Musician Rhiannon Giddens digs into American roots music and finds connections to cultures around the world
On Point | Podcast
WBUR
4.2 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pulitzer Prize-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens digs deep into American roots music and finds connections to cultures around the world.
Can any culture lay total claim to specific styles of music?
Today, On Point: A conversation with musician Rhiannon Giddens, recorded live at WBUR's CitySpace.
Transcript
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| 0:34.0 | This is OnPoint. I'm Megna Chakrabardi. |
| 0:38.0 | Musician Rian and Giddens is on a quest, and the facts of her own life are a compelling metaphor for the path she's forging. |
| 0:46.0 | Born in 1977 to a black mother and a white father, Giddens' childhood in Greensboro, North Carolina |
| 0:53.0 | was one where the messiness of American history showed in how racial confines were both rigid and permeable. |
| 1:01.0 | She tells a story about how her black grandfather and white grandmother both worked at a Greensboro tobacco factory, |
| 1:08.0 | and once when her white granny, as Giddens calls her, needed assistance with her taxes, she went to Giddens' black grandfather for help. |
| 1:19.0 | It's the South, isn't it? Giddens told the New Yorker magazine? The point is that they are different, but the same. |
| 1:28.0 | It's that duality that Giddens is exploring in the history of American music. |
| 1:34.0 | She's already well known in Roots Music as a former member of the Carolina chocolate drops, |
| 1:39.0 | but more recently she's been digging deeper into ideas about the rigidity and permeability of the cultural confines we place around music. |
| 1:49.0 | Say the word bagpipes, and it conjures up the image of a kilted highlander, she recently said, |
| 1:55.0 | but it should also bring to mind an old man in Sicily, or a soldier in Iraq. |
| 2:01.0 | Music has been in constant movement and constant change since the time of the ancient world. |
| 2:07.0 | No culture gets to put the lockdown on anything. |
| 2:12.0 | Giddens' restless musical exploration has won her a MacArthur Genius Award, and this year she was given the Pulitzer Prize in Music for Omar, |
| 2:20.0 | her opera about enslaved people brought to America from Muslim countries. |
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