Drops in the bucket

Some music genres reward almost any innovation or improvisation. But impressing old-time fans with your unique arrangements of fiddle and banjo tunes can be harder than nailing Jell-O to a fence post.

Savoring their uniqueness: The Carolina Chocolate Drops (with Joe Thompson)

However, the fact that the Carolina Chocolate Drops is an all-black old-time band makes the group so rare that their tinkering is embraced, and maybe even expected.

The Drops’ repertoire includes standards like “Dixie,” “Sourwood Mountain” and “Tom Dula”—though they might pull out a snare drum for one song, and they aren’t afraid to fret the banjo with a wicked slide. The band uses harmonica on some arrangements, and substitutes a clay jug to play lines normally reserved for a stand-up doghouse bass.

Still, Rhiannon Giddens (banjo, fiddle, voice), Justin Robinson (fiddle, voice) and Dom Flemons (guitar, banjo, jug, harmonica, snare and voice) didn’t try to break the mold when it came to choosing their band’s name. It’s taken straight from the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, a black string band from the late 1920s.

Old-time-country-blues preservationist Taj Mahal described the current Drops’ debut CD, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind, as “electrifying.” The band plays backwoods fiddle tunes and square-dance clawhammer-banjo jigs with a barn-burning vengeance that immediately commands attention, earns respect and compels people to get up and buck dance like it’s going out of style.

But in fact, the group traces its roots back to an orchard that—until these musicians came along—many people didn’t know even existed.

Flemons explains why that chapter of American musical history is so obscure: “String-band music went down the same road that blues, jazz, R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, funk and even hip-hop is going,” he says.

We all know that those genres were eventually appropriated by white musicians. “The only difference,” explains Flemons, “is that black string-band music was not preserved in recordings. It had no context in the popular black community, so there was no market [for it]—meaning the record companies had no demand—which means there are only a few [black] string bands that actually got to record.”

The Carolina Chocolate Drops follow the path of bands like the legendary Mississippi Sheiks of the ‘30s and black musicians from the North Carolina Piedmont, including Odell and Nate Thompson, Dink Roberts and Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (all deceased).

“We each came to this music individually, and we all thought that we were the only black people doing this music—and we were, in our respective locales,” offers Robinson. “I started off in classical violin as a child but quit around middle school and didn’t start playing again until college. I got interested in old-time music specifically when I heard an NPR broadcast about Joe Thompson” (Odell and Nate’s brother, an 88-year-old fiddler from Mebane, N.C., whose family has played old time for more than 100 years).

“Joe is the basis for our sound,” reveals Flemons. Robinson agrees: “His family’s style of playing has really influenced ours. We all go to visit Joe as a band, and we each take something different away from every session.”

The three Drops met at a banjo festival near Boone that was co-organized by Giddens. The 2005 Black Banjo Gathering was originally planned as an informal fish fry or barbecue with about 10 black banjo players in attendance. With the participation of big names like Béla Fleck, it grew into a four-day extravaganza.

Fleck, who’s white, is one of the few current banjo innovators who can sell out an auditorium. But the instrument of his fame, as Flemons explains, “is a black instrument—and an amalgamation of many instruments in Africa. For the first 100 years of its existence in America, the banjo was an instrument of black culture only.

[Tom Kerr is an Asheville-based writer.]

The Carolina Chocolate Drops play Jack of the Wood (95 Patton Ave.) on Saturday, March 24. 252-5445.