Recall the sound that set the salty, downhome tone for Beyoncé’s history-making single “Texas Hold ‘Em.” The first notes you hear on the first track by a Black woman to top Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs Chart, the spark that ignited popular discourse about a global pop megastar circumventing the gatekeepers of the country music industry, are a circling, syncopated old-time banjo figure. That part was played by Rhiannon Giddens, whose name you’ll know if you’ve followed folk music over the last 20 years. In that time, Giddens’ work has illuminated a Black banjo lineage that was long excluded from the official narrative of country music’s origins. That’s the authority her contributions carry.
An even more explicit historical signifier on Cowboy Carter, the album that would eventually win the 2025 Grammy for album of the year, are interludes featuring the, warm knowing speaking voice of the Black country singer Linda Martell, whose accomplishments in Nashville in the late 1960s had long been championed by one of her spiritual descendants, Rissi Palmer, who herself had made (modest) chart history in the 2000s. Since Bey herself certainly wasn’t out there doing interviews correcting the long held perception that country music is the province of whiteness, Giddens, the 21st century folk luminary and interdisciplinary virtuoso, and Palmer, the beloved roots and soul-steeped singer-songwriter and artist advocate, were high on the list of proxies that media outlets called on to be talking heads.
But to fixate only on that moment of massive mainstream attention is to miss the true priorities of the movement to reclaim the Black roots of folk and country music. Palmer and Giddens traveled wildly different career paths to reach the point where they can each see the community-building work they’ve done right alongside their artistry, contrary to the machinations of the industry, bear fruit. One measure of the distance they’ve traveled: This weekend, they’ll be among those celebrating the movement’s self-generated moment on stage and off all over downtown Durham, N.C. at a new festival called Biscuits & Banjos…