Sunday night's Davidson College Artist Series concert was a rare treat. Grammy Award-winning musician and composer Rhiannon Giddens received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from the college and then performed a set of original and traditional North Carolina tunes on banjo and fiddle.
"My speech is the performance you're about to see," she joked, after receiving the degree before a sellout crowd at Davidson's Duke Family Performance Hall.
With her on stage were Justin Robinson and Laurelyn Dossett, fellow North Carolina musicians and longtime collaborators. Giddens and Robinson co-founded the old-time string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops with Dom Flemons. Dossett co-founded the North Carolina band Polecat Creek.
Giddens, who grew up near Greensboro, told of discovering the banjo in 2005. She attended the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University, where she met Robinson. "When we learned the banjo was an African instrument, it blew the doors off," she said. Not long after that The Carolina Chocolate Drops were born.
At Sunday's performance, she and Robinson revisited the music of the late North Carolina fiddler Joe Thompson, with whom they "apprenticed," in her words. As always, she used the performance to share the Black history of old-time and bluegrass music and the nation's history of slavery and injustice. The music ranged from traditional foot-stomping, square-dance tunes to the sobering "At the Purchaser's Option."
The latter tune is a Giddens original — a tale of an enslaved woman who lives defiantly, including this line: "You can take my body/You can take my bones/You can take my blood/But not my soul."
Giddens was in North Carolina for a series of events, including a performance of her opera "Omar" at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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