Jo Reed: You mentioned Joe Thompson—he’s a National Heritage Fellow which is the award the arts endowment gives to folk and traditional artists. I would love to have talk about your interactions with him because he’s such an important figure in American music
Rhiannon Giddens: We were so lucky, we didn't know then how lucky we were. I think we know now, like me and Dom Flemings and Justin Robinson, the original Carolina Chocolate Drops, we started going down to meet Joe, Joe was 86 at that time, and he'd had a stroke but he'd kind of recovered enough to be able to play, which was amazing, and the white community around Mebane, which is where he lived, you know the white old-time community, had been really active in keeping him playing because he wouldn't play by himself, and this is a really integral part of the kind of music that he came from, he wouldn't play without a banjo player, which is one of the reasons why I ended up playing banjo in the band because I was the only one who could, so I said, well, I'm sticking with the banjo and filling the slot that needs to be filled, and I'm really grateful for that because the core of how I played banjo comes from playing with Joe Thompson, and he was an amazing, gentle, you know I think he was aware of the importance of his music but not enough to be too stressed about it. I don't know, I just think he knew his job was to teach and so he taught anybody who wanted to come by, and by teaching he played with them, and he was a really open person, and we got him for a handful of years which was really amazing, like a couple of those years were really intensely learning from him and playing with him and playing with him in public, and then when John Jeremiah Sullivan's article came out connecting Joe Thompson to Frank Johnson who had been completely forgotten but who was a black string band musician, he was a fiddler who had bought himself out of slavery with his fiddle, and bought his family out of slavery, and formed this string band which was famous all over the South, so famous that they actually started calling the music he played Frank Johnson music, like he was hugely influential, right, and so when Sullivan connected him to Joe Thompson. I can't even explain how big of a deal that was to me. In African-American history it's so difficult to get names and connections because of the nature of enslavement, because of the nature of being discarded, and most people, it's very hard for them to trace back over the ocean, you know a lot of people have a hard time getting specific names for their family tree. That didn't matter so much to me, this did. I actually have a musical lineage that has a name at the end of it. And we realized we were able to do this with a living member of the African-American community, this music which was almost dead in our culture. It's such an important thing, and so it really does inform so much of how I look at music and how I look at the world really, is having that experience.
