Rhiannon Giddens Is The 21st Century's Revelator

Rhiannon Giddens is as bluegrass as they come. She's got receipts too: Raised in the North Carolina piedmont by a biracial family, Giddens would listen to her uncle's bluegrass band, The Southeast Express. She remembers a childhood with Hank Williams refrains and old gospel numbers cooing through the radio.

Giddens' earliest memories of songs, of accents and upbringings, point to an intrinsic sense of self — an internal homing radar. She is a proud North Carolinian, someone who knows her roots down to the coordinates.

To this end, what has defined much of Giddens' career is her drive to calibrate that inner feeling with the perceptions of the outer world; to actively defy long-held assumptions that American banjo and fiddle traditions were invented by, and belong to, white people only.