RALEIGH, N.C. — As a singer, songwriter and instrumentalist, Rhiannon Giddens crosses musical divides.
Trained as an opera singer, she also plays a mean country fiddle. Folk, bluegrass, gospel and Irish ballads are all within her reach, and she’s even won a Grammy with the black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops. Now she’s eager to begin work on her first musical, about a white revolt against a part African-American government in one North Carolina city three decades after the Civil War.
A native of North Carolina, Giddens is the child of a white father and black mother who married three years after the Supreme Court struck down all bans on interracial marriage in 1967. Today the versatile 40-year-old performer is winning accolades while casting a fresh spotlight on African-American contributions to early American music. She even drew from slave narratives for her latest album, “Freedom Highway.” And for her accomplishments, she recently picked up a $625,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.
Musical in the works
Helped by the award, Giddens plans to take time off from touring to work on a musical about the 1898 overthrow of a so-called fusion government of legitimately elected blacks and white Republicans in Wilmington, N.C. Though a footnote in many history books, the insurrection by white Democrats who burned and killed their way to power is seen as an incendiary moment in the dawning of the Jim Crow era of segregation.
“I think there’s an opportunity to tell a story through this historical event, which politically was very important,” Giddens said in a phone interview about the revolt, which some historians likened to a coup d’etat. She recalled a pattern of violence directed against African-Americans for decades after the war and slavery’s end. Among those moments: Colfax, La., when about 150 black men were killed by white Democrats in 1873, and Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, when as many as 300 may have died.