Carolina Chocolate Drops File Under Quality Music

By Clive Davis, The Sunday Times
Photo ©Julie Roberts

If there is one thing that kills creativity, Rhiannon Giddens says, it is the habit of dividing music into genres: blues in one corner, folk, country and jazz in others. There was a time, she points out, when musicians knew that the best way to survive was by mixing things up. Keeping an audience of all ages entertained was the only thing that mattered; categories did not count.

This is by way of a preamble to explain why the members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops do not particularly care to be described as a “period band”. True, much of their music hails from the era of vaudeville and the once popular string and jug bands. But this is a group determined to prove that the past is not another country, that sets traditional banjo and fiddle tunes alongside Tom Waits’s Trampled Rose and a scorching makeover of Blu Cantrell’s 2001 R&B anthem Hit ’Em up Style, the story of a woman’s free-spending revenge on her faithless partner.

So, file under quality music, rather than nostalgia. Giddens and her colleagues, Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson, have created a vivacious potpourri that has brought them a cult following in America. Having started out as part of a musicological crusade devoted to unearthing and celebrating the African-American dimension of traditional music, the group now plays not only to the cognoscenti, but to audiences who simply want a good time. “We perform for old-time fans who clap politely and college students who want to dance and just go nuts from the first song,” Giddens says. “There’s an underground thing going on. Every so often, there’s a clash when you get ­people who want to dance all the time and people who’ve paid for their seats. We’re probably going to start doing some all-dancing shows — the energy levels are amazing.”

Admittedly, the idea of three young African-Americans wielding vintage instruments may seem incongruous at first. Yet, as Giddens explains, their mission is to champion a tradition that has been overlooked, in part as a result of that quint­essentially American pursuit of the new, in part because the music had become entangled with fraught issues of race and racism. Mention a banjo and most thoughts instinctively turn to country music or bluegrass — the white man’s property, in the eyes of many black Americans. The instrument also evokes the exceedingly dubious charms of the minstrel show. With their playfully archaic name, the Chocolate Drops are intent on challenging preconceptions.

It is easy to forget, amid all the negative connotations, that the banjo has African roots. It was developed by slaves transported to the new world who wanted to re-create the sonorities they remembered from their ancestral lands. Indeed, the rise of the Chocolate Drops coincides with a wave of interest in the origins of the humble instrument. The blues musician Otis Taylor, for instance, won acclaim with his 2008 album Recapturing the Banjo, as has the jazzman Bela Fleck, a virtuoso banjo player, for Throw Down Your Heart, a disc that finds him wandering the villages and plains of Africa in search of his long-lost musical cousins.

Nevertheless, the stereotypes are hard to shake off, which is why the trio have devoted a fair part of their energy to performing in schools, introducing youngsters to a side of American culture and history that has been all but erased from popular memory. It is tricky territory. Giddens’s voice takes on an almost evangelical tone as she discusses the challenge. “A lot of the music we play has been bowdlerised, ignored or demonised. As a people, we have taken that era and swept it under the rug. And there’s so much great music in it, and so many fantastic performance styles.

“I sometimes see The X Factor and American Idol. A lot of these people have no idea what entertainment is — they think it’s just singing into a stick. Then you look at some of these folks from vaudeville and they knew how to entertain. When we started out as a band, it was more about enthusiasm than anything else, but now I think we’ve got the skills. If people want to see virtuoso bluegrass, they go elsewhere. If they want to be entertained, they come to us. We always let audiences know where the songs come from, but we want to entertain, too.”

The three musicians came together in 2005 after attending an event in North Carolina called the Black Banjo Gathering. Soon, they were getting first-hand instruction and guidance from Joe Thompson — now in his nineties, and one of the last survivors of the prewar generation of African-American string band players. He had previously been sought out by white enthusiasts determined to keep the music alive, but the fact that young black performers wanted to learn from him was an extra boost to his morale. Soon, Giddens and her friends were making regular trips to Thompson’s home, absorbing new songs into their repertoire and listening to his anecdotes about the musicians of yesteryear. Although their touring schedule has grown increasingly hectic over the years, they still pay visits to the old man’s home. There are still lessons to be learnt.

Yet, if they are intent on unearthing the African-American contribution to the repertoire, it is also a way to emphasise the universality of music. Flemons, for instance, counts the Beatles and the Band among his prime influences, while Giddens, who studied opera at Oberlin Conservatory, is a devotee of Irish and Scottish music. A former member of a Celtic band, she is married to an Irish jazz musician. When I interviewed her at her mother-in-law’s home on the outskirts of Limerick, she was caring for their baby daughter. It is ironic, she laughs, that her husband knows more about jazz than she does, while she has the edge when it comes to traditional Irish music.

Aside from her newly acquired transatlantic relations, Giddens also has Native American ancestry, a legacy apparent in her cheekbones and long plaited hair. In short, much like Barack Obama, she represents a new, multiracial America. When the newly elected president described himself as a “mutt”, some strait-laced types were offended by what they took to be a derogatory term. Giddens, in contrast, could not have been happier. In his deceptively casual manner, Obama was opening a new chapter in America’s tortured history of racial taxonomy. In the wrong hands, “mutt” could be as much of an insult as, say, “octoroon”, but Obama drew the sting from the word. Giddens, Flemons and Robinson set out to do much the same with the term “chocolate drop”.
-http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6995761.ece