Rhiannon Giddens is a musical polymath. As someone who started out studying opera vocals, she’s best known for her skills as a formidable banjo player. Along the way, she has played a major role promoting old-time music and bluegrass while smashing the stereotypes of this genre being homogenous (i.e. strictly created by White people). That’s on top of composing music for the Nashville Ballet, hosting a podcast produced by the Metropolitan Opera and WQXR-FM (“Aria Code with Rhiannon Giddens”) and receiving the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Added to the list is her role as artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble, a nonprofit cross-cultural music organization founded by Yo-Yo Ma that he stepped down from leading in 2017.
Having completed a tour in the first part of the year with the Silk Road Ensemble, a fluid cross-section of musicians drawn from a breadth of musical traditions and genres, Giddens is switching gears, doing a series of bluegrass festival shows, solo headlining dates and mixing in another string of dates dubbed “American Tunes: Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” The latter concert series, which includes a June 27 performance at Hayden Homes Amphitheater, brings her together with Mavis Staples, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Hurray for the Riff Raff for an inter-generational celebration of songs.
Giddens conceived the series as an extension of her 2025 Juneteenth concert at the Hollywood Bowl, a gathering of banjo players called American Tunes that featured Steve Martin, Ed Helms, and Our Native Daughters (a supergroup she formed with Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Leyla McCalla. This summer’s string of gigs explores female and Black perspectives on folk music while reflecting on America turning 250 years old
Given how Giddens has emerged as a post-modern “Queen of Old-Timey Music” via her work with The Carolina Chocolate Drops and as a solo artist, it’s somewhat surprising how late the multi-instrumentalist got started on banjo, the instrument she’s most closely associated with.
“I went to Oberlin (Conservatory) for opera,” she said. “Before that, I would have been a regular old kid listening to the radio and my dad playing ‘60s folk music. I would have heard that and bluegrass, but I never picked up a banjo until I was in my 20s. I heard it played clawhammer style for the first time and I liked it. I loved it and wanted to know what it was. I got into the old-timey contra dances and square dances and that’s where I heard the banjo played as a dance instrument. That’s when I fell in love with it then. That was it. I fell in love with it as a community music, as a function music.”
With the United States celebrating its semiquincentennial this year, Giddens’ own interests, academic and otherwise, are being fed by the reams of research she’s doing for a book that traces the roots of old world instruments like the gimbri(a Moroccan three-stringed lute) and the 1858 replica banjo she currently plays. A major driver behind this project is connecting the dots between culture, music and the impact race — a topic that continues to be a lightning rod — has on our collective history, past and present.
“I’m doing this research now and there is cultural stuff that obviously forms the central part of our music,” Giddens explained. “It’s cultures coming up against each other. That’s what makes American music so changeable, so chameleonic. That’s why Black music is at the center of it. Taking on a Black identity is becoming American. It’s fascinating and it goes all the way back. We have to talk about it this way because then you realize that nobody owns nothing. But we have to tell the real part people had to play in this, because you can’t take anybody out or the whole thing collapses like a soufflé.”
She added, “They don’t want to have that conversation because the closer we get to that conversation, the closer we get to realizing that it was never about race in the first place. Race is used to enforce class and keep the majority of people on the problem. They don’t want us to get there. They want us to keep fighting each other. You stole my thing. Meanwhile, they’ve made away with everything.”
On top of the research and touring, Giddens will add variety to her 2026 endeavors with a late-year promotional run for “Ode to Mary Jo,” a non-music film in which she appears alongside Ed Helms, Regina Taylor, John Sayles, Jason Isbell and Steve Earle. Having been a regular cast member of the musical drama, “Nashville,” back in 2017 and 2018, the North Carolina native welcomed the chance to step away from wearing so many creative hats and not lead for once.
“I loved being part of this film,” Giddens said. “For my life, I’m kind of the head of a lot of things and I have to make all these decisions. I love being my own boss, but it was a nice break to go on set and just be told what to do. And all I had to do was emote, say my things, hit my mark and just do it as many times as they required. And there’s a freedom in that that I really enjoyed. It’s just a different aspect of being an artist.”
She would like to do more acting.
“People on set were amazing and I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” she said. “But the schedules of the musician and the actor are very hard to align because one of them is, ‘We need you tomorrow’ and the other one is, ‘We need to schedule you for next year.’ So they’re hard to make work. I’m grateful that I got to do it, but if anyone came to me and said they had a part for me, sign me up, it’s super-fun.”
Rhiannon Giddens
Sat, June 27 6pm
Hayden Homes Amphitheater
344 SW Shevlin Hixon Dr, Bend
bendconcerts.com/
$89
This article appears in the Source June 18, 2026.
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