just creates syncopation. Like you can’t—it’s very hard to not play with some kind of syncopation with that fifth string. So it is really inherent in what the banjo is and what the banjo has contributed to American music.

PIERCE: So I have a song of yours that I want to play a clip from and then ask you about. The song is called “At the Purchaser's Option.”

(“At the Purchaser’s Option” by Rhiannon Giddens plays)

I’ve got a babe but shall I keep him

’Twill come the day when I’ll be weepin’

But how can I love him any less

This little babe upon my breast

PIERCE: So break this song down for me. What is it about?

GIDDENS: It’s part of a larger collection of pieces written from the world of slavery. I wrote songs from slave narratives, and this one in particular was from the ephemera that surrounds slavery, the everyday evil. The quotidian nature of a system that was completely hand in glove with how we made money.

(“At the Purchaser’s Option” plays)

You can take my body

You can take my bones

You can take my blood

But not my soul

You can take my body

You can take my bones

You can take my blood

But not my soul

GIDDENS: And so I was looking through advertisements for people. They were, you know, you put an ad in the paper for somebody to sell them. And this is the thing that I always want to try to impress upon people, is that they don’t understand, because I didn’t understand, that people were cash. Black people were cash. You know, it was like you can have affection for that car and you can love that car, but if you need to pay a bill, you’re going to sell that car. And that’s what happened with people. It was like, Oh, Jill, love ya but got to go, you know? And it’s complicated, and it’s not to say that people were complete automatons, but like that was deeply rooted in the culture. And that’s what you see in the signs that say slave auction or runaway ads or this kind of thing, ads for dogs that are really good at catching slaves.

This is the stuff that I started getting into, and I found this one ad about this young woman who was for sale. She’s 22 years old. And it was the end of the ad, it said she has with her a nine-month-old baby who is at the purchaser’s option. It’s like, what do you do with that? What do you do with that? It’s like, it’s so epically horrific that it—just the very banal nature of those words, you know what I mean? At the purchaser’s option.

So I wrote a song just to do something with that. I wrote a song about her, just trying to think of the world that she lives in. How did she survive? How did she get up? How do you open your eyes and decide to get up and feed your nine-month-old knowing that tomorrow they would be gone? How do you do it?

This song came out of me exploring that and trying to hold her up and to think about her. I don’t know her name. I’ll never know her name, but I know that it took an amazing act of courage to face the day every day, and so [I] just tried to crawl into that space.

PIERCE: I think that’s the difficult thing about Black history in itself, is that there are so many names that are lost. So many names that have been forgotten, intentionally erased. Just even the idea of names. So you’ll never know that name. And so I’m wondering, how did you even find that ad?

GIDDENS: On the web. I do a lot of my research on the computer because so many things are digitized now. It’s a really amazing era for—as horrific as social media is and these other things, it also has allowed people like me to do the kind of research that previously would have been, you have to be at a university with a degree and the time to go sit through the stacks, you know; whereas, I can visit universities virtually and see what they have online.

And so there’s a lot of these advertisements. There’s a lot of, there’s like a whole collection of runaway slave ads. Freedom on the Move, which is—they’ve been taken and made into poems and lyrics, and now that’s going to be a concert of music. People are creating things from this. And it’s important because we have so little. When you look at African-American history, we have so little. And so every little bit we have is big.

And we’re finding these things like these runaway ads. There’s an incredible amount of detail in these ads. That’s how we found out a load of people played the fiddle and the banjo that ran away because they had a way to make money. It was one of the few ways that wasn’t like totin’ and fetchin’ that you could actually make a living. And so it’s important to not discard these things and to look at them through the lens of, we know that these were white people putting the stuff in the paper for reasons that are not great, but we need to take it and turn it around and go, this is information.

And the idea of the names. You know, I’ve tried to address that where I can. So my song that’s from a slave narrative, from the book called The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward—I wrote a song called “Julie,” and in that it’s a conversation between a Black woman and the woman who thinks that she owns her. And so Julie has a name and the mistress does not. And that was important for me. And I do it wherever I can. I even tried it in my opera Omar. (Laughs.)

I tried to give all the white people, like, non-names, and they said, You can’t do that because some of these people are historical and they actually existed. And I was like, Dang it. You know? So everybody got a name. You got a name and you got a name and you get a name. But, I tried to think about that where I can, because it’s just such a massive thing.

PIERCE: I have another song that I want to play a clip from. This song is called “Build a House.”

(“Build A House” by Rhiannon Giddens featuring Yo-Yo Ma plays)

You brought me here to build your house, build your house, build your house

You brought me here build your house and grow your garden fine

I laid the brick and built your house, built your house, built your house

I laid the brick and built your house, raised the plants so high

PIERCE: Again, break this song down for me. What is it about?

GIDDENS: This song is one that I wrote during the lockdown or during the kind of height of the pandemic and the height of the protests after George Floyd’s murder. And I was here in Ireland, kind of, feeling very stuck. You know, I couldn’t get home. I mean, this is a home, but it’s obviously not my birth home. And I was just feeling the strife that was happening in the United States and wanting to be, I don’t know, of use.

(“Build A House” plays)

I found a place to build my house, build my house, build my house

I found a place build my house since I couldn’t go back home

You said I couldn’t build a house, build a house, build a house

You said I couldn’t build a house, so you burned it down

Just watching all this stuff and the commentary and trying to explain to my children why I was crying. I just like, I got really mad. I was like, What do y’all want? You brought us here, you know, to build this shit. Pardon my French. You brought us here to build this stuff, and now you’re mad that we’re still here, you know? And that became the first line: You brought me here to build your house.

And it’s in very, very simple ballad language, this kind of 300-, 400-year history in three minutes. And the big point of it was to just, I don’t know, do something with all this emotion, again. And in all the history of the stuff that I’ve read, and it’s kind of like 15 years of frustration in one song. And Yo-Yo Ma reached out to me, the cellist reached out to me. It was really close to Juneteenth, and said, You want to do something for Juneteenth? And I said, I just wrote this song. And he said, Sounds great, let’s do it. And we did it. And we put it out there and, you know, it made me feel a little bit better, I don’t know.

And it’s now a children’s book, which is really exciting, with beautiful artwork by Monica Mikai, this fabulous artist. And I’ve done some readings and stuff and it’s really interesting how kids get it. ’Cause you might think this is a song about slavery. Like, Oh, how do you do that? And it’s like, people get it, kids get it. They see what’s happening. They’re like, That’s not fair. I’m like, Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s not fair. And like, that’s not right and that’s not cool.

And so that’s been really an amazing example to me of how things can live in different areas. So many ballads and history songs and whatnot, are like teaching songs. They’re like a moral or something that you can remember because it’s set to music and it rhymes and it’s really easy to remember and to take a song and to break it down and put images with it. And then you go, Yeah, that’s what these songs are for. It’s like creating a new ballad, creating new historical songs or something, you know?

It ends with, “I Shall Not Be Moved” [or] “I Will Not Be Moved,” which I learned from a mentor of mine—the guy who really is the reason why I’m sitting here talking to you—Joe Thompson, who is one of the old, one of the last Black fiddlers of the old tradition. You know, he was 86 when I met him. And he is the elder of what I do. He’s dead now. But I got a good handful of years with him. And he taught us the song “I Shall Not Be Moved,” which is a very common song that’s been used for the Civil Rights Movement. But I always think of him. He just lived his life, played his fiddle, was in his community. And, you know, didn’t stud’ them people. You know, so when I sing that and I get to that last part, I think of him. I was like, he created a life. He lived a good life, and he thrived in a soil that he was planted into. You know, his line. And why should we go anywhere, you know?

PIERCE: Absolutely.

GIDDENS: The roots go deep. It’s been a few hundred years. The roots are deep. So, we’re not ripping them up now! (Laughs.)

PIERCE: You recently wrote and composed the opera Omar about a West African man who was brought to America as a slave. Tell me a little bit about Omar. What inspired you to write an opera about him?

GIDDENS: I was commissioned to write Omar by the folks at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. I’d never heard of him. I was a North Carolinian, born and raised, never heard of Omar. Like legit, one of our most famous enslaved people, and I never heard of him. I was just livid. And these folks asked me to write an opera about Omar Ibn Said. And I was like, Y’all better go ahead! Aight, you know?

Omar was a Quranic scholar. He was 37 when he was sold, and he has to start completely over in this new world that’s full of violence, and nobody speaks his language. Nobody worships the way that he worships the God that he worships. And, again, how do you get through that? How do you claim a life within that? And how did he stay true to his religion, and write his autobiography in Arabic 20 years after he landed?

I felt a lot of responsibility. I still do, very, very much, wanting to figure out, what is my lens here? What is my journey as a—I’m not Muslim, I’m not West African. I’m not a man. I don’t study the Quran. There’s so many things that I’m not. And I kept having to go back to, I have to tell the story that I can tell with respect and knowledge—as much knowledge as I can gain—and to also really kind of let the spirit guide me.

PIERCE: Yeah. I think that’s the delicious thing about being an artist is that you can imagine with a cultural piece, right? I think when you’re a part of, in some aspects, a part of the African diaspora, it allows us to imagine with this cultural foundation. It’s joyous work. It’s heavy work. It’s again—we’re going to keep using this word complex. I think it’s complex work, but I think it’s beautiful that we’re in a time where we’re seeing Black people in the U.S. actually being involved in their own excavation.

GIDDENS: Yes. Yes, this is it. It’s like it’s cultural archeology. That’s what we’re doing. And it is just like you’ve got a field with some circles in it. And that’s how you know it was a castle, right? And you have to dig and you find these shards. And from the shard you extrapolate a freaking vase, right? Which is what they do because of the curvature of the thing and this and whatnot, and what they know of what was in the soil. And then they find this blue piece of glass that obviously had to come from like 3,000 miles away. And, you know, it tells you a lot about what was happening.

It’s the exact same thing with this music, except for we have to find the negative space around because, of course, music is here and gone. So it’s like finding the imprint that the music left, the imprint that these lives left in these sorts of bits and pieces. And it is great to see us there.

And it’s the only way forward. It’s the only way forward, is that we all have to be at the table. It’s not like just Black people should do this now; it’s like all of us should do this. There’s a team effort because it is all of our legacy, you know, and it’s not just Black and white. It’s also red, you know, talking about Native people, talking about other immigrant populations. You know, the music that was made by Armenian refugees in California and Jewish folks in New York and Chinese people in Texas or whatever. I mean, it’s like it’s super beautiful when it comes to that kind of thing. Obviously, the reason why people left isn’t beautiful ever. But, you know, we as musicians, as artists, as writers, we find the joy in the despair. And that’s how we keep going.

PIERCE: Do you see musicians as being translators in some sense, either in terms of translating history or translating emotion? Are they translators?

GIDDENS: I think artists create a shortcut. I think they create an emotional bridge for the listener into an emotion, a thought, a feeling. And I think that it’s an important job, but I am very sad for the fact that we need that. Because what it means is that people don’t create those emotional bridges for themselves, because we have de-arted everyday life. We’ve separated it. We’ve commodified it.

The amount of people that have come to the singing workshops that I’ve given who were like, Yeah, I was told I couldn’t sing. I was told I couldn’t play. I shouldn’t make music because I wasn’t very good at it. Leave it to the professionals. And that stuff kills my heart. It kills my heart because we don’t, you don’t need to go to the movies and the concerts and to watch TV all the time if you’re in the act of making art in your own life more, you know?

It’s not to say that there are some people who are really good at making art, and yes, pay them to do something that you are never going to be able to do, and you go enjoy that and that’s awesome. But like the everyday magic of singing a song or playing a tune or writing a poem or, you know, writing a story just to do it, not to make money at it, but just to do it? That’s what we’re missing, I feel.

And I think that we need more of that in, you know—put the music back in the schools, turn the TV off, and go learn how to play a really simple tune, really crappily on the piano. You know, it doesn’t have to be awesome, but it just needs to bring people joy, you know? So anyway, I’m a real proponent of, like, make us less necessary.

PIERCE: Ooh, that’s a mic drop moment there. (Laughs.)

DOUGLAS: That was Explorer Alyea Pierce in conversation with musician Rhiannon Giddens.

If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That’s the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe.

Learn more about Rhiannon and her music, the opera Omar, and her children’s book, Build a House, at her website, rhiannongiddens.com. That’s spelled R-H-I-A-N-N-O-N G-I-D-D-E-N-S. And you can follow her on Twitter @RhiannonGiddens.

You can follow National Geographic Explorer Alyea Pierce at her instagram @alyeaspierce. That’s spelled A-L-Y-E-A-S-P-I-E-R-C-E.

That’s all in your show notes, right there in your podcast app.

CREDITS

This week’s Overheard episode is produced by me, Khari Douglas.

Our senior producers are Brian Gutierrez and Jacob Pinter.

Our senior editor is Eli Chen.

Our manager of audio is Carla Wills, who edited this episode.

Our executive producer of audio is Davar Ardalan.

Our photo editor is Julie Hau.

Ted Woods sound-designed this episode and Hansdale Hsu composed our theme music.

The Soul of Music series is produced in collaboration with National Geographic Music.

Special thanks to Hannah Grace Vancleave, Jennifer Stilson, and Brittany Grier.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners.

The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world, funds the work of National Geographic Explorer Alyea Pierce.

Michael Tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling.

Nathan Lump is National Geographic’s editor in chief.

Thanks for listening, and see ya next time.

SHOW NOTES

Want more?

Learn more about Rhiannon and her music, opera, and children’s book at her website, rhiannongiddens.com. And you can follow her on Twitter @RhiannonGiddens.

You can follow National Geographic Explorer Alyea Pierce at her Instagram @alyeaspierce.

Also explore: 

Listen to the National Geographic podcast Into the Depths to hear more of Alyea’s poetry and follow Explorer Tara Roberts on a journey to document sunken slave ships in the Atlantic.

Learn about how music is used to heal the sick in Appalachia in this Nat Geo article.

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please consider a National Geographic subscription. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe today.