"There's times I'm playing the banjo and I just feel the ancestors," Rhiannon Giddens says. Karen Cox/Nonesuch Records hide caption

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Karen Cox/Nonesuch Records

Giddens sings and plays music throughout this interview. Click the audio link above to get the full experience.

Musician Rhiannon Giddens describes herself as "a folkie to the bone."

"There's times I'm playing the banjo and I just feel the ancestors. Like, I feel the spirits come through," she says. "And it's like, that's the only thing that's kept me going in this industry is knowing that I'm connected in that way to the people who came before."

Giddens plays music from the Black string band tradition dating back to slave times, and she played banjo on Beyoncé's hit "Texas Hold 'Em." She's also the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble, which was founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and is dedicated to playing with musicians from around the world, drawing on their musical traditions.

Her latest album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, takes its name from an Emily Dickinson poem. For Giddens, the theme of hope connects directly to her ancestors, who lived lives of extreme poverty in the American South.

"What right do I have to not have hope when I don't have to worry ... about starving?" she says. "I'm not saying I'm a Pollyanna, because I don't have a lot of faith in humanity, but I have a faith in humans."

Therese Madden and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the web.