- country:USA
- style(s):African-American
- label:Nonesuch
- artist posted by:Unique Gravity
Links
The Carolina Chocolate Drops are... revisiting, with a joyful vengeance, black string-band and jug-band music of the Twenties and Thirties - the dirt-floor dance electricity of the Mississippi Sheiks and Cannon's Jug Stompers.' Rolling Stone
'The Carolina Chocolate Drops may be reclaiming the black string-band tradition, but more importantly they're just making great music.' Newsweek
Nonesuch Records has signed North Carolina-based trio the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a young string band in the centuries-old Piedmont banjo and fiddle musical tradition. The group's members - Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson - all trade duties as singers and swap instruments, too. The band, which has toured continuously since its formation in 2005, has several US concert dates this spring before taking a summer sabbatical during which Giddens is expecting her first child. They will resume touring in the fall; their label debut is scheduled for early 2010.
Old-time Southern string music is often associated with Caucasian musicians from Appalachia, not African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont. But as Giddens pointed out in a recent NPR interview, "It seems that two things get left out of the history books. One, that there was string band music in the Piedmont, period. And... that... black folk was such a huge part of string tradition." Carolina Chocolate Drops seek to not only correct this misunderstanding, but to keep the old-time string music tradition alive.