Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Rhiannon Giddens - Page 2

I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the '90s, especially the women who were so strong, like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. It's a great art form.

That was the special thing about the Carolina Chocolate Drops. We didn't want to do music full-time. We weren't looking to get rich, which is good, because we didn't. But we went further than we thought we would go. We started that band to celebrate Joe Thompson and the black string band music. That's not really a recipe for commercial success.

If I wasn't touring, I wasn't making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn't have to do anything.

Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.

I don't have a genre because I play lots of different music that people would say are different genres.

The banjo is my chosen instrument - it's what I write my music on.

I love singing opera, but the world surrounding it is not me. I want to be barefoot. I want to be in control of my own career. I want to put on a show. In the opera world, you wait for people to call you until you get to a certain level. In the folk world, it's a lot easier to have control from the beginning.

When you are a commercial music artist, your music depends on your popularity.

It's kind of remarkable, everything that's happened to me. It's been such a whirlwind, but in a good way.

When I got into college, I got into operatic vocalists, like Leontyne Price.

To learn the history of the banjo is to recover the actual history of America.

I'm really taken with 'Calling Me Home' by Alice Gerrard.

I wouldn't be out here touring constantly if I didn't hope that my music was going to do something to somebody.

I always felt culturally adrift as a child because I'm mixed race. I've had to deal with that since I was little. Who am I? What makeup do I have? What are the black and the white?

I couldn't stand the politics in opera.

If I want to support my family and my crew, we have to be on the road, and that's really tiring.

I don't watch 'Game of Thrones.' I don't watch TV. I don't watch Hulu.

My life used to be record, tour, record, tour. You can never say no as a freelance musician. I was on the road 200 days a year.

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

I've been getting interested in reimagining folk songs and writing songs that should have existed but didn't, particularly around the Civil War when black voices were muted and only allowed particular channels.

I don't consider myself at the kind of stature of somebody who can play five cities on a tour, and that's it. I go where I'm wanted, and I've always had the rural areas of the country. We've always gone there, since the Carolina Chocolate Drops. There's a fan base that's there, and if I can afford to do it, I do it.

I think it's important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.

Othering people is something that humans have done for ever.

The first band I was in out of college was a Celtic band, and I had to learn to sing with a microphone, because I'd never done that before. At Oberlin, I never used a mic for any kind of singing.

Being mixed in the South, that's a struggle that everybody deals with differently. Some people go careening to one side or the other, and some people try to walk a tightrope between the two. I grew up spending equal time with both sides of my family.

People who put Europe in the center of the universe, they're very fragile.

I love being on the road and I love my band, but also need to be with my kids more and I need to be creating more.

I keep starting supergroups, writing ballets and things like that.

I'll talk about the banjo all day long and the history of minstrel shows.

In the commercial music world, the folk world, we sell records and concert tickets - this is the way I make a living. You go out, you make your art and hopefully people will put their money down for it. But it's getting hard. I have to be on the road so much to keep the lights on.

There was such hostility to the idea of a banjo being a black instrument. It was co-opted by this white supremacist notion that old-time music was the inheritance of white America.

I don't want to go on a talk show and talk about stuff I don't know about.

I've always liked women singers and appreciate a good story being told. That's what country music used to do on the radio.

American music is always best when it comes from a mixture of things.

I have to continue to work, and I have to be touring, because that's how I earn a living.

I'm discovering so much about how invisible, othered and dismissed the Islamic world is, in terms of the massive effects it had on European music and culture.

I'm really interested in history and when I looked into the settlers who came to my home state, North Carolina, I found that the largest settlement of Hebridean islanders outside of Scotland was right there in North Carolina.

Music affects people in a way that bare facts can't.

There is music out there that is commercially driven, whether you like it or not. That's a peculiarly American innovation. We innovated the commercial music business.

I play a replica of a banjo from the 1950s. It was the first commercial-style banjo in the United States so it's the first one that white people played.