This past Spring, Rhiannon Giddens – banjo player, violinist, and lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops - opened the annual Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee with a powerful speech on race, folk music, and what unites and defines us as Americans. Listen to the complete audio above, and read the transcript below.

(singing)

Good afternoon. My name is Rhiannon Giddens, and I learned "Pretty Saro" from Sheila Kay Adams from the western part of North Carolina, deep in the Appalachian Mountains. And I've spent most of my musical career investigating what it means to be an American, and what it means to play American music, and who gets to tell the stories, and whose stories are we leaving out? It's an honor to be talking to you at this this wonderful festival. This festival which not only crosses boundaries, it completely ignores them. It dances over their graves.

It's a bit of everything, this festival, just like me. I'm sure people often asked Ashley Capps, but what kind of music are you putting in this festival? What kind of festival is it? How do I know if I will like it if you don't tell me what kind it is? And I understand this. I really do. I understand his pain with any attempted characterization of his festival. Because it's something I've lived with my entire life.

I grew up with The Question. Yes, you heard that right, that phrase would be in italics if you were reading this. Italics, and bold, perhaps, with a very long footnote. The Question is what I see in people's eyes when I first meet them. And after name exchanges and shallow pleasantries they pause. It's a pause that's about six months in its gestation, gravid and expectant. And it stretches. And here it comes, in a few different forms. There's, "I'm just really curious, but ..." or there's, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but ..." and then my personal favorite, which is, "Gosh, I hope you don't find this offensive, but ..."

Now I don't have to tell you that if you have to preface your question with, "I hope you don't find this offensive," you might want to rethink the question. Which is, "What are you? What's your ethnicity? Where are you from? No, no, no, originally. Okay. Okay, well, where are your parents from? No, no, no, originally. Oh, okay." And don't worry, it's not just the white folks. A fellow from India once insisted that I was from there, in the face of all my protests to the contrary. And black people from my youth usually gave a question and answer, all in one. What are you, some kind of Puerto Rican or something? I wish I was making this up, but I'm not.

Any combination of any of these starts and stops and finishes, and depending on the mood and the time of the day and the placement of the stars and how nicely they ask and how tired I am, and how many books about slavery I've just read, I answer, "I'm really, really not from India, I swear. Please leave me alone. Or Puerto Rico, or Brazil, or Morocco. Oh, I'm black. I'm mixed. I'm biracial. Oh, I'm colored. Oh, I'm just a little ol' yellow gal from Carolina." Okay, maybe not the last one.

But I give in, is the point. I give in to their need to place me in a box. To lace me with their expectations. When I say, "I'm black," I remember always that I have white father. I'm not even biracial, with native ancestry scattered throughout my past. "Colored," problematic. And don't get me started on "yellow." It's a conundrum that has bothered me all my life. Now, look. I'm not the only one facing this. There's many ways to put someone in a box: religion, education, nationality, career, gender, you name it. But somehow this one is always at the root of them all, here. "The color line," as James Baldwin says. We do it personally and we do it historically. And what it does is lead to false narratives foisted upon our American culture that leaves us all the poorer.

Because when you really dig deep into the music that lies at the heart of so much American history, and gave birth to so many of those cherished record bin genres that have captivated the world, you realize that the story hasn't even begun to be told. That world music has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, that Africa met Europe far before the invention of the banjo, and that we are always an amalgam of the endless and numerous meetings, cultural exchanges, and influences of normal, ordinary people upon which civilization turns.

And when we pick out one narrative from the weave, and let it stand as the whole, it weakens us all. It's something we live with in this country. The little, tiny boxes not made of ticky-tacky, but of ignorance, that we like to force our culture into: the record bins, the radio stations, the Grammys, the separate but equal festivals. The Big Ears Festival always has so many amazingly different types of music sitting side by side, with no allergies or aversion. But this year there's a wonderful Appalachian component, complete with fiddler's convention, as Knoxville is located squarely in Appalachia. And it gives us a fantastic opportunity to see how both the commercial and the homegrown American string band is a beautiful example of both the victim of these boxes and a showcase of the cultural fusion that is our birthright as not just Americans, but as humans.

We are here in Knoxville, Tennessee, a modern southern city with a history of positive progress and a history of steps back, a history of early black political involvement, but also the race riots during the red summer of 1919, a city named after a colonial officer who had the unpopular but progressive opinion that the way the country was treating native peoples was disgraceful, a city which, unfortunately, is also built on the stolen lands of these aforementioned native peoples, a city situated in a region, Appalachia, which has simultaneously become an incredibly important source of a uniquely American culture, and it has the honor of being one of the last areas in the country it's okay to make fun of.

But the culture of Appalachia is made of hardy stuff. Generations who lived from the land and made their own amusements and kept vibrant cultural art forms that used to be alive all over the south and in some places, still are. The music of Appalachia, which was created, and is a wonderful example of the American experience: combinations of cultures with the partial isolation. And it became this much of a muchness that we have today.

Unfortunately, our general national impression of string band music, the proto-music of many subsequent American art forms, and of the banjo, the first real indigenous American instrument, if you ignore the hundreds of years of natives who lived here before America got here... which we tend to do. And for the purposes of this talk, just know that they're always there, glaring at you over my shoulder. The first real indigenous American instrument as a nation is that of an unrelentingly white, ethnically pure, and therefore, quote-unquote, "true" American tradition. That is our feeling about it.

There have, of course, been great inroads made in challenging that narrative in recent years, thanks to people like Taj Mahal, Bela Fleck, and, dare I say, the Carolina Chocolate Drops. But it's a hard thing to challenge in a popular consciousness that's still full of Hee Haw and The Beverly Hillbillies. If I can get people at the airport to even recognize that it's a banjo, not a guitar, that would be great.

Even in a recent movie about song collecting in the Appalachian, Songcatcher, the lone black musician in the movie, who happened to be played by Taj Mahal – who was given nothing to do, but anyway – is treated as an anomaly. Now, Appalachia is a region that has always, historically, had a black population, in some places, as high as 20% before the great migration of African-Americans to the north in the 1920s, and is clearly a place where musical and cultural exchanges have been going on for a long time. But to really start getting the picture you have to dig. Many cultures have gone into the making of the American story. But central to it, and to my talk today, is the black-white cultural exchange.

The banjo is a truly American instrument. But it's roots lie in Africa. The mass forced migration of so many folks from all over Africa, particularly the countries of West Africa, means the music, dance, and in some cases, instruments, came with them. Oftentimes the musicians were kidnapped from the coast for the express purpose of quote-unquote "dancing" the slaves on the ships, as enslavers found that if they brought the slaves on deck and forced them to dance, the loss of life, and therefore money, was less.

I'll never forget when I first met Daniel Jatta, who's from the Gambia. And he plays an instrument called the akonting, which I eventually went over there to learn, which is a proto-banjo instrument, a lute instrument. And he told the story, which kind of gave me chills, that his family, the people in his area, have a folkloric story about not going and playing the akonting by yourself at night. Because if you do, the devil will get you. Because they would go look for their loved ones and they would be gone. And there would be footprints, shoe prints, that they didn't know. They didn't have shoes, you know? And that thought just really... that is such an enormous story that we don't tell.

Enslaved Africans were mostly taken to the Caribbean and South America first, where the sugar plantations were. And as the years wore on, and slavery spread to North America, they were often still seasoned in that region and then sent on from there to their eventual destination. Sometime in the 1700s an instrument recognizable to us as a banjo appeared. A syncretization of what would have been multiple and varied west African lute-type instruments. It traveled with its people to North America.

For the first hundred years of its existence, the banjo was known only as a plantation instrument and as a quote-unquote "Negro" instrument. White people didn't play it, and in fact would never have thought to, except in perhaps isolated instances that have been lost to history and time. It was in the 1830s that documented white musicians and entertainers started to learn the banjo and subsequently set in motion a pattern of cultural exchange, assimilation, and appropriation in America that continues to this day.

Now, I have a banjo that is an example of the kind of banjos that would have come about at this time. And I'm gonna do a piece with this. I'm gonna head over here. Here I am. I'm going to be doing this with some special guests in a second. This banjo is a minstrel-style banjo. It's a replica of a banjo from 1858. And people are always surprised at how it sounds. But it sounds like this because all the early banjos were like this. Because they all were originally gourd instruments. They were handmade on the plantation. And this is the first commercial style, where white folk were buying and learning the banjo. But it still has the African sound to it. And so this banjo wanted to be involved in the writing of songs about slavery that I wrote quite a few of, from slave narratives. So I thought this would be a good time to do one, if that's okay. And if I could invite Brooklyn Rider out. This is Brooklyn Rider, y'all.

This song was a song that I wrote after I saw... 'cause I talk about slavery. It's hard to understand how commonplace slavery was. To the fact that people put ads in the newspaper when they wanted to sell somebody. It was very common. I saw an ad like this for a young woman, and at the end of the ad, it says, "She has with her a nine-month-old baby who is at the purchaser's option." And the thought of that, just... I have children and I can't even... I won't even go into where I went with that. But this song came out. It's called, "At the Purchaser's Option."

(singing)

For the first part of the history of this country, the assembly and the dance were the main form of entertainment. It's kind of hard to imagine when... before TV, before all of that stuff, all they had was dancing. For everybody, this was the main form of entertainment. If you were corn-shucking all day, you had a dance that night. And then if you were the rich people of the plantation, you had a dance that night. It just may have looked a little different and sounded a little different. But chances were, there were gonna be black people playing for it either way.

The main players for these dances were enslaved musicians, whether in the North or the South. The dance band musician was considered a servant. And Africans quickly became known for their musical prowess. The quote-unquote "Negro" fiddler was a common sight for much of American history. The first time fiddle and banjo combined would have almost certainly been in the hands of black musicians, and far from the Appalachian mountains, which is where such music is assumed to have originated. There are many contemporary accounts, from diaries to escaped slave notices that remark upon the Negro musician and musical excellence thereof. He, and sometimes she, loomed fairly large in the average American's consciousness. The image of the banjo was entirely black, whether truly black, or of blackface minstrelsy, which became the most popular form of entertainment in America for over 50 years.

Consider this, if you will. White men take shoe polish, cover their face with it, and smear white paint all around their mouth, wear tattered clothing, speak in a thick, fake Negro dialect, and sing and dance like fools. And this was the best thing since sliced bread. And it has tenaciously stuck around as an indelible part of our culture, from Mickey Mouse to The Jazz Singer to Vanilla Ice. The first white performers in blackface picked up the banjo around the 1830s and '40s and they brought it all around the world.

I wanted to play you a little tune from the 1850s, if that's all right. I thought about skipping it, but I thought, "Nah."

(strumming)

This tune, and maybe another one if I feel it, are from the very first published banjo tutor, called the Briggs Banjo Instructor from 1855. And these earliest tunes very clearly have African influence and they're the best connection we have to what this early minstrel music sounded like.

(strumming)

But I think it's obvious. You can hear in there where that music came from. A hundred years before rock 'n' roll, the first truly American instrument and American music took England and Europe and Australia and South Africa by storm. It was a huge hit, and very influential on all of those places. The Black and White Minstrel Show, with thin British men in blackface singing bizarre arrangements of American tunes while willowy blonde women floated through the scene was on TV in England until the 1970s. I encourage you to look it up on YouTube, The Black and White Minstrel Show. It will scare you.

Historical minstrel music was a mix of authentic African-American rhythms and melodies, composed songs, and European tunes performed on a stage. And the mix changed over time. And a great deal of that music has become, in a bowdlerized form, the national folk music we first learn as children, either through Bugs Bunny, or in school. "Blue Tailed Fly," "Oh! Susannah," "Cotton-Eye Joe," "Jimmy Crack Corn," "Camptown Races," the list goes on and on. People always like to forget that "Oh! Susannah" with the banjo on my knee song contains some pretty rough lyrics.

The minstrel band became as common a sight as the rock band is now. It was most often a combination of fiddle, banjo, tambourine, and bones. Now, the tambourine is where another thread comes into play that has been often completely ignored. Often considered today purely in a classical, rock, or gospel context, the tambourine doesn't register as a serious folk instrument with its own history. But it has been in this country for hundreds of years. A tambourine jingle was recently found at the dig in Jamestown, Virginia, from the 1600s.

Now, it was most likely brought over by the English in the early years. But the English got it as the tamburello from the Italians. And the Italians got it from the Moors. The southern Italian island of Sicily was ruled by the Moors for over 400 years, and was an entry point for many instruments and musical modes from the Islamic countries of north Africa and the Middle East. Not just the tamburello, but string and wind and other percussion instruments, like frame drums and goblet drums, that transformed the European face of music.

So when you look at pictures of minstrel musicians, it is a majority of the time held in a traditional southern Italian grip. And when it is played with tunes from the mid-1800s, like you just heard there, the rhythms often go hand in glove. The tamburello even found its way to Ireland via the large British military tambourines of the 19th Century, where it lost the jingles, got re-named the bodhran, and eventually began to be played with the tipper instead of the hand, but still using a lot of the same traditional patterns from southern Italy, even today. And they don't even know it. Some of the earliest bodhráns still have jingles, which are also called zills.

So an instrument from the Middle East and North Africa travels to southern Italy and Spain to northern Europe and England and Ireland and over to the United States, where it meets with an instrument from West Africa, which travels to the Caribbean up to North America. Sounds like world music to me.

In addition to minstrelsy, you have generations of folk working the earth in every shade, sometimes mixing, oftentimes not, but always finding common ground in music. Who knows who the first white mountaineer was to pick up a banjo from the black guy down the street? Or to surreptitiously watch and listen and then make their own? And then make up tunes and then trade them back to the same black guy? This is the important part of it, is that it was a give and take. But it all happened all over the South and banjo music quickly became entrenched in Appalachia: homemade banjos, wild tunings, heavily syncopated rhythms betraying African roots. And minstrels most assuredly traveled through these regions and also left songs behind. But there would have been lots of cultural exchange going on regardless.

Now for the fiddle. The fiddle was not just a vehicle for European tunes and chord systems. Even from the earliest years of the nation, blacks were playing the fiddle. And many ethnic groups in West Africa, such as the Fula, have a version of the one-stringed fiddle, not to mention all the native groups that have a version of the one-string fiddle. And short rhythmic motives surely found their way into the American fiddle tune. In fact, many of the earliest tunes collected by musicologists, such as Cecil Sharp, were already fusion tunes with origins decidedly in America and of African and European origin.

All right. And here's one. This is a tune from the Piedmont, North Carolina. More about where I got it from afterwards.

(singing)

Now, this cultural exchange didn't die out after emancipation. Black and white string band musicians from all over the South had a common repertoire of tunes. At the turn of the 20th Century, fully half of the string bands were still black. But between 1900 and 1930, string band music turns on a dime. By the '30s and '40s it's forgotten entirely that black people had any part in America's music. Forgotten are the countless black dance bands. Forgotten are the black callers, who so highly influenced the creation of square dance, that uniquely American dance form. Forgotten are the numerous generous musical exchanges that took place over many years between black and white musicians of all stripes. And it's no coincidence.

White supremacy and xenophobia, already growing unceasingly in the South since emancipation, gained serious traction after the destruction of Reconstruction. Reconstruction didn't just fail. It was deconstructed. And the black political base in the South was also dismantled, prompting thousands of African-Americans to move up north, which was called the great migration as I mentioned before. As they pursue the newest music in places like Chicago and New York, and exchange banjos for guitars, people like Henry Ford are busy whitewashing the story of old time music and dance as a direct response to exactly those new urban musics, blues and jazz.

Bust inventing a fictional American narrative, "Back in the days of the old barn dance," which was just for white folks, of course. At the same time, the brand-spanking new record industry A&R men were figuring out that they could sell more records if they segregate them. And contrary to reality, decide that white people only listen to hillbilly music and black people only listen to blues. And they market the music this way, the beginning of all those record bins. All those black string musicians left down in the South quickly found that if they wanted to be recorded, they had to learn what the A&R men thought that they should play, according to the color of their skin and white musicians on the opposite side. And so a rich, centuries-long tradition of black string musicians almost disappears.

it was my great fortune to meet one of the last traditional black fiddlers in the South some years ago, and become, along with my bandmates, the recipient of his family's musical tradition. Joe Thompson was a holdover from a previous generation, a dance band musician that played all the square dances in his community, white and black, along with his brother. What they would do is that people would come over after a long day of corn shucking to somebody's house. And they would take all the furniture out of the house and put it on the lawn. And then they would have a square dance in each room. And sometimes the band would be in the doorway, playing for both dances. And there would be somebody selling fried chicken. Not cooking it and giving it away, but selling it. And it was just in part of American fabric of life as anything. And it was only really the war, World War II, just dismantled all of those things and the rise of the TV culture, and the idea that we need to be entertained rather than entertaining ourselves. It destroyed the fabric of where Joe came out of. So when he was rediscovered by folklorists, it was a really beautiful thing, and he became a performer. But he grew up playing function music. And that's what a lot of this music was. It was functional music.

He was 86 when I met him and I think I said this already, but I'll say it again. And in learning his music I'm now part of a lineage that goes back to at least the 1700s. I'm gonna do a song of his. "Black Annie" was also his, but we're gonna do this one called "Lights in the Valley." And I'd like to invite Abbie Washburn up on stage. Abbie Washburn and guest.

Okay. They didn't tell me how hard this was gonna be, running back and forth. All right.

So this is a song... We'd go down to Joe's house. It's kind of an amazing thing, 'cause you think about education. And there's education and there's education. I went to Oberlin Conservatory for five years and got a degree in opera, which I then paid off by playing the banjo. I love that. But it was an amazing education. And I'm so appreciative. And I actually do use it every day.

But then I went and sat in an overheated, tiny house in Mebane, North Carolina, on every Thursday night. Now, when I say overheated, I mean overheated. It was like 95 degrees in there. But they were in their eighties, you know? And they got cold. And we would sit there and we'd play the same tunes, every week. And sometimes twice. Sometimes three times. It depends on how good Joe's mind was that night. And we didn't care. We just sat there. And sometimes we were almost falling asleep 'cause it's so hot. We were playing the tunes. And Joe wouldn't say anything. He wouldn't say, "It's not quite right." He would just say... He'd stop playing. And he'd go, "Hmm ... I think we took that a little fast," or "I think we took that a little slow, boys." Didn't matter if I was there. We were always boys. And that's it. We had to figure it out. And it's just... I consider actually just as valuable as that five year degree from Oberlin, because, you know, we learned... You can't put it on paper what we learned.

Anyway, I'm very grateful for that. And this is a song that he wanted to do when he wanted to tell people that he went to church every once in a while, i.e. every Sunday.

(singing)

Just give me a second. Yeah. I think we should do another song. Do you want to do "Come, Love, Come?"

Okay. We're gonna... I'm gonna throw this in, 'cause we've got a little planned thing that I don't want to get to too early. 'Cause like what? You've probably picked up on this, but this isn't a common thing. You know? It's a speech with musical examples involving other incredible musicians and we had this morning to do it. I'm thrilled, personally, with how everything's going, but ...

I thought I'd take this opportunity to do a song that I wrote some years ago. Because we are here in Tennessee, and this was a song that I wrote after I read a lot about... Yeah, we're back to slavery, sorry, for just a second. When a lot of people escaped and they followed the Union Army, they would camp outside where the army was camping. And they were called contraband. And this was back in Tennessee, where they had captured places. And they had set up their base camp. And so they called them contrabands, these poor folks. And this song came out of that history and thinking about all of the families that were torn apart by slavery and by the war. And all the families that are continuously torn apart by war and by forced migration and by all of these things. This is a song about that.

(singing)

Thank you.

This is our Creole music. And we have to treat it as such. There's no black or white in this, ultimately. There's years of fusing, of melding, of becoming something that appeals to everyone. But when you neglect to tell part of the story, the whole thing can collapse. When you reinforce, through the segregation of music, the idea that we are so different that some of us are the other, that we really can't just get along, that we belong in different bins, when the truth is so much bigger, better, and far more interesting, you threaten the very idea of who we are as people.

As I was doing some reading for this speech, this quote really caught me by hero and historian Howard Zinn, "The more history I read, the more it seemed very clear to me that whatever progress has been made in this country on various issues, whatever things have been done for people, whatever human rights have been gained, have not been gained through the calm deliberations of Congress, or the wisdom of presidents, or the ingenious decisions of the Supreme Court. Whatever progress has been made in this country has come because of the actions of ordinary people, of citizens, and of social movements."

Challenging the narrative has to come from us. We have to educate ourselves, because they won't do it for us. We have to realize the true contributions to our American culture, because then we see that it belongs to us all in equal share. Countless generations of ordinary people leading ordinary lives continually coming together through music, despite the efforts of the powers that be to keep them apart. The true answer of the American question is that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, inseparable, indivisible, and unbreakable.

So what do I answer when I get asked The Question these days. I don't say, "biracial" anymore, even though that's now on the census form. Look at that. It's not black, white, or other anymore. Sometimes it was just black or white. I don't say, "black." I certainly don't say, "yellow." I don't say any of those things because it's not my identity. I say, "I'm North Carolinian. I'm Southern. I'm American. Nice to meet you." Thank you.

(applause)

Thank you so much. I have a P.S. to the speech that I really wanted to share with you. I'd like to leave you with the closing stanzas of a poem from one of Knoxville's native sons, James Agee, which I hope I'm saying that right. I've only ever seen it. I never heard it. I first came upon this poem as a student at Oberlin, this is why you never know where it's gonna come, preparing for a concerto competition. Samuel Barber set this poem as Knoxville: the Summer of 1915. The last part of it, I thought, was really appropriate. And I would just like to end that with a little help from my friends.

(While strumming): "On the rough, wet grass of the backyard, my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I, too, am lying there. They're not talking much. And the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive. They seem, each, like a smile of great sweetness. And they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, with voices gentle and meaningless, like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist. He is living at home. One is a musician. She is living at home. One is my mother, who is good to me. One is my father, who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth. And who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying on quilts on the grass in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night? May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father. I'll remember them kindly in their time of trouble and in the hour of their taking away. After a little, I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her. And those receive me who quietly treat me as one familiar and well-beloved in that home, but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever, but will not ever tell me who I am."

Author’s note: Some of the research used in the address has not been published, and text would be edited with more time to cite specific points.