100 Quotes by Rhiannon Giddens

I love singing opera, but the world surrounding it is not me. I want to be barefoot. I want to be in control of my own career. I want to put on a show. In the opera world, you wait for people to call you until you get to a certain level. In the folk world, it's a lot easier to have control from the beginning.

I used to subscribe to Nintendo Power. The first issue had 'Mario 2,' and it had all the characters rendered in clay. So I started making all of these characters out of clay.

I like Queen Latifah.

I'm not an urban black person. I'm a country black person.

I'm still black in the eyes of America.

We have to talk about the negativity, but we have to enjoy the beauty of what this country, culturally, has done.

It's not about me, it's about the music. I don't do this because I want to be a star. I don't do this because I want to make a lot of money.

What's really interesting to me is to have a connection to what was going on in the past, but to make it a living thing.

In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative we've inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scotch-Irish tradition with influences from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures.