string band

Balancing laughter and sorrow seems to come easily to Giddens, 48, who has been on a serious mission to rekindle the legacy of the banjo and string band traditions as authentically Black creations ever since she met fiddle player Joe Thompson in 2004 and became a disciple.

That’s why she wanted to record the tunes they inherited from Thompson, as well as from Etta Baker and other North Carolina string band players — hence the “Blackbird” album.

Roni Stoneman, a virtuoso banjo player, mainstay of the country music television show “Hee Haw” and one of the last surviving members of the Stoneman Family, a renowned Appalachian string band, died on Thursday at her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. She was 85.

In “That’s All I Know About Arkansas,” Leventhal constructed a mandolin-topped string band in the studio to support a modal, Appalachian-tinged melody.

By age 12, she was sitting in with her father’s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners.