About

Rhiannon Giddens has released three albums under her own name, all on Nonesuch Records. American Railroad, her first album in collaboration with the Silkroad Ensemble, was released in November 2024, and her most recent album, a collaboration with Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, released in April 2025.

With What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Rhiannon and Justin returned to rural North Carolina where their collaborations began, seeking to create a "digital porch" in order to capture the kind of casual virtuosity that defined their early lessons from esteemed old-time player Joe Thompson, and to revisit the kinds of tunes that eventually helped make them two-thirds of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

"Come to our porch, sit down, have some tea, and we're just going to play some tunes," says two-time Grammy winner Giddens. "We wanted to record that feeling."

In order to create that front porch energy, Giddens and Robinson recorded the album on location across North Carolina including at the homes of Thompson and fellow roots icon Etta Baker. As a result, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow includes the ambient sounds of the outdoors alongside their banjos, fiddles and voices; the album is a literal "field recording" in the sense that it did actually take place in a field (or forest, or in the case of Baker, her home), but with excellent modern recording equipment. 

"It really felt like we could get into the spirit of what it was like when we started," says Robinson.  "We weren't trying to be too precious about any of them, just making something that felt authentic to our own experience."