Music Maker
2006
Dona Got A Ramblin' Mind
About This Album
To say that Carolina Chocolate Drops are an anomaly in the 21st century would be a huge understatement. Here are three twenty-something African-Americans playing a brand of acoustic, banjo- and fiddle-driven string band music that is nearly extinct today, and in fact peaked in the pre-WWII era. Although a number of Southern-bred black string bands gained popularity during the first half of the 20th century -- this band's name pays tribute to one of them, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops -- the style is generally associated with Caucasian musicians from the Appalachians, not with African-Americans from the North Carolina Piedmont style, so the emergence of a new group reactivating the tradition is truly a phenomenon. So is the music. This is no novelty; the Carolina Chocolate Drops are serious scholars of this sound and are adept at re-creating it. Two of the members, Rhiannon Giddens (fiddle, banjo) and Justin Robinson (fiddle), are from the Carolinas, and the third, Dom Flemons (guitar, jug, harmonica, percussion, banjo), is an Arizona native. All had established solo careers when they met in 2005 at a North Carolina event called the Black Banjo Gathering. Soon thereafter, coached by octogenarian fiddler Joe Thompson and inspired by Piedmont antecedents such as Dink Roberts and Elizabeth Cotten, they began developing their own take on the traditional black string band sound, not so much updating it as giving it new life.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10)

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