![\"\u00a0Rhiannon](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/4766900_7_articleinline_GettyImages-1622168134_1_.jpg\" "\\"\u00a0Rhiannon")
\u00a0Rhiannon Giddens performing in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim\/Getty Images)<\/p>\nRhiannon Giddens is the real deal \u2013 a Pulitzer Prize winner, a two-time Grammy Award winner, she\u2019s recorded with Beyonc\u00e9, and she\u2019s living amongst us.<\/p>\n
Giddens lives in Castletroy, a suburb in Limerick City, where she\u2019s raising her two children. She\u2019s been based in Ireland for about a decade now but, having grown up in Greensboro, North Carolina, in America\u2019s Deep South, she still struggles with some of the social nuances in her new homestead.<\/p>\n
\u201cCulturally there are similarities to the South,\u201d explains Giddens. \u201cRural cultures have similarities all over the world. Ireland has changed a lot, obviously in Dublin and some of the city centres, but outside of that it’s still connected to rural rhythms. There’s a lot I recognise as a Southerner, which was also ruled by rural rhythms, but with cultural differences, it’s hard to know where the lines are sometimes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The subtleties around what\u2019s considered polite can be difficult to pick up on. \u201cHow long do I wait before I offer tea? When do I recognise that somebody doesn’t want the tea? How many times do I keep offering? Those are the things where I know people think I’m rude when I’m just being shy. At home, you deny it twice and that’s it. Here maybe four times. I\u2019m still trying to figure it out,\u201d she says, laughing.<\/p>\n
Giddens trained as an opera singer, but after graduating she drifted into the world of bluegrass and beyond. She learnt to play the banjo and the fiddle. In 2006, she co-founded Carolina Chocolate Drops, an old-time string band. In 2016, a couple of years after the band dissolved, she became the first woman, and the first person of colour, to win the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo. She has always been evangelical about the banjo.<\/p>\n
Giddens even helped the banjo to a rare chart-topping position when she joined Beyonc\u00e9’s band and played her beloved instrument\u00a0 on 2024 mega-hit Texas Hold \u2018Em.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s an instrument descended from West African lute-type instruments, but it became the shape we know it in the Caribbean by enslaved Africans,\u201d she says. \u201cIt comes with them to the United States and becomes an emblem of black culture until the 1800s. It was something people from different parts of Africa could create a Creole culture around. It has an intense spiritual history.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0In the early 1800s, the instrument crossed over into commercial music. \u201cAs it does that, it\u2019s picked up by people of all colours,\u201d Giddens explains. \u201cThe banjo becomes an instrument everybody plays. In our minds, it’s tied to this pickin\u2019 and grinnin\u2019 rural thing, but it\u2019s in every walk of life. It became part of jazz, blues and classical music. It became known as America’s instrument, and it’s taken all over the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really the 1920s, when people started rallying around this mythical white history where the banjo gets co-opted and we get this idea of the banjo as one thing. When really it was many things which is what American history is \u2013 out of one, many things come. It came out of this pressure cooker of violence and a cultural coming together, all the good, the bad and the ugly. I’m part of a team of people trying to rehabilitate the banjo’s image because its true history is so interesting. It\u2019s such a good representation of American history.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Rhiannon Giddens performing in New York City. (Photo by Rob Kim\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
In 2023, Giddens won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Omar, an opera she co-wrote. It tells the story of a 37-year-old Muslim scholar who was captured in West Africa in 1807 and sold into slavery in South Carolina. It troubles Giddens, who has Native American heritage and was born to a black mother and a white father, to see what\u2019s happening to race relations in the United States under the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s always this narrative \u2013 that continues to have these flowerings \u2013 about keeping America for the whites,\u201d says Giddens. \u201cIt\u2019s been like that since the beginning. That’s why each wave of immigrants had a hard time because the people who became \u2018white\u2019 the previous generation were like, \u2018No, don’t take our jobs Irish people\/Italian people\u2019 or whoever was part of the next wave.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0She says the ideas the current administration is pushing are what she\u2019s been fighting her whole career.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople telling me \u2018The Civil War was about states\u2019 rights. Why does it have to be about race? Slavery wasn’t that bad.\u2019 I’m 48 years old. When I was a kid, we weren’t that far away from segregation. Here we are again. It’s terrible. I know where we’re headed \u2013 a lot of good people having to deal with a lot of bad stuff. We\u2019ve never dealt with the realities of how the country was founded.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cWhen it comes to the race narrative, they want to go back to the 1950s. We’re back to this stuff about the Wild West, back to \u2018the explorers of the Golden Age and these incredible men who conquered a continent\u2019. This is for sale in Walgreens [US pharmacy chain] right now. It makes me sad.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Rhiannon](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/4766912_3_articleinline_GettyImages-1810326941_1_.jpg\" "\\"Rhiannon")
Rhiannon Giddens is a big fan of Dolly Parton.(Photo by Ron Jenkins\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n