Food and music as culture

American food industrialised in the 20th Century, and so did biscuits. An unnamed Black cook for Pullman Company trains used a premade flour mix to produce biscuits on the fly; his work inspired Bisquick, the first commercial biscuit mix. In 1931, Lively Willoughby patented canned refrigerated biscuit dough. Biscuit diversity flourished, too, such as cathead biscuits and North Carolina’s hoop cheese-filled variety. Bakers embraced efficient drop biscuits and airy angel biscuits, which use baking powder, baking soda and yeast.

Biscuits had transformed from a seafaring staple to a luxury good made by enslaved cooks to a food of the working class. Farmers and labourers carried biscuits slathered with jam or stacked with ham in their lunchpails. Twitty recalled a line from South Carolinean journalist Ben Roberston’s memoir, Red Hills and Cotton: “To fry chickens, to boil coffee, to boil rice and to make good biscuits were the four requirements we demanded of cooks.”

The year of Giddens’ birth, biscuits broke into America’s fast-food pantheon. In 1977, Bojangles, a fried chicken and biscuits counter, first opened in Charlotte, North Carolina; there are now 800 Bojangles across 17 states. The same year, a single location of Hardee’s added ham and sausage biscuits to its breakfast menu. Across Hardee’s franchises, workers bake more than 100 million biscuits annually. In the 1980s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds took biscuits nationwide.

Buttered, dotted with blueberries, smothered in sausage gravy, split and sandwiched, biscuits had become wholly American without losing their Southern accent. “I see this food as graduated British, even if there’s nothing like it in the British Isles, not even scones. You can’t find them in Africa,” said Twitty. “So they’re this combination of all those different streams and elements that make America what it is.”

With Biscuits & Banjos, Giddens wanted to create a festival that would build community and inspire cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the three-day event in Durham, North Carolina (25-27 April) brought together Black musicians, activists, historians and chefs. Her Grammy-winning band, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, reunited for the first time in a decade, performing songs from acclaimed African American fiddler Joe Thompson and guitarist Etta Baker. New Dangerfield, a Black string band of Giddens acolytes, played a sweet and earnest New Orleans waltz, while Niwel Tsumbu connected the musical traditions of his native Congo to the American South.

By day, festival-goers ate biscuits from restaurants on a downtown Durham biscuit trail and bought tote bags that read: “Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit”. They also gathered in an armoury, which had held a square dance the night before, for a talk with Tipton-Martin, Twitty and Dr Cynthia Greenlee on biscuit history and the contributions of Black cooks to one of the US South’s most iconic baked goods.

Giddens hopes to stage the festival again in Durham in 2026, creating a space where food and music continue to challenge narratives, uplift Black stories and contribute new ideas to storied traditions.

“Food and music are such a great way to talk about culture,” says Giddens. “They’re disarming. They’re innocent. They are shaped by the forces around them, whether that’s political or cultural. The more we can understand that, I think, the more we can understand ourselves.”