The driving banjo on Beyonce’s Texas Hold ‘Em is not an anonymous session player. It is Rhiannon Giddens, a MacArthur Fellow, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and scholar of history. This deep dive traces how a classically trained opera singer from Greensboro, North Carolina, became a pivotal figure in reclaiming the Black history of country and folk music and dismantling the boundaries between genres.

We follow her from the Oberlin Conservatory to Scottish Gaelic mouth music and contra dance calling, to the 2005 Black Banjo Gathering in Boone that revealed the instrument’s West African origins, and to the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops. Then we track her solo rise through T Bone Burnett’s Inside Llewyn Davis concert, the New Basement Tapes, Songs of Our Native Daughters, the ballet Lucy Negro Redux and the opera Omar.

• How 1920s record executives split the same music into hillbilly and race records
• The 2010 Grammy for Genuine Negro Jig and the 2017 MacArthur Fellowship
• Co-writing the libretto and music for Omar, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music
• Taking over as artistic director of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad in 2020
• Acting on CMT’s Nashville, children’s books, and collaborations with Francesco Turrisi from Limerick, Ireland