Carolina Chocolate Drops
When the acoustic trio Carolina Chocolate Drops take the stage, many audience members automatically assume that they play bluegrass because of the banjos and fiddles involved with the music.
'That’s how they compartmentalize it,' said Rhiannon Giddens, a fiddler, banjo player and singer in the Chocolate Drops. 'They’ll say, ‘Oh, you play bluegrass. Oh, I understand now.’ Even though they don’t really understand what it is that we do. They have that need to categorize it. ‘You don’t play pop or R&B or rap, you must play this kind of music.’ That’s as close as they can get because they’ve never heard of old time music.'
To be quite specific, The Carolina Chocolate Drops play old time string music endemic to the Piedmont, that hill-strewn region of the Carolinas and Virginia that lies between the Appalachian Mountains and the Coastal Plain.
Joining Giddens in the band is fiddler, banjo player and singer Justin Robinson and multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons who plays, depending on the tune, everything from guitar to jug to harmonica to fife. All three members of the band live in the Research Triangle cities of Raleigh and Durham.
'The name Carolina Chocolate Drops is a tribute to a band from the 1920s called The Tennessee Chocolate Drops,' explained Giddens. 'That was a well-known black string band with Howard Armstrong who was a fantastic fiddler and mandolin player. Since two of us are from North Carolina and we were concentrating mostly on Piedmont tunes we changed it to The Carolina Chocolate Drops.' ~ MountainTimes.com
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