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Silkroad Ensemble
Guthrie Green
June 19, 2026
In 2012, I was living in a dark, dank apartment in a Stillwater alleyway. I had graduated from college, but what next? I had no idea. I spent my days writing the purplest prose you can possibly imagine, and my nights waiting tables at Mexico Joe’s. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time on YouTube.
It was in these meek—but not entirely undesirable—circumstances that a video by the group Carolina Chocolate Drops slid across my timeline. By that time, the video for “Cornbread and Butterbeans” (from their 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig), performed live for a Knoxville radio station, was four years old, but it felt as fresh as if it had emerged out of the Appalachians that very day. It’s a simple love song about eating honest food with someone you love. I must have watched that video over 50 times.
In it, along with American songbook luminary Don Flemons and fiddler Justin Robinson, is Rhiannon Giddens. In a video from the same series, Giddens sings a folk rendition of Blu Cantrell’s 2001 song “Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" so earnest and easy that I swore it was the first time I’d heard the song.
Even then, it was obvious that Giddens (along with the rest) possessed multitudinous chops, from vocal to instrumental, able to capture an audience on violin and banjo, and able to accentuate her fast and catchy vocal melodies with dense and complicated scale runs. For an alumna of Oberlin’s opera program, the Grammy that Genuine Negro Jig received for Best Folk Album seemed like a cosmic inevitability. Her career has since spanned folk, jazz, and classical, culminating in (among a zillion other accolades) a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and her appointment as the Artistic Director of the cross-cultural music program Silkroad, in which she succeeded none other than Yo-Yo Ma.