Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens plays the Assembly Rooms on Monday 7 December, part of her 2026 international tour. If you've come across her name recently, it might have been through her banjo work on Beyoncé's Texas Hold 'Em, but that's just the most recent thing she's done. She's an American musician, composer and author who's spent her career in folk and roots music, and this is a solo date in the middle of a wider tour.

She first made her mark as a founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and since then she's built a solo career that sits between historical research and contemporary performance. A lot of that work is about reclaiming the overlooked histories of Black and Indigenous musicians, so her sets often draw on the old songs and traditions she's spent years digging into. It's folk music with a specific focus on the people who were left out of the story.

There's a composer's side to her too. In 2023, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her opera Omar, which she co-wrote with Michael Abels. She's also the artistic director of Silkroad, the global musical collective Yo-Yo Ma started. Between the folk, the opera and the directing, there's a fair bit of ground she covers, and the Edinburgh date is one of the stops on her 2026 tour.

The concert is at the Assembly Rooms on George Street, starting at 7pm on Monday 7 December. Tickets are £43.80 including all fees.