Introducing … the Carolina Chocolate Drops
February 23, 2010 No Comments
You’ll have to excuse the ‘coon’ imagery and thick Mississippi Burning-like sensitivity around this this project, for the Carolina Chocolate Drops are not an R-n-B band; nor are they a funk band. Nada on the rock band either.
They are a black jug band, and the only modern day African-American one, too.
Has this been done before? Sure it has — it’s not a comeback by any means — but, just like all of the great traditions, black folk music, especially in the backwoods, is dying fast.
See, where they’re from, parts yonder of the Appalachian foothills, folk music is the equivalent of crunk to Atlanta. It’s like Bounce Music to New Orleans.
So, instead of an electric guitar, or even a beat machine. The Drops have a fierce banjo player.
They play to nearly all-white audiences, despite getting major exposure albeit quickly in the Denzel Washington-directed movie “The Great Debaters.”
The Carolina Chocolate Drops are Dom Flemon, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson.
And they will rock you.
Don’t call it a cotton-pickin’ comeback.
