By james art In 2005, several dozen people traveled to Boone for Black Banjos Then and Now, a multi-day gathering that aimed to explore and celebrate the banjo’s African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American origins.
One of the attendees was musician Rhiannon Giddens, then 28 and a recent graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The event, an outgrowth of a list of lists on the same theme, offered a chance for scholars and musicians to come together for talks, performances and raucous old-time jams, and to seek a new way forward for the art form.
It changed Giddens’s life—later that year she formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops with bandmates Don Flemons and Justin Robinson—and became a turning point in the revival of multiracial, intergenerational music of old. November 2005 INDI the cover describes it as a moment when “a new generation rests on old music”.
Twenty years later, Giddens will celebrate that moment with Biscuits & Banjos, a landmark three-day festival taking place in Durham city center on April 25-27. The event will serve as both a reunion for the event and The Carolina Chocolate Drops, who will perform alongside Taj Mahal, Leyla McCalla, Christian McBride, Rissi Palmer, The Legendary Ingramettes and New Dangerfield.
The program will include a celebrity chef cookie bake, square dancing and free banjo lessons, according to festival organizers, with more performers and events to be announced closer to the event.
In the years since that Boone reunion, Giddens has made a distinguished career of dusting off unexplored or willfully buried moments of Southern history and giving them musical texture, from a study of the 1898 Wilmington coup to an opera about the life of a Sufi scholar from 9th century, enslaved in North Carolina. Along the way, she received two Grammy Awards, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a Pulitzer Prize
“This festival has been a dream of mine for a long time,” Giddens wrote in the event’s press release. “It’s about honoring the ties that bind black culture together across time and geography, whether it’s music, food or storytelling. The Black Banjo Gathering was such an important milestone for me personally, and I want Biscuits & Banjos to bring that same spirit of discovery and community to today’s generation of artists and fans.”
Durham has seen its fair share of ups and downs with festivals over the past few years, but April promises to bring steady foot traffic downtown: The Full-Frame Documentary Film Festival will take place just weeks before, April 3-6. In the press release, Giddens, who is from Greensboro and has spent considerable time in the area, highlighted the Bull City’s multi-layered ties to black heritage.
“Durham is the perfect place to launch Biscuits & Banjos,” she wrote. “It has a vibrant community, an incredible arts scene, and a history that aligns with the festival’s mission to elevate and honor black culture.”
The festival is sponsored by numerous organizations, including the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Tickets go on sale Oct. 25, and a portion of ticket and merchandise sales will go toward hurricane relief efforts in Western North Carolina.
As with Black Banjos then and now, this festival offers the opportunity for a joyful call and response – between 2005 and 2025 and between the rich history of black roots music and contemporary artists today.
“We really want to get out there and perform, just say ‘Hey, you can do this if you look like us. You can play that music,” Giddens said INDI in 2005. “With both bands, we like to educate the audience a bit between songs, as it’s still something new to see a black string band.”
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