In 2005, a few dozen people traveled to Boone for Black Banjos Then and Now, a multi-day gathering that sought to explore and celebrate the banjo’s African, Afro-Caribbean, and African-American origins.
One attendee was the musician Rhiannon Giddens, then 28 and a recent graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The event, an outgrowth of a listserve on the same topic, offered a chance for scholars and musicians to come together for talks, performances, and raucous old-time jams alike and seek a new path forward for the art form.
It changed Giddens’ life—later that same year, she would form the Carolina Chocolate Drops alongside fellow attendees Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson—and became a turning point for a revival of multiracial, intergenerational old-time music. A November 2005 INDY cover story described it as a moment where a “new generation restrings an old music.”
Twenty years later, Giddens will celebrate that moment with Biscuits & Banjos, a landmark three-day festival slated to take place in downtown Durham 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.
Programming will include a celebrity chef biscuit bake-off, square dances, 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 gathering, Giddens has made an extraordinary career out of shaking the dust off of underexplored—or deliberately buried—moments in Southern history and giving them musical texture, from an exploration of the 1898 Wilmington coup to an opera on the life of a 19th-century Sufi scholar enslaved in North Carolina. Along the way, she has received two Grammy Awards, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a Pulitzer Prize
“This festival has been a long-time dream of mine,” Giddens wrote in the event’s press release. “It’s about honoring the connections that tie Black culture together across time and geography, whether it’s through 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 in the past few years, but April promises to bring steady foot traffic downtown: Full Frame Documentary Festival will take place just weeks before, on April 3-6. In the press release, Giddens, who is from Greensboro and has spent substantial time in the area, emphasized the Bull City’s layered ties to Black heritage.
“Durham is the perfect place to launch Biscuits & Banjos,” she wrote. “It has a vibrant community, an incredible artistic scene, and a history that aligns with the festival’s mission to uplift 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 October 25 and a portion of ticket and merchandise sales will go to hurricane relief efforts in Western North Carolina.
As with Black Banjos Then and Now, this festival offers the possibility of a joyful call-and-response—between 2005 and 2025, and between the rich history of Black roots music and contemporary performers 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 this music,’” Giddens told the INDY in 2005. “With both groups, we like to educate the audience just a little bit between songs, since it’s still quite a novel thing to see a Black string band.”
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