Rhiannon Giddens doesn’t seem like the kind of person who gets intimidated by high-pressure situations, of which she’s been in more than a few. Even though the North Carolina singer only recently released her debut solo disc, Tomorrow Is My Turn, she’s spent time with some heavy hitters.

Consider her unofficial coming-out party. Giddens isn’t new to the music business, having won a Grammy with her old-timey project Carolina Chocolate Drops. But it was only recently that the world learned she also has a soulful side as an interpreter of classic blues and Americana. Giddens took her first big step toward the mainstream in September 2013 at Manhattan’s Town Hall, where the singer racked up two standing ovations at Another Day, Another Time: Inside Llewyn Davis, a concert celebrating the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis. The movie focused on the folk scene in ’60s New York, and given the Coen brothers’ stature, it’s only fitting that the night’s performers included the high-wattage likes of Jack White, Patti Smith, and Marcus Mumford.

“That was my first time really doing a show as a solo artist, which was kind of nerve-racking for that reason,” Giddens says, on the line from a Bay Area tour stop. “But I didn’t really give the show a lot of thought other than that. And then I didn’t really realize the splash and the impact that I made.”

There have been plenty of surreal moments since then. Last month, Giddens joined Aretha Franklin, Lyle Lovett, and Emmylou Harris for an In Performance at the White House tribute to gospel music. And, yes, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama were in the crowd.

Last fall, the 37-year-old mother of two was hanging in a studio with Elvis Costello, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, and Mumford for the Bob Dylan tribute Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes. And it was during that project that Giddens finally seemed to twig to the fact that she was onto something. The experience would inspire the gorgeous back-porch ballad “Angel City”, the lone original track on Tomorrow Is My Turn.

“There were all these heavy hitters there, and I was the newbie,” Giddens says matter-of-factly. “I was also the only woman, and the only woman of colour. So I had all these inadequacies while I was there that I had to overcome. Literally, the last night of that experience, I had this epiphany where I stayed up all night and wrote that song. I played it all for the guys the next day and said, ‘Thank you—this is what I’ve learned.’ And then T Bone said, ‘Let’s put that on the record.’ ”

T Bone is of course T Bone Burnett, who produced Tomorrow Is My Turn, a refreshingly unvarnished record that genre-jumps through American music’s rich past. For her first solo outing, Giddens chose to lovingly interpret originals from some of her favourite songwriters. Nina Simone’s “Tomorrow Is My Turn” is presented as a dramatic exercise in classic French retro-pop, the field-holler traditional “Waterboy” gets made over as a country-blues throwback, and Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You” mixes gospel with gorgeous Muscle Shoals soul.

What stands out, of course—besides the fact that Giddens possesses an incredible set of pipes—is the way that Tomorrow Is My Turn never goes for the obvious. Forget “Jolene”: when it came time to consider the songs of Dolly Parton, the singer opted for the underexposed “Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind”. There was, she suggests, a good reason for that: life is sometimes about more than the heavy hitters.

“Right back to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, I come at things from an ‘ooooh-ah discovery’ point of view,” Giddens says. “I’m not interested in something that’s been done a million times before. We didn’t want to do ‘I Fall to Pieces’ or ‘Walking After Midnight’ by Patsy Cline. I’m far more interested in shining a light where it needs to be shone. You want people to enjoy the record, but you also want there to be another layer.”

Rhiannon Giddens plays the Rio Theatre on Thursday (May 21).