Comments on: Another Man Done Gone

Another Man Done Gone

chuckdarwin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:19:59 -0800

Carolina Chocolate Drops rock the piedmont.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are a group of young African-American stringband musicians that have come to together to play the rich tradition of fiddle and banjo music in Carolinas' piedmont. Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson both hail from the green hills of the North Carolina Piedmont while Dom Flemons is native to sunny Arizona. Jools Holland performance.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:31:58 -0800

just a note, the MeFi inline YouTube player icons make single-letter-links pretty much unreadable. It took me more than a couple of seconds to figure out it was ChocolateDrops rock

By: chuckdarwin

chuckdarwin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:33:07 -0800

I saw that too late :-(

By: gurple

gurple — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:40:56 -0800

I saw these guys in Seattle last year; they're phenomenal.

By: Pecinpah

Pecinpah — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:44:17 -0800

They'll be playing in San Francisco at the Bluegrass and Old Time Festival this year.

By: The Light Fantastic

The Light Fantastic — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:45:14 -0800

So very hot! Thanks!

By: The White Hat

The White Hat — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:52:05 -0800

Three years ago, I heard a blues guitarist at the Philadelphia Folk Festival say that blues music didn't belong to white folks such as himself-- that he was just serving as a custodian of the tradition until a new generation of African Americans came up and reclaimed it. Two years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing the Carolina Chocolate Drops at the following year's festival. Hopefully these are just the first of a new generation of young people playing blues, old time, and roots music. If it isn't then I'm SOL as far as my prospects for finding other like-minded musicians are concerned.

By: schyler523

schyler523 — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:58:05 -0800

They played a fantastic set at the Blues Festival here in Columbia, MO. My cousin got to play a festival with them somewhere in Western NC before she quit her bluegrass band to join the seminary.

By: gnutron

gnutron — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:59:36 -0800

truly wonderful. thanks for this!

By: oonh

oonh — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:06:38 -0800

I misparsed this... I thought that some chocalatier named "Carolina Chocolate" had stopped producing a flavor called "Rock the Piedmont".

By: MiltonRandKalman

MiltonRandKalman — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:07:53 -0800

If they tour with the California Honeydrops (who are playing Amnesia in SF tonight), I'm in.

By: Restless Day

Restless Day — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:25:27 -0800

Only tangentially related, Pura Fe's "Familiar Joy."

By: ChrisLee

ChrisLee — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:32:51 -0800

They rocked the Ryman Auditorium here in Nashville opening for Old Crow Medicine Show back in October. Rhiannon even covered Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style" and nailed it.

By: Mental Wimp

Mental Wimp — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:46:28 -0800

I love these guys! Thanks, chuckdarwin not only for the great theory of evolution, but also for the post

By: al_fresco

al_fresco — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:51:41 -0800

Sorry, Pecinpah, but that's last year's schedule. I know because my spouse is in one of the bands that performed. She did see them though, and is a big fan. Thanks, chuckdarwin.

By: Hobgoblin

Hobgoblin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:04:50 -0800

Caught them last year in Northampton, MA at the wonderful Iron Horse. They rocked us out. I'd travel to hear them again.

By: batmonkey

batmonkey — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:08:43 -0800

Today is all about the music joy. Mmm, mmm, good! I'm not as worried about that generation behind me as I used to be. In fact, I'm kinda super-appreciating them right now.

By: chuckdarwin

chuckdarwin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:45:56 -0800

They rocked the Ryman Auditorium here in Nashville opening for Old Crow Medicine Show back in October. Rhiannon even covered Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style" and nailed it. There are several videos said cover... even above.

By: Countess Elena

Countess Elena — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:11:46 -0800

I loved them when I saw them in Somerville recently, but although the venue was a fabulous theater, banks and banks of fixed seats didn't allow us much dancing. (But the white, white crowd did its best.) Can't say enough about "Snowden's Jig." It suggested that there was an entire genre of African-American music that has vanished.

By: king dingaling

king dingaling — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:18:28 -0800

By: schyler523

schyler523 — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:16:21 -0800

Welcome to Metafilter king dingaling, I think I finally joined after a year of lurking to post on a thread about the Grateful Dead...

By: chuckdarwin

chuckdarwin — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:58:19 -0800

This is so weird that I had to pay five dollars to make a comment. I see the banjo player walking Franklin St in Chapel Hill all the time in front of my work (with banjo in tow). The weirder thing is that I am a chocolatier by trade who happens to live in North Carolina. Tell him I said he's the mack and that they should do a longer UK tour next time. Chuckdarwin, are you by any chance a Tar Heel? No, but I love the place. I spent a lot of time on the Outer Banks as a lad. I lived in West Virginia for a long time before I left the states for sunny England. I caught these folks on the BBC the other night and was moved to post.

By: chuckdarwin

chuckdarwin — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:00:25 -0800

I loved them when I saw them in Somerville recently, but although the venue was a fabulous theater, banks and banks of fixed seats didn't allow us much dancing. (But the white, white crowd did its best.) I could not help but notice Rhiannon's dancing in a couple of those videos. Wow. She's an amazing performer. I hope to catch her in Pembroke soon, if her myspace calendar is correct.

By: chuckdarwin

chuckdarwin — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:38:38 -0800

Whistle the tune "Dixie,'' and in some corners of the South, you're in for a scrap. For some, it's a heritage thing. For others, it's a racist thing. For Justin Robinson, a Gastonia native, it's simply a good thing. No argument there. But Robinson is black, and you wouldn't think he'd like the widely accepted anthem of the Confederate South. Robinson is a fiddle player. And he plays with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a trio of young black musicians who play the old-time string band music popular with Southern African Americans way before MTV. Plus, he knows the musical history of "Dixie.'' And you can expect he and his band mates, Dom Flemons and Greensboro's Rhiannon Giddens, will talk about it this weekend when they perform at Shakori Hills just east of us in Chatham County. Yep, American music isn't all ... black and white. "It raises the eyebrows a little bit,'' Robinson, 25, says about the history of "Dixie.'' "But there are all sort of things like that in American history. What seems to be the truth is often not.'' A quick history lesson. Some say a white Yankee songwriter named Dan Emmett wrote "Dixie.'' He even owns the copyright. But in all likelihood, in the 1850s, Emmett learned the tune from a black string band family he knew in Ohio. And the person who wrote the tune, or at least preserved it, was a black woman. Ellen Snowden, a former slave from Maryland, was given as a gift at age 10 to a white family who moved to Ohio in the 1820s. She was the only person of color for miles, and she missed her family and her home. So, she wrote - or remembered - a song about the land of cotton. When she got older, Ellen taught the tune to her sons, Ben and Lew. In turn, she - or her sons - taught it to Emmett. So, look away, Dixie Land. Who knew? Now, I had heard this story from a musicologist and a Confederate historian. But they were white. And quite honestly, it really didn't bounce in my brain until I heard three black musicians make the tune their own. And that is some kind of powerful. Robinson plays "Dixie'' as an instrumental. It's on the group's latest recording, "Dona Got a Ramblin' Mind,'' and the way Robinson plays it, he gives it a winsome feel reminiscent of the back-porch South. But the Drops don't play it in concert anymore. The trio uses "Dixie'' as a touchstone on stage to help introduce a new tune they play. They call it "Snowden's Jig,'' a tune written by Emmett more than a century ago. Emmett originally called it "Genuine Negro Jig.'' But Emmett got that tune from, you guessed it, the Snowdens. Here's the big coincidence: The Snowdens lived right beside Emmett's grandparents in Mount Vernon, Ohio. And how did the Drops know that? From one night in Ohio. Last April, music historians Howard and Judy Sacks took an antique six-string banjo and a copy of their 1993 book when they went to see the Drops perform at an Ohio church. Afterward, they took the trio to dinner, talked about their research and gave them a copy of their book, "Way Up North In Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem.'' The Sackses spent 12 years on a book sparked by a walk in a local graveyard. There, they saw a peculiar inscription on the tombstone of Ben and Lew Snowden that read: "They taught 'Dixie' to Dan Emmett.'' That's when they went door to door near the graveyard and met a family who took care of the Snowden family decades before. And there, in a living room, Howard and Judy Sacks struck gold. They were shown what remained of the Snowden family and the legend of "Dixie'': a violin, two banjos, a scrapbook and a shoebox full of nearly 40 letters, written from 1836 to the 1920s. The letters became the backbone of their book. As for the banjos, that's the other part of this story. That night, at a small restaurant in Granville, Ohio, Robinson and his band mates held a homemade Snowden banjo that more than likely played "Genuine Negro Jig.'' And "Dixie,'' too. That, they say, was magic.