Rhiannon Giddens Opens Her Home River: 'American Tunes' at Hellbender Tonight
Some bookings are just good calendar management. This one is a homecoming with a lump in its throat. Tonight, Rhiannon Giddens — the Greensboro-born, MacArthur-and-Pulitzer-winning conscience of American roots music — brings her program "American Tunes: Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" to Hellbender, the Orange Peel's brand-new riverside amphitheater. A North Carolina icon, on a North Carolina river, two weeks into the life of the biggest new stage the region has built in a generation. If you script Asheville's recovery, you script this.
Giddens is the rare artist who can headline a 6,000-capacity lawn and still make it feel like a front porch. As a founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops she spent years excavating the Black string-band tradition that white audiences had been taught to forget; as a solo artist and collaborator she's carried that scholarship onto opera stages, film scores, and the Pulitzer rolls. "American Tunes" is her wide-lens program — a survey of the country's tangled songbook that takes its subtitle from "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," the hymn long known as the Black national anthem. It is not, in other words, a nostalgia set. It's an argument about who American music has always belonged to.
The setting sharpens all of it. Hellbender sits on the Swannanoa, on ground that Helene drowned in the fall of 2024. To watch an artist whose entire project is about reclaiming buried American traditions perform on land the river itself tried to erase — well, the metaphors write themselves, and for once they've earned it. And Giddens doesn't carry the night alone: the bill is a genuine roots summit, with Mary Chapin Carpenter, gospel-soul giant Mavis Staples, and Hurray for the Riff Raff all sharing the stage.
Why it matters beyond the poetry: this is the kind of marquee, culturally weighty booking Asheville has historically had to drive to Charlotte or Atlanta to see. Landing it here, in Hellbender's first month, signals that the new room intends to punch at its weight — not just chase the summer-shed circuit but program shows that mean something to the specific place they're happening in. A lesser venue books a heritage act and calls it prestige. This one books Rhiannon Giddens singing "Lift Ev'ry Voice" over the water that nearly took the neighborhood, and calls it a mission statement.
Practical notes: it's a lawn-and-tiered-seating configuration, so pack accordingly, arrive early for parking on the river road, and plan for August-in-the-mountains weather, which is to say: gorgeous until it very suddenly isn't. Bring a layer.
Go for the history lesson. Stay for the moment — a few thousand people, a hymn about lifting every voice, and a river that's finally being invited to listen instead of destroy. Asheville has thrown itself a lot of quiet, hard-won victories these two years. Tonight it gets a loud one.
Sources: 828 News Now: August concert calendar; Explore Asheville: New Music Venues