McGonigel's Mucky Duck

Carolina Chocolate Drops
September 15

930 PM

 

Among the dozens of hot bands currently mining the pleasures of old-time music -- from bluegrass revivalists Old Crow Medicine Show to folk-blues partymakers The Devil Makes Three to raggy specialists Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three -- Carolina Chocolate Drops are something else. 

First, they're black. Yes, African-American. What? You never heard of black country folksong? "Negro" string bands go way back. We're talking pre-Civil War, pre-Revolution even, when African slaves brought the banjo to the colonies, paired it with the European violin, and voila! 

The first New World mashup: dance music, American style. - San Francisco Weekly

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are the newest and youngest players in a long lineage of Black String Bands. The tradition traces its roots to musicians from Africa who came to the Americas in the holds of slave ships. The anchor instruments were made of gourds with a neck and a variety of string combinations. The same basic gourd banjo, called the ekontone, is played today in Gambia. Alongside the banjo gourd, musicians devised a number of fiddles, American-born relatives of the African ritti or one-stringed fiddle. Eventually, perhaps under the influence or orders of masters who wanted Irish jigs played in their parlors, black fiddle-players picked up the European violin, taking that instrument back to their cabins, adding classical-style fiddle to banjo and percussion; so the blurring of boundaries began.

All three of the Carolina Chocolate Drops can switch instruments, playing banjo and fiddle, trading leads and playing along with a stock of other instruments. This mixing-it-up comes from the traditional black string band where the banjo takes the lead, trading off the with fiddle, while any number of other instruments join in around them. Joe Thompson works in this way, always playing his fiddle in the company of a banjo.

While string bands and old-time music are often grouped with bluegrass at festivals, the sound is very different. Bluegrass has a fast-paced style and draws more on the guitar and the mandolin. It rarely includes the home-made instruments common to string band players like bones (or spoons), quills, and jugs. That said, more and more bluegrass musicians are opening up their style. Banjo players like Bela Flek and Tony Triska are just as likely to show up around jazz musicians as they are to play at a bluegrass festival. Audiences expect a string band to stick closer to home.

The string band, with its panoply of instruments, is also a socially open form. It says anyone can play or dance or sing. It’s about getting together. Some suggest that black string bands disappeared after the Civil War because the musicians no longer wanted to play music associated with forced performances for white plantation audiences. The immediacy and self-taught quality of the music makes it more likely that the documentation, not the music, disappeared. Looking back from early twentieth century players and contemporary players like Joe Thompson, it’s clear that the music kept going, passed down by family members and played for dances and gatherings in both the white and the black community. As Rhiannon likes to tell her skeptical fans, square dancing and string music is all about African roots and black folks’ traditions. 

 

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