Singing to remember. Rhiannon Giddens' Folk in. Piazza Duomo

Spoleto, July 2, 2023 - After Imany's, the next great voice expected at Piazza Duomo is that of American singer revelation Rhiannon Giddens on Thursday, July 6 at at 21:30. The American singer-songwriter, composer and multi-instrumentalist won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2023 foropera Omar, two Grammy Awards and a MacArthur "genius" grant. In Piazza Duomo she is accompanied by her art and life partner Francesco Turrisi, and plays her inseparable banjo. "Scholars know this, of course. The banjo is a chordophone of African origin, created from enslaved people. When I discovered it, I wondered how much other information is being disseminated incorrectly," he said in an interview for La Lettura.

In her works as a composer and performer, Giddens traces Gaelic, American, African American, and Native American folk traditions and their influence on European and American music, resulting in to powerful songs that target discrimination. Country, blues, jazz and gospel mingle in exploring the lives of people silenced to from slaves, to victims of the civil rights murders of the 1960s, to teenagers killed by police on inner-city streets. Like Giddens, Turrisi comes from disparate experiences and is the perfect wingman, between assorted tambourines from various sources, piano and accordion, which he plays with very original touch. Winners at the 2022 Grammys in the Best Folk Album category, the two artists perform to Spoleto a selection from their albums there is no Other and They're Calling Me Home.

Born to Greensboro, North Carolina, in the late 1970s from European-American father and African-American mother - married only three years after the landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling that allowed interracial marriages through the abolition of anti-miscegenation laws - Giddens, after studies in opera singing, attended Irish music and learned the fiddle from old African-American masters. "I am mixed." - states Giddens - "My father is white, my mother is black. And I constantly learned to go back and forth between one world and another. And that has made me who I am."