Reflecting on the last few months of her career, Rhiannon Giddens said recently, “It’s been a rather roller-coastery kind of year.” And she can reasonably make this claim: This musician, vocalist and co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Grammy Award-winning string band, has experienced peaks like being cast in the new season of the TV drama “Nashville,” and lows, like seeing her much anticipated Broadway debut unravel before it could happen.

And now, another peak: Ms. Giddens is the winner of the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. The $50,000 award is presented annually by a board that includes Mr. Martin as well as other banjo stars like Bela Fleck, Tony Trischka, Pete Wernick and J. D. Crowe. The board’s official announcement of Ms. Giddens’s honor is expected to be made on Monday.

While she will accept your congratulations, she said, in a recent phone interview: “I don’t want it to bring attention to me — I want it to bring attention to my banjo. I exist to tell the story of that thing.”

Since she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Ms. Giddens, 39, a North Carolina native, has been a present-day devotee of old-time music, an American genre that dates to the 19th century and is distinct from bluegrass. (To her, old-time music is “dance music,” and bluegrass is “performance music,” Ms. Giddens said.)