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Rhiannon Giddens on Her New ‘Blackbird’ Album, the Impact of Her Beyoncé Banjo Cameo, and Why She Canceled Her Kennedy Center Show: ‘It’s Important to Be Clear Where I Stand’
Rhiannon Giddens discusses her 'What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow' album, Hollywood Bowl show, Beyoncé banjo part and canceling the Kennedy Center.
And there’s a national summer tour, in the midst of which she’s overseeing an all-star Hollywood Bowl show in June that promises to be the roots-music event of the year, at least by the standards of the west coast, and maybe all points between here and Durham as well. But anyone who doesn’t follow those whiffs of what she does all the way to the source is missing out on a lot on brilliance — whether it’s her virtuosity as a player, her skills as a genre-defying composer (her opera, “Omar,” won a Pulitzer), or her oratorical prowess as a historian and populist educator about how most early American music was built on a framework of Black instruments and sounds. Is there irony that strikes you in the fact that you do all these extensive projects, including writing an award-winning opera, but then the most media mentions you’re gonna get are for doing a banjo part on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which you probably did not devote a lot of months to?
Or read this on Variety
