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ince 2012, Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been captivating viewers by peeling back the layers of American identity through the stories of actors, politicians, athletes, and musicians. Through deep archival work, and Gates’ mix of scholarly rigor and endless curiosity, the show has traced the family trees of hundreds of people, including himself. Last season on the show, Gates learned of his Irish ancestry, answering century-long questions about his family’s origins.
Of course, sometimes — often, even — the information discovered can be a painful truth. A 2015 episode featuring Ben Affleck sparked controversy when it emerged that the actor’s ancestors had owned enslaved people. The revelation was omitted from the edit, spurring a PBS investigation which concluded that editorial standards had been breached. There have been no direct descendants of slave owners since, Gates says, though he admits the subject does come up socially: “I ran into a person at a party, an actor, and she said, ‘I know you’re coming after me, but I’m afraid of what you would find on my Southern roots.’”
That search for clues in the bloodstream runs through everything Gates touches, including his new project, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, a four-part series premiering on PBS Feb. 3. As for Finding Your Roots, Season 12, which premiered last month, is stacked with fascinating characters from music and beyond.
Over 12 seasons, Finding Your Roots has profiled so many artists. Is talent carried across generations?
I would say often there’s a surprise musician, where a couple generations ago someone exhibited musical talent and they didn’t know anything about it. And then in other cases, like Branford Marsalis and Yo-Yo Ma, their parents were musicians. So there’s a propensity that’s inherited as well as one shaped by environment. That’s completely unscientific, but I think that it’s true.
This season features Rhiannon Giddens, who is so connected to early American music. What struck you about her story?
I grew up in West Virginia, listening to country all day long on WWVA. You couldn’t get anything Black until the sun went down. Even then I knew: Country music and the blues are the same — just with a different twang. It’s all about getting love, wanting love, having love, and losing love.
When I heard Rhiannon, I went, “She’s reclaiming those roots.” She lives in the interstices of soul, country, R&B, and the blues. That music was cooked in the hollows of the South — in the interaction between country white people and enslaved Black people. And her family tree is out of the ballads she sings. She descends from a moonshiner punished for bootlegging, a great-grandmother who ran off with a man named Snake, a white Confederate soldier who owned enslaved people, and an enslaved woman. She memorably said, “To be of the South is to hold infinite storylines. This is the fullness of who we are.” And I love that. It was just perfect. I mean, who could have anticipated all of those different stories on her family tree?
Lizzo, Wiz Khalifa, and Flea are among the musicians appearing this year. Any highlights?
In 1844, Lizzo’s ancestors were slaves on a Mississippi plantation and almost got sent to Liberia as part of the American Colonization Society’s plan to remove Black people from the United States and return them to Africa. They were freed only after the Civil War. Flea is our first Australian-born guest. His great-great-grandfather emigrated from Hungary in the early 1850s. Why? The gold rush. And Wiz learned the heroic story of his great-grandfather, who joined the Army in 1943 and was sent to New Guinea during one of the most harrowing episodes of World War II. He came home, faced the violence directed at Black veterans, and eventually left the Jim Crow South for Pittsburgh, where Wiz grew up. It’s an extraordinary story.
A few years ago, Ben Affleck requested the show not reveal the discovery that one of his ancestors owned slaves. The information didn’t air. Has that happened since?
No. But I ran into a person at a party, someone everyone would know, an actor, and she said, “I know you’re coming after me, but I’m afraid of what you would find on my Southern roots.” But we’re clear that there’s no editorial control possible. The only time we ever contact anybody is for what is euphemistically known by genealogists as a non-paternity event. When you’re like LL Cool J [in Season Three], when the people you think are biologically related to you somehow are not. And that’s because we don’t want to — you can’t reveal that in front of four and a half million people.
What was it like to be on the other side of the camera last season?
I was nervous, anxious, frightened, and then exhilarated. It was a catharsis. A mystery introduced into my life at nine years old was resolved. My shrink told me, “Don’t you know that subconsciously you invented this series to solve that mystery?” My knees buckled…. People think if they don’t talk about something, it disappears. But one guest said it best: “It’s like a 1,000-piece puzzle with one missing piece. And you found the 1,000th piece.”
Looking at modern Black music, do you see threads of the past?
In English literature, there’s a concept called intertextuality. Joyce’s Ulysses rewrites The Odyssey. Percival Everett’s James rewrites Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. You take a standard and turn it inside out. Sampling is just the hip-hop name for intertextuality. Musicians take a bar, a lyric, a riff, and reposition it — signify on it. That keeps the ancestors alive. Kendrick Lamar keeps alive the R&B, soul, and blues that shaped earlier generations…. It’s not my cup of tea musically, but he’s a genuine poet. You have to love his lyrics. And I love what it’s doing to keep the tradition alive. It’s the family tree of music speaking to itself.
PBS is facing severe cutbacks. What is the outlook for public media?
It’s a tragedy. Public broadcasting is essential for the free exchange of ideas and for making knowledge available to the widest population. The greatest tragedy is for rural areas, like where I grew up. Those programs are vital to educating our children.
You’re still teaching at Harvard. What do your students teach you?
They remind me of the belief in endless possibility and the thrill of discovery. That moment when a student encounters a sentence that names something they felt but never had language for, that’s profound.
Who are your dream gets?
[Sings] “Jolene, Jolene …” I would love Dolly Parton. Clint Eastwood. Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Smokey Robinson. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Often people say, “Why haven’t you asked me?” And I say, “We’ve asked a thousand times!” It never gets through [their gatekeepers].
What keeps you up at night?
My children and my granddaughter. The rising tide of hatred — antisemitism, anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment — it breaks my heart. That’s why we’re about to launch Black and Jewish America: Americans in Interwoven History. Because we need each other. And I’ll get criticism, but so what? White supremacy is a real thing and getting worse, and I’m determined to fight.
