A Banjo Player From North Carolina Is Writing The Next ‘Hamilton’

Rhiannon Giddens is following in the footsteps of Lin-Manuel Miranda ― in more ways than one.

First, the North Carolina-born musician earned herself a spot on the 2017 roster of MacArthur Fellows, a career-defining prize commonly referred to as the “Genius Grant” that comes with a “no strings attached” award of $625,000. Miranda snagged the multi-disciplinary grant in 2015, as did icons like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Colson Whitehead before him.

Second, and perhaps more surprising, is the fact that Giddens is writing a musical. The acclaimed banjoist, fiddler and founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation for her work “reclaiming African-American contributions to folk and country music and bringing to light new connections between music from the past and the present.” And she plans to continue doing just that on the stage, by bringing to life the story of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898.

She says the 19th-century event is often left out of textbooks or oversimplified by white Americans as a “race riot.” It was a massacre, she clarified, and a coup, that revolved around the 1898 North Carolina election, when a group of armed white supremacists marched on Wilmington’s City Hall and “overthrew the elected local government.” Some historians estimate that hundreds of African Americans may have died in the violence that ensued, between the biracial Republican Party and the Southern democrats who sought to disenfranchise black voters, though official records mark the death toll at 25.

Giddens, of course, wants to tell the harrowing story through music. Like much of her work before it ― her performances with the Carolina Chocolate Drops or her 2017 solo album “Freedom Highway ― the musical would not only introduce new audiences to a forgotten piece of history, it would introduce them to musical influences that have long been left out of popular folk and country narratives, too. The MacArthur Foundation recognized her …