Rhiannon Giddens

Partial Transcript: Well, my name is Rhiannon Giddens and I’m a musician, singer, banjo player, and educator. I think that about covers it.

Partial Transcript: I started out living in North Carolina and being exposed to sort of the usual mix of things and just being a part of the state (???) or a little bit of bluegrass and country, heard a bunch of pop music, heard a little bit of blues and jazz. A lot of folk revival stuff and ended up going to school for classical music and doing opera and rediscovering—well, just discovering the roots of folk music—of the folk revival and becoming an avid contra dancer and folk dancer and folk—and the music that went with that. And then discovered the banjo and the history of the banjo and wanted to know more and sort of become this historian, musician—there’s music historians, but I’m a musician first. So musician historian. I don’t know.

I do historically based music a lot of the time and it’s kind of been my mission to—at this point—to excavate and illuminate forgotten chapters of American history through music. Because music is always reflecting what’s going on in the culture, especially folk music. So it is commercial music—especially when folk and commercial cross. Because a lot of commercial styles of music are very connected to folk music. It started off—and anyway. So you can cut all that out, but that’s what I do.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think it’s pretty well summed up what Cecil Sharp left out of the story visually, by a movie called Songcatcher, which kind of like takes that story of people finding this connection between these Victoria songs in England and the Appalachian Mountains. And so this woman is going to collect songs in the Appalachian Mountains and she’s looking for this ballad singer. And she stops and sees a black man playing a banjo on the stoop, which in the film is played by Taj Mahal. Taj Mahal, right. And she stops and asks him where this ballad singer is and then keeps going. And that to me, is the story.

It’s like, Oh hey, black person playing a banjo. Where’s the ballad singers? All right. Let’s forget you know, you know. I mean, that’s kind of it. I mean, the story of—it’s like, for me, it’s multiple things. One is the assumption that all of this music starts in Appalachia, which is just not true. Two is that, there were no black people in Appalachia, which is also not true. So those are two enormously huge assumptions to make and really skew the story. But like he wasn’t the only one who did that. I mean, Lomax did it too. I mean, a lot of people who were looking for a narrative ignore everything that’s outside of that narrative because—and it doesn’t take away from the work they did. It doesn’t take away from what they saved.

But it does frustrate you and you think about what they left out. And that’s always been frustrating. Like, what was Taj Mahal doing? What was he playing? I want to hear that. I mean, the ballads are great. We’ve got a bunch of recordings of ballads. Like what was the dude with the banjo doing? And how was that affecting the culture there?

Partial Transcript: I mean, music has been an integral part of the human existence since the beginning. And it’s only the last—it’s only since the music industry has come into the—the commercial music industry has come into play. A few hundred years ago it’s like broadsides and you start seeing music in print that is accessible to the common man. Because before then it would only have been people who were highly trained; the Mozarts and the Bachs or whatever. But you start getting popular music being disseminated in the form of broadsides and then you start getting the parlor music—people playing in their parlor.

So you have the middle class that’s coming into play in the United States. But it really doesn’t—even then you still have to be a part of the music. You still have to make it, to hear it. Then you start getting the recording industry and that changed everything. So it became a passive consumerist thing rather than an active communal thing. And I really don’t even think we’ve acknowledged how that’s changed our society. Because now music is this sort of background, it’s like this wallpaper to our culture and so people don’t value it anymore. It’s like, oh, I don’t like that. I’ll just change the channel, blah, blah, blah.

Whereas, back then it was like, I don’t like this song. I have to learn another one. (laughs) Or I have to hire a band to play. There was much more human interaction. There was much more involvement and now you’ve got a whole—generations upon generations of people who go, well, I can’t sing. I can’t dance. I can’t—and that used to be the main form of connection. After the work is done, it’s music and dance for thousands and thousands of years. And so it’s an enormous shift. I mean, it’s like we’ve had some really seismic shifts in our culture and that’s one of them.

And on the one hand, it allows for this cast of professional music makers more than there would have ever been. Because you would have been working. (laughs) You know, in the fields or in the factories or whatever or have been a dilatant—lots of money and playing when you feel like it. But the idea of making your living doing music—and on this scale—is pretty recent. But we’ve lost a lot. We’ve gained—in terms of, I can get on a bus and tour—but we’ve lost a hell of a lot in terms of everyone feeling like they can play or sing a song. Like it used to be—you made it yourself or you assisted somebody else in making it, or you sang with them, or even if you weren’t the best singer, like it didn’t matter because you sang to sing, not to sound good or to make it. And that’s a problem I think.

Partial Transcript: Well—I mean, I can speak from personal connection to the Piedmont, which is the foot of the mountains. And I know it’s very similar to a lot of stuff that had been going on in the mountains—with my experience with Joe Thompson, who was a communal—and a community music maker. His family, the Thompson family, were the dance band of the community. And so when you had a corn shucking, everybody would get together and they’d shuck that corn and then afterwards there would be a square dance. And his family would play for the dance. And that kind of—everybody coming together to dance, to play, to sing—that was it. There were no radios, there was no TV. And that was literally it.

It’s like, what are we going to do? Let’s have a dance. (laughs) And just, you just think about that—like the way that you connect with people at a dance like that—the way that the community comes together and you know what’s happening with your neighbors. You know what’s going on. And that’s been replaced with people in their individual units sort of like watching a screen. I mean, the TV really killed that kind of music making. There’s—somebody was telling me a story about doing research on the Romani in the UK. And they traveled around, they would camp and then they had this really rich aural tradition of storytelling and music and dance.

And he was following this particular family that would camp in this underpass. That’s like—that’s where they would camp at this time of the year. And he was following them and then they got a TV. It was like a TV or a radio. They got some sort of—and he said six months later he came back and it was like wiped out. Like all they were doing was watching and listening. It was like—it takes no time to wipe out generations of—you know. It’s just—it’s a pretty potent weapon.

Partial Transcript: Well, you don’t have—the journey of the banjo is so interesting and is so hidden in American culture. You don’t have the banjo until you have a lot of people from different parts of—primarily West Africa coming over—not under their own volition—being brought over to North America, particularly to the Caribbean, which is where people who were going to be sold into slavery were seasoned—especially if they were going to end up going up to North America. So, so much of what becomes African-American music and dance is formed in the Caribbean, in Congo Square, New Orleans where all of these different cultures didn’t speak the same language, weren’t playing the same instruments, but were playing in a sort of family of instruments of these lute type instruments. Either the memory brought over or the instruments themselves brought over.

And then the synchronization of all of that forming what becomes known as the banjo or the banjar or the banjer or whatever, banza, bonza—in the Caribbean and then being brought with people up to the southern United States or actually, just the United States in general. Because people forget that there was—there were enslaved people all over. I think it was like the first European settler stepped foot in North America and like twenty years later the first African-Americans know what I mean? It’s like very, very intertwined all over the place. And that’s really important to remember because the image of slavery in the deep south leaves out the Tidewater region, the mid-Atlantic, and all of those folks that were forming these cultures, these enslaved cultures that then were marched down to the pins in Louisiana and then over to Texas into Alabama and Mississippi.

So it’s very much a wide cultural thing. So you have African-Americans with this native instrument—this truly American instrument, the banjo and it’s a plantation instrument for the first hundred years of its existence. And no white person plays it. Like people know—that’s a plantation instrument. And you have this and you also have black musicians being trained to play for white dances. So you have these dance masters coming in, but then black musicians pretty quickly become very prized and so they’re going back to the quarters and they’re playing the banjo and they were doing all this—their music and dance, and then they’re going to play for these European dances. And they’re playing fiddle and there’s all of these primary sources about—that darky could play a scratby (???).

It’s like, they’re learning Scottish tunes and English tunes and all—whoever owns the plantation. And then of course, that’s going to come back and it’s going to mix and the first people to play fiddle with a banjo would be African-Americans. I mean, that’s just obvious. That’s like—they’ve got the banjo and they’ve had the fiddle for hundreds of years. They have these runaway slave posters saying, plays the fiddle, plays the fiddle, plays the fiddle. Like highly prized. So you have all that coming into being.

And then you have this forum—this sort of string band forum. Of course, there’s interactions between whites and blacks. Particularly poor whites and blacks because they’re the ones interacting. Like the aristocracy’s not interested in this. So you’ve got all this stuff and it starts to—you start getting the first white people playing the banjo—these traveling entertainers. Those are the ones we know about. I mean, who’s to say that there wasn’t some white people who didn’t—who weren’t entertainers, like who were for—you know what I mean?

Like who’s to say that? But that’s what we know, is these blackfaced entertainers start playing the banjo. They make some changes to it but in form, it’s pretty—it’s like, the stuff they do, it doesn’t change the basic form of the banjo. There’s no adding the fifth string. I mean, it was already there and all these sorts of things. And then so blackfaced entertainers started taking the banjo and people go nuts. They’re like, what is this thing? This is amazing. And it becomes this cultural explosion. Like they traveled to Europe and Australia and South Africa and it’s the whole world’s first encounter with Indigenous American music, even done through white people playing a blackface.

I mean, it’s just so—there’s so many layers and it really sets the ball rolling for what becomes a pattern of American culture, where it’s this sort of black fusion of European, African, all sorts of things. And then of course, there’s always a back and forth, but it seems like this thing starts here and then sort of the white community comes in, makes it commercial—because now you’ve got sheet music and you’ve got people writing minstrel songs and you have people writing stuff in this style. So it becomes a commercial music, where people are going around getting paid to play in blackface.

And that’s been the pattern since then and the world going, oh, whoa. What is this? And this huge like obsession with the banjo starts taking hold and it starts going through this rapid growth. And you have the metal hoop and then you’ve got middle strings could end a sentence and you’ve got all—and then it gets further and further away from the roots of it and it turns into something else. And so you have that happening. So you have like multiple things happening. The banjo becoming a minstrel instrument and then you have emancipation. So then you start having actual African-Americans going into minstrelsy and that’s the only way they can be performers, is to do minstrel music.

So they’re putting on blackface—on their blackfaces but then it starts to subvert because—the only way to survive doing that sort of thing is to subvert it. So that starts to happen. And unique African-American humor starts twisting blackface and then you start having people going, why are white people still performing a blackface when there’s but people who can actually do the—? So that starts happening but you still have these parallel tracks. Then you have development of coon songs and all—and then you see the minstrelsy, which is like the most popular form of entertainment for years and years and years and years, be at the heart of where American music goes, where American entertainment goes.

I mean, you can see it today. But it’s particularly the first radio shows, the first TV, the first film. Like the first quote unquote talkie is about a blackface musician. So it’s out of these huge roots in our culture, this idea of minstrelsy. And then you have the whole thing between emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance, which is like seventy years or sixty years. And you have all of these really interesting things happening in the African-American community. You’ve got people getting into classical music, you’ve got people still doing minstrelsy, you’ve got people forming and then you got where the blues is starting to come from. There’s this incredible mix of things happening. And at this point, American music is still very much like—there’s no such thing as genres. It’s just people making music.

And then you have two things that really shape what happens to string band music—are the great migration and the advent of the recording industry. So you got the great migration where there’s all these African-Americans going up to better lives quote unquote in the north and so you have change in cultural values. Like all of the sudden, fields and corn and corn shuckings and the banjo’s kind of with that. It’s not so much, oh, well, there’s the whole blackface thing. That comes in later. Like the idea of the banjo being shameful. At this point, it’s like
it’s the old stuff. Now there’s even the blues and it’s like we’re in the urban environment. And people back home are like, we want to be cool like our cousins who are up in Delaware or whatever.

So you have all of that going but they’re still a pretty vibrant black string band tradition at this point. And then you have recording industry coming and going, all right, so we’re going to sell quote-unquote black music to black people and white music to—they start doing this because they want to sell as many records as possible. So they say, okay, black people clearly just listen to blues because that’s who’s buying these Bessie Smith records. Neglecting the fact that people can listen to more than one kind of music.

It’s so fascinating, these decisions that go into it. And then white people clearly listen to hillbilly music so we got hillbilly music and we got blues music. And so you get a black string band that would walk into a recording studio and the guys like, so, what blues do you know? A black string band’s not going to be like—that black string band is going to be like, let me go learn some blues because I want to get paid. So there’s all of these things happening.

And you also have these federal conventions coming into being, right. And you have black musicians being banned from playing these conventions. So in the string band community—I mean, these things become a hub of what’s going on musically, and black people are banned from doing it. You know what I mean? It’s like there’s an absolute effort to clear African Americans from this music. It’s just fascinating. It becomes sort of the ethnic music for white people. It’s like, we’re going to have this so let’s just kind of take you out. Whether it was conscious or not, that’s what happened.

And the changeover is staggering when you consider the banjo is a black instrument, then it becomes a white commercial instrument. Turn-of-the-century you’ve got half the string bands are black string bands and then probably thirty years later, it’s probably like 5%. I mean, that’s staggering to me. It’s an absolute—you know. And I used to think, oh, it just kind of happened that way. But now I realize that there was a concerted effort banning black people from fiddle conventions. Like the recording industry, there was a concerted effort to do this. And that’s got to be addressed. Sorry, that was really long but it’s a lot. I mean, you can’t—

Partial Transcript: Well—I mean, dance is so hard because at least you have—with the music—you start having recordings. But dance—there’s no video for quite a while. And then of course, this narrative of—we have such a backwards thought about square dancing. It like became this weird thing you did in sixth grade and it’s made fun of in cartoons and—you know, do-si-do and round your partner, da, da, da, da, da. And it became part of this whole, it’s okay to make fun of country people thing, which is still today. But it was this vibrant—folk dance was this vibrant thing that everybody did.

So you have the Europeans coming over with their sort of—their social dances, the English country dance being the primary form of entertainment back over in England. You’d go to an assembly and you have your dance card. You’d know all these dances and you get taught by the dance master and there you go. And so people come over here and they want to do what they did back home so they have these dances. And on the plantation, the dance bands very rapidly became slave dance bands—these African-American dance bands.

And so they were learning all of these tunes and then you start having—for a while dance masters were coming over from England to teach this sort of fledgling English colony the dances. And then eventually, the people who knew the dances the best are the musicians. So they start calling the dances because they know them. And so this idea of this sort of formal, here’s my dance card—sort of devolving into—because you’re so far removed from that culture, of course, it starts becoming its own thing. And so you have these dances that start being called and you have the quadrilles turning into square dances and the country dances sort of turning into contras, especially up north.

And you have this sort of Americanized thing happening to these dances. And you also—the musical form starts to influence—starts to inform the dance. So you have these African-American musicians who were sort of mixing-start mixing forms. And in communities where you don’t have this division—in poor communities, I think that starts to—it starts mixing even more and then it’s not even to say that the Indian influence—the Native American influence on dancing. All these communities that were mixed and blacks and Indians mixing and there’s just so much that you can only speculate. But there’s enough proof of the dance bands and all of that stuff to go, okay, like that’s going to—because they’re going to also have these African tunes.

There was African fiddling, there was—so there’s all of this mixture. And if you listen to the tunes and you watch the dancing you can see all of it. I mean, it’s very, very different to what was happening in England, when it becomes its full self. I mean, because I’ve done English country dancing, I’ve done square dancing. The phrases—the musical phrases that happen in southern square dancing, I mean, there’s no analogy. These sort of short phrases, the repetitiveness of it. It’s an American thing and being an American thing means that there’s this whole African-American influence. I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for but that’s—

Partial Transcript: I mean, from what I understand, in these communities when you used to have the dance masters, you’d learn the whole dance and then you would do the dance. But then as that started to break down, you have rural communities, you have just a culture that’s doing its own thing that’s separated from the mother culture and England and wherever. You’re not having dance masters coming quite so often. So you like, I don’t have time to learn this dance. I’m working. I just want to go to the dance and have fun. And so the musicians, who were often African-Americans, would—well, let me tell you what happens next. And then that evolves into this sort of ritualized calling that we are familiar with today with the rhyming and all of that sort of thing.

As a caller, I used to call a lot of dances. And those things start coming in and also, that also comes from cultural things too. It’s not just, let me say this rhythm cool. That comes from songs or it’s coming out of the culture too, the particular way these calls are being sort of formed into these patters. But, yeah. So you’d have—the musician knows the dance better than anybody. So he starts to remind people. And then it just evolves into this calling thing, which you don’t have an analogy. You don’t have that in England. You don’t have English country dances being called over there. The only calling you have over there is American dance—people starting to do American dances over there in the ‘60s or whatever.

Partial Transcript: Oh, not to mention the Hawaiian— (laughs) It’s like, the thing is, is you have cultural narratives that become very comforting. And you have this idea—that drives me crazy—that white people don’t have a culture or an ethnicity. And so people attach to things and this old-time music, this bluegrass music has become, hey, this is what we did. You know what I mean? And the thing is, all of it’s bull. All of it’s BS—all of it. Everything. The only thing that matters is what actually happened. You know what I mean? But we get this idea and then we just like glom onto it. And the thing is, is this music comes out of how America formed, right. And we don’t want to look at how America formed. That’s the beginning of the problem, is that America—people like to relegate slavery to this little knot over here. Like the Civil War. (laughs) You know what I mean?

People love to do that and they like to think, oh, America was formed by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and these pilgrims. And there was this little thing with the Indians, but whatever. It’s all good. And everybody’s like—and then we have these poor black people who were in chains and it was terrible. And then they were free and then they’re like happy doing the blues and now why are they complaining? What’s wrong with them? And it’s mind-boggling to me because—and that just tells me how screwed up the educational system is. Because the amount of scholarship that’s available—I mean, it’s like you do this and it’s like, whoa, there it is.

You don’t have American history with the African-American history. And the fact that we have a month to talk about it when really it should be the whole—all of it is intertwined. You don’t have George Washington without—George Washington Carver—you don’t have all of the whole history of the United States without all of the people who went into it. And whether people want to admit it or not, African Americans have been an absolute integral part of the development of this country. From our labor being used to fuel the economic industries in the north. The North likes to be like, oh, we didn’t have—we banned slavery.

Yeah, but you still built the ships that carried slaves over here or carried people over here to be enslaved. That’s important. People weren’t born slaves in Africa. They were people that then people decided to enslave. You built the ships, you benefitted off of the cotton making—all of it—the American economy is what it is now because of slavery. And nobody wants to admit that. Nobody wants to admit that because that might mean some stuff. So you have that and then you have in the musical and cultural area, you’ve got the embarrassment that is minstrelsy.

The first American music that the world heard was white people in shoe polish—or burnt cork cavorting looking like idiots. I mean, and they were very talented—very talented musicians. That doesn’t take away from their dedication to the music in that form. But they’re like pretending to be black people. It’s bizarre. And it becomes this—such an industry and people just want to forget it happened. But it’s like, you can’t. You can’t forget it happened. I mean, Bugs Bunny is in blackface. Like Mickey Mouse is like based on a blackface character. Our culture is completely intertwined with this stuff. But there’s such ignorance about it and there’s such a—we haven’t crafted the narrative to even be able to talk about it in an intelligent way. Somebody says, blackface and they’re just like, agh.

Wait a minute. There’s this music that we don’t talk about that is like half of the folk songs you learn as kids started off as minstrel songs. But nobody wants to talk about it. So it’s hard to talk about the history of string band music because all of this stuff is off the table. It’s much easier to go, well, you know there’s this unbroken law in fact to—because that’s a romantic narrative. But that, to me, is anti-American. It’s anti-American and people don’t want to admit it. It’s not admitting that America is the sum of all of its parts. All of the different cultures that came in and did this thing—there’s a reason why the world loves American music—is because everybody sees a piece of themselves in it. And you can’t—you ignore that at your own peril.

I mean, I think you see this music, it’s going down this path and you like—I don’t know. It’s very frustrating. I’m going to be honest. I’m tired. I’ve been doing this for years and I’ll be—I was in something, I was doing something for this project and it was a prominent African-American musician and I had this banjo and I was like, this is supposed to be set in like the 1830s and ‘40s. Like, this is the sound. And I’m playing this banjo and he’s like, that sounds like Africa. And I’m like, do you not know where the banjo comes from? I’m just like, how much—oh, my God. This is 2017. It’s just such an uphill battle. Like with the black community too. It’s an uphill battle.

And if you want to ask me like why I think this is so important when we’ve got young men being killed by the police and churches getting shot up and mass shooting—because music is a reflection of culture and if people have a better understanding of where this music comes from, where the culture that this music came out of—we can maybe understand why there’s this absolute fear the cops have around black people—black men. I mean, you know what I mean? It’s like another huge piece of the puzzle and it’s like, if you can hear a song—like All Coons Look Alike to Me and understand why somebody whistling that could cause a riot. Music is absolutely intertwined and I just think it’s super important. It’s super important and it’s a record of what the culture was doing. So the more we can understand about it, the better.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. I mean, what the hell is authenticity? You know what I mean? It’s like, I find these conversations about cultural authenticity really frustrating because it goes along with the idea that skin color means anything. It’s—what did you grow up with? What is blood? Like ultimately, it’s your experience defines who you are. But you also have intention and you also have ability. So it’s—there’s this weird thing where you have somebody coming in from the outside and if they sit at the feet of the master for twenty years and the master says, you are my disciple. Who’s to say that, that person is less authentic than that master’s child who didn’t give a shit about the music, didn’t want to learn the music, and is working five states away. You know what I mean?

And then maybe comes back and wants to learn a little something and then he’s held—he’s held up as the authentic thing and this outsider is held up as well, an imposter. And to me, the disregarding of what the master says, I think is really a problem. Because the old guys like, if you came in with a heart willing to learn, they would teach you. Because that’s all they wanted. They wanted to pass it on. And that being said, I also think there’s people who have come from the outside who’ve come to take rather than to give. It’s like you have people who are related to the masters who do the same thing.

So it’s like—ultimately, it’s like, what is the time spent and why? I know that me and Justin in The Carolina Chocolate Drops–we’re from North Carolina. Dom is from Phoenix. But the three of us spent the time with Joe Thompson. So the three of us—and he says, you guys are my band. You know what I mean? And he’s played with a lot of people and I’m sure he’s said that about other people but to feel that from him trumps me being born an hour away in Greensboro. And like coming to _______(???) I collect—we’re probably we’re related. But that doesn’t mean anything. What means something is the time that we spent with him and yes, Justin and I have a different relationship to the music than Dom does. Because I have memories of my grandparents from the south in that area that color it in a certain way. But that doesn’t replace the time spent.

Dom has his relationship to it. He’s got his family that have ties to the South, of course. But we all have a slightly different relationship to it, but that doesn’t mean that Justin and I have more of a right to Joe’s music because we’re from North Carolina. I just really firmly believe that intentionality is really important. It’s like you were intentional and you want to get into the music and you want the serve the music, then it doesn’t matter where you come from. It just happens like—when I sit with Joe and it’s very easy for me because I’m from the area. He’s like—he was just like my grandfather. I can settle into that world.

And that’s the difference, to me, is that it’s just what I gain, and what I can do is going to be shaded in a different way. But I just really believe that the person who’s passing it on, they know when they have found a disciple. And they don’t really care where they come from. They really, really don’t. I mean, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn. I’ve just heard the story over and over and over again. So when it comes to authenticity you also have changing times. So we’re never—like the Carolina Chocolate Drops, no matter that we’re all black, no matter that two of us are from North Carolina, no matter that—any of this stuff, we are not going to be Joe Thompson.

We’re not going to be the Thompson family band because that world is over. That’s the other thing that people forget. It’s like, we already are in a different—on a different planet because we are performing this music for pay. We are going out and we are performing dance music on a stage. So that’s already—is that authentic? We’re not playing for a corn shucking anymore. Was when Joe started playing on stage—is he not authentic anymore? I mean, there’s too many people putting these rules down. People used to say to us, don’t teach Joe new tunes. As if he’s like a relic in a museum. I’m like, don’t change him because he’s pure? He’s not pure. He’s a dude from the country who heard bluegrass on the radio, felt that was the new thing, even at 86.

Nobody is pure. Everybody is a changing musician and traditions change. And what’s considered authentic changes. The only thing that doesn’t change is your intention. If you’ve got the right intention, you can always feel it. If you’re coming in skating the surface and just want to take, people feel that especially the old timers feel that. So I don’t know.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. I mean, Joe Thompson is an African-American fiddler from Piedmont, North Carolina. I met him when he was 86. And what became the Carolina Chocolate Drops formed at his house, learning his music. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to do that. I’m just so—I feel like we were so blessed and he opened his house and we spent a lot of time with Joe just playing the same tunes and listening to the same stories. And sometimes you get a little extra nugget.

And giving him the idea that his music was living on in his community was huge. Because there were lovely, wonderful people from that area that had playing with him for years. They’re from the white community and that means his music is living on in his community, which is really important. But his cultural community as well, the idea that there are black folk out there playing his tunes. The fact that he knew that that was happening before he passed on at 93 I think was a big source of pride for us. Because that is part of—that’s just part of it. If you know that you’re this cultural link, you want to see people in your community carrying that on. And to know that there’s still this lineage of fiddle players that goes back and back and back. Don’t put this in there, but there’s a guy in Wilmington I want to put you in touch with, John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Did you ever read that article about Geeshie Wiley and the last kind words of blues on The New York Times? There’s this huge—anyway. He’s just this—he gets in there and he researches. And he’s researching now black string band music in North Carolina. And he is going back to like before 1898. Like connecting this lineage. And you talk about authenticity and there is this kind of thrill to know that you are in a line. That is true. But it has nothing to do with blood, as they say. It’s a cultural lineage rather than a blood lineage.

And I think that those lineages are important to continue. And if you really look at the past, people have come in and off of different areas and that shit doesn’t matter. It’s like keeping it going. I do think—and acknowledging that it changes, that we are carrying on Joe’s work in a different way. We are no longer playing for the community. We’re playing for the larger community. We didn’t turn it into pop music. You know what I mean? We are still serving the purpose of the music, just in a different way.

Partial Transcript: I mean, it gives purpose to my life to be on this mission. To talk about Joe Thompson, to talk about slavery, to talk about civil rights through music. I can’t really imagine having a music career based on my experiences losing a boyfriend or whatever. I mean, that’s totally a viable thing to do. There’s plenty of people doing that already. I feel like what keeps me going is this higher purpose. No, I don’t want to say higher—I don’t like to say it’s better or worse. It’s just for me, it is the only thing that keeps me going in this industry. Because the industry is so focused on—and our culture right now is so focused on the individual and being famous and all of that mess.

Whereas, this is really more of a—this is for the better good for everybody. Because the more I can—whatever limited platform I have, I’m going to talk about these things. We do Birmingham Sunday every night. We do these songs based on slavery and everything. We do a Joe tune every night. We tried to change that narrative in the way that we can. I’m not Beyoncé, you know what I mean? (laughs) But like there, here, and here and Dom’s doing his part and Justin’s doing his part. Everybody in the collective is out there trying to change the narrative in the way that they can. And we just have to—we have to.

Partial Transcript: Oh, what have we lost? The disconnect, the digital world is not just music. We’ve lost the connection to the human being. You know, on Facebook like I’ve got all these friends but the neighbor next door has been lying dead in their apartment for two weeks. You know what I mean? It’s terrible. We used to know—it used to be our entertainment was each other. Whether it’s singing, dancing, or did you hear them arguing down the street about blah, blah, blah, or so-and-so? They’re going to break up. We used to be obsessed with each other and now we are obsessed with the frickin fake people on TV, these reality stars. Oh, so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so. And then we’re like texting each other rather than actually having tea together and talking.

And is the same with music. It’s like on the one hand, it’s this great freedom for people around the world to have access to things they would never have access to. But on the other hand, there is this disconnect to, what does it mean? And a lot of times people can make it mean something for them and then this beautiful thing can come out of it. It’s not to say they can’t do that. But overall, even when you had a record you had this beautiful artwork, somebody made this thing and you put it on a thing and you put the needle on it and you hear the sound. And now it’s just like, you know. You don’t even get that.

So it is a vast disconnect and people—I don’t know where it’s leading. I’m scared, to be honest with you. Really, the last hundred years, we haven’t seen a shift like this since we became agrarian over hunter gatherers. It’s literally that big of a shift. It’s one of these seismic things, cultural changes. And things will—I mean, if we don’t kill each other or destroy our habitat first—things will shake out and we’ll enter in the next phase of human—I mean, when the printed word came, you lost oral tradition in a lot of places. Because then people started writing things down and then you forget, you don’t have to remember anymore.

Humans used to be able to remember amazing things. And now it’s all—and now, this is the next step. We can’t even write anymore. It’s like all this rain out in the ether. But it’s just another shift. We just have to mourn what’s being lost and have hope for what’s coming. Because like I said, along with these changes are also changes that mean like I’m not going to die in childbirth hopefully. We don’t have TB. You know what I mean? It’s like there’s also these amazing positive things that have come along with it. So it’s like, what are you going to do?

Partial Transcript: Well, it’s important to remember everything that goes into the tapestry of American music, whether it’s Appalachian music or Piedmont music or whatever. It’s important to remember all of the strands because that’s the truth. And the truth is always much more interesting than the fiction that is being fed to us. And the truth is what informs who we are and explains why we do what we do. The truth does that. Illusions don’t do that. Illusions obfuscate. They do this thing. They’re feeding—if there’s an illusion that’s being sold it’s because somebody is selling it. And why are they selling it? Anything that goes into keeping us apart, anything that goes into us not understanding each other is going into the ruling class and their desire to keep us all separated so they can continue making money and having all the power. That’s it.

I mean, even this kind of—I mean, people might think, well, this is very specific to music. It’s all part of the game. Because music is supposed to be able to bring us together. And that’s what it has done over and over and over again. It’s like, you have nothing else in common but you can meet musically. People are making music together even if they’re not—they’re daughters aren’t talking or even if they can’t speak in public, they can make music. And anything that’s going to take that away—I think, should be looked at in a very shady manner. (laughs) Because that’s the experiment that is America. That is why it has succeeded, is because of all of those colors, not just the one, but all of them. And any way to support that and to reinforce that is the way to go.

Partial Transcript: Oh, when we lose our history we lose who we are. Because everything that’s gone up into this moment has made our culture the way it is. So if we don’t understand that, A, we’re going to keep making the same stupid mistakes and B, we have lost the core of what it means to be American. You see it happening now. People forcing these narratives down these under-educated people’s throats and I include myself in that—I mean, I didn’t know about the banjo until I was an adult. I’m always wary. Knowledge is power and knowing that we are more alike than different, is powerful and that’s why they don’t want us to know that. They don’t want that. They don’t want African-Americans to know all the shit that we went through. No, we weren’t just like shackled and whipped. We actually had unbelievable strength to create this economic powerhouse. It was on our strength that this stuff happened.

And then you have all this time that we created—helped create all of these different forms of music. It’s mind-blowing. And we made it through being killed and shot at and our whole neighborhoods being burned down and laws being written—it’s like, all these hundreds of years of, not surviving, but thriving and contributing unbelievable amounts to this American culture that then becomes this global culture. They don’t want us to know that because it keeps us—well, it just keeps us in this thing and takes away our power. But then that takes away everybody’s. Everybody loses. When one piece of the puzzle loses, everybody loses. And of the white culture thinks that this was not this-it wasn’t just like, you all did this to us. There was all of this stuff going on that we, we did this together. And it just was then taken. But everybody’s power is getting taken away.