Rhiannon Giddens Shares Her Interpretation of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” from Forthcoming album Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, Out September 18 on Nonesuch Records  | Shore Fire Media

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11 August, 2026Print

Rhiannon Giddens Shares Her Interpretation of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” from Forthcoming album Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, Out September 18 on Nonesuch Records 

Spare Voice-and-Guitar Performance Honors the Legacy of the North Carolina Folk Music Pioneer

Listen to “Freight Train”: https://youtu.be/LACnsBUsY4o

 

 

ugust 11, 2026 — Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Genius Award winner, and two-time GRAMMY Award-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens today shares “Freight Train,” a spare interpretation of the song made famous by North Carolina music legend Elizabeth Cotten. This latest track Giddens’ forthcoming album—Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, out September 18 on Nonesuch Records—features only Giddens’ lead vocal and longtime collaborator Dirk Powell on acoustic guitar.

Pre-order Hope Is the Thing with Feathers here: https://rhiannongiddens.lnk.to/hopeisthething 

Giddens’ intimate vocals and Powell’s quiet guitar reveal the economy and emotional depth that have allowed “Freight Train” to travel across generations. More than an exercise in revival, the performance is an act of lineage: one North Carolina artist returning to the work of another, honoring Cotten’s singular musical language while carrying its living history forward.

Listen to / watch video for “Freight Train” here: https://youtu.be/LACnsBUsY4o 

“Freight Train” sits at the heart of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, a live-recorded collection inspired by the beauty of people coming together and drawing strength from one another. Made with few overdubs during sessions at The Cypress House in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, the album invites listeners into the center of the room, preserving the sounds of musicians listening, speaking, stomping, and creating together.

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The ten-song collection brings together key collaborators from throughout Giddens’ life and career. Giddens—on lead vocals, minstrel banjo, and fiddle—is joined by longtime bassist Jason Sypher; Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi; Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu; Louisiana native Dirk Powell; her first bandmate and fellow North Carolinian Justin Robinson; her nephew Justin Harrington; Amelia Powell; Charly Lowry; and Giddens’ sister, Lalenja Harrington. The album was co-produced by Giddens and Powell, who also engineered and mixed the record.

“Louisiana, the Congo, Italy, the Carolinas—all of these influences and people coming together to make something: that is American music,” says Giddens. “It’s how American music came to be, and that was the original thought of creating a band with the musicians that I’ve been playing with for years, and featured on this album.”

“Freight Train” follows the release of “Carolina Rain,” an original from the album written by Giddens and Powell. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers also includes interpretations of North Carolina musician Ola Belle Reed’s “High on a Mountain,” Indigenous activist, singer-songwriter and storyteller Pura Fé’s “Going Home,” and traditional songs including “Cluck Old Hen” and “Walk with Me,” a duet with Giddens’ sister. The title track was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name.

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The album arrives during an extraordinary period of creative expansion for Giddens, who recently signed with WME for worldwide representation in music. She also served as a music supervisor and consultant and contributed original music to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners; created new music for Ken Burns’ PBS documentary The American Revolution; and co-authored Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo with Kristina R. Gaddy. She will also make her leading-role film debut in the forthcoming An Ode To Mary Jo, alongside Ed Helms, Jason Isbell, Steve Earle, Regina Taylor, and John Sayles.

Additionally, Giddens recently launched the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation, a nonprofit celebrating the African diaspora’s role in shaping American identity and culture through music, literature, food, and community. The Foundation grew out of her sold-out Biscuits & Banjos Festival in Durham, North Carolina, and will support music education, instrument access, and programming that invests in artists, teachers, and tradition-bearers.

 

 

“Giddens’ work has become a foundational influence for a generation of younger Black roots musicians” – Rolling Stone

“Few American performers this century are more accomplished and important than Rhiannon Giddens” – Mojo

Track List

  1. Angel Fire Rise
  2. Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
  3. Step Away Blues 
  4. Wish in Vain
  5. Carolina Rain
  6. High on a Mountain
  7. Freight Train
  8. Walk with Me
  9. Cluck Old Hen
  10. Going Home

 

Tour Dates:

Aug 20 – Lenox, MA – Seiji Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood *

Aug 21 - Waterloo, NY - The Vine Theater at del Lago Resort *

Aug 22 – Chautauqua, NY – Chautauqua Institution *

Nov 01 – Minneapolis, MN – Walker Art Center (Mack Lecture Series)

Nov 14 – New York, NY – Carnegie Hall (with Silkroad Ensemble & Yo-Yo Ma)

Nov 25-29 - Hamburg, Germany - Elbphilharmonie

* Performance with Silkroad Ensemble — Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual

 

About Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, Pulitzer Prize winner, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art.

Giddens has released three previous albums under her own name and two in collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, all on Nonesuch Records. American Railroad, her first album in collaboration with the Silkroad Ensemble, was released by the label in November 2024. A collaboration with Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, was released by Nonesuch in April 2025.

A founding member of the landmark Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the all-female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters, Giddens is as much a curator as a creator. She is the current Artistic Director of the Yo-Yo Ma-founded Silkroad Ensemble, hosted a TV show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, and has hosted two podcasts (Aria Code from New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR, which ran for three seasons, and American Railroad from Silkroad). Giddens has published two children's books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She was a music consultant for 2025’s landmark film Sinners, and appeared as a recurring cast member on ABC's hit drama Nashville and as a music history expert on Ken Burns’ Country Music series on PBS. In 2025, she launched her own music festival in Durham, NC called Biscuits & Banjos, to celebrate Black culture outside the mainstream, and in 2026 she turned that initiative into a Foundation to house her mission-based work, the Biscuits and Banjos Foundation.

As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”