The Carolina Chocolate Drops
First, play this:
These are the Carolina Chocolate Drops. We saw them Friday night, first-row right side, at McCabes Guitar Shop. They are Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson. Dom and Justin are still in their 20s, and Rhiannon, who is prettier than the first girl who ever stopped you dead in your tracks, is just over 30. This is a paragraph from a Joan Anderman story about them in the Boston Globe last April, (Joan Anderman, according to this virtual Bostonian, is one tight music writer and a great reporter; look how much she gets into this short explanation of their genesis): Flemons met Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson (both natives of the North Carolina Piedmont) two years ago at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, N.C., a first-time event celebrating the banjo's African-American roots. Flemons, who grew up in Arizona, starting playing three years earlier, when he was 20, and had become a voracious student of the instrument's lineage. Giddens, a fiddler and banjo player, studied opera and then immersed herself in the contra dance community before discovering string-band music. Robinson is a classically trained violinist, but an NPR report about an elderly musician named Joe Thompson sparked his curiosity. Robinson soon traded his violin for a fiddle and sought out Thompson, a lifelong resident of Mebane, N.C., who is thought to be the last black string-band fiddler of his generation. Thompson became the trio's mentor, and the lion's share of the Carolina Chocolate Drops' repertoire includes songs they've learned from him during their weekly visits. "He starts playing a song, we start following him, and he lets us know if there's something to be done," is how Flemons describes the group's tutelage under Thompson, who will turn 89 next month. "It has all the basics," he says of the music's lure. "A good feel - and that can be a strong beat or a swing beat or a thumping dance beat - that gets you on your feet and enough of a tune to sing along to. This music was made for dancing." Now wouldn’t you love to be in that room with the Chocolate Drops and Joe Thompson? Well why not? Go ahead, but then y’all come back now and let me finish my story. So we saw them Friday night and we were smitten from the first fiddle stroke. Don, a tall, rubber-boned, foot-stomping kid in suspenders and pork-pie hat, started off on a dobro, Rhiannon (barefoot, bright cotton dress, jeans) and Justin played fiddles. Before the night was over we’d hear a five-string banjo, a tenor banjo--with a slide, which was awfully neat--the jug, harmonica, snare drum, base drum, the bones, and a kazoo. They played songs with straight whiskey titles like Starry Crown, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind (the title of their album ), Cindy Girl, Cornbread Butter Beans, Viper Man (with a slide on the tenor banjo) as well as some unexpecteds like a folkified run through Blu Cantrell’s Hit ‘Em Up Style (though sharp friend Vicki, a tamborine-banger in a local band herself, caught the a jug = beatbox thing very early on). Shortly before the and of the first set, a large African American man in the audience raised his hand and prayerfully begged Rhiannon “to sing that Gaelic song.” And she did, a capella, in Gaelic. It was stunning, it opened as a lament, picked up tempo and resilience verse to verse, and ended in a triumph. There was a large group of Scottish Highanders, she said later, who settled in North Carolina, and the last Gaelic church in North Carolina was Black. Well imagine that. Yes, along with the songs there were lessons--they do a lot of school and college gigs. They spoke of the likes of Joe Thompson, Vera Hall, Papa Charley Jackson, Nobel Sissel, who wrote Viper Man, Grand Pa Jones of Hee Haw, and the Rowan Martin Hilltop Band, to mention a few. The best story, however, went to Dom who noted that this year is McCabes fiftieth anniversary playing live music in the back room. The first people to play in the back room were Elizabeth Cotton and Mike Seeger in 1958. Now Elizabeth Cotton was a self-taught banjo and guitar player who wrote a song, Freight Train, which is easily destined for folk immortality, when she was 11, which would have been 1906. The point of Dom’s story is that this style of music, string band music played for Square Dances, or more accurately, “Frolics” as they were called on the Negro side of the tracks, has all but disappeared in African American culture. Joe Thompson at 89 is thought to be the last string player of his generation. Elizabeth Cotton was another somewhere connected to that tradition, and she died in 1989. But there they were, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, just kids in our book, rescuers of a whole musical dialect, on the same stage of McCabe’s guitar shop that Elizabeth Cotton played on. May the circle be unbroken, amen. There is no American story involving race where race is not a factor, and this one’s no different. Rhiannon told Eric Easter of Ebony-Jet magazine in an interview: “A lot of Black music when it originated was raunchy, raucous, dance music. Black people created it, then Black people left it and white people held onto it forever. “In some ways the white people who held onto the music have been almost too respectful of it, playing in these insular circles and not willing to stretch it for fear of disrespect. I think there’s been a real desire for Black people to come back to this music and recapture what’s been lost. People seem to respond to us because of the energy we bring back to it – as an impetus for getting out of your seat and dancing.” At the end of the night, as Rhiannon put down her banjo and ran to our side of the stage to barefoot clog dance thought the fidllee-ai-yay finale of Sourwood Mountain, I thought of all the Elizabeth Cottons in music, and all that made them, and all they passed and pass along, on altars like this in back-rooms of music stores, and about everyone who loves making a music with a guitar and banjo, and about how our music, the folk and soul, and blues and rhythm of it all, is all just about making love, one way or another. My true love lives over the river, Hi-Ho Fliddlee-ai-yay
A few more jumps and I'll be with her.
Devil's in the women if they take a notion.
Hi-Ho Fiddlee-ai-yay
