Reflecting on my Conversation with Rhiannon Giddens

by Jerma A. Jackson, History Department, UNC

Art can capture the elusive dimensions of human experience like almost nothing else. A meaningful example from my own experience can be found in my encounter with the Carolina Chocolate Drops back in the 2000s. This irreverent group of young, black string artists that included Rhiannon Giddens, now an artist in residence at Carolina, took aim at race in ways that felt unorthodox but unequivocal. That powerful combination grabbed my attention. I was flummoxed in part because they were embracing banjo and fiddle music—a style that had hardly interested me previously. Yet the musicians proudly pointed out that the songs were quite popular among African Americans in the mountains during the 1920s and 1930s. This information was not entirely news for me. Still, I found the enthusiastic embrace of the music intoxicating. I was not prepared for how much I could be moved and intrigued by their willingness to strut their chops and engage the past while schooling the audience about our misguided assumptions about fiddles and banjos as “white music.”

Giddens continues to raise fresh, poignant questions about race as I discovered when we met over Zoom in April 2022. During her tenure here she is pursuing a simple, straightforward question: what was the soundtrack of 1870s North Carolina? The question is deceptive in many ways. The focus on the 1870s means that Giddens is effectively pushing past the advent of recorded sound, heretofore an important reservoir for understanding American music. More importantly, in looking past recorded sound, she is venturing beyond the music industry too, and inviting us to consider just how and under what conditions people in a particular place and time came together to make music.

Something quite magical happens, when musicians make music together. Even as individuals share what they know, the experience inevitably proves greater than the sum of its parts. The mix of skills, knowledge, and engagement offers the possibility for something entirely new and different to emerge. We refer to this engagement as the creative process. Yet it remains one of the central mysteries of musical performance. Significantly enough, the creative process rests at the heart of the issue Giddens is exploring.

As an historian, I am both intrigued and compelled by the context in which Giddens is exploring the creative process—the late 19th century South. This period was marked by considerable racial strife, violence, and discord. Reconstruction was unfolding in the 1870s in North Carolina, a telling example of the social tension permeating the state. Yet in her search for the soundtrack of this moment, Giddens is inviting us to consider how in the midst of heightened racial tension efforts at upending racial categories and boundaries were unfolding too. Her research reminds us that even in the throes of extraordinary violence, creative engagement and interaction across racial categories and boundaries can occur.