I spoke with Rhiannon Giddens in mid-June 2023, soon after the announcement that her opera, Omar, cowritten with composer Michael Abels, had won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The award is just the most recent jewel in Giddens’s crown; she’s also won two Grammys, a MacArthur grant, a spot in the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, among many other honors. 

But these achievements only hint at the broader impact of Giddens’s work over the last twenty years. Since debuting with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an all-Black old-time music group featuring Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson, Giddens has arguably done more than any single musician to broaden the look and sound of the Americana scene. You can hear her influence in the growing number of prominent Black artists who play and sing country- and folk-oriented music, notably Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Leyla McCalla, who collaborated with Giddens in 2019 as the quartet Our Native Daughters.