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.

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