100 Quotes by Rhiannon Giddens

When I first got into string-band music I felt like such an interloper. It was like I was sneaking into this music that wasn't my own... I constantly felt the awkwardness of being the raisin in the oatmeal.

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn't have to do anything.

My life used to be record, tour, record, tour. You can never say no as a freelance musician. I was on the road 200 days a year.

I remember so vividly the first time I saw one of Marshall Wyatt's superb compilations called 'Folks He Sure Do Pull Some Bow' and seeing a picture of a black fiddler and freaking out. I had stumbled upon the hidden legacy of the black string band and I wanted to know more.

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.

The banjo is my chosen instrument - it's what I write my music on.

When I first heard the minstrel banjo - I played a gourd first - I almost lost my mind. I was like, Oh, my god. And then I went to Africa, to the Gambia, and studied the akonting, which is an ancestor of the banjo, and just that connection to me was just immense.

I play a replica of a banjo from the 1950s. It was the first commercial-style banjo in the United States so it's the first one that white people played.