100 Quotes by Rhiannon Giddens

When I got into college, I got into operatic vocalists, like Leontyne Price.

We're not here as a black band playing white string band music. You know, we play stuff in the Appalachians, we play stuff in the white community, but we really highlight the black community's music.

I've always liked women singers and appreciate a good story being told. That's what country music used to do on the radio.

I'm really taken with 'Calling Me Home' by Alice Gerrard.

The first band I was in out of college was a Celtic band, and I had to learn to sing with a microphone, because I'd never done that before. At Oberlin, I never used a mic for any kind of singing.

My stuff lives in Nashville but I live wherever my children are.

I really got into Gaelic music and the whole sound of it, and I got to go to Scotland.

I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.

I'm really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.