'How long do I wait before I offer tea?': US star Rhiannon Giddens on living in Ireland
Rhiannon Giddens plays Cork Opera House as part of Sounds from a Safe Harbour.
Rhiannon Giddens is the real deal – a Pulitzer Prize winner, a two-time Grammy Award winner, she’s recorded with Beyoncé, and she’s living amongst us.
Giddens lives in Castletroy, a suburb in Limerick City, where she’s raising her two children. She’s been based in Ireland for about a decade now but, having grown up in Greensboro, North Carolina, in America’s Deep South, she still struggles with some of the social nuances in her new homestead.
“Culturally there are similarities to the South,” explains Giddens. “Rural 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.”
The subtleties around what’s considered polite can be difficult to pick up on. “How 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’m still trying to figure it out,” she says, laughing.
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.
Giddens even helped the banjo to a rare chart-topping position when she joined Beyoncé's band and played her beloved instrument on 2024 mega-hit
“It's an instrument descended from West African lute-type instruments, but it became the shape we know it in the Caribbean by enslaved Africans,” she says. “It 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.”
In the early 1800s, the instrument crossed over into commercial music. “As it does that, it’s picked up by people of all colours,” Giddens explains. “The banjo becomes an instrument everybody plays. In our minds, it's tied to this pickin’ and grinnin’ rural thing, but it’s 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.
“It’s 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 – 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’s such a good representation of American history.”
In 2023, Giddens won the Pulitzer Prize for 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’s happening to race relations in the United States under the Trump administration.
“There's always this narrative – that continues to have these flowerings – about keeping America for the whites,” says Giddens. “It’s been like that since the beginning. That's why each wave of immigrants had a hard time because the people who became ‘white’ the previous generation were like, ‘No, don't take our jobs Irish people/Italian people’ or whoever was part of the next wave.”
She says the ideas the current administration is pushing are what she’s been fighting her whole career.
“People telling me ‘The Civil War was about states’ rights. Why does it have to be about race? Slavery wasn't that bad.’ 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 – a lot of good people having to deal with a lot of bad stuff. We’ve never dealt with the realities of how the country was founded.”
“When 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 ‘the explorers of the Golden Age and these incredible men who conquered a continent’. This is for sale in Walgreens [US pharmacy chain] right now. It makes me sad.”
- Rhiannon Giddens plays Cork Opera House with Francesco Turrisi on Saturday, Sept 13. Sounds From A Safe Harbour festival takes place across Cork city from September 11-14. For details and tickets, see soundsfromasafeharbour.com
I’m listening to a bunch of early Dolly Parton stuff at the moment. She was a feminist from the get-go. Listening to her lyrics is incredible – she was doing all of it with a smile, and her painted fingernails on her guitar, but she’s singing, “You men, y'all need to get it together.” There's a song – that's the name of the record too – and the whole chorus is, “My mistakes are no worse than yours/Just because I'm a woman”. That was radical back then.
I've been reading a lot of Garth Nix, a young adult fiction author. There's a swath of fiction now that's all about romance and happy endings. I like old style youth fiction, where it's challenging things, but everybody doesn't die like in His books deal with death and these two worlds – a magic world and one that’s not, and these terrible people trying to take over it. It has strong female characters which is cool.
Jay Alexander was the house magician for The Rolling Stones. In the green room, he did tricks for people, sleight of hand stuff. In the basement of a restaurant in San Francisco, he opened a little theatre for maybe 250 people, and he has this magic show that he runs every weekend. Right in front of your face, he's doing this amazing stuff. I enjoyed myself so much. It's funny and touching.
Also in San Francisco – because we had a couple days off – I saw one of Paul Simons’ farewell tour shows. I know him a little bit. I've sung with him. His folks gave us some tickets. I was there with Joan Baez sitting next to me. It was so cool to watch somebody in that part of their lives, how they chose to run their show. As a fellow professional musician, I was struck by how he put it together. His voice is different. He's singing stuff from back in the day, but the first half of it was brand new music. I'm like, “Good on ya!”
