Rhiannon Giddens

The roots musician is inspired by the evolving legacy of the black string band.

A new release of an 1891 song by Louis Vasnier deepens what we know about the genre’s origins.

Beyoncé is following in the footsteps of many Black musicians before her.

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

Artists like Yola and Rhiannon Giddens are blowing up what Giddens calls a “manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.”

If you think that the banjo can teach us nothing about American history, Southern culture and modern race relations, then you certainly don't know the banjo.

How preparation for a big purchase turned into an adventure through history.

She animated the horror and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer.

The story of the first major black-owned record label and the mystery behind the man who created it.

Omar ibn Said was captured in Senegal at 37 and enslaved in Charleston. A devout Muslim, he later converted to the Christian faith of his enslavers. Or did he?

The banjo's history and its symbolism of community, slavery, resistance, and ultimately America itself.